A Day in the Life
My name is Magomed, and my village is stacked on a mountainside like steps. I am nine years old, and I am Botlikh, which you have never heard of, because there are only about six thousand of us in the whole world.
Our houses are stone, built one above another on the slope, so my roof is my neighbor’s yard. In the morning I climb down to bring in the apricots drying on flat baskets in the sun. Dagestan apricots are famous, at least to us, and my grandmother dries them, jams them, and folds them into flat sweet sheets that we tear like paper and eat all winter.
The word Dagestan means land of mountains, and the mountains decide everything: where the road goes, when the snow shuts it, which village speaks which language. From my roof I can see a village across the valley where the people speak a different language than mine, even though a strong boy could walk there in an afternoon. My language, Botlikh, is spoken almost nowhere else on earth. It has no books. When I learn to read at school, I read in Russian and Avar, never in the language my mother sings in.
On Fridays the men go to the mosque, and my grandfather prays five times every day, facing far-off Mecca. He is teaching me. In our village, this is what everyone has always done, as far back as anyone can tell.
Fun Facts
- Dagestan means “land of mountains,” and more than 30 languages are spoken within it.
- The Botlikh language has almost never been written down. There are no Botlikh books, newspapers, or Bibles.
- Botlikh children usually grow up speaking three languages: Botlikh at home, and Avar and Russian at school.
- The region is famous for its apricot orchards, terraced gardens, and drystone houses built into the slopes.
- Some villages in highland Dagestan are still cut off by snow for parts of every winter.
- There is no known church and no known community of believers among the Botlikh.
How to Pray for the Botlikh
Pray for the first. Among the Botlikh there is, as far as anyone knows, no believer yet, so pray for the first Botlikh man, woman, or child to meet Jesus, and for courage for them in a village where everyone knows everyone. Pray for the Botlikh language, that someone would write it down and that Scripture would one day exist in it. Pray for the believers elsewhere in the Caucasus, that their lives would carry the good news up the mountain roads.
How Kids Can Help
Find the Caspian Sea on a map, then look just west of it for Dagestan, in the mountains of southern Russia. Pray for a people so small that most maps will never print their name. The February 2026 Wonder Letter was written from the perspective of a Botlikh child, with a map and vocabulary, so your family can know them better than almost anyone in your town.
Scripture to Remember
“He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.” (Psalm 147:4)
Six thousand people is small to the world and not small to God. He has the Botlikh counted, and named.