Tajikistan travels

All who are thirsty?

Earlier in the trip, Steven and Catherine took an unplanned journey to the south of the country.  This is the story of what they found...

Catherine:
‘It’s with some trepidation that I start the day’s journey to Bishkent. This is something to do with the fact it’s a long and quite mountainous drive, but, if I’m to be completely honest, I’m slightly worried by the fact it borders Afghanistan and Uzbekistan – not two of the safest countries in the world.

Bishkent was badly affected by the civil war and today a mixture of people from across central Asia live in the area. People have also been moved there by the government and there are strong claims that the Government has reneged on promises of housing, potable water, land grants, and other social services (see this US report, section 1f).

Ghamkhori’s director tells us that this has led to tensions in the region but thankfully there hasn’t been any open fighting.

We drive past numerous cotton fields. It’s a cold day but people are outside working the land. There are rusting buildings scattered across the landscape – a reminder of Soviet times when people worked in factories for a regular wage.

The drive up into the mountains is beautiful. The road we’re on was once one of the most important roads in central Asia, linking Tajikistan with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Now it’s fallen into disrepair and has become yet another ghostly reminder of the Soviet ‘glory days’.

The only modern interruption to our journey is the traffic police and their speed guns. Yes, we are on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, on an old potholed road that’s carrying more donkeys than cars… but the traffic cops are waiting to fine any driver who goes over the speed limit.

When we arrive in Bishkent we are taken to a village Mahalla committee meeting.  We walk into a cold, dark room where around 30 people are sat on cushions listening to today’s lesson on poverty.  They applaud Steven simply for announcing that we’re from the UK.

Ghamkori provides a ‘facilitator’ [a tutor] to come to the committee meetings and teach the committee members on various topics such as;

• how to avoid fights in the family – there are often more than two families living under one roof in Bishkent so relations can become rather frayed
• how to pay less for a wedding – nuptials are important and expensive events and many people end up poorer because they’ve paid for one.
• healthcare – doctors are expensive and the villagers are told how to treat some conditions like diarrhoea themselves. 

These may seem like basic lessons to take, but as one of the members of the committee comments: ‘If you don’t know how to do anything, you don’t start to do anything. Ghamkori has taught us how to do things.’

Alongside a lack of electricity, no healthcare and a lack of investment, the main problem for this village is access to water.   Women and children have to walk two kilometres to the nearest spring.

The women explain that this is hard work and time consuming:

‘Our people like to work. Maybe if we had a well here our hands would be free to attend workshops for sewing or baking.’

One of the women on the committee invites us to her house. She is 47-years-old, a widower with seven children. Her husband was a truck driver who was kidnapped and subsequently killed in the civil war.

She now shares a two-roomed house with three other families - a total of eighteen people living together under one roof.

She farms cotton but as she explains, ‘There’s no benefit from cotton, it provides enough for food but it’s not enough and sometimes we’re hungry.’

Steven takes her outside for photographs as it is too dark inside: 
‘I ask to photograph her in her kitchen and once again find myself surprised to be taken to an outside area with an open frontage and just a fire for cooking on.   

I talk with her as we take the shots and discover that the going rate for cotton picking in this region is just 10 dihram per kilo.   A good day will net 60 kilos of cotton – next to nothing for backbreaking, freezing cold, work.  From the age of 12, local children are let off school between March – November each year so that they can help their families in the cotton fields.’

Catherine:
‘She has two children working in Russia and they send money home to help her survive (about US$150 every 3 – 4 months, she says). She worries about them – the youngest is 21 - and she says she never knows what they’re eating and they never tell her how they are treated.

She, along with every other woman in the village, has to make the 2km journey to collect water. The house uses 160 litres a day and that’s just enough for cooking and washing.   It’s raining the day of our visit, so pots are strategically positioned below the drainpipes to collect rainwater.

It’s a hard and time consuming task collecting that amount of water everyday: ‘Water is life for everyone. If there was a well, we’d all have free time to do other work.’

But things have already started to change thanks to efforts by Ghamkhori and the local committee. Only recently local government officials visited the village to see how people are struggling to get clean water.

