Voices of the poor. Can anyone hear us?

I met Gogola (name changed) at the entrance of a shopping mall in Tbilisi. Gogola is about 80 years old. She is holding few packs of paper towels to sell. She cries often. So I met her when she was about to cry, asking me to buy some of her paper towels. Now I ask myself if I would have talked with Gogola if I was not conducting my fieldwork concerning the illegal street vendors... Retrospectively, I want to believe that the personal curiosity of knowing her was bigger than the academic one. Gogola is from Abkhazia. She left Abkhazia during the war, in the beginning of 1990s. However most of what she talks is about Abkhazia and her life there. Her husband used to be a locally appreciated writer and a journalist. Was killed during the war and his head was sent to Gogola in the box. Her daughter had a Ukrainian husband, who also got killed in the same period. Since then, meaning for last 20 years, she has horrible headaches. Gogola loves to tell the stories of her husband and daughter, stories of the sailors and tourists (Abkhazia is a seaside region, used to be the famous summer resort in Soviet Union) relatives, friends and parties. She hardly talks of present, or anything that happened in her and her family’s life after the war. One of the few postwar realities she shared, as probably I asked, is that her relatives and friends from Abkhazia avoid talking to her. I asked, as I realized she used to belong to well-educated and probably well-off circles, and I suspected that good social networks should have been helpful for persons facing harsh social problems. Gogola says, when her relatives see her selling paper towels, they avoid greeting her. She says people think it’s a shame to vend on the streets, especially because she used to be a wife of an appreciated writer, member of a respected family, and now she turned into a disgrace.