TAJIKISTAN

Hi friends and family,

Greetings from Tajikistan. Although I do not know how to begin telling you about my travels after already two weeks, I will have to begin somewhere. I am definitely enjoying my stay - although it has actually been over 100 degress every day thus far. At night, it is even still 85 or so. Of course, I am estimating this because I don't know celsius in terms of feeling once it passes 28. It was one week before I even had a fan. After I got the fan, I realized that the family here believes that fans are the same as air conditioners and that you can't have the window open at the same time as a fan is on. I do anyway, obviously! I have been thus far out of Dushanbe (the capital) only once, and that was a for a huge celebration for the circumcision of a 7 year old boy. He had belly dancers, a throne, and a king's robe and scepter. He sat on his throne counting money, bill after bill, while his grandmothers danced next to the professionals. There was vodka on all the tables, upsetting the more religious Tajiks and thoroughly pleasing the Russians at hand. Otherwise, occasionally I go to the grandmother and grandfather's house a little outside the center of Dushanbe. There, I am thoroughly reminded of Haiti, because at any time there are twenty to thirty family members and friends in the house or courtyard talking, singing, sweeping, cooking or watching the people pass by. The women have been cooking countless stews of berries and fruits to preserve them for winter. Fresh figs and berries or cherries are the favorites. I normally eat for dinner Pilav or PLOF - a rice mixed with garlic flavor and lots of carrots, or I have a stew of vegetables and chickpeas with buckwheat. Here, I am just simply going to lots of large community festivities and learning to cook exotic Tajik foods - although I hear that after two weeks the variety of food becomes small and we lose our appetite. I live in a family of 5 children and two parents. There is one daughter named Idigul and there are four boys, all of whose names I cannot remember. The mother is exactly how a mother would need to be in order to manage 5 children in a three bedroom apartment. The daughter gets her own room...! The youngest boy is 10. We all eat together on the floor and Tajiks really like to eat their PLOF with their hands or scooped up with bread. I live on Somoni street.

Everything in Tajikistan is named after Ismail Somoni, and the short lived Somoni rule. I have not yet learned much about this, but I do know that Iranians like to laugh at the idea of any Tajik history. Here, the Tajiks simply call Iran a brother country and think of Iran as an equal. Iran always has been very proud, I suppose.
I do not live close to my classes, and so I am required to every day take the Trolleybus to and from the Central Asian Development Agency, where we rent rooms for classes. The Trolleybus though has actually been dangerous as the electric line has fallen down and we have had to evacuate the bus and step over the live electic line. One boy thought it would be funny to jump on it, causing the men who were trying to lift the line back to the sky to go running after him, chastising him. Yesterday my host mother chastised another young boy for sliding down a cement incline on a plastic bottle. It was a make-shift slide, but he was becoming horribly dirty after each ride ...Children outside the U.S. find a million ways to play without computer games. ...Now, I am on my way to a regular Tajik dance class that I take at a dance theater next to the Presidential palace.