TAJIKISTAN | Famine Blues
Monday, July 26, 2010 at 05:00PM 
Tajik cotton. Radio Nederlander Wereldonroep.
Journey | Daniel J Gerstle, HELO Magazine, July – August 2010
The young mother’s sun-dried face appeared to be frozen. She had long reddish hair tied up under a scarf, a furrowed brow, stark eyes, and unrevealed lips. Her chest was wide and thin, her breasts empty, so that she looked somewhat like an empty duvet below the chin. She wore a billowing green cotton smock with red flowers printed on it. She held her child like a small handbag, the little girl’s eyes rotating helplessly left and right.
This was one of those blistering hot days in Khatlon, the southern province of Tajikistan. Here all the melted snow of the Pamirs sinks below the sand, misses the people entirely and drains into the Panj River on the border of Afghanistan.
Damn hot, painful to climb into a roasting car with glowing pleather, much less to live with nothing and have to hike kilometers along a sandy path just to help some rich guy grow cotton under the sun.
Alijon drove Emma, the Spanish nutritionist and me from post-war Kulyab out to a shuddering little shack nestled aside rows of budding cotton flowers in Khanabad. Finally, after so much yearning to understand, I was about to get a strong dose of the famine blues administered by a young woman from the hills and her three-month-old girl. The brief event revealed for me the very heart of why mass hunger was so difficult to prevent.
The young mother with her aching eyes and handbag child reminded me of a beggar I came across in Khojand, a small town in the north of the country.
There I had finished a simple bowl of borscht with bread and started to come out of a cafeteria when a woman scrambled in from the street. She was about twenty-four like the young mother, wearing a similar flower-patterned cotton smock. The beggar began screaming at the lady cook behind the counter, who defended herself by trying to wave the beggar out of the cafeteria like a fly which had snuck in through the air vent.
The screaming beggar clawed at a loaf of bread. The cook looked genuinely concerned but wouldn’t give up the loaf. Seeing the bakery overflowing with goodies, no doubt through lenses fogged by a lack of caloric energy, maybe anemia, scurvy, and a half dozen other nutritious deficiencies, the beggar was beyond a headache. She was out of her mind, dizzy and furious.
Finally, a truck driver stood up and, more decisively than the cook, shouted for the beggar to leave. The beggar looked at all the beady eyes around the room staring at her, including mine, then pulled her dress over her head, revealing her breasts, the skin stretched tight across her rib cage, her protruding hip bones, and her bare pubic area. She screamed one last time like that and then stormed out.
After that, I couldn’t eat peacefully for the rest of my time in the country. This of course left me trying to stuff huge portions of rice pilav into an unwilling belly, so I ended up leaving food on my plate before returning to research about how to prevent famine.
Next in line behind the young mother at the supplemental feeding center in Khanabad were women who fit the more expected look of the Tajiks: black hair, long brow, stern, large forearms; they only made the young mother seem more out of place, like she was the descendant of a red-haired Bactrian Greek.
The aid workers were former college students. Two women ran the center and there was a man outside with the trunk open on his Lada, revealing a stack of packages containing wheat flour, salt, sugar, and vitamin-enriched cooking oil.
The young mother took her turn at the scale. The aid ladies were polite. They followed the usual checklist, filtering their directions to the applicant through the usual lenses. They were glad not to have sucumbed to the famine conditions, proud to have conquered an advanced school, and ambivalent on many levels about their work.
There is a term long-used for those who witnessed a massacre but escaped unhurt: “survivor’s guilt.” Aid workers, not those locked in an office all day but the ones literally feeding or treating people, have something similar. It could be called, "triage burn". They were possessors of vitamin enriched food, but not even a fraction of what was needed, so they had to decide who received it and who did not.
They indicated for the young mother to lie her child, the one like a handbag, its eyes helplessly swivelling left and right, onto a measuring board. Length marked, the mother moved the baby as directed to a green cloth sling. The sling’s loops held it fast to a weight scale.
One of the aid ladies marked the weight of the child with the swiveling eyes. To the young mother it must have felt like a staged ritual, one akin to having someone else choose your lottery numbers, or worse, one staged to present the appearance that the judgement of whether to give food aid or not was actually based on name or clan or political association.
Here was the moment of truth. The aid ladies made a simple calculation. Good news and bad news. In Tajik, they told the woman, “Good news! She’s gained weight since the last time.”
The young mother stepped back, looked as if to clench her fist, half-smiled, and stood confused. The aid ladies blinked.
“So we’re not getting any flour?” the young mother asked.
“We are so happy she’s getting better,” one of the ladies replied. “Unfortunately, we don’t have enough aid to go around for everyone.”
The young mother looked at each of the healthy aid ladies, at Alijon, Emma, and me, out the door toward the car full of little bags of flour, and beyond to the horizon of blooming cotton plants.
“Am I supposed to starve my child to get aid?”
“Not at all; it’s just we don’t have enough for everybody. I’m sorry but we need to see the next family.”
A second mother came up, saw the familiar debate, and became apprehensive. From here, I did not get a clear translation but the exchange could be summarized along these lines.
“Why do you have three workers," asked the second mother, "then another driver with two foreigners, two cars, and fuel all to give us a little pathetic bag of flour? Or worse, to have us walk here from the village, and then not to receive it?
“What are we supposed to do? Our husbands traveled to Moscow for work and we hardly hear from them except to have a child or get an empty envelope. And we can’t carry the children to labor in the farms...”
The aid workers had heard all this before. What were we to do? We come to help and ended up appearing as those who were withholding help. Not ironically, it was the great collective farm around us which applied the heaviest blow.
Central planners in the government believed the best way to feed the country was to employ laborers to farm cotton for export. Meanwhile, the laborers could not afford food to make it to a field to farm a crop they could not eat.
The first young mother, now backed by the second, found her strength now and came at the aid workers more furiously. The nutritionist I was traveling with suggested we leave, so as not to make matters worse.
After all, we were on our way back to a therapeutic feeding center where the children who were too sick for supplemental aid went for emergency care. We would see many handbag children with swiveling eyes, but ones closer to the grave, their mothers simply waiting.
As we emerged from the shade of the center into the angry sun, I looked back one last time at the young mother. She seemed to storm out of the center with her daughter. She came to the road as we drove past. It seemed she not couldn’t decide whether to walk the hours back home, or to head for the center of the town to beg.
We drove out past scores of other mothers streaming down the road to apply for aid at the center. Eventually, their heads were obscured out the back window behind the vast fields of cotton flowers.