Mercy Corps' Peaceful Communities Initiative (PCI) is designed to reduce the potential for conflict in isolated or border villages of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan by helping communities peacefully address resource-based needs and improve relations with their local governments. An elected Community Initiative Group (CIG) helps mobilize residents to contribute ideas, resources, and labor to improving both the social structure and infrastructure of their communities. Examining the impact of the program on women, I encountered a number of dynamic female leaders who were encouraged by PCI to assume positions of leadership in their communities. None were more impressive than Tutinisso Nasarova, a fearless and spirited woman who was inspired by personal sorrows to crusade for women's empowerment and engagement in the community.

A Born Rebel

Tutinisso Nasarova is baking the daily bread for herself and her five children when I arrive in Soi Veshist, a poor and isolated mountain community tucked high above the Zerafshan Valley in Tajikistan. She immediately drops her work, runs down from her house, and hops over a stone wall to help me up the steep slope. She is a diminutive woman, whose spry movements and ready smile belie the precarious reality of a female head-of-household in this remote village. Just yesterday, one of her sons was bitten by a rabid dog and is now recovering in the hospital. The vaccines cost 61 somoni (US$20), the equivalent of nearly two months' of her widow's pension, and she wonders how she will pay for his medicines.

"If I had had an education," she says, "I would have been able to earn a salary of my own after my husband died. When I was in high school, I was a top student, the best in my class. But at that time, girls weren't allowed to go to university, so it was out of the question to continue my education. Looking back, I think how different my life would have been if I had been able to learn a profession."

To the extent she was able, Tutinisso has always rebelled against the restrictive customs that govern girls' lives in this conservative village where most marriages are still arranged by parents and a girl's honor is her essential value. When she was young, two strangers once wandered into the village. They had gotten lost in the mountains and hadn't eaten for days. All of the women instantly vanished into their houses to avoid conversation with an unknown man. Only Tutinisso was bold enough to break that taboo. "Of course, I couldn't bring them into our house," she says, "But they were starving, so I cooked them a meal and brought it to them outside on the lawn and talked with them. People were stunned that I could be so forward, and rumors flew. But I told them, ‘Look, they may be strangers, but they're just people, too. We have to treat them like human beings.'"

When she was 16, Tutinisso again defied tradition. Her parents had arranged for her to marry a first cousin, but she refused, telling her uncle that she was in love with another man. Both the defiance and the concept of marriage for love were unimaginable at that time, and the consequences of her action were grim. For years afterward, the community shunned her, and the scandal greatly shamed her family.

To escape the gossip, Tutinisso moved with her chosen husband to the city of Samarakand, Uzbekistan, where she enthusiastically participated in the committees and social activities that were common during the Soviet Union. When her husband unexpectedly died of hepatitis at age 44, however, she was suddenly bereft of a happy marriage and a comfortable lifestyle. "I married for love," Tutinisso says, "But I must have loved too much, because I lost him too soon."

Starting Over

After the death of her husband, Tutinisso returned to Soi Veshist with her five children, the youngest of whom were six-month-old twins. She supplemented her meager widow's pension with her physical labor, gradually turning a tiny plot and herd of livestock into a stable support for her family. In the course of a day, she would hike up the mountains several times with her livestock, cut and collect hay, work her garden, bake bread, carry water, and cook for her children. "My life became very hard," she says.

"Hard" seems a small word to describe Tutinisso's sunup-to-sundown routine, but for her, the most difficult part of her life was the loneliness and disengagement from community life. With her return to the village, Tutinisso's opportunities for civic engagement vanished, and she had few occasions for social interaction even with her neighbors. "I used to be so active and engaged when I was married, but after my husband died, I had no options. I became like all of the rest of the women, just working at home, lonely and passive."

Then in 2004, Mercy Corps' USAID-funded Peaceful Community Initiative (PCI) program arrived in Soi Veshist to initiate a community-driven program that would help the residents implement technical and social projects to develop their village. Intrigued as ever by newcomers, Tutinisso saw the PCI program as an opportunity to rekindle her youthful activism and pour her energy into improving the quality of life in her community. Regretting the missed opportunities of her own youth, she made it her mission to get the women and girls involved in the PCI projects and engaged in their community.

"When PCI came, everything changed for me," she says, "My mind changed. I thought about the girls and the women in this village, how they are still suffering, how their first duty is to their brothers and fathers. They're not allowed to go anywhere, not allowed to be educated. I asked myself, ‘For how long are our girls going to be shut up like this?' So at every event and every meeting, I told the women, ‘Look, you have to be active! You have to make decisions for yourself!' I want them to broaden their outlook, to open their prospects for the future."