As one of the villagers explains ‘There are some problems that we can solve by ourselves but the committee can help us with local government – we can’t do it alone.’

Work has now begun on cleaning 700 metres of open pipes and they’re also building a well to get underground water. Most of the cost for this comes from international organisations, but the local government is contributing some money from its tiny budget.

And the villagers themselves are contributing to the cost of this well. It’s an investment in their future and something they are more than willing to support.  They need to raise just 130 somoni more to finish their side of the funding for the pipe…

Steven:
We’ve heard that some of the men from the village are trying to earn more money by quarrying in a local limestone area.   Before taking the long drive back, we travel the few kilometres to the site and find a handful of men stabbing enthusiastically at huge rocks with metal poles.   

Scrambling up the quarry side I look down on a large truck made of three open compartments.  These men are working to fill a third of the truck – a task that will take two men more than two days to complete.   

They’ll earn 30 somoni for their trouble...

SharePoint

Alongside our work in bringing these stories to you and our colleagues back home at Christian Aid, Steven also burned the midnight oil working at our Dushanbe office whenever there was a spare moment…

With over 500 staff and 600+ grassroots partners in some of the poorest countries, we have to take great care in how we communicate and share information around the world. After all, it's no use having a great project in one country if that knowledge cannot be shared elsewhere.

So one of the things I'm responsible for is the introduction of Microsoft SharePoint at Christian Aid - it's a way to collaborate and share information between staff, wherever in the world they happen to be.

You can read the story of why we decided to go with SharePoint here.  But I'm often asked in NGO circles why we chose big bad old Microsoft rather than a 'good' open source route. Taking a moment to stand on my soap box, here's why...

As a charity we have a duty of care to the people who give us donations.  That duty is to maximise our 'profit' - the difference between costs and income - so that we're able to create the biggest impact in countries like Tajikistan.

Using a Microsoft product means that we are buying into a system that requires no bespoke development from us and, more importantly, does not require rare and expensive open source guru's to maintain it.  We can configure the software quickly - the SharePoint go live took four months from a standing start - and avoid the lengthy development cycles of open source. What's more, our staff get to work with a familiar interface… so the training burden is low.

We've got this all working in the UK; so my challenge for this trip would be to see exactly how well SharePoint worked from Dushanbe and if I could squeeze the tests in amongst everything else.

The first opportunity to have a look at things was during Eid.   Sat amongst the squawking PC’s (every time the power dips, which is often, the voltage regulator boxes screech like a bird) I got to play PC engineer – getting rid of viruses and updating windows so that the IT guys in London would trust a VPN connection from one of the machines.  It was a frustrating experience as the updates took over 8 hours to complete.

We never did get to test the VPN as the internet service provider couldn’t change the configuration settings in time (despite us paying an extortionate monthly fee for 512k access), but I did manage to get the staff connected through our eGap system and also prove SharePoint through Citrix.   Each of the methods has its disadvantages and I’d much rather be using the Cisco VPN - so we’ll be testing that remotely very soon.

The important thing was that I was able to train our staff in Dushanbe how to use SharePoint and they’re now able to share files and collaborate on line with colleagues in London.  Not bad for our first international pilot and I have a checklist of changes ready for when we hit the next international office (likely to be Nairobi).

For now, we’re close to having – for the first time ever - all Christian Aid staff able to view and contribute to the same information; be they here in head office, in a church building, out in a developing country, or on an international flight.   

We think that’s pretty amazing.

Postscript:  Our SharePoint deployment is part of something called the Common Knowledge Programme and was reviewed recently in Enterprise Information Magazine.  Email me for a copy of the article.

Update...

We've figured out the copyright on the song from this article. You can listen to the Babushka song by clicking this link.  Listen as you look through the stories on this site.  I wonder if it sends the same chill down your spine as it does mine.

Do you remember the good old days... before the ghost town

Lots of links to photo's and other articles in this entry.  Right click the underlined text and select 'open in new window' as you progress through the story...

We arrive at another house on another sunny but freezing cold day in Balykchy.  There is a large green gate covering the entrance and a little girl who does not want to let us in.  The translator explains who we are and the girl eventually relents. We walk through a small scruffy garden area – complete with frozen water supply - and make our way through the cardboard that acts as the door to the house.

