“You are so beautiful. Your smile is full of sunshine. You are what dreams are made of.”

On Tuesday I started my first day at my internship. I really hadn’t known what to expect as every time I tried to clarify my duties or any information about the organization, Focus Humanitarian Assistance, Russian Representative Office, with Davlat Khudonazarov, director and my primary contact, all I got back was an email saying “We will be happy to have you in our office. Welcome to Moscow.” I really hoped it was just his poor English skills, but part of me was worried that I was traveling 8 time zones away to find I’d be volunteering in someone’s apartment, or, even worse, be completely useless to the organization and thus not have a summer internship at all.

It took me a little while to find the actual building, as I’ve been relying on hand-drawn diagrams via Google maps for getting anywhere in Moscow (while I would normally lament not having a smart phone, I’ll instead be positive and say thank you Baby Jesus for Google Earth making its way to Russia, as it was not around in 2008-9, so I’m don’t know how I found anything at all). When I finally arrived at my destination, I realized it was located right in front of a giant sports stadium where Eurovision 2009 was held, which has now become a shopping complex and is surrounded by Central Asians begging and selling their wares, as there is a mosque nearby.

It then took me another few minutes to find the proper entrance to the building. Russian buildings are unnecessarily complicated, with designated street numbers, building numbers, home numbers, corpus numbers and entrance numbers, usually all on the same place you are trying to get to. And sometimes the number is something like 14/2, so be careful not to mix it up with building 14/1. To make things even clearer, usually there will be several streets near each other with similar names, like by my apartment, for example, there is (translated) “Sandy Street” “New Sandy Street” “Sandy Avenue” “Little Sandy Avenue” and “Big Sandy Road” all within a five minute walk, several of which intersect. Imagine trying to tell a gypsy cab driver in Russian where you live after a long night out. Oh, did I mention all the buildings in each neighborhood look pretty much the same? It’s great.

Just as I was about to call Davlat for the third time, I saw a Tajik looking man in a sweater vest and fitted jeans carrying a briefcase enter a side door to the building. Seeing a professionally dressed Tajik is pretty uncommon in Moscow (as most are really poor and work in manual labor or the service industry), so I following him into the building. Sure enough, as I came up the stairs to the fourth floor and the Focus Humanitarian Office, I saw this man enter just a few seconds before me. As I enter the office, I was greeted by Davlat who brought me into his personal office to tell me about the organization and my job.

An old picture of Davlat

Davlat was a few inches taller than me, in his 50s or very early 60s at most, with olive skin, mostly white hair, thick black eyebrows and kind eyes. Wearing khaki pants, a maroon polo shirt and loafers, he looked like any of my friends’ dad from Upstate NY, except for the fact he was Central Asian. I also didn’t know what to expect when meeting Davlat for the first time. A documentary filmmaker who at one point headed the USSR Union of Cinematographers, he ran for President of Tajikistan in 1990-1991, but lost to the incumbent communist candidate in a highly rigged election. When a civil war broke out in the country in late 1991-early 1992, he and his family fled to Moscow, however Davlat continued to make trips back to Tajikistan to help with conflict stabilization and peacemaking in some regions. When threats were made on his life and his family’s lives in Moscow, he came to the US for some time on various fellowships, including one at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in DC, where I worked as a research assistant last year. (More background on Davlat’s awesome story). When I told Blair Ruble, the head of the Kennan Institute, that I would be working with Davlat this summer, he replied, “Davlat is literally my favorite person on the planet. I am envy you.” And this is coming from a man who has worked closely with hundreds of human rights activists and civil society leaders from the former USSR over his career.

