Episode Transcript
Hello, my name is Aziz and I'm the son of a divorced mother.
She is really my superhero.
That's why it's important for me to support women to share their uniqueness, their personalities,
their perspectives, and emotions about this world.
In these difficult times in human history, we need to bring the people of the world together.
And when we hear the voices of women, when we listen to real lives of women from other
countries, we connect our cultures without differences or stereotypes, and we get inspired
by their stories to live a better life.
That's what this podcast is all about.
My guest today is Nozanin Homidjonova.
Nozanin is from Khuzhand, Tajikistan.
Currently, she is a second-year student at Polytechnic Institute of the Tajik Technical
University named after M. S. Osimi.
Her major is technology and information systems in the economy.
Nozanin works with the public organization SHAMS, which provides access to quality education
for girls from removed areas of Tajikistan by using modern technologies.
At the moment, they are implementing their new project for girls, Win the Future.
Her hobby is her blog.
She loves sharing her opinions and being an influencer.
Nozanin, how are you today?
Hello, Bazis.
Today, I'm great.
I had a lot of positive emotions today.
And I am really, really happy to be here and share my life stories and my influence to
my community.
Thank you for having me.
I'm happy and honored, really, to interview you.
And I'm very curious about you as a person.
So I like to begin with this nice first question.
If your friends, Nozanin, the people who know you and love you most, could describe your
personality, what would they say about you?
Okay, it's a really good question.
If I ask my friends to describe me in few words, I think my best friend will say that
I am positive and comfort person to communicate this.
I really look to several situations in positive side and like, find good solutions to make
it better.
I think my parents will describe me as a responsible girl because I really love to do everything
on time.
And I love to be useful for someone.
And I think my friends will describe me as communicative, open-minded, and so on.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
I love the sunny sunshine attitude you have.
It really represents Shems.
And therefore, I will begin with this.
What gives you this positive attitude?
I mean, we live in a time where a lot of people have anxiety, worry, they feel a lot of depression,
they cannot make themselves feel positive.
What inside you gives you this positivity?
Is it because when you are useful to other people, that makes you more happy?
Is it you're born that way and you're just a positive person?
Or maybe in the past, you had some difficult situations and you decided to be good vibes
only?
Or how was it for you?
So I want to start that I am not always positive.
There are a lot of situations when I am really negative and I am sad because it's life and
every day something will happen.
So first thing I came up with is books.
I love reading about psychology, like good habits, healthy habits, self-development books.
In every book, I read that idea that a positive view to something will change the situation
for 180 degrees.
And I really agree with that because some day something will happen, like I am late
for some meetings and I have two choices, like I can be angry and just live this day
without with my angryness and or I will choose being positive and like find something good
in this situation.
And last year I had not good year because I lived in another city and there was a lot
of situation when some people was not good to me and they wasn't respectful with me.
And it was kind of sad and it made me like stronger that I decided that I will be respectful
for everyone.
I will respect everyone in my way to future and I decided that being positive is much
more better than being sad because life is really short and living with negative emotions
every day isn't good idea because in the end of our days, like for example, 70 years old
or 80, we will think about only positive emotions of our life.
With that reason, I decided to look for everything with positive side and find everything in
everything something good, something that is nice for me and something that will teach
me something new.
That is great.
I love your attitude and I'm happy that you're trying to help other girls in Tajikistan improve
themselves and maybe have the same positive attitude and become stronger when people criticize
in the same way that you learned.
Can you talk a little bit about the project Win the Future?
What does it mean?
Why is it important and how is the situation of some girls in Tajikistan in some remote
areas?
Our project Win the Future means a lot to me.
The main idea of our project is to attract more girls to take sphere STEM because Tajikistan
is really small country and here, especially in rural areas, girls are not allowed to continue
their education after school and especially for working with technologies because our
society think that this profession, this major is only for boys and our organization decided
to break this stereotype and we were thinking about something innovative to bring to our
education system and one day I came up with idea about preparing girls to enter to the
universities of our country with tech and modern technologies.
We wanted to attract girls for this sphere.
It is free program for girls.
We provide free lessons with necessary subjects which is necessary in entering the university
entrance exams.
We choose three regions from our country and gathered 150 girls.
We called this project Win the Future because our future is modern technologies with day
by day people inventing something new and everything became like automatized and robots
are invented.
