On a recent Saturday morning, a dozen Afghan women gathered in southern Moscow for their weekly Russian lesson. A few chatted effortlessly, the words gliding between them. Others could just about manage a brief introduction.
Twenty-year-old Farkhunda is scrutinizing a set of grammar rules, tracing her finger over a line of noun endings. “I was not meant to be doing this,” she says in English, a mischievous smile dimpling her round cheeks. “I was studying to become a doctor, but we had to leave.” One year ago, Farkhunda — who like others in this story, only gave her first name — and her new husband left their native Kabul for Moscow. He also gave up his studies, and now works as a market seller, peddling trinkets and lighters. Moscow is home to a lively but cowed Afghan community, which centers around a cluster of gray tower blocks that make up the Soviet-era Sevastopol Hotel. It is in one of the hotel’s low-ceilinged rooms where an affable, middle-aged Russian woman teaches them. For her students, this is often their only engagement with life outside of the home.
Afghanistan’s deeply patriarchal society, combined with Russia’s pervasive and sometimes violent xenophobia, means the women often pass their days at home with the children, while their husbands are out working. Most of the men have found work in the Sevastopol, which no longer functions as a hotel but is instead a jumbled shopping center, where rickety elevators deliver Russian customers to boxy rooms filled with mass-produced plastic, from fidget spinners to shisha pipes.
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INC News, 30/07/2017 - ©MoscowTime
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