# Not quite so alone

Source: https://www.qaravan.org/stories/not-quite-so-alone/

Timur, 22, left Russia after police told his graduating class they would be sent to occupied eastern Ukraine or into the police. Frank Carson, 83, was an AIDS buddy in the 1980s. QARAVAN’s Rainbow Connections program matched them to practice English together.

*Timur and Frank at a QARAVAN gathering in New York, January 2024*

Participant

## Timur, 22

### How did you end up in New York?

I was in my fifth and final year of pharmacy school in southern Russia when the war started. When Russia began drafting men to fight, police officers came to our university and told us that after graduation we would either go to Donbas [in occupied eastern Ukraine] and rebuild it, or join the police. I had spent five years studying medicine and suddenly had no choice. It wasn’t only about being gay anymore. Everyone in Russia has lost their freedom. I got some money from the bank, flew to Mexico, crossed the border on December 31, 2022, and five days later I was in New York.

### What was the hardest part?

Being alone. Nobody gives you advice, nobody tells you where to go or even where to buy food. Here, it’s the language barrier that’s most difficult.

### Where are you from?

Kabardino-Balkaria, in Russia’s North Caucasus. I’m Kurdish; my grandparents came from Iran. Racism in Russia is strong, so my parents deliberately didn’t teach me Kurdish, so that I would speak Russian without an accent. It didn’t protect me. I grew up in a Muslim family and always knew I would have to leave. My parents still expect me to marry a woman, and I’m afraid to tell my relatives about myself.

### How did you find QARAVAN?

By chance. I saw [QARAVAN] marching in the New York Pride March and came to its New Year’s party. A woman from the team told me about Rainbow Connections, where I could practice English. That’s how I met Frank, and now we study English together. When I have more free time, I want to help however I can. Many LGBTQ+ people from Russia here try to shed their background quickly, because they fear homophobia even in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. We need more representation.

*Timur*

Volunteer

## Frank Carson, 83

### How did you come to Rainbow Connections?

About ten years ago, through CBST, the LGBTQ synagogue in Manhattan, I learned there were LGBTQ people in New York from Russia and Ukraine who knew few people here and had little or no English. My heart went out to them, because they’re LGBTQ, and that’s such a strong identity for me. When someone from [QARAVAN] who remembered my volunteering at CBST reached out, I jumped at it.

### What is your life like outside volunteering?

I’m retired, so most of my life is volunteering. I was a college professor, and I still think of myself as an educator. In 1989 I left academia to work on AIDS full time and was lucky to get a job at GMHC, where I worked for the last 15 years of my career. Three days a week I train with a personal trainer, a young man from Kazakhstan.

### Did the AIDS years shape your volunteering?

In many ways. I started out as a buddy. I don’t want to count the young men I was a buddy to who died; at that point there was no cure. In the 1980s, people living with HIV often had no one to talk to. English wasn’t the problem then, but the need was the same: a sympathetic ear, someone who could say, “I don’t have HIV, but I’ve been through something similar,” so the person feels heard. That’s the direct parallel with Rainbow Connections. Those of us who volunteer with it are helping a lot of people feel that they’re not quite so alone.

### What would you tell someone who is hesitating to get involved?

It’s so much about compassion. I didn’t know you were still looking for volunteers. Now that I know, I’ll talk it up with my friends. I have some pretty compassionate friends.

*Timur and Frank*

Recorded in New York in January 2024. Timur’s answers are translated from Russian. Edited for length and clarity.

## Rainbow Connections

Rainbow Connections pairs newly arrived LGBTQ+ immigrants, many of them asylum seekers, with trained volunteers for English practice, help finding their way around New York, company and basic emotional support. It continues the buddy program QARAVAN and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), New York’s LGBTQ+ synagogue, organized from 2015 to 2017.

[About the program](https://www.qaravan.org/programs/rainbow/)