Inside an old lady sits stooped on a tiny stool.  As with Nikolai and Lupina, the room has almost no furniture and clothes are piled up on the bed.  But this time the room is clean and airy.  Light is streaming through the window and there is some sense of ‘home’.  Having spent two weeks crouched on cold floors staring abject poverty in the face perhaps we’re also less shocked by the circumstances we find ourselves in… and more able to concentrate on hearing the stories we’re told.  This turns out to be a fleeting confidence.

Tentieva Suyun is 73 and has lived in Balykchy all of her life.  She stutters through her life story, clearly confused to have three strange faces in her room and a translator asking lots of questions.  She married at 23 and worked as a guard – the area was host to a lot of military testing during Soviet times.

Of her five children, only three survive and only one of those three has anything to do with her – a daughter who lives in the same house, together with her young daughter.  Three generations under one roof, living in just one room.

It’s a familiar story.  Tentieva, her daughter Aichachan (42), and the young girl Aizada (7) barely scrape by.  Tentieva’s pension is little more than US$10 per month and her daughter tries to supplement the household income by selling sunflower seeds at market.   The last time they saw anyone from the social department was almost a year ago.

We talk about what little state provision is available for these people.  There’s a palpable tension in the room when we discuss the situation with the local social department (see the end of blog entry: ‘Spring of Life’).  Aichachan pipes up; “The social department does not do anything.  They just take for themselves.”   

This is proving a hard interview – what else is there to say?  How many more stories like this can we bear to hear?

We talk with little Aizada for a while.   Fortunately, she is able to go to school and tells us how much she enjoys ‘mathmatica’ (maths).  A man enters the room.  He’s the ‘head’ of the block of houses on this road – a man by the name of Marat Namazov.

He explains that people try to help one another but there are limits to what can be achieved.  Of the 200 or so households in his block only 2, maybe 3, households have work.

…That’s 99% unemployment…

It’s time to take photographs and take our leave.   I chat to Marat about our meeting with Yevgeny Semenko just a couple of weeks ago, though it feels like a lifetime has passed. 

Marat acknowledges that the pensions are at least paid on time now; “In the past, we might have to wait for 6 months before a payment was received”.   But the being paid on time has just meant others in the town are less sympathetic to the obvious plight of the elderly and the very young.   Whenever Marat asks for assistance he is told ‘at least you get your pensions’.

As the Kyrgyz government seems set on a downward spiral, the future for these people could look bleak indeed without the lifeline which is Resource Centre for the Elderly.

Steven gets accosted

After meeting with Tentieva Suyun, we travel a short distance to a group of houses in the next block.  The houses edge a small dirt square.  There is a communal ‘toilet’,  a hole in the ground with two excrement-covered planks across it and a single sheet of corrugated iron for privacy.   We are to interview two men but the room they are in is too small, so I step outside back into the square leaving Daniel and Catherine to the interview.

I have the camera with me and an old lady spots me.   She wants me to photograph her house too.  At first I decline.  This isn’t poverty tourism.  We only want to take the pictures of people who’ve had a chance to tell us their stories.   She persists.  I enter the small house.

There is a single living room.  Small and unfurnished.  No different from the others we’ve seen on this trip.  I look through to her kitchen.   The roof is half missing.  Water has come through.  There is ice everywhere.  The old lady tells me that during winter she will have no water for 2 months or more.  ‘Bubu’ is 78 and she lives with her daughter, 45.

The realisation hits that we're not just seeing the worst-affected of the communities we visit.  Sometimes this is the experience of everyone.

Suddenly the daughter appears in a doorway.  She offers me some bread and I take a small piece.  Her fingers are black with ingrained dirt and she’s wobbly on her feet.  Before I realise it, she’s forcing pieces of bread into my mouth with her fingers.  The translator is outside and I’m on my own with these two women.

I make my way to the door.  The woman has her arms around me and she’s kissing me all over my face.  The translator looks appalled and we establish that she’s drunk on vodka.  She’s trying to explain to me why she drinks.  She doesn’t need to.  If I’d lived any of the lives we’ve witnessed on this trip, I’m not sure I’d stop at drink.