An Activist Emerges

Tutinisso was the only woman elected to be part of the Community Initiative Group (CIG), a group of residents elected to help design and carry out technical projects and organize social activities. As a CIG member, she helped the community identify the infrastructure problem that they considered their main priority—refurbishing and expanding their dilapidated, 30-year-old school. She also helped mobilize the residents' required contribution to the rehabilitation work on the school. According to tradition, the men would help with the construction, while the women would prepare meals for the workers. But Tutinisso refused to adhere to that gendered division of labor.

"When we first started working on the school," she says, "none of the women or girls went out to help. But then I started to persuade people, and a few other women and girls went out with me and helped with the project, whitewashing the walls, painting the floors, cleaning the classrooms. Before PCI, such a thing would have been unthinkable, to have women working in the company of men. But people saw that the carpenters were doing their work, and the women were doing ours, that we weren't doing anything bad. Of course this is just one small step for us, but it is a step forward."

In addition to working on the school project, Tutinisso took her role as a community leader literally in stride, trekking the four-kilometer-long path—part road, part streambed—out of the village to attend PCI-sponsored seminars and training sessions that could benefit her community. Little by little, Tutinisso encouraged one, two, a handful of other women to join her.

"I accompanied other women to trainings, and I walked some of the young girls to a journalism course, so that their parents would feel comfortable letting them leave the village. I went to women's houses to convince them that it's not scary or shameful to leave the village, that in fact it's good for them and their daughters, and that they can really learn something from these projects."

For those women who were unable to leave the village, Tutinosso held her own seminars in Soi Veshist, transferring whatever she had just learned to her neighbors. One notable workshop she attended was a women's leadership seminar, at which she met women from other PCI communities, from local NGOs, and from the Hukumat (the local government) to discuss issues relevant to women in Central Asia, such as early marriage, family planning, female suicide, and domestic violence.

"When I came back to the village, Tutinisso says, "I immediately started gathering groups of our women, whoever was there to listen, and I told them everything I had learned. I told them how marrying off our daughters at 14 and 15 years old can jeopardize their health. I read them the leaflets about family planning and explained to them that when we have too many children, we cannot afford to raise them all or educate them. I told them it's better to have smaller families of healthy children, than so many children that we cannot afford to feed or educate them. They listened, and they were all fascinated with everything I told them."

Representing a Village

Tutinisso's tireless activism on behalf of her community did not go unnoticed by her neighbors. Returning home from a nearby village, a former classmate stopped her on the road. "Congratulations!" he told her, "We've elected you to be our representative to the hukumat!"

As Soi Veshist's local government representative, Tutinisso is now the first person officials come to when they enter the village to collect or give out information. She is also responsible for monitoring community health issues and regularly goes house-to-house to test the iodine level in people's salt (to help eliminate the common problem of goiter), update the records of children's vaccinations, and remind women when vaccinations are needed. Tutinisso is not paid for this extra labor but is grateful for the responsibility. "It's a great honor to be selected by the community," she says, "It's their way of thanking me for my work, and I am glad that I have the opportunity to improve the life of our village. I hope that I can help make this a healthier community."

Relishing her now full life, Tutinisso continually steps up her leadership among the women of Soi Veshist. Three days a week, she attends a PCI-funded sewing class for ten girls, so that by the time PCI exits the community, she will be able to take over the course and train the next group of young women, who are willing to pay to learn the highly valued skill of sewing.

Tutinisso seems as proud of her handiwork as her adolescent classmates are. As always, though, her mission is not her personal development but expanding opportunities for the young girls in the community. Leveraging the respect she has gained through her work with PCI and the local government, she personally lobbies on behalf of young women, doing her best to persuade those parents who can afford it to send their daughters to the city for higher education.

"For me, it's too late. I missed my chance to get an education, and as a widow, I'm not even able to educate my own children, because I just don't have the money to send them to the city. That's why I focus so much attention on the wealthier families in our village who can afford to send their children to school. I don't want any of these girls to have to suffer alone as I did."

Opening opportunities for young women in Soi Veshist is not easy. Religion and tradition, poverty and isolation still form a barrier, locking young women away from the outside world, about which they are increasingly aware and curious. But time is slowly eroding tradition, and Tutinisso's single-handed chiseling has opened a crack in the wall. Just allowing young women to take a vocational training course would have been unthinkable in own youth, and Tutinisso is confident that in her lifetime, a few girls from Soi Veshist will realize her girlhood dream of leaving the village to study.

"I've always been a rebel," she grins, "And I want the girls in my village to be rebels, too. Times are changing. And you'll see, once one of these girls from our villages gets an opportunity, there will be no stopping them."




Contributed by Emily Hillenbrand, a Master's candidate in International Development with a focus on gender at American University in Washington DC. She received a Tinker-Walker travel grant from American University to complete a research internship with Mercy Corps, Tajikistan.

To read another Global Envision article about women entrepreneurs, see Planting Seeds in Yanbian.



Return to top