And Life Continues in Tajikistan...

This week I feel pretty settled into my routine… I’m finishing up week 3 of classes and am finding myself pretty much comfortable in Dushanbe these days. Since I have a lot of free mornings, I’ve taken to wandering down to Rudaki Park (about a 20 minutes’ walk from my house, but a little longer if I’m just strolling) and sitting there amongst the fountains and flowers to do my homework. I get a lot of funny stares as I sit in the park alone with a Farsi book open on my lap, but it’s prompted some conversations with local Tajiks about what I’m doing in Dushanbe (and often, why I would choose to leave the United States for 3 months to come here of all places… and when I mention that I want to learn Farsi and can’t go to Iran, it generally turns into a discussion of US-Iranian politics that my Tajiki just can’t keep up with).

Still, I like sitting in Rudaki Park because 1) there are a lot of fountains! and 2) there are a lot of flowers! The park’s really pretty and just full of beautiful buildings and statues (pictures below!) and it’s a great place to sit for the morning… not to mention there’s a great Western-style café nearby that has fantastic iced tea and iced coffee (with real, safe-to-use ice), and wi-fi. For now, it’s great to sit outside in the park, but once winter comes, I might be forced to send my morning study sessions inside the café.

Which brings me to… my host mother, Matluba, wakes up by 5:00 every morning to get breakfast ready. Little host sister Munisa leaves the house for school at 7:00, so they eat breakfast very early. I don’t get the impression that they expect me to get up and eat with them, but I do feel bad if I sleep past 7, because then I just feel like Matluba is waiting on me. Point of story; I’ve been getting up and eating pretty early, and it’s getting pretty cold before 10:00. I usually have to eat breakfast in my cozy AU sweatshirt, but I’m dubious about wintertime meals. There’s not really anywhere inside to eat, but I really can’t imagine that they eat out in the courtyard in freezing weather. On the other hand, a house with no heat (and no two feet of insulation, like my Swiss house) means that the rooms inside tend to be the same temperature as the outdoor courtyard, so maybe I’m wrong. I’m glad, anyway, that it’s cooling off – it’s making covering my shoulders and wearing long skirts as I walk around Dushanbe in the mornings far more bearable.

As far as language, my Farsi is steadily improving… my four intensive Farsi classes (13 hours per week) are certainly helping that, and I now understand nearly everything that goes on in them… for my media class we have to read one news article in Farsi for each class, then summarize it and talk about in class, which was really nearly impossible at first, but is getting much easier! I’m so thrilled with myself when I am able to read a whole legitimate piece of news in Farsi (okay, with some help from Google Translate). My Tajiki is better too, but I can’t really speak it…  I’ve just been kind of throwing some Tajiki words into my Farsi – today in my Farsi Conversation class I accidentally used the Tajiki word for school (Maktab) instead of the Farsi word (Madrassa). Oops. But point of story, I’ve started to understand most of what my host family says to me (minus a few words that they can’t remember in Tajiki so say in Uzbek and/or Russian instead) and I get the general gist of what they say to each other, which is great!

My Tajik afternoons are generally spent at Café Orash, a local café on Rudaki, about 20 minutes from school/19.5 minutes from my house with pretty good snacking food and absolutely the most amazing chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had. =) It’s great and really wonderfully relaxing to just sit at Orash (which has only outdoor seating) doing homework with the other Americans until we head off home for dinner. Then, by the time I get home, I don’t usually have much, or any, work to do, so can spend the evening sitting and drinking tea with Matluba and Munisa (other two host sisters, Guldasta and Galya, have both left to return to their husbands: Galya just up the road and Guldasta in Uzbekistan).

Tomorrow, we are leaving for a weeklong trip to Badakhshan, the province in the Southeast that stradles the Afghan border. We’ll be driving for seven days, several hours a day, through the Pamir mountains down there, stopping occasionally for short hiking/walking trips. In preparation, a couple other Americans and I went to the Bazaar this afternoon to buy some fruit and nuts, since snacks (and at times, lunches) will be scarce once we leave Dushanbe. The Bazaar was pretty cool, I had been there once before, but very briefly, and there were people selling absolutely everything you can imagine: food, clothes, and everything else.

Now I’m just chilling at Orash for a bit, as usual, and really, really excited about the trip!

