Two Kyrgyz Women by Marinka Franulovic - HTML preview

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woman had finally arrived, but she would have to wait for the next day

to understand where she really was.

A woman approached Ainura and showed her a narrow corner divided

from the rest of the room by a curtain. A few colorful blankets thrown

on the floor marked an apparent sleeping area. Ainura spotted a wood

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burning stove boiling a pot of water with which she immediately

saw herself washing Ali’s clothes dirtied along the journey. A rusty

samovar for tea sat on a table. Ainura needed to wash her baby’s

cotton diapers if she wanted to have them ready for the next day. After

she had washed and hung everything, she went to sleep holding her

son. Most of the night, Ali kept his tiny hands over his mother’s face.

She leaned him near her breast to allow him to nurse whenever he

wanted. They slept soundly; they did not even dream.

***

At 5 am, an authoritative voice announced to the roomful of sleeping

women that they were to be ready for work in an hour. Aside from

Ainura and Ali, five other women lived in the hut, the space between

them divided by curtains and thin mud walls. Ainura was shown to a

bag of oats in the corner and told to prepare breakfast: porridge for six

people. The young woman was quickly put in her place when the voice

reprimanded her, saying that though she was new, she now shared the

same shoes as all the others.

The women of Ainura’s hut were all in their thirties and forties. Ainura

was the youngest. Awakened too early and not interested in porridge,

the two women who arrived with Ainura suspiciously looked around,

their eyes revealing disappointment. The two women were separated

from their husbands and added that they had left their families behind.

Still, they only murmured to themselves, “It’s okay.” They were

prepared for simple conditions, and the place where they were brought

was worse than that. They certainly did not expect milk and honey,

but they expected to be paid a salary four times higher than what they

were earning in Kyrgyzstan. This was why they did not complain.

Two other women spoke with loud voices. They had been brought

to the farm involuntarily just a week before, and they could not say

too much to the newcomers about what lay ahead. The other sleeping

women, who arrived with Ainura, did not stir. Ali also slept. It was

cold in the hut and Ainura needed to light the fire. She picked up sticks

of wood off the floor and lit them. Then, she placed the hot coals

inside the samovar. The hut had no running water, but Ainura was

used to this. The young woman always considered cold running water

a privilege and hot running water a luxury.

30

The winter morning light that modestly shone into the hovel revealed

to her that she had come to a very basic place, even more humble

than her home in her village, crowded with her siblings, parents and a

husband. She accepted the mystery of life and never asked more than

the days were ready to give. Having grown up with eight siblings,

Ainura learned early on how to split her wishes and expectations into

nine equal portions. Not much else was left. From the modest income

from which her family survived, Ainura always expected very little, if

anything at all.

Soon the man to whom the autocratic voice belonged introduced

himself as the farm’s owner. He immediately started explaining what

the women were expected to do. In his early sixties, he was much older

than they were, and only this fact, without anything else, immediately

brought him significant respect. All the women had been brought up to

respect and trust older people – old people are wise and evenhanded.

This attribute made them listen without questioning. The owner lead

the women to the land they needed to prepare for the young tobacco

plants, which needed to be planted in one month’s time. He calculated

how much time this job was to take for each of them, and that each

was responsible for a large portion of land.

The man reminded the women that he was the owner of the farm and

they were on his land to work hard. His house was near their hut and

he watched everything going on in the field from his window. The

man asserted that the land did not know breaks and pauses; the grass

grew every day equally so there were no Saturdays and Sundays off

for them, just working days.

Ainura heard Ali crying while the owner talked. The baby had

awakened and he was wet and hungry. She wanted to go inside to

change and feed him, but the man ordered Ainura to wait until he had

finished his instructions. The owner further admonished Ainura to have

her baby tasks done every morning before 6 am, when all laborers had

to be in the field.

The women understood that their working time was from dawn to

dusk. Lunchtime was from 1 to 2 p.m. Ainura had been appointed to

prepare lunch for herself and the five other women with whom she and

Ali lived. She also needed to clean up after her hut mates, feed Ali and

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wash his non-disposable diapers, which were always wet or soiled as

she could not change him between the morning and lunchtime. Could

this be done in just one hour? Ainura never considered preparing food

a chore. She gained much experience at her eatery, and preparing food

was a simple task for her. If one is already happy enough to have food

to eat, what a small job it was to prepare it.

Six thousand tenge, or approximately $40, was the monthly food

allowance for Ainura’s hut of six women. Ainura was told to buy food

from the small kiosk on the main road toward the village. They were

selling food in transparent plastic bags: sugar, flour, potato, oil and

eggs. With a weekly budget of $10 to feed six, Ainura would not need

to shop often. The tobacco farm was not far from the village center.

