It'a another early start and the second day of my Mercy Corps visits. The Ferghana valley has been an important silk road trading route for 2000 years and whilst the fertile land shoudl make for a wealthy region, the high population and lack of government input has made for a tense and abysmally poor one.

It is for this reason that Mercy Corps have begun another initiative to resurrect the local economies. This takes the guise of the Barakot Programme whereby micro loans of $80 are given to budding entrepreneurial women to set up their own businesses. I visit three of these that took the loans and have turned them into thriving businesses be they market trading, bread making or silk weaving. Some have even expanded to employ further local staff and the high success rate of these projects is a credit to the work done by the Mercy Corps staff as well as the businesswomen.

Our last visit is to the nearby silk factory in Margilan where silk has been produces for 2000 years, ever since the secret of silk production escaped from CHina. I was taken round and shown all the different processes involved in producing silk, from growing the worms, boiling the coocoons, making threads, dying them and then finally producing scarves, carpets and the like.

It's been an exhausting day and I return to the guesthouse to relax before heading out to supper with a newly arrived Belgian girl.