Some Thoughts on Gender After Two Weeks

Has it really been two weeks? I can’t believe that my first month is more than half over! Time really dragged for the couple days before classes started, but now it’s just flying by – I’m always so busy with schoolwork or vocabulary increasing or tea drinking…

But, having been here for 17 days, I thought I’d talk a bit about gender in Tajikistan. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on that, and thought I’d try to help everyone understand. I’m fascinated by the gender roles in Tajikistan. As in most countries “over here” (Thanks, Shelby Jamerson, for those words), there’s a big divide between what’s expected of women, and what’s expected of men. Unlike many Central Asian countries, though, this divide is definitely more a cultural thing than a legal or even a religious thing. While most women I’ve seen on the street (and in my family) wear headscarves, I haven’t been, and there are definitely some Tajik women who don’t cover their hair either. While they do generally wear traditional Tajik dresses – and I’m hoping to have one made for myself too! – that are nearly floor length, and worn with matching pants underneath, always cover the shoulders and are very often long-sleeved, I’ve been getting the impression that the stares I get as I walk down Rudaki Avenue (the main street in Dushanbe, where nearly everything is located) are more due to my (somewhat wild) red hair and obviously white skin than the fact that my skirt comes only to my knee and that I sometimes give in to the heat and uncover my shoulders. No one – not even my host family, who might be expected to correct any of my cultural faux pas’ – has ever mentioned to me that I might be dressed inappropriately, and I don’t ever feel unsafe on the streets… especially with all the Russians wandering around, who really don’t adhere to Tajiki dress codes at all. =)

Of the women in my family, the oldest daughter works (though I don’t know what she does). She doesn’t live with us, but, as I think I’ve mentioned, she comes by every morning for breakfast to drop off her two young children, and returns for dinner until late at night when she brings her kids home. The second oldest sister used to work (as a secretary, I think) when she and her husband lived in Uzbekistan, but for now, while she is staying with us, she’s at home. The third oldest sister doesn’t work – at least not right now; she’s just had a baby – but she did attend University, so maybe she will work at some point in the future. My youngest sister is only 15, so she’s still in school, but she’s dreaming now of going to the US or to Russia to study fashion after she graduates. My host mother does not work, and, as far as I can tell, spends her days relentlessly cleaning every inch of the house (today, I awoke to her shining my doorknob) and making sure that the food constantly out on the table never gets depleted.

My sister Galya, the one who has just had a baby and has been living with her parents for the past 40 days, but is leaving today to return to her husband’s house, talked to me a lot about being female in Tajikistan on my first night here. She seems to me to be kind of at the mercy of her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law, and of Tajik society. She told me that she didn’t want to get married so young (she was 21 when she married her husband), and she doesn’t feel ready to be a mother, but that society here dictates that women get married in their very early 20’s and have children immediately afterwards. She loves her husband, and they were friends for a long time before they got married, but his family, she says, is quite strict so she doesn’t get to visit her family very often. Once, I came home to find a gaggle of women eating in the courtyard, and Galya introduced them to me as her husband’s family (his mother, sister, and aunt, but not him), and invited me to sit and eat with them, but she herself spent the meal waiting on her in-laws.

On the streets, women keep their eyes down if they are walking alone, and never speak to men they do not know, and vice versa. When we went to the mountains last week, while we were walking along the road, we accidentally ended up in somebody’s yard. A little boy came out of the house and we explained what we were doing. His father came out and introduced himself to and shook the hands of the two guys in our group, but completely ignored Amanda and I. It wasn’t a rude thing, but actually a respectful thing – men would never talk to a strange woman they weren’t interested in starting a relationship with. I also have a host brother who still hasn’t introduced himself to me, but I rarely see him anyway, so that really doesn’t bother me so much anymore.

All that being said, I feel very lucky to be a host daughter in this country, especially with my particular family. My four host sisters and host mother, are together whenever they are home, but from what I can tell, my host father and brother live pretty solitary lives. I don’t know where they go when they are not in the courtyard, but I see my host father and once in a blue moon my host brother for dinner, but beyond that, they never seem to be around. The women also throw lunch parties and have female friends over nearly everyday, and when I come home in the early afternoon, there’s a good chance that a group of women will be gathered around plates and plates of food in the courtyard, eating and gossiping away. The same goes for after we finish a meal in our family – my host brother and father stay at the table until they are finished, then they get up and leave to do manly things on their own, and the women – usually four sisters plus mother plus me, and my little host niece (and nephew too, I guess) – stay at the table for several hours laughing and talking and drinking tea and eating cookies. It’s like playing tea party, but for real, and it’s such a wonderful sense of community that I would probably miss out on if I were a male visitor in the family. While I’m not really getting a sense of what it’s like to be a Tajik woman (I’m not expected to cook or clean, but hopefully once my Tajiki gets better and my being in the kitchen won’t be such a hassle for everyone else, I’ll help cook too), I do feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds.

Independence Day Weekend... Flags, Mountains, and Crashing Weddings.

