At the beginning of August this year, Tuyak Kazkenovna Eskozhina, the founder of our home and a woman whom hundreds of children called their mother, passed away.
Together with her husband, Anuarbek Baisarin, she raised more than 800 orphaned children, beginning with a seven-year-old girl they met at a market in Almaty in the 1990s. Having grown up as an orphan herself, Tuyak Kazkenovna knew what it meant to live without parents and could not simply walk away.
In 1998, after selling their apartment in Almaty, the couple opened a private children’s home in Talgar — the very home where we are today. Over the past 28 years, several generations of children from different backgrounds and nationalities have grown up within these walls. Today, they include military personnel, doctors, teachers, and simply happy people who have built families of their own.
Her foster children came from all across the country to attend her funeral — the people she once simply called “my children,” never distinguishing between those who were born to her and those she welcomed into her family.
In recent years, the Baisarin family has endured several profound losses. Now Tuyak-apay herself is gone — a woman whose heart became a home for so many children.
We are continuing her work. The building to which she devoted 28 years now needs our care, just as the children who came here once needed hers.