Wuensch on the Carpet

    I have been corresponding with an agronomist (Dr. John Lamers, an agronomist at the University of Urgench) in Uzbekistan, giving him some pointers on statistical analysis.  He sent me a thank you package which arrived in May of 2006.  To get it here he gave it to a friend who gave it to a friend , who....... who mailed it from within the United Snakes. In it was this drawing, done with colored pencil. 

    The model for this drawing must have been a web image of me.

    Inside the rolled-up drawing was a woven image of me.  Here it is hanging on my wall:

Here it is in more detail:

    What a delightful gift!  I asked John for details about the production of the woven image.  He explained that one of his students has an 18-year old sister in the business.  They downloaded one of my portraits from the web, and she sketched the image and then hand stitched the carpet from that sketch.  It took about a week.  A very cool gift from what I understand is a very hot Urgench.

    John's institutional affiliation is the Centre for Development Research, University of Bonn, Germany.  He is the director of a project working out of Urgench.  He explained that decades of excessive irrigation for cultivating the "white gold" cotton (during the Soviet era) resulted in what is now known as "the Aral Sea Syndrome", in  the Aral Sea Basin, which includes Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan and parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Iran an area inhabited by 60 million people. The irrigation water was obtained by diverting water from the two major rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr, which feed the Aral Sea.  Since the 1960s, the sea surface has been reduced by 60%.  The desiccated Aral Sea floor became a source of harmful dust storms.  John describes the Aral Sea Basin as "a schoolbook example for a human-induced rapidly advancing soil salinization and exhaustion, which threatens both the ecological sustainability and economic viability of the small-scale farmers.  John described the climate as "extremely continental, with typical long and hot summers and short cold winters.  The potential evapotranspiration exceeds between 14 and 16 times than the annual precipitation (100 mm). Agriculture is only possible with irrigation. The main crops are cotton, winter wheat, rice and alfalfa, but livestock rearing is rapidly gaining in importance.   The ten-year project which John directs started in 2002.   Between 2002 and 2004, 24 Ph.D. students, 37 M.Sc. students, and numerous bachelor students have been working in the project, on all kinds of subjects: agronomy, soil science, hydrology, economics, agroforestry, aquaculture and much more. Students are basically from the region and it hoped that most will return after graduation in Germany.
 

Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch

This page most recently revised on 27. May 2006