Well this was my second weekend in Tajikistan, and since last week it was eaten up by orientation stuff, it was really the first, and it lasted three days, because Friday was Independence Day (the twentieth anniversary!), so that’s where I’ll start.

Since we got here, the whole country has been in prep-for-independence-day mode. There are banners all over the city and huge signs with the flag on them, and lots and lots of excitement. We’ve been hearing about this huge, huge military parade, and so we really wanted to go! Most of our host families, though, were like “we’re over it,” so a few of us decided to head out together to watch, early Friday morning – like 8:30 – and I walked down to the Ped Institute (a big bright blue teacher’s college that is the landmark for my street: it’s on the main street of Dushanbe just before I turn off of it) to meet some Americans… and all along Rudaki Avenue was this flag that has been the talk of the town. It’s the longest flag in the world, and it’s over 2 kilometers long, weighs over 800 kilograms and had to be carried by 3000 people. Yep. Tajikistan: we don’t really have an education or sanitation system, but we have the longest flag in the world. Khub, Tajikistan, kheyli khub… It was actually pretty cool, though, like as far as you could see on the main road was just this flag with thousands of people holding it (and later, sitting on it/under it as they got tired of standing). The first part of the parade was military, which was really not that exceptional… picture your average military parade and you’ve pretty much got it. After that, though, were thousands and thousands of people – schoolchildren and teachers all dressed alike, all medical students dressed alike, a bunch of groups of people that we couldn’t quite figure out, and then lots and lots of women wearing traditional Tajik dresses, which was really cool to see, all just marching across the city. After the parade, I went to the Botanical Gardens to meet with my “hamsohbat,” my language partner, who I’m supposed to meet with a couple times a week to see Dushanbe and practice speaking Farsi/Tajiki. They were pretty standard Botanical Gardens… but really, really big, and with a few really beautiful buildings around. I went home for dinner, where my host family was having a party with a bunch of relatives – I’ve asked who they are so many times, and I think I get a different answer everyday – so of course they invited me to join and we ate A LOT. After dinner, my host mom and sisters were just sitting around, talking, and watching a performance on TV for the President. What seemed like all of the students in Tajikistan – including my youngest khahar, Munisa – were dancing in this show, and it was huge and really cool. At the end, there were some fireworks on the TV, and we heard them over our house, so we all ran out into the street to see them. They were the most sparkly fireworks I’ve ever seen, so GREAT! A 2-kilometer flag, and especially sparkly fireworks.

The next day, the Americans went to Varzob, where there are mountains to hike and extremely cold rivers to sit in. We wandered around the mountains for a while, had a GREAT lunch of Osh Palav, the Tajik national dish, which is basically rice with some carrots and tomatoes and beef, amongst other things, in it. After lunch we walked down near the river, and then along the road, just seeing what we found.

Sunday was pretty much a work day for me… I had put off my homework all weekend and I had a lot to do, so I pretty much stayed in the house for most of the day, except for a few hours that I spent in the American Councils office to use the internet. I was sitting in my room, though, and one of my sisters came in and told me that they were going outside to watch part of a wedding, so I went with them, to the house across the street. There was a stretch Hummer parked outside (random, in Dushanbe) all decorated with roses and ribbons, and lots of people running inside the house to the sound of horns, wearing everything from traditional Tajik dresses to Western strapless gowns (but not really so much in between)… Then everyone went inside and it got really quiet for a few minutes, until they all burst out again, this time with the bride in tow. Tajik brides aren’t allowed to smile or show any emotion at all, so she just looked at her feet, led into the Hummer by the groom.

Now it’s Monday, and the week is already looking pretty long… Lots of words to learn and work to do… This weekend one of my sisters is going back to her husband’s house with her son, so we’re having a big send-off party on Saturday, and the women of the house are busy preparing for that, and collecting all of the gifts that people have sent. The house is so full of things for babies… Cribs and cradles and a thousand pairs of baby shoes.

Some Thoughts on Language and Classes

So I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the language in Tajikistan, and thought I’d update and clue you all in. For the past two years at American University, I’ve been studying Iranian Persian, or Farsi. In Tajikistan, most of my classes are Iranian Farsi classes, and that’s how I’m continuing studying that language. In Tajikistan, though, the national language is not Farsi, but Tajiki, another dialect of Persian, which is very similar to Farsi. The biggest difference, besides the Tajik accent and the influence of Russian and Uzbek, which have leant some words to Tajiki, is that Tajiki is written in Cyrillic, instead of the Arabic script that I have come to know and love over the past four semesters. Generally, people here study Farsi in school, and the two languages are related closely enough that most everyone understands it, but the problem that I am coming up against is that my Farsi isn’t good enough to make sense of the Tajik accent and Russian/Uzbek/purely Tajiki words. Also, I can’t really read or write in Cyrillic, so the street signs and shop names stump me. After my first Tajiki lesson on Tuesday, though, I’m improving. I feel somewhat literate now, but it takes me a while, and sometimes I feel five.

