For Desi this was liberation.
Desi, the village nurse is now a farmer too and before she is ready to service the sick, she must service the animals. She is disappointed. To be back in the dirty farm is returning years behind, just like 40 years of her life had been erased. She remembers having to milk the cows when she ten years old and it something she never wanted to do again. I hated it she says. With communism all farmlands were collectivized and the country’s animals were taken away to the cooperatives; owning even a chicken in one country house was not allowed.
For Desi this was liberation. She finally became a real student. I was the first woman of the village to go to the city and follow higher studies. Many villagers did not approve of this. In the mountains where traditions have ruled life, women are made to stay home, marry and take care of the house and husband. The only girl in a family of 7, Desi is particularly thankful to her oldest brother who has fought for her, convincing their parents that Desi, as much as boys, had the intellectual capacity to study.
Marriages arranged when still laying in our baby crib
Desi was ready to fight for her possibility as a woman. She became a fervent communist, came back to the village city experience and education. She became representant of the women’s federation at the Tonya Curre Cooperative she fought for women’s emancipation, for their participation at work, for their access to education. She thought them to care for their children’s health and fought for the abolition of some traditional customs that limited them. “Here marriages were arranged we were still laying in our baby crib,” she says adding still revolted by the idea “even worst, sometimes even when the baby was still the mother’s womb.”
