DUSHANBE (UCAN) -- Twenty years ago, St. Joseph Church here was full of parishioners, with Masses, catechism and other activities held in German. Now this shrunken parish does not have even one permanent German member.

Migration is transforming Tajik society. The flight of people caused by the civil war of 1992-1994 and subsequent economic problems has dramatically affected Catholics and the Russian Orthodox community, but also society in general.

According to Father Ezequiel Ayala, the St. Joseph parish priest, only one or two German Catholics reside in the capital, but they were not born in the country and came to work for an embassy or international organization.

The same is true in the second-largest Catholic parish, St. Roch, in Kurgan-Tube, 80 kilometers south of the capital.

Father Pedro Lopez, the parish priest there, spoke with UCA News in the wake of the 2008 World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which the Church celebrated on Jan. 13. "I'm not sure about the exact numbers of parishioners in St. Roch Parish in Soviet times, but I'm sure most of them were Germans, who have largely emigrated to Germany," he said.

The priest counts only one or two ethnic Germans in his parish, with the other parishioners being ethnic Russians or Tajiks.

In the 1960s and 1970s, according to Church sources, about 30,000 ethnic Germans lived in Tajikistan, and many were Catholics. In 1974 they refurbished a house to make St. Joseph Church, the first Catholic church in Dushanbe. The transformed house surrounded by fir trees and a two-meter-high wall in a quiet suburb was identifiable as a church only by a small inscription on the door and a small cross on the roof, hidden by the trees.

Today the church does not need to hide its purpose. Yet churchgoers, looked after by Incarnate Word missionary priests from Argentina, are few. Catholics in the country number only about 250.

Father Ayala may hope for that number to increase, but he is not looking for a return to the past. "It doesn't matter actually what the nationality of our Catholics are," he said.

Migration has also hit the Russian Orthodox community, and more visibly. Twenty years ago, they made up 15 percent of the population, a figure that has now dropped to around 3 percent.

Ekaterina Makarova, 82, lives alone since her only son left for Russia with his family in 1995. She tries to survive on her small monthly pension of 70 somoni (US$20) but has had to sell some of her clothes and furniture in the local market.

"I know I'm too old and would disrupt my son's family if they took me to Russia, because they've bought only a one-room flat in Khimki," a town 80 kilometers south of Moscow, she told UCA News.

"There are plenty of old people left by their children who went to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991," Makarova added. She noted that Dushanbe used to be a completely Russian city, but since the civil war that pitted Muslim militants against the government, most of the Russians have left.

"I will end my life here in Tajikistan," she said.

Migration is also affecting the local Muslim population, even though it is composed largely of ethnic Tajiks. Due to unemployment and a poor economy, unskilled workers go to Russia in search of work.

Government statistics in 2007 put unemployment at 2-3 percent, but unofficial estimates are much higher.

International agencies concerned with migration claim up to 900,000 Tajik citizens, a large segment of the economically active population in this country of 6.5 million, go abroad annually for seasonal or permanent work.

Many women are home alone or with their children.

Makhbuba Sfieva's husband lives with the family no more than three or four months a year. The rest of the time he works in Moscow.

"He works in Russia and can earn very good money to feed our family of seven people," she told UCA News, "but it is very difficult to live separately most of the year."

Sfieva, 36, said her 1-year-old son "has not seen his father, who has worked in Russia since his birth."

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