She’s holding my face close to hers.  Crying.  I straighten slightly and she falls backwards off the step.  She’s not hurt thank God but she’s getting very upset.  She takes my notebook from me and crouches on the floor trying to write.

I take a photograph of her, which I regret.   But this is yet another face of poverty and just as legitimate a story to tell.  We’ve seen how people have been haunted by poverty and we’ve seen how people have regained some self respect.  Now I’m seeing what happens when life feels utterly hopeless and wrong.

We manage to leave.  By Issy-Kul a railway runs along the shoreline – I sit on one of the rails and desperately want to cry.  I’m grateful that Catherine is sat next to me.  Kannat is dealing with the trip in his own way – there’s loud rap music coming from the vehicle.

Spring of Life

Our accommodation has shrunk at every stage of this journey.  We’re now all sharing a small apartment, despite having the option of spreading over a few different places last night.  Our little group has achieved community… we came out to Central Asia as colleagues.  Now we’re friends and able to support one another through the incredible lows and highs of this trip.

Our first morning in Balykchy and we begin with a meeting of the Self Help Group (SHG) committee – a group which oversees the actions of each of the SHG’s in the town as well as co-ordinating the local emergency response.  It turns out Balykchy is in a seismic zone and there are regular tremors, though the last major quake was in 1975. 

As ever, the people of the group are incredibly warm, generous and kind hearted despite the dire personal circumstances they face.  The leader of the group, an elegant woman in her late sixties called Vera Popova explains that her group sells pies and bread to the local schools and markets.   The money they make goes to paying back micro credit loans and assisting with the funeral costs of the group members. 

They face a lot of competition from younger unemployed people in the town and a local restaurant has recently undercut them, but they continue to work.  “We are not ashamed.  It’s our work, our labour” explains Vera.   To stand out, the group have organised traditional uniforms for themselves and sing songs at market.

With this, they launch into a vigorous rendition of the Russian folksong 'Katya Katusha' – the story of a girl who is waiting for her boy to come back from WW2.  “He will fight to protect us from the enemies and she will protect their love” explains Vera.

This is a rare moment away from poverty and again we wonder how people are able to maintain such spirit.  We managed to record the folksong – CA staff can listen to it here on the Intranet.
Somewhat unbelievably, we have to take care of music copyright issues so can't post this tune on the blog site just yet.   If we can find a way around this then we'll let you know.

After much singing, we return to the challenges these proud but frail people face.  Again, there is nostalgia for the old Soviet system; “even when you just had 20 roubles for your pension, you could survive” says one woman.  “Life at that time was better.”

The group explain life in the town;

“Balykchy is seen as a dead town these days.”

“The town of the very old and the very young.   Those who can work have to go to Bishkek.”

“We cannot afford to live”

“The elderly are neglected – our children have their own problems”

“There are many homeless, they sleep by the utilities pipes to stay warm.”

It’s cold where we are.  We give lifts home to the committee members.  On our own again, we are to meet some of the poorest people in Balykchy town.   

But first we need to visit the ‘City Department for Protection of Social Labour’ so that we can be accompanied on our visits by the head of the department.  We wait in the vehicle while Kannat goes to get him - but two minutes later and he’s back empty handed.

It turns out that the official is drunk and can’t come with us.   A regular occurrence we’re told.  I feel a well of anger building up inside me…

Back to Bishkek and beyond

After a lovely evening spent with our colleagues from ACT Central Asia, we say a fond farewell, rising next morning to blue sky and sunshine ready for our journey back to Kyrgyzstan. We’ve had such an extraordinary time in Tajikistan - a country of vibrant, generous and courageous people; abandoned factories and unemployment; uncertain futures and low expectations; tensions of dependency and independence.

The thought of using T(r)ajik air again has been hanging a t the back of our minds since our Tupolov experience 10 days ago, and it was with some trepidation that we arrive at the airport. We are relieved to board a small, though elderly jet. We are intrigued to find that all the luggage is being piled up at the back of the plane and there is a somewhat random distribution of seatbelts: Catherine has none, and eyes the emergency door handle as a place to hold onto, although it becomes cased in ice during the journey!

