While planning my trip to Uzbekistan, I imagined many possible scenarios for what this country would be like. Most of them involved camels, naan, irrigation and Soviet-induced ecological catastrophe. Somehow, the predicament of being compelled to pick fruit while wearing a polka-dotted skirt and strappy sandals was not one of the images I had in mind.
It all began the night before, when my friend Maryam and I had escaped early from a wedding banquet to see our friends, Akmal and Anvar. We spent the evening strolling the broad, tree-lined Tsarist boulevards that make up the center of Samarkand. When we realized it was getting late, Maryam retreated to her house, but I was chagrined to realize that I had misplaced my key.
So that I wouldn’t have to wander the city alone all night, the brothers graciously offered me a bed in their guesthouse. With no apparent alternative I accepted, and we made our way through the deserted streets, finally reaching their courtyard home. I welcomed the opportunity to see behind their home’s walls as a rare glimpse into the privacy of traditional Islamic housing. As a foreign, unannounced and female guest, I felt a bit nervous. The brothers assured me that their mother was away on business in Kazakhstan, and their father always welcomed foreigners into his home. Exhausted, I quickly fell asleep in their spare room.
At 7 a.m. the next morning, I woke with a jolt to the sound of tapping on the window, quickly followed by shouting. Apparently, the father was eager to wake his sons for their Saturday garbage disposal routine. The family’s neighborhood lacked garbage facilities, so the Nasimovs chose a dump several miles out of town. Every two weeks they would have to fill their Niva (think the Soviet answer to a Jeep Wrangler) with buckets of garbage to haul to the disposal area.
The only benefit of transporting the garbage themselves was the opportunity to visit the family’s long-neglected dacha [summer home]. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, this dacha colony had provided a traditional escape for the Russians living in Soviet Central Asia.
The boys dropped their father and me off at the dacha, and they headed on to the trash dump. As the father unlocked the gate, we were greeted with overgrown foliage and unripe grapes. He quickly set about picking amber-colored lumps off the ground and washing them under the spigot. “A sun-dried apricot,” he said, as he handed me one. “Eat it.” Truly, this was the most sun-dried apricot I had ever encountered. It had been drying, in the grass, for an indeterminate period of time. I had tasted worse in Central Asia.
He then scoured the garden, looking for more fruit to feed me. I sampled fresh blueberries, raspberries, cherries, apricots and plums. He would point to a fruit and say the Russian or Tajik name, make me sample it and then ask if I had ever seen it in America.
Having softened me up with fruit, he was now ready to put me to work. He handed me a red, plastic bucket and pointed to a tree, bearing miniature plums, which were ridiculously tiny by Western standards. “Fill this, and we will make a juice compote,” he said. Addressing his sons, who had returned, he said, in Tajik, “I love making her work. Americans don’t have to work like this.” The brothers later explained to me in Russian what he had said. They weren’t sympathetic to my plight either, since their government makes university students pick cotton in exchange for free education.
Still wearing my dress clothes from the wedding, I began to plunk plums into the bucket. I rolled up the sleeves of my black shirt, baring my shoulders to the harsh Uzbek sun and continued picking for the next several hours. I filled the bucket several times in the process. “We will make compote,” he would reiterate every time I looked discouraged.
Though they never did make compote, I don’t resent my brush with forced labor. Uzbekistan remains inextricably linked to fruit in my mind. Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that a lot of the people on my flight brought melons on board in lieu of carry-on baggage. Fortunately, I didn’t have to pick them.
Sonia Smith is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and Editor-at-Large of the Georgetown Voice. She anxiously awaits mitten and scarf.