So we really want to be the girls surrounded with this modern technologies.
So we provided free master classes for girls about modern technologies.
We showed them that a lot of new technologies like VR glasses, AI glasses, told about electromobiles
and AI drivers, they were really interested in it and they told us that it was really
interesting and they want to develop in this sphere.
So now the project duration is one year and it will end in August 2023.
So we are working with three regions and every region we have 50 girls and we hope that 90
girls from 150 will enter to the university and we hope that most of them will enter in
a vegetarian basis.
We provide free classes, our subjects are information technologies, chemistry, physics
and math.
I really value the work that you do for girls, for women to help them get into the technology
sphere and on a more personal level your topic of study, you study in technology and information
systems.
How did you choose this subject, what encouraged you for it and what do you find interesting
about it?
Yes, thank you, very good question.
Actually during my school years I was attracted most in art, in drawing and dancing but one
day when I was in 11th grade, I saw a lot of new opportunities for girls and with the
COVID-19 started everything was online and everyone was isolated so we have to work with
our laptops, we have to work with new programs like Zoom, like Mail and it gave me a motivation
to develop in this sphere.
I saw that this sphere is developing day by day, improving and it will be really great
for me to study it and develop it in my country because Tajikistan is a really small country
and not everyone know about that country and not everyone here is a programmer.
I thought yes, I want to be the first girl from Tajikistan who is very popular programmer
or web designer or something else and during my school years I really liked math.
I knew that my brain is analytic, not interested in art, yes, I liked drawing, I liked painting
but my brain was really analytic, I liked think about something, I like working with
numbers and even my math teacher told me that I am really good at math and it was another
motivation to continue this and when I was choosing my major I thought yes, no, Zainini,
you will be a great programmer.
First year in my university was great but difficult too because before that I didn't
work with computer a lot and I have to firstly learn about computer basics and programming
was something new for me, programming languages was something unreal.
We just wrote some codes and it came up with another program, another window and it was
really great and I didn't disappointed with my choice, I liked my sphere and I really
want to develop this sphere in my community and help other girls to find themselves in
this sphere, yes.
That is wonderful and I know that you have a blog, you enjoy it very much, you help people
with it.
My question is, maybe there are girls in this world who dream of starting a blog, of becoming
an influencer but they worry that some people will write some negative comments that hurt
their feelings or they worry about the judgment of society, of family, of just followers.
How do you deal with that?
What do you do so that you feel confident and strong when you create something on your
blog?
Even if some people can be rude potentially or maybe nobody is rude on your blog, tell
me more.
Sure, my blog is another important thing for me.
I started in 2018 and that time Instagram wasn't really popular in my country.
I just started posting beautiful pictures of me in nature but my blog hasn't any clear
message, clear goal, clear aim and so in 2020 I thought that my blog will be about self-development
and yes, there was some negative comments to my blog.
Someone told that you are only 17 years old and you don't have any good experience to
share with us so Instagram is not for you.
I just deleted that comment and forgot about that because in this world there are a lot
of haters and I know that I can't change their mindset but I can change my attitude to the
situation.
I thought that every that person who write negative comment in their lives there are
a lot of negative situations so any happy person don't want to do something bad for
someone because they are happy and they want to make this world better.
So when people write negative comments and do something negative to your site, just don't
pay attention to it, delete it, block that person and just continue your activity, go
for your goals because when you reach your goal that person who was rude to you will
come to you and maybe ask for some advices to start a blog or advices to self-development.
So don't pay attention to that person and go for your goals and reach it and someday
you will thank yourself that you didn't give up and continuing doing something great and
every hour action will bring something great so be always positive, don't give up and go
for your goals.
Thank you Nozaneen, it was my privilege and my honor to have you here to share the work
you do for Tajik girls to share your life, your perspective, your experience.
I wish you success, I wish Shems more success and to all girls from Tajikistan to have the
choice and the possibility to go into technology fields if they want without any limitations.
Thank you again.
Thank you very much Aziz for having me here.
It was my pleasure to share my experience with you and maybe give some new ideas or
some motivation for other girls who will listen to this podcast.
So yeah, I wish you success in your project, it's really great and I saw a lot of great
girls in this project in your Instagram account and you are doing a great job and I really
appreciate it.
Thank you so much and I wish you a good day or a good evening.
Thank you very much.