The main road to Almaty lay behind it, and the sound of traffic was

the only noise the workers seemed to hear constantly. The owner had

forbidden everyone from going to the village because they had no

documents. The man further warned the workers that Kazakh police

would beat and imprison them if they attempted. He reminded the

workers that they were to speak only Kazakh if they were to meet

anyone not from the farm.

***

The land, covered by snow for most of the winter, was hard as a

walnut shell by early spring. There were neither tractors nor any

other mechanical help available at the farm. All the necessary digging

needed to be done by the hands of the young women. Needless to say,

neither workboots nor workgloves were provided for the workers,

either. Instead, garbage bags were used to cover the workers’ miserable

shoes, the same shoes they wore when they arrived at the farm. Other

trafficking victims from the shelter had later told me that their shoes

would be taken from them each night before going to sleep - insurance

against nighttime escape attempts.

The rough and impregnated land demanded much backbreaking

labor to transform its tough clods into the sand-like ground suitable

for planting. It seemed that not only did the land not appreciate the

workers’ hard work and efforts, but it defiantly remained as tough

and inhospitable as its owner. Like cream cheese on hard dense

black bread, which the workers never had for breakfast, every March

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morning the land was covered with snow and an icy frost which, in

turn, froze their hands.

The farm laborers soon shared their stories with each other about how

and why they came to the Kazakh tobacco farm. Ainura learned that

most of the workers, as in her case, were promised other jobs, but

instead were brought to the farm. One of the girls was from the city,

and she was even the closest to Ainura in age. Her name was Altanay

and she used to live in Osh. She spoke Kyrgyz differently and even her

Russian was good. Altanay was much more educated than the others.

As in Ainura’s case, she had been promised a job in the Almaty store,

but instead she was brought to the farm. It was clear that she was

going to have the hardest time working in the field since she never

lived in a village. And she did. Altanay worked very slowly, and from

the way that she held tobacco plants everyone could see that she had

never before worked the land. The owner’s henchmen started calling

her “White Hand,” a pejorative reserved for people who were useless

at work. They took every opportunity to insult her and to make jokes

to make her ashamed. After two weeks on the farm, Altanay was gone.

Nobody knew where, but they all suspected why.

The women’s first month on the farm was coming to an end. Most

of the snow had already melted, and big crows on the trees became

noisier than the traffic. The reward for hard labor sometimes comes

as an even harder task to complete. This was true for the following

stage: transplanting young tobacco plants into the prepared ground.

Transplanting required a different kind of labor, where the women

had to hunch over most of the time. Vastly difficult and monotonous

work lay ahead. Indeed, young tobacco plants are not rice seedlings,

and dry Central-Asian land has no tropical softness. Freshly awakened

from winter dreams and well pampered by the hands of Ainura and the

other women, the soil greedily fed itself with the rays of the spring sun

and the warmer air. Equally fertile and anonymous as the women who

worked on it, the land was ready to return the given effort. The planted

tobacco plants sprouted fast, along with all the unwanted grass and

weeds, which needed to be pulled. There was more work to be done

every day, and the women’s salary had yet to be mentioned.

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With the increase of amount of work, new workers were needed for the

next stage of tobacco farming. Soon, two new women arrived, one in

her thirties, always with a young girl of nineteen, as if an inseparable

twin. They shared a hut next to Ainura’s. The two new women from

southern Kyrgyzstan met in a private car, which they thought headed

towards a well-paid job at Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek. When they woke

up near the tobacco farm after a long night’s drive both thought they

were still in Kyrgyzstan.

Ainura remembered the beautiful voice of the older woman, which

floated through the thin mud walls of their hut during late evening

hours. But Ainura was too busy with the work she was expected to

perform on the farm, and she was unable to socialize with anybody

else. She gave her rare free minutes to Ali and no more time was left.

The newly arrived farm laborers were used to working the land from

their prior lives. They were all village people who led simple, rural

lives, which they had shared with their family and cattle. The farm

owner had good reason to be satisfied with them; his hard land was

rapidly cultivated and the green lines of young tobacco plants were

already giving an early promise of a generous harvest.

The afternoon sun in March and April was incredibly harsh, and

Ainura decided that this heat was the worst part of the work in the

field. She professed to me her profound dislike for the landscape

around the tobacco farm, and how she now appreciated how much

more beautiful her own country was, with the mild springs weathers

and cattle and blooming trees scattered over the hills. At the tobacco

farm, everything was flat and dusty.

