“We help where we can help, and when we can’t, we can’t, but we must never judge them.”

On Friday when I showed up to work, I discovered that the main street that runs in front of our office had been blocked off and filled with rows of colorful tents. On one end, vendors sold fruit, vegetables, spices, nuts, meat and dairy products and on the other, various knick-knacks such as silverware, underwear, socks, purses, Tupperware, and books. After I walked up the four flights of stairs to my office, I asked Borkhotun about the pop-up market on our street. As it turns out, every Friday there is a Central Asian bazaar, selling fresh produce either from the Russian countryside or trucked in from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and even as far away as Tajikistan. Borkhotun said that she liked to make her lunch on Fridays from whatever she could find at the market. It seemed like a significantly better option than her usual lunch of nothing at all.

As I unpacked my things, Borkhotun told me that she had been up all night worrying about the pregnant woman having AIDS. I was glad I wasn’t the only one. “I just don’t think she will come back,” she said. “I have asked her so many times to get medical testing for herself and her baby and she always ignored me. I don’t have faith that this time will be different. About twenty minutes later, our doorbell rang and Khoziat opened the door to the pregnant woman from the previous day and her female apartment mate. In contrast to her sullen, almost dead expression the day before, the woman was smiling and animated. Borkhotun tried her best to conceal the look of total shock on her face as she led the pregnant woman into her office and closed the door. About ten minutes later, Borkhotun came out holding a stack of papers to make photocopies of. Using English so the woman wouldn’t know we were talking about her, Borkhotun said, “That lady who going to have baby, she not have AIDS! I can’t believe it. She is ok!” I felt a huge wave of relief and happiness rush over me, which lasted only a short time before I remembered that her husband still had HIV and they were probably having unprotected sex and that even if she didn’t have HIV now, it was only a matter of time before she contracted it. “Borkhotun, make sure we get her counseling or tell her to use protection, ok?” I said, “This is still very dangerous for her if her husband has HIV.” “Ok, we will give her the address of a free AIDS clinic we work with that does not discriminate against migrants,” Borkhotun promised. “You know, I thought she not care yesterday,” Borkhotun ruminated in English, “but maybe she just scared. Well, she not have AIDS. One good thing happened today.” This last sentiment was said in a hopeful, positive way, but also acknowledged the real possibility that it might be the only good thing that would happen that day.

The main office phone rang and Khoziat answered. Taking down information in a notebook, she hung up and explained to me, trying to use her English as well, “Woman giving birth now. This her third baby. Her last baby, she have problems with birth. Her last baby have kidney defect. She need Skoraya Pomoshch.” And with that, Khoziat called the Russian version of 911, explaining that this woman was giving birth and needed an ambulance. I couldn’t help but think how weird it must be to be a 24 year old office assistant and calling 911 at work regularly for other people’s serious medical needs. However, it was a necessary service that our office provided, as a lot of the younger Tajik immigrants don’t know Russian that well and those that do have a noticeable accent, meaning that the hotline operators could very well refuse them service because they sounded like foreigners. By calling for the migrants, our organization basically tricked the paramedics, so that they would show up to the apartment and SURPRISE brown-skinned people! But then they had to take them because they were already here! I love it.

While we waited for more migrants to come in and for the doctor to arrive, Khoziat and I had lunch in her and Borkhotun’s office. Since it was the first time Khoziat and I had ever hung out by ourselves, I asked her what she was studying in school, expecting something similar to myself (human rights) or Borkhotun (international law). “Construction engineering,” she casually replied, eating some chopped up tomatoes from the bazaar. I almost spit out my food. Obviously I knew women could be engineers, having quite a few amongst my friends and family, but picturing sweet, uber-feminine Khoziat, both shorter and far skinnier than me, managing a team of burly (most likely Tajik) male construction workers was kind of a bizarre image. That is one good thing I would say about gender roles in Russia (and like Borkhotun’s comment, perhaps the only good thing I will say) – women in power (bosses, politicians, etc.) in Russia can still have long hair and wear high heels and makeup if they want, and people won’t think less of them or their ability to command authority. In fact, they will probably get more respect for remaining “feminine” while doing a tough job. And even better if they are a mother. Not that there are tons of women in leadership positions in Russia, but still. Food for thought, American corporate/political culture.

