After spending eight years living in the United Arab Emirates before the birth of their daughter in the late 1990s took them back to Canada, teachers Zora and Dave Keffer were no strangers to exploring the world.
And so, after she grew up and graduated, the couple came across a teaching opportunity in Central Asia, and decided to hit the road again on an adventure that would take them first to Kazakhstan and then later to a small city in Uzbekistan.
Despite initially fearing they had found themselves in an austere-looking former Soviet backwater, prone to power cuts and intolerable heatwaves, the couple say moving there was an incredible experience that offered positives no longer found in the West.
According to Zora, originally from the former Czechoslovakia, they “figured it was time to resume our …