A Kazakh lady, Sakhan Dosova, will mark her 130th birthday on March 27.
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.
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