Views of spectacular snowy mountain ranges and lakes soon relax us and we smoothly descend to another perfect landing. Only later are we told by our translator that due to the age of the airlines, the pilots procure their landing skills in order to avoid loss of wings and other essential aircraft parts…

We are met at the airport as if by old friends by members of Resource Centre for the Elderly along with our translators Galina and Galina (!).  We want to avoid travelling through the mountains at night, so head off immediately for Balykchy – a town 3 hours east of Bishkek on the edge of the beautiful and mythical lake Issy-Kul.

It is wonderful to watch the landscape roll by as we wend our way towards the majestic mountains. Falcons perch in wayside trees, herons gently dip for fish in low rivers – this is a breath of fresh air. The sheer vastness and expanse of the plains, the mix of rock formations, searingly bright sunlight, frozen rivers, snowy peaks and blue sky conjures visions of the Wild West, Tibet, Mongolia. 

We pass through small towns with wide tree colonnaded streets populated by decorative houses with chalet-style wooden lofts, and blue painted window frames. It is easy to be beguiled by these scenes and the lightness is starkly contrasted by ominous derelict factories, decrepit irrigation channels and farm machinery that so frequently scar the intervening landscape.   

After a while we begin to climb into the mountains and the previously distant hills now tower barrenly above us – yielding only sparse vegetation to challenge the most intrepid goat. Roads are shored up by anti-avalanche tunnels and a small railway line follows our route. The only other evidence of humanity is the ever present electricity pylons and telegraph wires lacing across the hillsides and occasional settlements with drying washing spread out between bushes like cobwebs.  This is now a mountain road winding past a dramatically frozen river – its glistening rapids fixed in time. It’s clear by the number of wild birds that there must be so much wildlife hidden in this terrain and I gasp at the sight of a snow leopard sitting on a rock only to discover that this is one of the many statues lining the route! All these views are gained through the side windows of our bus – it being too terrifying to view out front at the speed we are going.   The driver clearly has aspirations of racing fame…

We descend down again into plains and at last glimpse the blue ribbon of lake opening up as we wend our way into Balykchi town. This is a totally different place to any we have been. It feels like a remote outpost mountain settlement, with wide roads and desert all around, rising up to snowy peaks. 

We stop briefly in order for Kannat (the volunteer co-ordinator for Resource Centre for the Elderly who is with us for this leg of the journey) to buy smoked fish – a speciality of the town. He is surrounded by around 20 women clutching bundles of Siq and trying to catch his attention.   He eventually emerges with a prized purchase which he later shares with us.

The lake is the focus for the town. It is regarded as sacred and is surrounded by myth.  Only recently have people begun to swim there. The water is salty and, even in piercingly cold temperatures, it never freezes. It is also sited as the second deepest in the world and has revealed evidence of a lost ‘town’ beneath the surface giving it the stature of Atlantis. Later that evening, we wander around the parameter as small children skate and sledge on the frozen ponds around its edge, spying water birds. It is extremely beautiful and is very calming after our exhausting journey.  Given what we are to face over the next few days, it is a welcome respite.

Life has been hard here in Balykchy. In Soviet times the population topped 100,000 - most of whom were employed in large and prosperous factories (one wool pin factory employed half the town).

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a rapid decline: factories have closed and the population reduced to just over 40,000 as Russians and others have moved away. This has left grandparents caring for grandchildren, parents without sons, wives without husbands.

With this has come the ever familiar reduction of income, employment, health and hope that we have been seeing everywhere. This is the purpose of our visit to Resource Centre for the Elderly here in Balykchy – to visit various projects that are helping the elderly in particular, to regain their livelihoods, a sense of community and hope for the future…

Leavening of rights, hopes and dreams

We visit a Ghamkhori workshop on HIV/AIDS in a village school situated several kilometres from Kurgan Teppe. The classroom is sparse, paint is peeling off the walls and pieces of glass are missing from the windows. There is no electricity or heating.

