The Oldest Woman In The World?
Dosova lives in a small town of Prishakhtinsk, in central Kazakhstan, has 11 children and 37 grandchildren and great grandchildren.
According to Nuken Alkeshova, her granddaughter who takes care of her, the last national census several years ago revealed that her grandmother was the oldest citizen in the country -- and if true, the oldest citizen in the world by 16 years.
Alkeshova put her longevity down to eating cottage cheese and not eating sweets, and in an interview with RFE/RL's Kazakh Service certainly doesn't put it down to the $110 a month state pension she receives.
It's incredibly difficult to deny or support her claim. Dosova has both a Soviet-era passport and Kazakh identification card.
But speaking to a Kazakh colleague, he said his mother, born in the 1930s, didn't know exactly which year she was born.
In the Russian and Soviet empires, the combination of non-Russian speaking locals and non-Kazakh speaking provincial officials meant bureaucratic errors were common.
Because of the distances involved in getting from remote parts of the steppe to regional capitals, documents like birth certificates were often processed every few years in mass batches thus widening the margins of bureaucratic error.
That's not to take anything away from Mrs Dosova though, who is clearly a remarkable lady.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Dosova said she hoped our correspondents wouldn't see what she saw in her long life and wanted the Kazakh authorities to realize how pitiful her pension was.
-- Luke Allnutt
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2009 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
London, Mar 25 (ANI): A Kazakhstan lady, who mothered ten children, will be celebrating her 130th birthday this week, making her the world’s oldest person by 16 years.
Sakhan Dosova’s age was discovered during a census in Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan, when the date of birth on her passport showed as 1879, which was the same year Edison invented the light bulb and Stalin and Einstein were born.
Dosova’s age surprised demographers when they found that she had been on Stalin’s first census of the former Soviet region in 1926, when her age was given as 47, and they are now trying to confirm the record.
For the 129-year-old lady, she puts her longevity down to her love for cottage cheese and her sense of humour, and never visiting a doctor or eating sweets.
“I don’t have any special secret. I’ve never taken pills and if I was ill I took grannies’ remedies,” the Sun quoted her as saying.
“I’ve never eaten sweets. But I love kurt — a salty dried cottage cheese — and talkan, a ground wheat,” she stated.
Dosova lives in poor conditions in an overcrowded flat with a granddaughter, Gaukhar Kanieva, 42, and apart from hearing problems she is in good health.
“She is a very cheerful woman. We think laughter and her good mood help her live so long,” Kanieva said of her grandma.
The aged lady has been congratulated by the local mayor, and as of now, she is the oldest living person in the world followed by American Edna Parker who is 114.
Dosova was born on March 27, 1879, when Queen Victoria had 22 years left to rule, Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story. (ANI)
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