Less than 100,000 som: clearing the smoke from a school in Kara-Dyikan

This spring we drove through the secondary schools of Osh and Batken oblasts as part of a sub-grant from the European Union, working on internet access and on lifting the STEM teaching skills of teachers in remote schools. At one of our pilot points — School №7 named after Tagai Tashmamatov, in the village of Kara-Dyikan in Uzgen district — what we saw was not the connectivity problem we had come to fix. It was the heating system.

The basement held two coal stoves and a small boiler. Smoke and soot from the stoves were finding their way up through the building into the staff room and into some of the classrooms on the first and second floors. The school serves around 1,300 students and 120 teachers. The boilers had run that way for years. The teachers I spoke to had simply accepted it as a fact of cold-season schooling.

It stayed with me after we left.

The Kyrgyz invention

At about the same time, news was circulating about a Kyrgyz inventor — locals call him Amantur baike — who had built a filter retrofit for coal stoves. The principle is simple. The filter sits in the exhaust path of the stove and captures the particulates that would otherwise leave by the chimney. The exhaust that does leave is meaningfully cleaner. The cost is low enough that a single rural school can pay for it without writing a grant.

We decided to apply the invention at School №7 directly. In June this year, the installation went in. The complete cost — the filter plus the installation — was under one hundred thousand som. The installation was done by ОсОО Beybars, the contractor Amantur baike recommends. The decision and the work were both small enough that a school director could authorise them inside the existing maintenance budget.

The winter check

When winter came, the director of the school — Isakova Arzygul Zakirovna — sent me a video of the boiler running. The footage shows what the retrofit was supposed to do: there is no visible smoke at the exhaust, no soot drifting into the building, and the children and teachers inside the school spend the winter breathing air that does not contain coal particulates from the basement.

What this means for other schools

There are many schools and kindergartens in rural Kyrgyzstan that still heat with coal. Coal heating is not going away in the next winter or the winter after that. What this particular intervention shows is that a school does not have to wait for a fuel-switching programme to clear the air in its own classrooms.

For under a hundred thousand som — a sum that fits inside an oblast education department’s discretionary line — a school’s air can be made cleaner before the next academic year starts. The intervention does not require new boilers, new fuel supply chains, or a multi-year procurement process. It requires a filter retrofit on the existing stoves and a contractor willing to do the installation.

I am noting the practical details because that is the level at which a school director or an oblast education officer can act:

• Amantur Salymbaev, the inventor — mobile: 0706 633 364
• Reel showing the principle: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSSSrxejS9y/
• Installer (recommended by Amantur baike): ОсОО Beybars
• Project write-up on ISOC KG: https://isoc.kg/news/industrial-ash-collector-installed-in-the-kara-dyikan-secondary-school-in-uzgen-district/

What we were originally there for

I want to close on what brought us to Kara-Dyikan in the first place, because it matters that the story is not “an air-quality project.” We were there as part of a European Union sub-grant on internet access and STEM teacher training. The ash collector did not displace that work. The students at School №7 are part of the cohort whose digital and STEM skills the original project is building. The classroom air being clean is the unstated precondition for everything else we are trying to do with the same students.

Sometimes you go to a school to install a router and you end up installing a filter on a coal stove first. The witness-voice version of this is just: when you see the basement, you do not pretend you did not.