***

Not much time had passed after Ainura’s arrival at the tobacco farm

before she awoke to the fact that life and work at the farm was true

hell. This was when the beating started. One morning a man who lived

in the hut behind the women refused to go to work. Apparently, he said

that he was sick and needed to rest. Four men were sent to beat him.

Ainura heard the man’s screams in the early morning as Ali suckled

her breast. The baby’s eyes were closed. Ainura had just been musing

that the infant grew as fast as the young tobacco plants.

34

When the cries first came from the neighboring hut, the other women

ran to peek through the window. The beaten man’s hut mates later

recounted that the henchmen had continued to kick after he had fallen

to the floor. When they finally did stop, the man remained on the floor

and showed no signs of movement. From where he lay, he was no

doubt able to see the world from a wounded frog’s perspective, and

his torturers were furious birds with long beaks ready to tear apart

vulnerable prey. They loudly threatened not to pay him since he was

lazy and a bad worker. This taunt came at the time when the workers

still hoped that they would be paid for all they were suffering.

The semi-conscious man was then dragged out to the field, thrown

down, and ordered to continue working. The other laborers watching

silently understood clearly that this had been done to warn them; the

owner wanted them to remember well what would happen if they too

dared to refuse his orders. The man was barely able to walk the day

after, so he was given a task of washing the owner’s son’s tall black

jeep. As the field work increased, the beatings occurred daily.

Every two hours while out in the field, Ainura had to return to the hut

to feed Ali. The bosses complained that she was leaving the field too

often. “Baby can wait, work is more important,” they would reprimand

her. Ainura had much milk; if she could not feed every two hours, her

breasts would swell to engorgement. At the same time, her shirt was

muddy and sticky from the combination of dirt and milk trickling from

her, encouraging a new round of humiliating taunts from the men.

The owner’s henchmen made no secret that they were losing all

patience with her, as the infant kept her from working enough. They

even claimed that other workers had complained about the baby’s

crying at night. The young woman knew this was untrue, because Ali

slept well most nights. During the daytime, however, the infant did

cry. Left on the floor for most of the day, without his mother to see or

other voices to hear, usually wet and hungry, what else could a baby

do but cry? An untended baby does not hide its desperation.

The owner’s people were soon after her all the time.

“Who could think of bringing such a small creature to a foreign

country if you intended to work seriously?”

35

“Where is her husband?”

“What decent woman goes so far without a husband alongside her?”

“Does she have parents? Does she have relatives?” These were just

some of the reproaches directed constantly at Ainura.

Finally Ainura replied to the men that the recruiters in Kyrgyzstan

told her they had no problem with bringing the baby. She foolishly

added that they had promised her a job at a store, and that no one had

ever mentioned a tobacco farm to her. For this defiance, Ainura was

brutally pushed back and forth among the henchmen, until she finally

hit the floor, hurting herself badly.

***

One evening, after Ainura had finished her afternoon work in the field

and had already started preparing dinner, the owner entered her hut,

accompanied by a man she had never before seen. “This man wants

to talk to you,” announced the owner before disappearing, leaving the

young woman, her infant, and the stranger alone. She placed a tea pot

on the table and took Ali to feed him. To maximize the time she had in

the hut, the young woman fed her baby constantly while she was close

to him. She was able to breastfeed and walk, breastfeed and cook,

breastfeed and eat, and breastfeed and dress or undress. This was just

the way how things were for them.

The man spoke Kazakh with an accent, and Ainura guessed that he

was Chinese. She could not know what this man wanted from her, but

he was obviously somehow connected to the owner as he was far too

much at ease standing amidst the surroundings. He did not resemble

the henchmen, however, and this was already promising. Without

introduction, the stranger directed questions about Ali: “How old is

he? Where is his father?” With his short, fat fingers the man pinched

the baby’s cheeks and commented on how strong and good looking

the infant boy was. He expressed some compassion by acknowledging

how hard it must have been for her to work and to take care for such

a little baby. His conclusion was that the difficult situation on the farm

would not bring any good to either of them.

36

The stranger finally revealed his intention with the offer: “Let me buy

the boy, I will pay you handsomely.”

Although the man’s bid was made matter-of-factly, he added that

he understood if Ainura needed some time to make her decision.

The stranger closed the meeting by advising Ainura to act as a good

mother and do what was best for herself and her son. He urged the

young woman that her only reasonable decision could be to sell her

son to him in exchange for money, which would bring her more good

now than an infant boy. Ainura squeezed Ali closer to her breast and

replied that she needed no time to think. She would never sell Ali and

he should not come again to ask.