The class we visit is made up of 16- to 17-year-old girls. I would use the term teenagers in the UK, but the age of the youth here doesn’t seem to correspond to those of the same age back home. All fourteen of the girls are sat with their coats on to keep warm.

They are sat two at a desk and in rows, which brings back memories of my own school days with the exception that the chairs that we had, although not the best, all had backs and the desks were not ready to collapse if too much weight was placed on them.

As we talk to the pupils, two of them seem particularly keen to take part in the conversation: Zamira Tagaeva and Rukhsora Nazarova, both aged 16. 

They tell us that the class has been learning about HIV/AIDS. They are currently studying HIV prevention and finding out which activities could place them further at risk.

Zamira tells us that she finds it worrying that this is a disease that can’t be cured and that they were not even aware of it until Ghamhori held the first workshop with them in 2004.

The class tells us the different things that they have been taught and how during classes they will often split into groups to do their work. Many of the girls are quite insistent that they will make their future husbands have blood tests, especially when they return from working in Russia or other countries.

I am sceptical that this would happen in reality, so we ask the girls whether they believe that a husband would agree to this.  Their response is a unanimous:

“We will make them.”

It is law in Tajikistan that children go to school until they are seventeen, and nearly all of the girls in this class tell us that they would like to complete their studies so that they can get good jobs and then they will marry.

One of the girls has already been told that she will get married when she finishes this school year. I wonder if she is the only one willing to tell us this and how many of the others have been told that they will soon have to be married.

We discuss with the girls what they would like to do when they finish school. Rukhsora says:

“I have a dream to learn English and to become an interpreter and go abroad.”

She says that she has a friend who is living and studying in Dushanbe and that if you have the knowledge it is not difficult or expensive to go to university.

Zamira tells us that she would like to be a journalist:

“I like this job…I don’t know a journalist personally but from watching television and listening to radio, I am interested.”

She also tells us how she likes to read the newspaper and that from the paper she has learnt how the number of people with HIV/AIDS is increasing. The girls invite us to their houses but we are unable to visit them as we are expected elsewhere. However, we ask if we could visit them the following day.

The next day we arrive at Zamira’s house and are greeted by her and her mother, Suvara. They lead us into a largish room where, with typical Tajik hospitality, they have laid out nuts, sweets and other foods for us to eat.

We have just had lunch and we’re embarrassed that we can’t eat the food we’ve been given. We’re relieved that Zamira and her mother accept our apologies and don’t take offence.

Zamira comes into the room carrying four loaves of traditional Tajik flat bread.  We had wanted to see how this bread is baked but Zamira tells us that she had to bake the loaves this morning as she was uncertain when we would arrive and they take some time to make.

Suvara and Zamira explain how they make the bread together by mixing the ingredients into a large metallic bowl. They then knead the mixture and leave it to rise for two hours.

Once the bread has risen it is separated into individual loaves and then baked on the inside wall of their bread oven. The oven is in what could be best described as an outhouse in the backyard and it seems that this is where most Tajiks have their bread ovens and kitchens.

Both Zamira and Suvara are full of smiles and seem to be incredibly close to one another. These two seem to be another example of how warm and loving the Tajik people are. I wonder whether strangers would be afforded such openness and hospitality back home.

We ask Suvara whether Zamira will be allowed to further her education in order to become a journalist. I am surprised by the response, especially considering how close these two seem to be.

“Her granny will not let her continue her education,” says Suvara.

We pursue this further and ask what she thinks Zamira should do as she is her mother, but find out that the decision is with her mother-in-law and the village elders.

In this village girls are not allowed to carry on with their education. It’s seen as unnecessary and many of the families would be unable to cope with the financial burden of supporting and paying for a child to go to university.

Suvara informs us that it is for these reasons, both financial and because of the village elders, that Zamira will not continue her education.

Zamira’s resolve for continuing her education, that yesterday seemed so unquestionable, is much reduced. She says:

“Sometimes I feel like continuing my studies, but then sometimes I come back and my granny starts to say something, so I don’t want to study then.”

Suvara adds, “Some girls study at university and then get married and the husband stops them working. So why go and get educated?”

