I was about age eleven then. And I started thinking about myself: ‘Well, why is it that we lost these twelve people and the Kazakhs on the whole tended to survive?’ One of the first things I realised was the lack of fuel. We didn’t know about fuel. We didn’t have reserves of fuel. I therefore applied myself systematically to the gathering of cow dung. Morning, noon and evening I collected cow dung. I set up a cow dung pile. One of the best cow dung piles in the village. It was admired! It was beautifully done. I knew where to collect the cow dung and how to arrange it and so on. And that determined me to become an engineer which I did because in fact I came to realise that survival very much depended on actually the practical things. All the other things were not that significant; it’s the practical things – the water, the shelter, the food and so on. So I collected a large amount of cow dung and this determined me to do something practical, something that you could actually contribute to people’s living.