An Ageing Population

The older person I’d like to talk about is a neighbour of my parents called Halima opa, who is now eighty-three. I’ve known her my entire life; she used to give us apricots from her tree when we were children. What makes her life fascinating is that it spans almost the entire modern history of Uzbekistan. She was born just after the Second World War in a village near Samarkand, trained as a pharmacist in the Soviet era, lived through the 1966 Tashkent earthquake, and experienced independence in 1991 as a woman in her mid-forties, when her entire professional world was turned upside down. Remarkably, rather than retreating, she reinvented herself in her fifties. When the state pharmacy where she worked closed, she started a small business making herbal remedies from plants she grew herself, which she still runs, with the help of her granddaughter, who handles the online sales. These days, she spends her mornings in her garden, sells her products at a weekly market, and in the evenings she’s often surrounded by neighbours asking her advice — on health, on family disputes, on everything. I find her life interesting partly because of the history she has witnessed first-hand; listening to her is like hearing a living textbook. But more than that, I admire her adaptability. She’s lived through three completely different political and economic systems, and each time she found a way not just to survive but to remain useful and respected. She challenges the stereotype that older people resist change; if anything, she’s embraced it more gracefully than many people half her age.

Shaxs → tarixiy kontekst (davrlar) → qayta kashf qilish → hozirgi hayot → nega qiziq (stereotipni buzish).