Ali was three months old at that time. He had already given her his

first smile and he waved with his arms when she was close to him. The

infant always turned his head towards her, and he could recognize her

voice from across the room. Ali was all she had in the world at that

moment. He was more important to Ainura than she was to herself,

more precious to her than the destiny of the planet. He was her future

and her present, even when it was impossible for her to imagine that

she would ever have any of either.

Twice before he left the man repeated, “You should not be selfish. You

should think about what is best for your child.”

Ainura later learned that this man’s cruel mission was not always

unsuccessful. She knew there were other tobacco farms with Kyrgyz

workers nearby. She also knew that women on these farms were

raped by local men. The women lived in fear and gave their babies

away. Isolated from health facilities and far from their families, this

seemed like the normal solution for such births. This baby merchant

would appear soon after the delivery, and the newborns would be

expeditiously traded.

Village men came to Ainura’s hut at night, too. They tried to come

inside their rooms by pushing through the plastic-covered windows.

Sometimes the women feared that the fragile hut walls would fall

apart from the bumping and pushing of the local men. Ainura knew

well why the local men were after them. It was apparent to her that

37

the farm owner was using them without mercy, and the village men

wanted to use them too.

***

These tales horrified Ainura and she soon began to fear for Ali’s safety,

especially when she had to leave him alone for longer periods of time.

Ainura began taking him out to the fields, where she worked with him

on her back. The young woman thought she could tend the tobacco

plants with one arm as she held Ali with the other. At least this way,

Ainura could nurse the baby if he cried. Her hands were dirty but her

milk was sterile. Now with his mother all the time, the boy was finally

safe.

As the work in the field became harder, the owner and his men

gradually turned more vicious. Since their arrival, none of the workers

had yet to receive payment, and any hope that they might faded with

each passing day. The owner and his people were changing as well,

becoming more ruthless in their treatment of the laborers. Even the

language they used towards them had evolved from general shouts to

pointed threats of beating and even murder.

Only the tobacco plants lived carelessly, growing quickly, straightening

up and opening their long green leaves to be closer to the sun.

Naturally, the plants were oblivious to the suffering of those who were

taking care of the fields with their own bare, withered hands. Like the

strong wind across the wide-open steppe, more and more terrifying

stories rushed past them, shaking the souls of the unfortunate Kyrgyz

laborers. They were no less vulnerable to this wind than the rare steppe

trees rooted in the dry ground. These horrific tales were meant to scare

them and to assure them further that the most terrifying story of all

was the one they were living out together.

Ainura heard of an entire Kyrgyz family, six people from three

generations, brought to Kazakhstan to work. Together they had looked

for a life better than their miserable day-to-day survival in their

Kyrgyz village. Before departure this family sold all they had. Once

they arrived in Kazakhstan, this family lived in captivity for more

than four years. Their children no longer went to school, they were

38

forced to work in the fields with their parents, and their elderly had no

hospital when they fell ill.

One day, instead of salaries, the owner brought a small black and

white television for the worker’s hut, which was placed atop the

wooden board serving as their table near the samovar, where Ainura

hung the clothes and the cotton diapers of her baby. Suddenly, instead

of their own fears and darkest worries, the television set brought them

the magical world of Mexican soap operas. The ups and downs and

convoluted intrigues of the imaginary rich Mexican family and their

servants displaced the momentary problems of being prisoners on

the tobacco farm. The show started at 6.30 p.m., and as soon as they

finished their long day in the field and took off their dirty shoes, the

workers could not wait to indulge themselves in the dramas of all those

Robertos and Gabriellas, whose lives seemed, in all their complexity,

far more dire than their own.

In the beginning the laborers watched silently, often too tired to talk.

After some time, they started making comments or even trying to

guess what was going to happen next. All those well-dressed ladies

from palatial homes were genuinely unhappy with their unfaithful

husbands, evil sisters, deranged mother-in-laws, and dishonest

servants. Just after two weeks, the interesting and unpredictable

destinies of the screen characters became much more important than

their own. The Mexicans lived such exciting lives, so rich and real to

the workers that the actors could have easily stepped out of the screen

and into the communal area of the women’s hut, ready to take up the

plot-points of their destinies.

Ainura rarely had time to sit down to watch the serial without doing

something else at the same time. She was usually busy preparing

dinner or washing clothes. Sometimes she sat down to breastfeed Ali.

She was convinced that he liked to watch the program too. The infant