One Month (+)

When I arrived in Dushanbe six weeks ago, it was hot. And still hot when I arrived in Khujand, nearly a month ago. Every day I put on my sandals to go out the door, and put on my sunglasses. It is always sunny (Yesterday was the first cloudy day I have seen). It is still in the 80s and hot in the sun in the middle of the day, but autumn has fallen: when I sit by the window in the kitchen in the morning with my Nescafe, I wear a flannel shirt because of the breeze.

I am still figuring out a daily schedule. Until this week, I have had the luxury of waking up slowly without morning appointments. I moved my Tajik lessons to 9 am, so on Tuesday and Thursday I now have to get up. I spent the mornings going to the bazaar for food or planning lessons. I have added classes slowly at the American Corner as I get to know the students and volunteers there. They are all eager to talk to a native English speaker, and want TOEFL lessons, and want to know how to get accepted into programs to go to America, and I spend a lot of time just talking with people.

In the evenings Sarah and I make ourselves dinner. We've been invited out many of the nights: to eat with someone visiting from the Embassy, or (twice) to talk to a group of American tourists, and Friday nights the small Khujand expat circle gathers for pizza and beer.

On two Saturdays I have gone with a group of volunteers from the American Corner to talk to students in the regions about American exchange programs and volunteering. I enjoy getting the chance to hang out with them and try to practice my Tajik, mostly listening hard. The coordinator of the American Corner is a wonderful woman I want to get to know better, and most of the volunteers are male university students, who are also students in my classes.

Sundays have been varied: last week I was sick in bed, today I went shopping at both the bazaar and the 'supermarket'. Tomatoes already cost more than they did when we arrived. Though there are fewer raspberries, there are apples everywhere, and they are delicious. I have made two apple pies since arriving, and at the moment I have an apple cake in the oven cooking for a friend's birthday.  Last night we had a bonfire and grilled beef and mutton while enjoying the full moon, and Sarah and I spent a long time explaining to Europeans why we so badly needed marshmallows.

I am looking forward to enjoying the rest of fall. Everyone is bracing for the winter, and warning us to cherish warmth while we can. I am also looking forward to teaching more, and hopefully learning more Tajik. In addition, I am looking forward to more baking, guitar-playing, and swimming - none of which I expected to be a part of my time here.

Postcard from Kairakum

 

Greetings from the Tajik Sea!

Tajikistan is a landlocked country, but people often call this large reservoir a sea. Sarah and I went with a group of other Khujandi expats (including two who own cars) to Kairakum on a lazy Sunday afternoon. We sat on a concrete tapchan/gazebo (I think there were dried corn stalks as the thatching) and ate and talked. A few of us wandered down to the sea and went swimming. The water was fairly warm; apparently the water is several meters lower now than it is in the spring, after the rains.

So we'll have to go back in the spring to see the water at its true height!

Kyle

I had to add this photo of my foot hanging off the tapchan to show how much watermelon we are and how the seeds were.

P.S. Kairakum was created with a dam on the Syr Darya River to irrigate more fields of cotton. I had to find out when it was built, because no one with us knew: 1956-58. It is 55km long and 20km wide at its widest point, covering an area of 513 km squared, an average depth of 8.1m, with its deepest point at 25m.

Тоҷики

Tajiki is the national language of Tajikistan. Depending on who you ask, it is either a dialect of Persian, or a distinct language in the close-knit trio with Farsi (spoken in Iran) and Dari (spoken in Afghanistan).

I studied Farsi at Yale, which means that I learned the Arabic alphabet, learned my professor's Tehran accent, read modern short stories, and wrote my senior essay about the historical context of Simin Daneshvar's novel Savushun. Tajiki uses the Cyrillic alphabet, because it was part of the Soviet Union for over 70 years. Tajiki uses many Russian words, and much of the Farsi I learned is considered literary Tajiki, and not used in everyday speaking. 

This means that I speak weirdly. People ask me if I am from Iran, more for my wrong-vowels than for my word choice, I think. The long ah in Farsi becomes a long oh in Tajiki, and the long ee is a shorter eh, and so on. I make lots of spelling mistakes when I write - but fewer now. Some people say they think it is a beautiful sound; I think the relationship may be a little like Americans' relationship with British English. Nonetheless, when people ask how I learned Tajiki, I say, "I studied Farsi for two years at university. I arrived here a month ago, and now I am trying to change from Farsi to Tajiki."

