 as she gently places leafy branches onto the remains of existing ones. Bibi Khan is a tired mother of three who lives with her mother-in-law in a village just outside Khiva in Uzbekistan. She'll spend the summer working her cotton and wheat fields whilst her husband is off in Moscow working as a migrant labourer. Spring, though, is taken up with sericulture, the raising of silkworms. She's careful not to speak too loudly, and the television in the other room is kept at a low volume too. Silkworms, I'm told,