Davlat spoke to me in a mixture of Russian and English, in a caring and patient manner. “The first day of new work is always uncomfortable, yes?” he asked, and I sheepishly nodded. He asked me what I knew about their office, which truthfully was not much as they lack a website and produce no search results in Russian or English. I had thought about trying to get more information via email before coming to Moscow, but it’s always a little awkward to say, “Thanks for letting me intern, important person, now what do you do again?” Davlat explained that they only got this office in 2009, but the organization had been around far longer than that, as an affiliate of the Aga Khan Foundation. The office acts primarily as a service provider, with the main function being free medical advice. The doctor on staff is a volunteer who works at a local hospital. Rather than providing medical treatment, he gives consultations, advising Tajik migrants who walk in where they should get treatment for their conditions, which specialist they should go to and how to get it the cheapest or under the table. Additionally, the organization puts on various trainings and programs and serves as a hotline for anything the Tajik migrant workers need help with, as many don’t speak Russian, so even making phone calls on their behalf is an important service which they provide.

My fears of being useless were quickly assuaged when Davlat explained that the majority of their funding comes from the Aga Khan Foundation headquarters in Canada, so most of their documents need to be translated into English in order to receive more grants. He said I would eventually be working on a grant for their newest project, vocational training for Tajik labor migrants. He explained that it had to be a “poezdka” outside of Moscow because they needed to get a venue large enough for the training but also somewhere where the neo-nationalists couldn’t find them and they could learn in peace. “Nationalism is on the rise here,” he said ominously. “I see it every day. It is getting worse. It is a pity.” Nationalism in the Russian sense is not a heightened sense of pride in one’s country as in the somewhat innocuous American usage, but rather explicitly encapsulated in the phrase “Russia for the (ethnic) Russians,” which is frequently shouted at conservative/neo-Nazi rallies around Moscow where young, Slavic Russians make “Heil Hitler” hand gestures. It’s pretty terrifying.

Davlat then asked what I was interested in and currently studying at grad school. I told him human rights, and he said that his wife, Gavkhar Juraeva, a famous Tajik human rights lawyer, happened to work just across the street at her non-profit, The Tajikistan Foundation, which provides free legal aid for Tajik migrant workers and has several Central Asian lawyers on staff. She is frequently quoted in the Russian news and in the Western media whenever something goes down with the Tajik population in Moscow, usually a massive police raid or new immigration law. Davlat suggested I go back and forth between the two offices over the summer to get a sense of both aspects of human rights promotion, the legal side and the practical side, which, of course, sounded amazing.

Davlat then led me around the office (two small personal offices, the doctor’s office and the main sitting area – in total the size of a NYC studio apartment) to introduce me to the people I would be working with. The guy in the sweater vest, whose desk is in the corner of the main sitting area, was Rustam. He was in his  late 30s-early 40s, tall, very thin, with tan skin, black hair greying around the edges, dark brown eyes and comical eyebrows. The two women staffers shared one of the small offices on the other side of the main room. One, Khoziat, was 24 (the same age as me), white, model skinny (like most young women in Moscow) with long black hair and bright blue eyes. She looked almost Russian to me, but I’m sure a Russian could tell (somehow) that she was Tajik. Davlat told me she was finishing her master’s degree this semester. The other, Borkhotun, was in her mid to late 30s, with olive skin, extremely long, ashy brown hair, and light green eyes, looking almost Afghani, which makes sense as she was from the part of Tajikistan (the Pamir Mountains) that borders Afghanistan. Davlat informed me that Borkhotun was a lawyer who specialized in international law (which essentially all human rights law is). Both of the women were naturally beautiful, but I wondered if the general Russian population would be able to see it beyond their obvious (in Borkhotun’s case) ethnicity. The Doctor wasn’t in yet from his primary work at the hospital, but Davlat assured me that I would meet him later. Davlat explained that each person in the office is from a different region of Tajikistan and thus speaks a different dialect of Tajiki so that usually someone in the office can communicate with the migrants in their native language when they come in.

I sat down at the long, oval table in the middle of the main room with my laptop, while Rustam sent me a grant proposal to translate for a Tajik Migrant soccer tournament that Focus co-sponsors and that he volunteers for. The tournament, in its third year,  is comprised of over 20 teams of migrant workers representing different neighborhoods of Moscow, competing in 30 games over three months at a real sports stadium. The top three teams at the end of the tournament get cash prizes, but besides the money incentive, it gives the migrants a way to make friends and something to look forward to in their otherwise dismal schedule of 18+ hour work days in unsafe conditions. Rustam invited me to come to one of the games some weekend when I was free.

