Since I have traveled and pictured in my blog so many amazing places from around the World, I now feel unjust of not talking about my native city — Almaty, which is yes, in Kazakhstan.

Do you know what I miss most these days? The long summer nights in my friends’ garden. The disappearing sunlight was dimming slowly, dissolving the memories of the past day, making them irrelevant. The expectation of the new night in the garden all what mattered. The laughs, the chats, the arguments, the us, the silent pitfalls, the feeling of being young and cheerful and free. Even if we weren’t. The feeling all what mattered. With me having no memory for things, I do remember the almost every element of that garden: the wild bushes of attempted vegetables, heavy branches of trees hanging low full of green sour cankered apples, an ornamented table cloth with old stains of wine and candle wax, the hammock indeed and the air… dense for fresh land and greens smell, the land black and rich, the air where bugs are the kings. The garden, which held a meaning of that cave, of a refuge. Refuge for a license of being valuable for who you are and not for who you want to be. No matter how strong or vulnerable you felt. As if you had that silent unspoken very natural right for existence and in the same time this very existence was making you very very important. The no-judgements garden. Why do I miss it now? Don’t we all miss it?

Truth to be told – traveling Kazakhstan is not easy, well, I mean it’s not “intuitive”. Traveling in Kazakhstan is like using an Android to an Apple user, but once you master it, it is an adventure, which is kind of cool, if you are looking for one. Why I am saying that is for the reason of setting expectations straight – this country has no touristic infrastructure, and I mean it. Hence it’s wild and worth it.

When it comes down to actually doing things, what does it take? I believe it is the most important question among many. What it takes for people to be wishing for better but one person to start putting them together. After having traveled literally around the Globe and having interviewed over 30 active doers in places from Japan to Guatemala to India, I have come to one major answer to the question I put above – it takes courage and inspiration. But it is also about a universal belief in a better life, into a justice, a feeling that “who if not me”. And no matter which corner of the World you live, these people like “sparks” are everywhere, you recognize them by shining eyes and an action plan at hand. They first do, then look back and analyze, because they do something that most probably nobody have done before. That something can anything from building tetrapak houses for people who live the slams, to going on a wild-sea odyssey to record and probably save some unique marine species. There is another uniting factor – they love the place where they live, and they have that sense of awareness which brings a level of entitlement for social responsibility to take action.