Culture shock, sure. ADVERTISING Culture shock, sure. But the woman from Tajikistan whose return to Hawaii was made possible by community donations is in school and hit the ground running, adjusting to the island after three years away. Mehrangez Rahmatova,
Culture shock, sure.
But the woman from Tajikistan whose return to Hawaii was made possible by community donations is in school and hit the ground running, adjusting to the island after three years away.
Mehrangez Rahmatova, 19, was on the Big Island in 2012 as a student at Konawaena High School as part of the State Department’s Future Leader Exchange program.
She spent a year here with A host family before returning to her home country, where finances and social pressures took her out of college and on the path to an arranged marriage.
So, her host mom, Pamela Wang, began an effort to raise enough money to bring Rahmatova back to the Aloha State and enroll her at Hawaii Community College — Palamanui.
“I still can’t believe I made it here,” Rahmatova said Friday, her fourth week back in Hawaii.
She’s been busy signing up for courses, getting her books, learning the bus schedule and just adjusting to life here.
It’s been a little hard, she said, because of the culture change and the fact many of her friends from Konawaena moved on. But people are welcoming and recognize her from a story in West Hawaii Today in November about the fundraising effort to bring her back, something she said helps.
Living in the United States has been a major shift from the post-Soviet, largely mono-cultural, and patriarchal culture of Tajikistan.
“People think I’m telling a story,” she said of what’s happened so far. “But it’s my life.”
There was obvious relief in Wang’s face as they talked about getting Rahmatova to Hawaii.
While in Tajikistan, her international travel work had to be done in the capital, an 8- or 9-hour drive from her village. All of those trips were taken on mountainous roads with minimal shoulders, where she could see the rusting hulks of vehicles in the valley below.
To get a U.S. visa, she had a short meeting with an official who asked her a few questions in English. In part because of her earlier attendance in the FLEX program, the visa was granted without difficulty.
That was not true for local officials. It took two days of standing in line to even meet a man to renew her passport. Even though he was working off her previous passports and she was sitting next to him, he misspelled her name. She didn’t discover this until the new passport arrived weeks later.
She tried again, and found that a bureaucrat then wanted her to update both passports and pay the “expedited processing fee,” again.
When Wang heard about the problems she thought “haven’t we gone over enough hurdles?”
But Rahmatova made it through began her trip.
“We had tried to anticipate everything,” Wang said, but there was one paperwork scare in the U.S.
Rahmatova’s medical records were required and Wang was stunned. It never occurred to her they would need the records. But Rahmatova reminded her about the immunizations she needed when she arrived in 2012. Those records were at a nearby clinic.
It took about 10 minutes for the clinic to produce the records, stamped and signed, Wang said.
In her home country, they’d still be waiting in line, Rahmatova said.
Right now, she is still developing her life course.
She volunteered with the Special Olympics, a sort of program that doesn’t exist in her home country.
It turned her firmly in the path of health care, she said, and she’s studying to be a nurse. She’s leaning toward being a health educator or assisting in improving life for the disabled.
It connects back to what her father hoped she could be, but faded away because of costs and long-term training. When it’s all said and done, she doesn’t know if she’ll go back to Tajikistan, stay in the U.S. or go elsewhere.
Now that she’s back, she’s ready to get back into many of her old activities. She’s gotten back into the water after three years in landlocked Tajikistan. She also would like to continue her studies in judo, which she did as a student and part of a club.
Email Graham Milldrum at gmilldrum@westhawaiitoday.com.
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Lend a hand
Pamela Wang is continuing to collect funds for Mehrangez Rahmatova’s scholarship. She projects it will take about $10,000 a year.
Donations can be sent to: Christ Church, P.O. Box 545, Kealakekua HI 96750. For more information, call Wang at 323-2117.
