It is a harsh, unforgiving existence for the 1,200 Kyrgyz people who live at the end of the remote and inhospitable Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan, a 140-mile-long strip of land surrounded by China, Tajikistan and Pakistan. Less than half of the children there live to see their fifth birthday. And it is commonplace for women to die during childbirth. There are no doctors and no roads or vehicles. They live so high up there are no trees. In winter, the temperature goes down to 40 degrees below zero, and there are as many as 340 days of freezing weather a year. They live in near-complete isolation in a place so removed that the Afghan wars never made it this far. For thousands of years, the Kyrgyz lived a nomadic life, wandering from Siberia and Mongolia to Kazakhstan and China into Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and eventually — about 150 years ago — into the Wakhan. The grass there was good. The Kyrgyz would spend their summers fattening up their animals and during the harsh winters would move into the lower valleys, which were then in Russia or, on the other side, China. But the Russian Revolution in 1917 cut off part of that route, and when the Chinese closed their border after the revolution in 1949, some Kyrgyz were trapped in this desolate section of Afghanistan. Cut off from their brethren on the other side of the borders, they had to adjust to the brutal winters. Continue reading →