Azerbaijan: Delivering Dreams
Baku's Enterprising Orphans
Producer/Reporter: Jonathan Miller
Executive Producer: Ron McCullagh
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Cursed by war and economic devastation but blessed by geology, the people of Azerbaijan look to their vast untapped oil wealth as the cure-all for their country's countless crises. The reality is that the foreign oil giants will rake off the early revenues: Azerbaijanis will not benefit for at least a decade. "Delivering Dreams" tells the remarkable story of a group of young, disadvantaged Azeris who have proved what it's possible to build in the meantime, before the oil dollars arrive.
This film documents the success of a parcel delivery service whose motorbike couriers are all orphans and whose clients include the big oil corporations. The company has filled a niche in the market and its expansion, since it started last year, has outstripped all forecasts. Its profits fund an SOS telephone helpline, staffed by disabled people. It too fills a niche as the only psychiatric counselling service in a traumatised nation.
This is an unusual tale of those at the bottom of the heap defying the odds, taking their future into their own hands -- and succeeding. This inspiring story is set against the bleak backdrop of social and economic upheaval in a nation where one in seven is a refugee, where unemployment's endemic, where psychiatric disorders have multiplied.
We follow the story of Shamil, an orphan and former street kid. Now 17, Shamil was being forced to leave his orphanage with no job to go to and no family to turn to. Then, for the first time in his life, he struck lucky. Today, as a motorbike courier, he has a sense of direction and a job that's the envy of all his old friends.
At the SOS helpline, we meet Pervana, a telephone counsellor, who believes that her own struggle to cope with her blindness has given her particular empathy with many of the 2,000 desperate people who call the hotline each month, many of them suicidal.
"Delivering Dreams" is not just the unreported story behind Baku's oil boom. It throws open the question as to why such an idea cannot be exported and replicated in other countries where society's most disadvantaged have been overlooked by the state.
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