Living in Tajikistan is hard. People are very poor, the climate is harsh, the government is corrupt and a war has been going on for decades, just over the border in Afghanistan. But life is harder for some Tajiks than others. I'm talking about girls and women. Opportunities for girls and women can be much more limited here than in the United States. It took me a very long time to get used to the idea that here, I might not be able to do everything I'm used to doing in America, simply because I'm a girl. Still, I try to fight back against people's perceptions and prejudices as much as possible.
Even before I came here, I knew that men's and women's roles in Tajikistan are different than they are in the U.S. But I really understood the differences when I looked around one day and noticed that I was the only woman on the street. Then I realized that women are absent from public places. There are almost never any women at sports games, for example. When I go to a restaurant, I'm usually the only woman there. And while many women have jobs outside their homes in a city like Dushanbe, it's rare to see a woman in public in smaller towns and villages.
A lot of the time, women are confined to their house, where they cook and raise children.
