By Gerry Boyle '78

When Alfred Dostie '70 was a boy in central Maine, his window to the world was his stamp collection: tiny scenes from faraway places like Azerbaijan and Andorra. Dostie never dreamed that one day he would be buying stamps in places like Bielawa, Bijeljina and Brzesko.

Dostie grew up in Augusta, where his mother, a widow, worked in the weave rooms of one of the city's textile mills. His father, who died when Alfred was 6, was a loom fixer. "I like to tell people I have two degrees," Dostie said. "Colby College and Bates, Edwards Division. That's the old cotton mill. That's how I worked my way through college."

On the advice of Reginald Houghton Sturtevant '21, then chairman of the Board of Trustees of the College, Dostie went to Colby. He went on to work for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and several Vermont banks as chief auditor and senior vice president. Then, married with three children, Dostie had what he describes as a mid-life crisis. He left his bank job and formed his own firm, consulting for small community banks in New England. In 1996 he took an assignment with a bank farther afield: Kazcredsotsbank in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan. "It was the former state bank," Dostie said. "They had a pretty elaborate lobby but very few assets."

Dostie found himself 11 time zones away from Vermont, 100 miles from the Chinese border in Central Asia. His two-month assignment: to introduce Kazaks to western banking principles. In the process, Dostie got an education of his own.

Stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Chinese border, Kazakhstan has valuable oil reserves and other natural resources. "Just looking at the world map, you see the strategic importance of it," Dostie said. "But it was pretty bleak. Not a lot of snow. Mountains outside of Almaty, then the capital, rise to seventeen thousand feet just ten miles outside of town. Beautiful country but typical Soviet architecture. Block buildings, uneven stairs, terrible plumbing."

In 1991, with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan was turned back to the Kazaks. When the Russians left, they took their centralized banking system with them. In place of the Soviet system– essentially a money-distribution system–260 private banks sprang up. Except they weren't banks in the American sense. "There were no depositors," Dostie said. "They were all investors. If you look at an American bank, you see eight or nine percent capital. Over there, ninety-nine percent capital, no deposits."

Those were heady days. Kazaks expected private enterprise to create an American standard of living very quickly. But Dostie predicts it will take two or three generations for true private enterprise to become part of the Kazak culture and that of Bosnia, where he worked in 1998. Dostie went to Bosnia for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which hired him to review the performance of 32 banks there and in the Republika of Srpska. He was based in Sarajevo, where ethnic enmity still simmered. He sent voluminous missives home, mostly about the cities, the people. "Artillery holes are much more immense and impressive, but it's the bullet holes that seem more insidious. They are everywhere for no apparent reason other than someone wanted to waste some ammunition or as if a game was played to poke holes into every single square meter of building wall in the city," he wrote.

Dostie spent nine weeks in Bosnia, selecting banks for inclusion in a U.S.-sponsored $250-million small-business lending program. He was back in Vermont for a little more than a year, doing consulting in New England and New York but couldn't resist another foreign foray. As of July 1, he was due to begin an assignment for Asian Development Bank–in Uzbekistan.–Gerry Boyle '78