"We don't feel comfortable about asking for help, but we really need it," says Janabay Sadikov. He is the first deputy of the Supreme Council in Uzbekistan's autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan. The area is one of the worst hit by the severe drought that Central Asia has faced over the last two years.
The drought has brought the Central Asian states' ailing health and education services into sharp focus. Mr Sadikov's embarrassment is understandable if you consider that a decade ago his country was part of one of the most powerful states in the world. Today its status, like that of neighbouring Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, is reduced to that of developing nation.
There are many positive remnants from Soviet days. There is an abundance of highly qualified medical staff and a dense network of health institutions. People are used to consulting doctors frequently and are generally well informed about health matters.
Mothers, for example, know that they need to have their children immunised against various diseases.
On the education front, literacy rates are not far off Western European levels, and school attendance is high.
There was a safety net in the Soviet Union. It was not perhaps the most efficient one, but it did function. Central Asians used to get enormous assistance in terms of drugs, supplies, vaccines, and educational materials.
But that assistance stopped with independence a decade ago, and the health and education infrastructures have been in rapid decline ever since. The current drought is exacerbating matters.
Most schools in the east of Uzbekistan no longer have running water.
Health funding in the country is around $2.50 per year per capita, the bulk of which goes to staff salaries.
Ernazarova Djaksignl, the head of the psychiatric hospital in the Uzbek city of Nukus, says she gets paid $12 a month. There is so little money coming into the hospital that she and other staff members paid out of their own pockets for curtains and simple toys for the children's ward to make the place more homely.
In Turkmenistan, despite the fact that four-fifths of the central budget goes on health and education, performance in these areas is deteriorating rapidly. Primary school enrolment rates have fallen from 94 per cent to 83 per cent over the past 10 years, and the quality of education is falling.
Tajikistan is the poorest of all the former Soviet Central Asian states, and the health and education systems reflect that fact.
In the northern province of Khujand, the health budget is the equivalent of $200,000 for around two million people.
The last time we got drugs from the state was four years ago, says a doctor in main hospital in the town of Shaartuz in the south of the country. The institution is entirely dependent on donations from international aid organizations and non-governmental organizations.
In education, the major difficulties include problems in general school maintenance, lack of teaching aids, paper and school supplies. The challenge for the governments of these countries is to rationalise their health systems, and reduce staff numbers to sustainable levels. They also need to find a way for communities to take more responsibility for their health and education institutions and expect less from the state.
"At the moment the institutions are state-owned and people are used to benefiting from the health system without feeling that they are responsible for it, without any feeling of ownership," says Dragoslav Popovic, a health and nutrition expert with UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.
In many developing countries in Africa, he explains, the challenge is to build up the infrastructure, to build hospitals, train staff.
But here in Central Asia the infrastructure already exists, and there are lots of highly qualified people. The challenge is to stop the infrastructure from falling apart.