I have been following Bunyod Bek’s stories that he has been writing for the BBC Uzbek. Today’s story reminds me a lot about five years I spent in Tashkent. First I came to study at one of the very prestigious schools (Well corrupt and full with richi guys). Education wise it was very good, we had some very good lecturers and classrooms were well equipped.

I started working. Buying and selling - BUSINESS? I was only 15, I used to buy few perfume and makeup products from someone I knew and walked around Tashkent looking for places where women usually gets together; like bazaars, hospitals, saloons, nursery school, etc. I guess I walked everywhere in Tashkent. Never used any transport while doing “business”. To be honest, I earned more than my parents. Couple of years later, I was grown up “adult” and could no longer go around to hospitals with my little bag full of makeups and perfume. I started doing different and more profitable business – but there was a price and hard work behind it, like, I had to wake up every morning at 5 am and go to bed at midnight plus full time student at the University. Sometimes in between I even went to work in daily labourers’ bazaar. I always thought that I no longer live with my parents and I had to earn my own money – Perhaps I was right. I used to hang out (withmy richi friends) in restaurants and nightclubs, which my parents would never be able to support me – Perhaps that was wrong. That’s the story of one teenager who worked ONLY for himself. Now, you can imagine if I had a big family to look after.

How hard would I be working in the streets of Tashkent?

Many Uzbeks who live in London (young – old, man – women: some left their young children, as young as 3 months old, behind and have not seen for years) also share small accommodations. I used to know someone who lived with twelve Uzbek students in two bedrooms flat in north London. Half of them worked during the day and slept during the night and other half vice versa. So everyone had a place to sleep.

All were learning “English”, some are doctors, professors, graduates, skilled, unskilled, businessmen and etc. You can continue the list as long as you want.

Here is the second story:

Women trying to make ends meet

By Bunyod Bek
In Uzbekistan when people meet each other, the first thing they always ask is: How much money do you earn? It’s been like this for a long while now. “What can you do?” people say, “This is where we live, so we have to try to earn some money somehow.” You hear people saying this all the time. And if even if you don’t ask about money, you can be sure that at some point in the conversation the person you’re talking to will say, quite calmly: “This is our fate, what can we do? This is where we live so we have to try to earn our money somehow.”

Today, when millions of Uzbeks young and old are leaving the country to look for work faraway from their families, you hear people repeating this expression to console themselves.

Eighteen-year old Gulchera is from Fergana. She started work in a café on the Tashkent ring road two weeks ago. The owner of the café hired her at the women’s day labourers’ bazaar, in Kulyuk on the eastern edges of Tashkent. Gulchera lives behind the café with the other café staff in an old office building. She earns 3000 soms per day – that’s about two dollars – and she’s saving it up to get married.

“My parents and my younger brother and sister have gone to Russia to work,” she told me. “They left me behind because I’m the eldest. They’re coming back in the autumn. They said they’ll try to earn enough money to pay for the wedding and it’s up to me to earn the money for my wedding clothes.”

Gulchera used to earn up to 5000 soms a day when she picked up work on the hired labourers’ bazaar, but she says things are better in the café because at least the food and lodging are free.

Almost 80 per cent of women looking for work on the Kulyuk day labourers’ bazaar have come to Tashkent from the provinces. Some of them have brought their entire families with them. The entire neighbourhood has turned into one big hostel for migrant workers. Landlords cram people in – sometimes you find ten people living in one small room.

On the bazaar I met three women from Andijan – two young girls and an older woman. They said they’d come to the capital because their lives back home were so difficult. The older woman’s husband had gone to Kazakhstan to find a job. She told me she’d left her two children behind with her elderly mother in Andijan. The two girls told me they were students at the Uzbek Kyrgyz University in Osh in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. They said they’d come to Tashkent to try to earn the money to pay for next year’s tuition fees. They told me they were hoping to earn around 200 dollars each, by September when the new academic year starts. But neither of them had much idea how they were going to manage to earn that much money, or what kind of people they might find themselves working for. The girls told me that last year, two of their friends went to Kazakhstan to harvest cotton. The man who hired them turned out to be a very bad person and they were both raped by local men. They had to do whatever it took just to survive. “We also wanted to work in Kazakhstan, but when we heard what happened to our friends we decided not to,” the Andijani girls told me. “Our people are much nicer.”

It was time for them to go home to the tiny house they were renting. As they left the crowded Kulyuk bazaar they said that today had been a good day because they’d been hired by someone who was kind to them. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes they don’t want to talk about the sort of people they’ve had to work for. “But today was okay, they say. “Today we found a way to earn our money”. And with that they disappeared along the railway tracks and into the darkness leaving the black smoke of the bazaar behind them. Tomorrow they’ll be back to start all over again.