And then the Tajik migrants started to file in around noon. The first people to come in were an older man and his nine-year-old daughter, whom Davlat greeted with hugs and kisses, asking Khoziat to make up a tray of tea for them while he showed them into his office and closed the door. After about 20 minutes, Davlat came out of his office and whispered something to Borkhotun, asking her advice. The way people worked just seemed to make the office a welcoming, safe place.. While Davlat was in his office, Rustam’s work cell phone went off, which hilariously has a Mexican mariachi song for a ring tone, a song I now know by heart as his phone rings about twenty times a day. Khoziat offered me some delicious graham cracker cake and tea while she showed me the registration book that sits on the main table, documenting the hundreds of people the organization helps each month. Two more Tajik men came in. One, with dirt ground under his fingernails and a wet cough, told Borkhotun that his wife was pregnant and that they had lost their apartment in a fire a few months back, so now they had none of the required documents necessary for her to be able to give birth or receive care in a hospital. Borkhotun brought him into her office to talk more as another three men filed in. One looked about my age, wearing a violently purple Adidas jacket and rocking a Dorothy Hamill haircut, another was in in his late 50s in khakis and a nice white shirt. Some looked well put-together; others were so dirty they looked like caricatures from a Dickens novel or coal miners, with bloodshot eyes and thin, hollow faces. No matter what their age or what they looked like, they each helped each other fill out the visit questionnaire, comprised of seemingly simple questions like today’s date and place of birth, but who knows how many of them knew Russian at all or were even literate. Other than barely audible whispers of instruction, they all sat quietly and patiently, waiting for the doctor to arrive. In the meantime, Rustam asked my help with translating a medical diagnosis (which apparently are also sent in English to the main office). Several dictionaries and medical websites later, we came the final conclusion that the patient was suffering from a “radiating duodenal ulcer of the 11^th section.” Working here was going to really stretch my Russian (and English) vocabulary.

About an hour later, the doctor still had not gotten back from the hospital. Davlat came out of his office and sat down next to me at the table. “I am leaving now for America,” he said. “I will not be back until the end of June. While I am gone, I want you to speak only English to Khoziat and Borkhotun. Their English is perfect, they must practice.” At this Khoziat looked embarrassed. “The Doctor, he knows maybe 10 words in English total. His English is very bad. Maybe you can sit with him for a few hours each week and help him learn.” Looking at Khoziat and Borkhotun, Davlat said, “I want you to only speak English to Hilary when I am gone. God gave us Hilary with her American education at Columbia and you must use this opportunity.” (By his tone of voice, the God part was a meant as a comic grandiose exaggeration to get the point across). Getting serious, Davlat continued, “There is a passive way of learning and an active way of learning. You all must be active while I am gone.” And then he got up, wished everyone goodbye, and left for the US.

I left about an hour later (with my scheduled work hours being 10-3, though I knew I would end up staying longer as the summer progressed). As I got on the metro, I thought about how happy I was to be working with these migrants that I had only read about and wrote about in scholarly papers. It felt amazing to know I would be doing something useful to help them and to help my co-workers who spent their lives dedicated to these people that no one else in Russia wants to help or even notice. It sounds strange, but it really felt like the first time my soul was truly happy (Delicious, delicious irony, given my 17 years of Catholic schooling, and the fact now I’m working with a majority Muslim population in a Muslim foundation funded by a Muslim religious leader). As I left the metro at Sokol, my stop, I went into a nearby “produkti” (mini grocery store/kiosk thing) to put money on my phone on one of the automated machines. Just as I was paying for more minutes, an old Russian man comes up to me out of nowhere and says “You are so beautiful. Your smile is full of sunshine. You are what dreams are made of.” I nodded awkwardly and said “spasibo” a lot and left the store. Normally, I might have questioned his sobriety or mental state or general creepiness, but I just let it stand as a bizarre, unexpected compliment. After all, today was a good day.