Red Carpet

One of the two companies that I had started in 1990 for working in Central Asia was called International Business Partners (IBP). We were inviting marketplace professionals to go to Kyrgyzstan and teach the principles of free market enterprise.

Our first contacts in Central Asia were with government leaders at the highest level. IBP at first hosted government ministers from Kyrgyzstan in the USA. They flew into Dulles, and we arranged meetings with US government officials including Senators and Congressmen and other dignitaries. They toured businesses and met with governors, mayors and other officials in Atlanta, Charlotte and Jackson, Mississippi. In turn, the Kyrgyz government hosted small groups from IBP, and we led conferences on free market enterprise for these government leaders at first because they were unsure what we were going to teach. After one session they realized the benefit of this instruction and selected a wider array of citizens to participate.

Most people in Kyrgyzstan did not even know the Russian word for profit when we started teaching these principles, so we had to use some very simple material. We chose Junior Achievement material. That’s right—we taught Communist government leaders the principles of free market enterprise using high school curricula. It worked!

The teams that we brought to Kyrgyzstan were given very rare privileges as we were among the first westerns to have such a close relationship with government officials. Communism had not fallen yet, and westerners and oil companies had not arrived. We were asked to go to other parts of the country to lead conferences, and everywhere we went, they literally rolled out a red carpet to welcome us. We traveled by car and by helicopter, but no matter where we went we were treated as royalty.

Central Asians had been isolated from the world for 70 years since the beginning of Stalin’s iron fist dictatorship. They were hungry for change and Americans coming to their town was a big event.

In one of our early visits the very first Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, Nasirdin Isanov, entertained us in his office. A month after our visit he was killed in an auto accident in the outskirts of Bishkek. The Prime Minister had presented me with a Kyrgyzstan chess set. Today, I still have not unwrapped the individual chess pieces from their brown waxed paper wrappings.

I ask myself, “After 32 years, why have you not unwrapped the chess pieces?” My first response is that I received several Central Asian chess sets as gifts and this one is more special to me. Another response would be that I am saving this special chess set to talk about with my grandchildren. One third of our grandchildren are young adults now, so I missed my chance with them, and other younger grandchildren want to play chess, not talk about the origin of the set.

OK, so I guess I will just keep my chess set intact with the original wrappings and let my kids determine what to do with it after I have gone on to glory.