I set off at 8am to the Mercy Corps head office in Tashkent and meet with Zoya again who gives me my itinerary for the next three days. It is going to be an intensive three days of project visit which will allow me to get an idea of exactly what work is taking place here in Uzbekistan.

Due to a tight schedule, I had to charter a taxi all the way to the Kokand office. But it was worth being able to stop occasionally to take pictures of the stunning mountain scenery. We passed numerous villages along the way, overshadowed by the gigantic snow-capped mountain peaks. It's pretty much the only way to get into the Ferghana valley these days without travelling through neighbouring Kazakhstan or Tajikistan - a result of Stalin's ridiculous border allocations done to separate potentially difficult sets of people.

The valley itself is somewhat dissapointing, being more of a plain than a traditional valley with steep sided mountains. But the region is clearly fertile and cotton production dominates the landscape - a Soviet relic. We hurry along at breakneck speed. The lack of a seatbelt is not reassuring, still we arrived in Kokand in good time. This has always been an important city on the Silk Road since Greek times and used to provide the last resting place in the valley for caravans coming from the East before the more desert-like plains of modern Uzbekistan. Sadly little remains of it's SIlk Road past and my visit was primarily to the Mercy Corps projects rather than historical sights.

I meet with the staff of the Community Health and Sanitation (CHS) projects and Dilshod and Nargiza introduce the programme to me over lunch. Afterwards we drive 40 minutes to two communities involved in the current CHS project. I will write a more detailed report of this shortly, but it was a worthwhile couple of hours monitoring the actual projects and talking to the residents of the community. Traditional Uzbek hospitality was on display as I was offered tea and biscuits and even at the end they didn't want to let any of us leave, offering us dinner and a place to stay instead. Sadly I couldn't accept as I had to get moving but it was wonderful to see the positive togetherness of this once isolated community.