JDC Children’s Initiative Restores Kindness and Hope to a Struggling Uzbek Family

"Today you are interviewing the poor people," says Lena as she welcomes visitors into the sparse and dilapidated space that she and her family call home in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. By definition, it would be called a hovel.

There is no front door: only frayed curtains separate a mud-room entranceway from the family’s living area.

A small room contains two rusty cots where Lena and her teenage daughter Oksana sleep, a rickety wooden table where the family eats, and a wardrobe closet containing the family’s few articles of clothing. A tiny heater in the center of room fails to warm this space and the modest, adjacent room where the family’s two small children sleep.

"If you want to know what real cold is like, just take off your coat and stay awhile," says Oksana with a sense of humor that loosely veils the uncomfortable truth: it is bone-chilling cold in the house.

"I’m trying the best I can," says Lena, who earns $18 a month as a bus conductor. "It is a struggle to just provide three meals a day to my children. We try to make do with what we can."

It is hard to imagine, but life for this family is a marked improvement over what it once was several years ago when Lena left a husband who was abusing both her and her children. The house where they are living was all that she could afford.

"It doesn’t matter what little we have—now there is happiness and love in this house," says Lena.

It is a new beginning that Lena so strongly craves. Mostly she dreams of being able to move to Israel, but for the time being her husband refuses to grant her a Jewish divorce, which is required in order for her to make aliyah.

Meanwhile, with the help she and her family are getting from JDC, Lena feels that she is already on the road to a better life.

"I am so very grateful that there is the Joint and they are stretching out a helping hand to me," she says. "They are of course providing us with the things we need to survive, like monthly food packages," says Lena of assistance they receive from the IFCJ-JDC Partnership for Children in the FSU. "But they are also helping us spiritually. Human beings consist first of their souls and then their bodies."

Twice a week, Lena’s two younger children attend the JDC-sponsored Mazel Tov program held at the Tashkent Jewish Community Center. There the children enjoy extra-curricular activities such as Hebrew and English language lessons and programs introducing them to Jewish traditions.

"The JCC has become like their second home," says Lena. "There is kindness once again in our lives."

January 2008