I plan to share some of what I learn here, both my ridiculous mistakes and the stories or phrases that I like from my lessons. 

Khujand.Хуҷанд

See also in Google Earth

I will start by quoting an email my friend Michael sent me:

You are...bound for the northernmost Persian-speaking metropolis in the world. You also can now drop things in conversation like, "Yeah, I was living in a city near the crossroads of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. You know, the four squiggly corners."

Stats:

• Latitude: 40 deg 17' (compare to New Haven, 41 deg 18'; closer to Pittsburg, 40 deg 28')
• Elevation: 1,000 ft
• Population: 165,000 
• The city formerly known as Leninabad (along with many others in the former USSR). 
• Home to the tallest statue of Lenin in Central Asia (removed last year from his place of honor and relegated to a lower pedestal away from Lenin St; in his place is a large statue of Ismoil Somoni).
• Ancient history: Alexander the Great established a base here in 329 BCE. In the local museum there is a room filled entirely with Grecian-style mosaics telling Alexander's life story.
• Geography: at the mouth of the Fergana Valley, which extends north into Uzbekistan. 
• Capital of Sughd region of the country. Sughd is the most fertile and prosperous part of the country. The biggest crop is cotton, which is all picked by hand. People are beginning the 'cotton campaign' now to pick it; that usually includes students being yanked from classes for several weeks-two months to take part.
• Travel from Dushanbe: about a 6-hour drive through a Tunnel of Death and then the Shahristan Pass (ie Pass of Death). A new tunnel (built by a Chinese company) is due to be completed at the end of this month (a year late). It should make the drive about 5 hours. There are also daily flights, which is the safer option in the winter when the roads are bad.
• My home for the next ten months. I live near the center of town so we can walk almost anywhere we need to go. Outside our window we have walnut and sycamore-like trees blowing in the wind, as well as some cedars. 

Do You Have a Family?

On one of my first days in Dushanbe, a young man asked me, "Oyleh dareed?" [Do you have a family?] I answered, "Of course. My mother and father and two brothers are in America." "Na," he responded, "Shohar dareed?" [No - Do you have a husband?] This is one of the first questions that people ask here. There is only one word for family, but when you are old enough, "family" means "your own family with husband and children because you should be married by now and if not you should marry a nice Tajik boy."  For me, "family" means my relatives in America, and it also means my friends here, who are my Tajik family.

My family in Dushanbe was obvious from landing: myself and the three other ETAs arrived on the same flight and stuck together from then on. Embassy workers often commented on how we were always together. When we went to a talk with students in Qurghonteppa, one of them asked, "How long have you known each other?" We thought about it - we had been together in the country for a week at the time, but we met in Austin, TX, in June for four days - "Three months?" "I thought you had known each other since childhood," the students responded.

ETAs, our embassy contact person and one ELF get silly during a long photo-shoot evening.

Our mother - or Fairy Godmother, depending on the day - was the woman that Areebah and I stayed with for two weeks. Shafoat is a local embassy worker who let us sleep in her daughter's beds, lent me her clothes (and gave me some), cooked for us and taught us to make sambusas. Areebah and I stayed up late talking to her about Tajikistan and America, education and healthcare, college and her daughters: one sixteen and indecisive, one eighteen and now a Freshman at Goucher College in Baltimore. Shafoat was our host, our guide to the city, our friend, our mother, as well as host to the other ETAs and ELFs for frequent dinners, inviting over her other friends from the embassy and generally easing our transition into the country.

We put the "bright" in Fulbright.

Leaving Dushanbe was unexpectedly sad because I felt like I was leaving this family. Now in Khujand, I have a smaller family so far: Sarah, an ELF (English Language Fellow - her ears do not seem to be pointy). She arrived a week after the rest of us, but was just as much a part of our pack in Dushanbe. We were glad to find that we liked each other enough to propose: "Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but do you want to live together, maybe?" We both enjoy singing, and have become something of a traveling minstrel show. On our way to Khujand, we stopped at three English classes, and ended up singing "Leaving on a Jet Plane." After the first one, we brought the guitar in (we bought the guitar in Dushanbe). Our apartment is beautiful, and we are glad to have each other to talk about our impressions of our jobs and the places we go and the people we meet.

We took this picture to advertise how ready our home is for visitors - 

particularly for our family spread elsewhere South in the country, but also for others.