Salamat Baktybek-Kyzy, 21, had been saving the profits from her florist business in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to buy herself a prosthetic leg. But when orders collapsed amid the COVID-19 lockdown, she decided to start donating flowers for free.
Russia has suspended the use of a model of domestically-made ventilators after they were linked to hospital fires that killed COVID-19 patients in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Aventa-M ventilators were also included in a high-profile delivery of Russian medical equipment sold to the United States last month but have not been used there.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned predicting the economic future into a dice roll, but data from the International Monetary Fund suggests some potential trends to watch. Their forecast: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all members of the European Union, will encounter the largest reduction in economic growth, but also the biggest rebound in 2021. Ukraine will suffer more than Russia, but likely experience the same level of comeback.
Central Asia's largest bazaar has been closed for a month now, causing hunger and poverty for some 50,000 people in Bishkek who worked there before COVID-19 struck. Some of these people live on-site in shipping containers, while others live at an informal shantytown on a garbage dump near the giant marketplace in the Kyrgyz capital.
Small businesses in Russia say promised measures to cushion the blow of the coronavirus lockdown have not been delivered. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted on April 14 that the Russian economy would shrink by more than 5 percent this year, which many economists say could put millions out of work.
For Georgian wines, an increasingly trendy beverage in parts of the European Union and U.S., the coronavirus pandemic could not have come at a worse time. Spring is when new wines hit the market, but Georgia’s export-oriented wine production has slowed significantly, with some wine companies either slashing production or shutting down entirely. Work in the vineyards of Georgia’s eastern Kakheti region, the heart of its wine industry, however, doesn’t stop even during a quarantine.
A car mechanic in Siberia has found a new calling: giving cows pedicures. And it has helped reverse a fall in milk production at a local dairy.
For the past few years, Vika, a former TV journalist, has run a lively coffee bar in Minsk's Komarovka market. Always ready to chat, she works 12-hour days and then goes home to write a novel "about my pain."
The Nenets call themselves "the children of the reindeer." They number fewer than 50,000. In Russia's hostile tundra conditions, their lives are much as they were hundreds of years ago.
No need to worry about the carbon footprint of Uzbekistan's ancient technique for preserving winter melons. Its special "kovunkhona" storage chambers have no automatic cooling systems at all. Instead, they just rely on cold outside air and centuries of local experience keeping melons fresh until spring.
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