On The Road Blog
Staying Connected
- By Joseph Bednarek on August 22nd, 2011
- Category: Blog, Europe and Eurasia
Dushanbe, Tajikistan – Dushanbe Youth House has grown over the years into a trusted community and resource center for children and youth from Dushanbe and the surrounding region. This GFC grantee partner provides courses in foreign languages, small-business development, computer skills, civic education, and sewing, as well as vocational training and access to psychological counseling. One of the activities that Dushanbe Youth House has sponsored for many years is an amateur, or ham, radio club. The amateur radio club offers children and youth at Dushanbe Youth House the opportunity to repair and build radio equipment, to develop a communication strategy, and most excitingly, to communicate through amateur radio code with other radio clubs throughout the world. Each club has its own distinctive call sign, and I was able to meet with a few of the teenagers at Dushanbe Youth House who are active members of the club. On this day, they were training a younger member, and they showed off their equipment and gave a few examples of radio clubs around the world that they had recently contacted.
The amateur radio club is just one of Dushanbe Youth House’s activities that allow children and youth to develop their leadership skills, their practical knowledge, and their mentoring abilities. Mentoring is an especially important aspect of Dushanbe Youth House, according to the organization’s director, Matluba Dadabaeva. Matluba introduced me to three of the young civic education and volunteer club leaders at the center, one of whom, Rahim Aminov, became involved with the organization nine years ago when he started taking courses at the age of 12. After he had completed some of the courses, he started volunteering for the organization, and he has been a volunteer and teacher at the center since that time. For Rahim, volunteering at Dushanbe Youth House led him to realize “that there are some special problems [facing children in Tajikistan], but that you can resolve those problems. I’ve volunteered for a lot of other organizations, but even after all those experiences I am still with Youth House.” One of Rahim‘s favorite things about working at Dushanbe Youth House is that “Matluba is an open-minded person. If you have some idea, some new thing that you want to do, she says ‘OK, it’s great, we’ll do.’”
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