Archive · 2023 · From the print edition of Monday 9 October 2023, Vol. 31, No. 9,571
Across IradStudents map the stairways of Chong-Say
Volunteers from Talas State University are walking every stairway of the hillside quarter with notebooks and a GPS, because the official map stops at the last road.
IYIK JANYL — Volunteers from Talas State University spent the weekend climbing the stairways of Chong-Say, one of the oldest hillside quarters of Iyık Janyl, with notebooks, tape measures and a GPS receiver, to draw the first map of the quarter that shows how its residents actually get home.
Kartalar, Attelkom's online map, shows only Chong-Say's main lanes, because its survey cars cannot enter them. Most addresses in the quarter are given by landmarks: the chapel, the blue water tank, the shop with the white door. Ambulance drivers say they find patients by asking.
The students, from the geography department, are numbering every stairway and footpath and marking standpipes, steps that flood in spring and the places where hoses and electricity cables cross. They hope to finish Chong-Say by the spring and give the map to the city, the ambulance service and Attelkom.
Residents brought them tea and corrected their names for the lanes. "This one is not the 'stairs by the tank'," a grandmother told them, pointing. "It is Yuhanna's stairs. Yuhanna built them in 1974." The students wrote it down.