Khoziat continued, “I just finished my master’s degree, but now my professor wants me to apply for a PhD. I don’t know, I just want to go home to my hometown in Russia and be with my family and friends, but when I told my mom about this, she told me to stay in Moscow and get my PhD. I think I am the only one who doesn’t want me to get a PhD.” On the other end of the spectrum from the Tajiks who came into our office every day, Khoziat’s biggest problem was being pushed toward getting a third degree. “Then how did you come about working here?” I asked, wondering why an engineer was working in a medical clinic. “Well, Davlat and his wife are friends with my family and he knew that I spoke English and Russian and was going to school in Moscow, so he asked me to work here as an afterschool job.” Switching to English she added, “Davlat, she is a good man (mixing up “he” and “she,” which Tajik English speakers tend to do a lot). She is very political and very kind and good filmmaker too. So many people come in here. They all have sad stories, very sad. It is hard work, but it is good to help people, yes?” “Yes,” I replied. It was good to help people.

After lunch, our office’s tech guy came to scan Khoziat’s laptop for viruses. With black plastic framed glasses, a red plaid shirt, grey jeans, converse sneakers and a messenger bag, he was the Tajik version of a hipster computer programmer. When we were being introduced, his eyes lit up. “Hilary kak Hillary Clinton?!” Yup. That’s me. Realizing I was American, he switched to English, which he was surprisingly really good at. “So you have elections coming up in November. This is exciting. Who are you voting for?” I swear, foreigners always seemed to be more informed about American politics than the average American is. As Computer Guy grilled me more about my feelings regarding Republican and Democrat foreign policy and domestic hot button issues, the Doctor barged into the main room, arms stretched out wide like a 1950’s sitcom husband returning home. Greeting everyone in Russian, he looked over at me and said, “KHELLO!” loudly, as if I were deaf. He then pulled a white cowboy-looking hat out of a plastic bag and put it on. “This hat like Mexico people hat. I buy at market because it like in Mexico. Americans wear cap and Mexico people wear hat.” I just gave a forced smile and nodded a lot. Ever since explaining to my coworkers that Mexicans were the Tajiks of the United States, they had asked me dozens of questions about Mexico, Mexican food, Mexican immigrants and Mexican music. As it was my fault the office was now obsessed with Mexican culture, I didn’t have the heart to tell the Doctor that what he was thinking of was a sombrero and that I was pretty sure they didn’t sell them at Central Asian bazaars. Although I did notice that he said Mexico the correct way (Mehico) instead of the Russian way (Mek-see-ka), so at least I was exerting some sort of a positive influence.

The Aga Khan

As the Doctor settled into his office, a young couple came in and sat down at the main table. The woman, with rusty-yellow colored hair (the kind that happens when someone with black hair tries to dye their hair blonde) tied back in a long braid, was noticeably pregnant. The man, who looked significantly young than her, had darker skin, wore a matching red Adidas tracksuit and had the demeanor of a puppy about to get hit with a newspaper. When the woman noticed the portrait by Davlat’s office of the serene looking man , all dressed in white, sitting on a silver throne, she quickly got up, bowed, and began praying, elbowing her boyfriend to do the same. I had noticed that we had framed pictures of this middle-aged white guy all over the office: the guy on a throne, the guy in a Muslim prayer hat, the guy shaking hands with Putin, the guy chilling with the Kirill, the Patriach of the Russian Orthodox Church, the guy waving to the masses. The woman’s reverent behavior confirmed my suspicions that the guy was actually the Aga Khan, the head of the Ismaili sect of Sunni Islam, which is what is practiced in the Pamir region of Tajikistan. 