We have had a very pleasant time with Zamira and Suvara and thank them for inviting us to their house. I am saddened as we leave because in this one household we have seen how difficult it is for girls like Zamira to challenge the divisions that seem to exist in Tajik society.

If it continues to be the role of the village elders and grandmothers to decide whether or not children can continue their education, then it may be another two generations or more before girls like Zamira can actually fulfil their dreams of studying for good careers.

It also seems so unfair that those who appear to be bright enough carry on their studies are denied this choice because they have been born on the wrong side of the gender divide.

Fortune tellers, mother-in-laws and microcredit

One of our last visits in Kurgan Teppe is to the village of Qahramon. It seems a sleepy village and, as with all other towns and villages we visit, the evidence of poverty and abandonment is everywhere. It just never seems to end. Wherever we go.

The first visit of the morning has been intensely emotional with more than a few tears shed, both by the young girls we meet as well by ourselves. In many other countries, life for girls in their late teens would be only just beginning. For these girls, it seems that life is already closing in. As they describe their resignation to the fate being imposed upon them, they talk with a sad wisdom that would normally be reserved for elderly women, or so I assume.

It is with some surprise, then, that in the next group we visit, we find a dozen or so elderly women who, in the words of one, say that they are now ‘old ladies, but we are like small children who have just learned something new.’ The contrast is astounding.

As we enter a dark room with the usual unlit stove, a powerful, large-busted woman grabs each of us one by one and plants great smacking kisses on our cheeks.

‘How is your husband? How are your children? How is your mother, your father, your grandmother?’ she greets us, laughing uproariously. The atmosphere in this room is so warm and inviting, despite the cold.

Two women’s self-help groups have gathered to talk to us. With the help of Mehrengez, they have been taking courses in health and hygiene, disease prevention, collecting funds, saving and finance management, contraception for their daughters and daughters-in-law, and even lessons in how to get along with mother-in-laws (a notoriously problematic issue for young wives in Tajikistan where domestic violence isn’t just an issue between husband and wife.) But the mood is jovial. Perhaps they could teach us a few things about getting on with our own mother-in-laws we laugh!

The large-busted woman tells us how much life has changed. They had all worked on the local collective farm during the Soviet period and all their needs were provided for. But when the Soviet collapse came, followed by war, they had found it so difficult to find their way.

“Life was so difficult. If we found a cabbage, that’s all we had for our soup and we had to eat bread made out of corn. Then came Mehrengez and taught us how to find a new way.”

One woman describes a time following the war when they had no food for 47 days. “My son was 17 and he nearly died. It was like this until Mehrengez came along.”

They now get together once a week, discuss their problems and make decisions on how to help each other solve issues. “Look at us, our mood has changed!”

They all laugh and giggle furiously, explaining that traditionally Tajik people are more likely to trust a fortune teller than their neighbours, or even friends. Then, the laughter turns to raucous hysterics as they proceed to enact the role play activities they do during their social training sessions with Mehrengez. Two of them exit and then re-enter: one dressed as a fortune teller and the other as a housewife. The 'fortune teller’ pretends, with extreme theatrical aplomb I might add, to be able to solve all the housewife’s problems, foretelling a bright future. Of course, by the time she has muttered a few charms and passed a walking stick three times round the housewife’s head, she has procured from the gullible woman all her warm clothes, jewellery and any spare cash. The role play, they explain, is to highlight that through helping each other they can all gain without being cheated out of their precious few possessions, unlike if they were to place their trust in a fortuneteller.

Through Mehrengez, they have also received microcredit which they have used to grow potatoes and tomatoes, and to buy cattle. They fatten the cattle during the summer and then sell them for profit. They can also borrow funds from the group pot if they need to buy medicines for a daughter, son or grandchild. However, they add bitterly, in the current climate in Tajikistan, even the doctors are corrupt (owing to such poor pay) and will often only treat people when dollars are put on the table.

In the past, the Soviet state took on all the responsibilities of health prevention and social welfare. Now, these elder women of the village are learning to take on these responsibilities themselves because the new state is unable, and perhaps unwilling, to do so.

