Buzkashi and Links

Buzkashi literally means "goat (buz) - pulling (from kashidan)".  It is the Central Asian horseman's game, similar to polo but with the headless body of a sheep. There aren't many rules; the goal is to  get the goat in the pit at one end of the field. Only there are no field boundaries - spectators periodically must run out of the way of the galloping horses.

When I was in the Pamirs in 2011, I went to a sort of Buzkashi exhibition/practice in Murgab, the Kyrgyz area, with some other expats. A friend took some photos, and then later I was introduced to a professional photographer who has won international awards for his Buzkashi photos (he also happens to be a Yale grad). Check out his amazing photos at www.theodorekaye.com. (Going to his website again informs me that he has published a book with his photos and an essay.)

All rights reserved Theodore Kaye. From http://www.theodorekaye.com/buzkashi/#2

I went to my first real game a few weeks ago. It was in Aperlevka, near a gold mine where some Americans we know work. Men kept crowding around to talk to the foreigners. I acquired a bouncer who would field questions to me as we talked in Tajik, and then periodically remind the crowd, "The goat is that way! Watch the game, not these people!" Mostly, I think, so that he could talk to me himself, about how we should come next weekend to Adressman, his town, which is much more beautiful and less dusty. He also informed me that almost everyone at this game was Uzbek. Buzkashi is is mostly/traditionally played in southern Tajikistan, but Kyrgyz and Uzbek (countries to the north) also play, so there are games in Sughd, but few of the players are Tajik. (I apologize if that is confusing, but that is life in these squiggly border areas where nationalities and ethnicities are thoroughly mixed.)

Below is a less-professional but more local video that one of the geologists made of his photos from Aperlevka (comments and discussion near the end are not necessarily condoned by me). The video was from the weekend before I went.

A short film made in Kabul was nominated for an Oscar this year (the two young stars were flown to Hollywood and went to Disneyland - what an impression of America!). I have not seen it but want to.

A documentary made about Buzkashi players in southern Tajikistan:

The other week for a movie night we watched the 1971 movie The Horsemen, starring Omar Sharif, set  and filmed in Afghanistan, and featuring an extended Buzkashi segment near the beginning. Apparently it can be viewed in full on YouTube.

Mice

Mice are usually good at hiding, and yet recently they have been scurrying their way into my life. Not live ones, luckily; though I do think they can be cute, I had most of my sympathy driven out of my vegetarian heart when part of my job at summer camp was to be "Mousketeer" and set traps to catch the rodents that ate holes in our clothes and threatened the kitchen. I do not welcome them inside, and our apartment here has proven rodent-proof. That does not mean that my heart is hardened to fictional mice.

I have started a new "Reading Club" at the American Corner: I inherited one when I first arrived that became frustrating, since I had to figure out what to read and how much to print since new people would come every time and I wouldn't know how many and what level they would be. So I canceled it, since that is the wonderful prerogative of my position. But at the conference in Nepal, our main presenter emphasized that she believes that reading aloud helps students at all levels. New research supports reading aloud to ESL/EFL students because they can listen to correct pronunciation, not worry about comprehending every word, and understand more than when they try to read aloud themselves (I know I experience this: when I read aloud in a foreign language, I focus on words and my brain cannot also focus on meaning; I have to either read it quietly before or after). I seized upon this suggestion, and decided it could stand on its own. Read-aloud story time in libraries is a time-honored American Library Tradition. And the American Corner is in a Library. And we are all about teaching American Traditions. Most importantly, I really enjoy reading aloud.

I looked through our collection of lower-level books, and considered something like Old Yeller or Sarah Plain and Tall, but settled on The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. It is a recent children's classic and winner of the Newbery Medal in 2004. I was a little older than its target demographic when it was published, but my mother bought it for my younger brother, and I was taken by the hardcover's soft-pastel drawing and the pages' deckled edges, and quickly swallowed the story of the mouse who falls in love with a human princess. I didn't really remember the plot when I picked it off the shelf at the American Corner for consideration, but its fate was sealed when I found a PDF teachers' guide that advertised using it in a class for ESL students, as well as parents' reviews that said it seemed to be written as a read-aloud novel. Participants at the American Corner have now learned the words "scurry" and "despair." [If you would like to learn a new word, mouse in Tajiki is муш (mush), which is comfortingly close to English, but a bit cuter-sounding.] They are still figuring out the graphic organizers I have given them (they didn't seem to want to draw). But I am excited to reach the second section next week, when we learn that the king has banished soup from the kingdom due to a series of events involving a rat. There is true despair in the kingdom over this - and there would be here, too, because soup is an important staple of the Tajik diet (I know a Tajik girl who went to the U.S. for university and wrote home asking for soup recipes to make in the dorm kitchen because she was homesick for soup and couldn't find any).