After they finished praying, the Doctor called them and Borkhotun into his office. I heard a lot of raised voices coming from his office, mostly from Borkhotun and occasionally the Doctor, finally calling Khoziat in to make photocopies of the couple’s documents. While Khoziat was using our ancient scanner, she explained in English, “This woman, she want abort. Want baby in her to die,” and made an ‘x’ over her stomach with her finger. Well, that was the most straightforward and gut-wrenching way I’d ever heard an abortion described before. When Borkhotun came out of the Doctor’s office to get the papers from Khoziat, she quickly explained in Russian that this couple was unemployed and not married and wanted an abortion, but the Doctor explained to her that at 6-7 months pregnant, she could not get a safe, cheap abortion anywhere and that it would probably ruin her chances of having any children later in life. Borkhotun added angrily that this woman heard all the risks and didn’t care and kept asking for an abortion anyway, as she entered the doctor’s office again. “She in general against aborts,” Khoziat told me, explaining Borkhotun’s foul mood.

Over the next few hours the couple moved from the doctor’s office to the main room to Borkhotun’s office, with either the Doctor or Borkhotun pulling them this way or that to talk to them further. All the while, the woman sat up straight and looked defiant while her boyfriend sunk lower and lower in the chair, looking like he was trying to melt into the floor. Finally, the couple came out of Borkhotun’s office, with Borkhotun making them say “I promise” several times and telling them to call her as soon as “it happened.” Closing the door behind them as they left, Borkhotun announced “They will be married and have baby!” I did not see that one coming.

Still in shock at this unexpected resolution, the doctor walked over to me and said in his shitty English, “We have difficult work. This job, it make me gipertonik (hypertensive),” and flicked the back of his neck, smiling. “The Doctor, even though he has hard job, he smiles like an American,” Khoziat added, laughing at his English. The Doctor, still smiling, rebutted matter-of-factly, “We sometimes cry, but at home, not here.” The fact that they all talked about the emotional difficulty of their work like it was a normal thing somehow made it all the more heartbreaking. The Doctor’s phone rang and a child’s voice could be heard, asking when he was coming home and whether she could have McDonald’s and pears for dinner. “Of course you can,” he answered, then asked the little voice about her day. I couldn’t even imagine coming home to little kids after spending your day dealing with AIDS and abortions. Maybe that’s why he was so good at smiling and making jokes.

Totally exhausted, Borkhotun sat at the main table and recounted to me what had happened. “This man, he calls me this morning and asks if I can help him get his girlfriend an abortion because her relative said I was the person to talk to. I was stunned and very angry, as I don’t believe in abortions and some migrant out there is going around telling people I help with abortions! But something stopped me told me not to yell at him and I got the idea to trick him into coming in so we could talk about it. So I said, ‘why yes, I can help you.’ And he asked, ‘I only have $60, is that enough?’ I lie and say, ‘sure, come on in.’ $60...can you imagine?” As someone incredibly pro-choice, I was extremely uncomfortable hearing about my co-worker fooling someone who was trying to get an abortion, but I kept quiet and let her continue.

“So when they come in, this woman, all she wants is an abortion even though it is dangerous this late in the pregnancy and they will not tell me why. But I could sense there must be a reason. So I keep asking and threatening them until they told me the real reason: they are unmarried and live together and the woman was afraid that her older brothers would come to Moscow and kill her if they found out she had a baby and was not married. So together we called up her parents in Tajikistan and got them to agree to approve a marriage between them, which means once the parents agree, since they are elders, the brothers cannot do anything violent against their sister. You know, I think the mother knew that her daughter was living with this man unmarried. You could hear it in her voice. So now they will have their baby and be married and it will be good because the baby will have two parents. Russia is no place for a single Tajik mother. I think God did this, he told me not to be angry and helped me save that baby.”

Every feminist bone in my body wanted to rage at everything that had happened – denying an abortion, forced marriage, brothers killing sisters over premarital sex. But I took a breath and tried to see the situation through Borkhotun’s point of view. With $60 and their presumable illegal status, there was no way that woman could have gotten a safe abortion anywhere in Moscow and in Tajik culture, being a mother is still a woman’s primary role and highest honor. Not being able to have further children would ruin her life completely in that society and potentially ruin her prospects for marriage (in addition to whatever one’s personal views on abortion were). In making her get married, Borkhotun was protecting this woman and her baby from poverty by ensuring this child would eventually have two incomes to support it. It was easy to be pro-choice and indifferent to marriage in America where we had clean, safe medical facilities and where women had the opportunity to make a good salary with which they could support themselves and potentially a child. When survival is one’s primary concern, sometimes things have to be thought about in a different way.

