Published by
Eurasianet
Eurasianet
For weeks on end, Chynara Kanybekova, a 25-year-old housewife in Sulukta, a village in Kyrgyzstan’s southern Batken region, carefully kept her grocery store receipts. “I gathered 106 receipts. The whole family was collecting them,” she said. People normally discard the slips as soon as they get them, but Kanybekova had her eye on a state-run receipt lottery prize. And her persistence paid off. Earlier this year, her number came up. And in late January, Kanybekova made the trip to the capital, Bishkek, to pick up her prize: the keys to a one-bedroom apartment, also in Bishkek. “My husband is th…