the prologue

I wanted to write this as an introduction, a prelude as I anticipate a surge in blog-diarrhea.
I guess this all started on the interview trail. I told fellowship directors that I wanted to continue working with my Central Asian migrant women population, but instead of focusing on HIV/STI prevention like I have been, I wanted to expand the field and look at their contraceptive practices, which i thought were likely to be minimal.
This whole thing was supposed to happen in Moscow. The way the project was originally developed, conceptualized, and approved, I was going to interview Central Asian migrant workers at their highest concentration point: looking for migrants, one must go where migrants are, and migrants are in Russia. But after attending a conference in Moscow and receiving an email from my contact organization on-site threatening imprisonment and deportation if I show up, drastic changes had to be made. You see, Russia is undergoing a population crisis: as the country drinks itself into early cardiovascular disease faster than it reproduces, Russia's birthrates are plummeting, and fueled by emerging totalitarianism and a modern nationalist xenophobia, research about contraception, especially, among marginal migrant populations is less than favorable. So back to the drawing board, resubmitting the proposal, the budget, and the IRB for re-approval, Tajikistan has become my emergency contraception to the one-night-stand with Moscow I had in January.
So Tajikistan. It is a small Central Asian country, one of the 7 stan's (technically, 8, but Kurdistan is yet to gain its sovereignty), just north of Afghanistan. Population of about 8 million, the majority of people between the ages of 18 and 50 are working abroad. Because the unemployment rate is high, something like over 30%, and every fourth person in the country has at least one family member working abroad, mainly in Russia. In fact, 50% of the country's GDP is from remittances (that's money sent home by people working abroad). Tajikistan has ranked as the second largest sending country to Russia since 2008 (second only to its neighbor Uzbekistan). This, I guess, sort of makes Tajikistan a perfect setting to study labor migration. Except that labor migrants are, by definition, laboring elsewhere. The project team I have assembled has assured me that the migrants, migrant women to be exact, will be found--located, recruited, and delivered to me, for an exchange for research participation fee. Which is yet to be delivered into the country. Which has been an ongoing battle with the Northwestern (go'cats) accounting services, and in combination with various political unrests, it has been a source of chronic indigestion for some time. The battle rages on, as my departure nears. My boss, in his attempts to cheer me up and calm me down, has argued that all of this--changing and redeveloping the project, resubmitting the IRB, fighting the IRB and accounting services--is part of learning, part of the whole experience of running your own research. Sigh. I guess, at this point it doesnt matter. This will be my third trip to the country, in fact, during my weekly coffee date with my mother, she handed me some old leftover Somoni (that's Tajik currency) to take with me. I'm all maxed out on maxi skirts and i'm getting on a plane, so whatever isn't finalized or packed will just have to be figured out. Now the challenge is to find me some women!