I took several books from the shelves of the American Corner; one night I read The Tale of Desperaux in bed, and the next I read Maus, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust. Both have careful illustrations, but the latter took my breath away from darkness rather than light. I had always wanted to read it and was recently reminded of its existence when the ELF in Almaty told me she is using it in her university English classes. So it caught my eye when I saw it here. We have a fairly random collection of books that are mostly too advanced or too specialized for most of the people who come to the American Corner, like 400-page biographies of Benjamin Franklin, or to a book by Julia Alvarez co-written with her husband Bill Eichner. 

But this week Christmas came in the form of hundreds of new books - from Scholastic! It was like book orders in middle school, only many times better - and many times heavier. Several people waited for the truck on Monday, but by the time it arrived there were only five of us left, and it took over two hours to carry all of the them up to the fourth floor of the library in the dark. I carried books, and the boys paired off to carry the new shelves and tables. We still don't exactly know what's in all of the boxes, since the embassy ordered them, but we understand that they are easy books more appropriate for people just learning English, and I cannot wait to find out (maybe Stuart Little is there?). We have managed to investigate the one large box of DVDs, which included many good movies, but I was most excited about An American Tail.

Sarah and I have been talking about showing this movie since September, when we realized that it would be a great way to discuss what it means to be an immigrant and temper the mania for visa requests. It is about the trials of a Jewish-Russian immigrant family to New York in 1885, from getting separated from family to being swindled by rats who take advantage of recent arrivals. And, yes, these characters are also mice. (Wikipedia informed me that Art Spiegelman thought director Stephen Spielberg plagiarized his idea, but decided not to sue.) Before arriving, the family is certain that "There are no cats in America/ and the streets are paved with cheese!", but, of course, there are cats in America. Spielberg makes our hero Fievel Mousekewitz heart-breakingly cute, especially when he and his sister sing "Somewhere Out There." Previewing the movie at home, I was surprised to realize what a little kid Fievel is; I remembered him as my age - which shows that I last watched it when I was about 8. When I showed it yesterday people weren't ready to talk about it, but they did say they enjoyed it - and they stayed until the end, which often doesn't happen when we show movies. 

I went home with another one of the new DVDs, since I have a cold and needed something to curl up with alongside my honey-and-lemon 'tea'. It shockingly doesn't feature mice: You've Got Mail instead has everything comforting that doesn't require thought: bookstores, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, and a happy ending.

Mouse update 26 Jan: To keep the theme going, during our Burns Night I read his "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785." I love the image of the him stooping to talk to the mouse - though we also speculated that perhaps his tendency to stop and write a poem instead of continuing to plough his field might have contributed to his failure as a farmer.

Some Tajik Media (and Links)

News: For news about Tajikistan in English, I end up reading Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Eurasianet. The former has more frequent and timely news stories, and its Tajik-language service is an important source of independent journalism as the moment (so important that its website was blocked earlier this year). The latter seems to have better feature stories, like the piece on foreign investors and the photo essay on Now Ruz.

Movie: Last weekend we watched a movie set in Tajikistan! Spies Like Us is probably the only Hollywood feature film that mentions the country. It stars Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, and is a ridiculous send-up of Cold War spy movies. There is actually nothing particularly Tajik when they are supposed to be in the country, but we cheered when they mentioned that they were on the "road to Doo-shan-bee" (as opposed to Du-shahn-beh). Lots of fun. 

Music: My slightly-ingratiating answer if asked my favorite musician is "Daler Nazarov," one of the most famous musicians in the country. I got to see him in a concert in Dushanbe before I left, and he was absolutely amazing. (I will post if/when we get the BBC Persian recording of the concert.) He plays old Persian poetry on guitar with a back-up band that mixes traditional sounds with more international/modern sounds. By the end of the concert I was in love with him and his sax/flute player. A previous ETA described him as a Bob Dylan-character: he is seen as intellectual and a good songwriter, but is popular more with parents than their teenagers. He does make young people want to play the guitar. This is his website, but you can also search his name on YouTube.

Poetry: The staple of Tajikistan and the rest of the Persian-speaking world. Part of the reason I started studying Persian. Omar Khayyom seems to be the most favored Persian poet here - perhaps because Samarkand is closer than Hafez's Shiraz or Rumi's various homes in Iran and Afghanistan and Turkey. One of the local embassy workers sent me this Word Doc of a few of Khayyom's poems in Tajik and two different English translations.