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
29
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
31
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
32
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.
33
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