Rustam turned his computer chair around to face us with a devilish look on his face. “You know, she was 24 and all calm about it, and he was just a young naïve guy, 20 years old…He probably wasn’t even the baby’s father.” “Rustam, how can you say that!” Borkhotun asked, incredulous. “Did you see that look on her face? She was clever and collected and knew what she was doing. For all we know, maybe she didn’t even know who that baby’s daddy was and just picked this dope as an easy mark.” “Rustam, a woman knows when she is pregnant,” Borkhotun scolded. “She knows who the father of her child is. There are ways of telling. I mean, she just knows, am I right, Hilary?” Well, this was getting awkward fast. “Oh no, this stuff happens all the time. Look,” Rustam replied, pulling up a Russian Yahoo! answers forum on his computer and reading aloud the title, “Help – I’m pregnant and don’t know who my baby daddy is.” Khoziat and I laughed while Borkhotun scowled at Rustam. The Doctor, hearing the commotion, came out of his office, with a smirk on his face that read ‘well this should be good’ and sat down with us at the main table, snacking on the Indian curry chex mix. “You should listen to him, Borkhotun,” the Doctor said while fishing peanuts out of the mix with his pudgy fingers, “He is quite the ladies’ man and knows how these women work.” Borkhotun just rolled her eyes at me and shook her head. “Don’t say that. We help where we can help, and when we cannot, we cannot, but we must not judge. We don’t know what kind of despair these women are living through. Migration is not for women, it is dangerous and scary and they are lonely and need protection. You can see why they would want to have relations.” And for a change, the Doctor was silent.

“You know,” Rustam said, reminiscing, “we had a case like this this past winter. A woman got pregnant and started dating this guy before she began to show to make him think it was his. And this guy was a real simpleton, like the guy that came in today, not knowing anything about how babies are made. So when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant, he called his family in Tajikistan to say he was getting married and his wise aunt said, wait a minute, how long have you been dating? When he said only two months of months and explained how pregnant his girlfriend looked, the aunt knew something was fishy and explained her suspicions to him. When confronted, the girlfriend admitted the truth, but this guy, he was a good guy and agreed to marry her anyway.” “Do you know how that story ended?” Borkhotun interrupted. “What do you mean?” Rustam asked. “The woman ended up refusing his proposal and had the baby recently in the hospital and then just abandoned it there. They had to put it in an orphanage.” “No way. I never heard that.” Rustam said. “I’ll prove it,” Borkhotun responded, going into her office to get out her old case notebook.

Bringing it to the main table and flipping through the notebook, she stopped at an entry toward the bottom of the page and traced the words with her fingers. “Oh my god,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “What is it?” the Doctor asked, eagerly hunching across the table to get a look, spilling peanuts on the table. “The woman that came in today is the cousin of that woman who tricked that man. Look, they have the same last name and are from the same village and list the same contact phone number back in Tajikistan. She must be the relative that told that woman about our ‘services.’ We should call them back in! Maybe they can adopt this child so it does not have to be in the orphanage!”

“And what would they do with a second baby? You heard them, they are unemployed,” Rustam replied, always the voice of blunt reason to Borkhotun’s optimism. “But they are family!” Borkhotun argued. “How can you not know your family member, your cousin, is abandoning her own baby?! They never even mentioned it when they were here! In fact, they hadn’t even talked to their own parents back in Tajikistan for several months before this. How can you not be close with your family, especially at times when you need them the most? How can we fix this problem…In the jamaat?” she asked, referring to the leadership communities based on regional origin that Tajiks self-organize by while in Russia. “No, it is in the families,” Rustam responded. “Some families are so strict, they know where every member is in Russia and where exactly they are working on any given day. Others, like this woman, they don’t even call home for months. The problem is back in Tajikistan. We can’t fix this from the top when the problem is all the people at the bottom.” As Rustam and Borkhotun began to argue about the jamaat’s role in fixing social ills, I checked the clock and realized it was 6:30, well beyond the end of my normal workday. I wished my coworkers a good weekend and left the office after my first week of work in Moscow exhausted, overwhelmed and exponentially more enlightened.