Mighty Mouse

Our first days in Dushanbe have been drenched in warm laughter and comic relief, which alleviate otherwise serious situations.  More importantly, a fellow Fulbrighter and I have been graciously afforded housing with an unbelievable generous, genuine, and compassionate host mom, who I will henceforth refer to as Mighty Mouse.

 

Who is Mighty Mouse?  She is a single, Tajik mother who, despite all cultural taboos and a combative family, still chose to divorce her husband after learning he secretly took another wife.  She is someone who has bucked the system that she grew up in.  She is someone who survived the Tajik civil war and watched her closest, brightest friends leave their country with their families.  She is someone who has worked her way up to a responsible position at one of Tajikistan’s most prestigious foreign institutions and earned enough money to sustain her daughters.  She is someone who has managed, through her work, to travel to Paris, Bangkok and New York (places up to 90% of her countrymen will never see).  She is a woman who still loves her country despite the hardship she has endured and despite the pessimism she feels while looking up at the second highest flagpole in the world (which is currently in downtown Dushanbe) and passing the unremarkably gilded mega-monuments that her so-called chosen government has erected.

Mighty Mouse is my uneven lens into Tajikistan.  Could some of her observations be skewed?  Perhaps.  But she is an anthology of women. 

Smoking her fifth Esse Light Elite cigarette, she talks to us about the differences between our respective cultures.  She shuts her eyes while recounting another hilarious cultural conversation she had, “I once was talking to my friends in Russian about living with a man, and I said to them scratching my head, ‘So I don’t think there is anything wrong with a man and women living together before marriage!”

Her friend, also a Tajik, replied in deadpan tone, “you are saying you would let your [oldest daughter] live alone...with a man?”

A flood of childhood innocence rushes to her eyes, and anyone watching her closely can see that this youthful certitude has been protecting her throughout the meanest of times.  She gasps, “No!”  Because she is Tajik, after all. 

We continue to talk about the reality of life in Tajikistan.  I try to engage her with tales of my mother and father, about my sister who is sixteen like her younger daughter.  But my heaviest stories are just unnecessary details compared to her long-lived, deeply felt and guarded experiences. 

“I don’t trust one doctor in this city,” she continues,

“Once my daughter was suffering all night from fever.  I awoke to check on her and realized her tongue was stuffed back in her mouth, her eyes had rolled upward, and she was not breathing. I wailed in fear so that the neighbors heard me.  One man jammed his hand in her mouth and rolled her on the side to open her airways.  I rushed her to the hospital down the street.  By that time my daughter had bit my index finger down to the bone as I tried to keep her from choking on her tongue.  The hospital gave her an injection to calm her down and sent us to the specialist. 

Rather than rushing to help my daughter, this specialist yelled at me. ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU COME TO US FIRST?! YOU SHOULD BE PAYING US YOUR MONEY, NOT THEM, FOR THAT INJECTION.  WHO TOLD YOU TO GO THERE?!’

Aghast, I shoved my finger in the doctor’s face.  ‘Do you know how to treat this?’ I asked him.

Any doctor or trained nurse should have learned this simple procedure.  But this doctor looked up above my head and asked the crowd, ‘Can anyone fix this?’

I told him right then, ‘Take my daughter, and I can take care of myself.’”

As Americans, as well-off Americans, well off, well-educated Americans, we were humbled.  This is why we came to Tajikistan – to better understand the reality on the ground and have honest conversations.  Teaching English felt like a meager contribution when one considered the gravity of interlinked problems in the country.  But we still tried in our own way to comfort her, and mostly show the tremendous respect we had for her.  I wanted to ask even more about the experiences in the war and her time in college.  We wanted to understand how her daughters were spared from the other Tajik students who endured corruption and bribes in schools.  We also explained how conservatism sometimes barred women’s rights in the States, and how some Americans grew up governed by policies set by behemoth financial institutions, were financially illiterate and unwittingly plagued by consumerism.  We hadn’t necessarily lived enough to know what true hardship was like.  However, as we kept a subtle understanding of the ever-present inequality in this situation, we felt something of a real awakening.

Regardless, what will always stick with me about the amazing conversation we had tonight was the strength of Mighty Mouse.  I will always think of her has a role model, whether she realized it or not.  I think she will probably not, because she is too humble and too concerned with empowering us in other ways.  But by being herself and sharing her experiences, I feel a little more grown.

Disclaimer: I snapped a pic of these finely dressed, little girls in Kulob, not Dushanbe.