“Through Mehrengez, we have learned a lot. We have learned that we have rights and we can use these rights. We have learned about disease and we have learned to go to the doctors early, to prevent disease. And we have learned how to make a profit.”

“Before we set up the self-help group, we were just neighbours. We didn’t gather as a group. But now life is so different. We get together, we talk, we listen to each other as counselors. Now we can laugh and smile and help each other because Mehrengez has helped us.”

Choosing the future ?

We call at a house in a local village to visit members of a young women’s sewing class supported by our partner, Mehrengez.  The snow has turned to rain but it’s still bitter as we retreat from the cold to huddle into a small dark room at the back of a house where eight or nine girls have gathered to speak with us.

The group was set up around 18 months ago for young women with few or no skills to help them develop their education and improve their livelihoods. Over the first 6 months, Mehrengez invited school tutors to train the girls in pattern cutting, sewing, costume making, Russian language, reading and writing. They also learnt about infectious diseases and conflict resolution within the family.

Over the following year, the girls developed their practical skills and they now work six days a week making cushions and clothes to sell at market including the traditional Tajik ‘halat’ coats.

Even though the room we are all in is dark, we can see jewel-coloured garments, patterns and embroidery designs – all in various stages of completion – hanging up on the walls. Mehrengez has helped them buy eight second-hand sewing machines and many brightly coloured spools of thread. Through their work, the girls are now able to top-up their household income by around 30 soms per month.

The girls, aged between 14 and 20, seem very close as a group. But as we begin the interview most look reluctant and frightened to speak. This is not surprising, we are in one of the most conservative villages in the country, where young women must cover their faces outside the house, and stay at home rather than study or work.

As the girls begin to trust us, most speak with great candour and maturity, revealing how many of them have already been through much in their young lives.

As we move around the room, each girl summaries her family experience. Virtually all were affected by the civil war with one or more male members of the family either killed or later migrating in search of work.

Memories and sadness seem to lie right behind their eyes, as one member says in tears: ‘Never can we forget this…. my father went to the war and didn’t come back.’ 

Although the war is now over, times are still hard.  Manzura, another member of the group, explains:

‘Our life is very difficult. Most of our fathers are in Russia. It’s very difficult for our families. That’s why we came here to work, to study. We buy a few things for ourselves but most goes to our families.’

As we ask more about their activities, the girls become very talkative and friendly like any teenagers in the UK. It’s clear how much they are enjoying this aspect of their lives. They make a very real contribution to the family income and have developed knowledge, friendships and freedom within the group. ‘It’s good for our lives and most of all we can be free to express our thoughts. We have a profession now for all our life.’

It should be noted that the girls initially struggled to attend the group because their community was highly suspicious of the initiative, fearing the girls would be corrupted. The success of the group is an achievement not only for Mehrengez, but for the girls and their families too.

Some also speak of friends whose parents will still not allow them to attend. The teacher from Mehrengez shares her enthusiasm too, telling us how she has seen the girls grow and develop their horizons. She explains that at first the girls didn’t want to speak to her or uncover their faces, but things have now changed: ‘I feel it’s my big achievement and real progress in my work….they believe us, they trust us.’

This is bitter-sweet. Though the girls appear joyful and confident, when we ask them about the future, their hopes have only limited horizons. In a conservative society and particularly in this region, there is an inevitability about the future. Manzura’s ambition was always to be a doctor. She says that she is illiterate due to the civil war and will never have enough knowledge to fulfil her dream. She is plainly very bright and though only 20 years young, sees the door already closed to her ambitions:

‘We want to be independent like women and girls in other countries. But as we grow, they quickly match us with men and all our life we spend in the garden and grow quickly old. This is our life, and we don’t want it.’

It seems that this generation of young women are on the cusp of something new and different. Though they are aware that they will probably never achieve the independence of their dreams, things are better than before with new skills, education and friendship. As Manzura says:

‘My dream is this: I don’t want to live like my father and mother. I want to live in a different way. I don’t want to come back to the horrible days I have seen in my life.’

We were sad to leave, and as we did so, many of the girls seemed very emotional, and Manzura was in tears. I think our visit had opened up some very sensitive issues for them.