A Sign in the Language Center - this is a kinder sign than most, things are rarely printed in English, and often not even in Farsi.

With all of that in mind, at least two of my four host sisters (my chahar khahar!), but probably all of them and my host brother, speak Farsi as well as Tajiki, because they’ve learned it in school, alongside Russian and some English. Most adults, though (my host parents included) speak only Russian and Tajiki, which makes communicating with them much more difficult. Generally, foreigners who come to Tajikistan either are Russian or speak Russian, so when people hear that I’m not Tajik and don’t speak Tajiki, they switch to rapid Russian, when they would have been better off sticking with the Tajiki and slowing it down.

Classes started on Monday, and I like them a lot! If nothing else, I’m glad to have something to occupy my time, because the weekend was dragging a bit. I am taking 5 classes: Mass Media (this one is really interesting; we’ll be reading Persian news articles and talking about them. Hopefully this will expand my vocabulary to include words that I hear on the television every night, and give me the ability to hold a more substantial conversation than “My name is Emily. I am from New Jersey. I have one sister, a cat, and a dog”), Grammar (also useful, but nothing too interesting to note), Tajiki (we only have this class once a week, for a two hour period, but I’m really excited for it! Don’t know how well studying two languages – and two alphabets – at a time will go – it was a bit hard to switch between them!), Conversation (this is my only professor who is Persian and not Tajik, and she spoke a little too fast for me to follow, but it should be helpful to use the language in a classroom for five hours a week), and Reading Literature (this is the same professor as Conversation, and it was much easier to follow her lesson when we were reading along from a text).

The classes are all three or four people, which is really nice, because it gives us all a chance to practice speaking almost individually with the professors, and to basically set the pace for our class. We’re grouped by our language abilities, so in my class we are all pretty much on the same level, and so the professors can really bend over backwards to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. They’ve been pretty willing to veer away from designated lessons to explain things we didn’t know, and they’re careful to make sure that each of us is following the lesson and understands. Even though trying to learn in a Persian-only classroom (we’re actually charged $5 for using English in the school) has been challenging, I can already tell that I am getting better, but I still have trouble catching up if I break my concentration for a second to take a sip of water or write down a word!

On the Door of the School

I’m also going to have a Peer Tutor, a Tajik my age who will practice Farsi with me and show me around the city. It will be nice to have someone around to work with who speaks the language and also knows places to go in Dushanbe!

If I am Forced to Eat Another Cake... And Lots and Lots of Tomatoes.

It’s about 3:30 on Sunday morning in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Somehow I can’t quite figure out how to sleep at a normal time in this country – yesterday I slept until breakfast at 8, then went back to sleep until orientation at 1, came home around 5 and was awake for about an hour, took a nap until dinner at 7, and was asleep again at 9. Since I can’t sleep now, I thought I’d update you all on arrival and first impressions and all that.

My house and my room are both wonderful. The house is all organized around a courtyard (for lack of a better word; it’s made of cement and acts as garage/hallway/dining room/central family meeting place), and all of the rooms branch off of it. It’s really nice to eat outside now, but once it becomes winter I imagine it will get a bit cold. My room is really nice too – it has a window looking over the courtyard, a desk, dresser, cabinet and, recently, a nice mosquito friend. I can’t figure out how to get him out though, because there’s a curtain over the door to stop such friends from getting in, but now he’s a bit stuck in here with me. It’s quite a dilemma. I also have a relatively western shower and toilet, which was unexpected but a nice surprise. There is a kitchen table, but I think that it’s too small for guests, so when people are over for dinner – which has happened quite a few times in the three days I’ve been here, actually – we eat on mats on the floor of the courtyard. The house is also literally right next door to my school – it really does take me 20 steps to get there, which is convenient because my sense of direction admittedly leaves something to be desired. I’m worried though, that I’ll never get to see the city and therefore never know my way around, so I’m going to make a point of walking down to the main street before and after class, and for lunch.

The numbers of my host family keep fluctuating as friends and relatives keep showing up for dinner, but I think I’ve got it down. My host parents are both extremely sweet and helpful; the father only arrived yesterday after working away all week and almost immediately said “oh, this is also my daughter.” He’s also convinced that I should be learning Russian alongside Tajiki and Farsi, but I think I’ll focus on the first two first. My host mother doesn’t speak very much Farsi, so communicating with her has been a bit difficult, with lots of sign language and also smiling and nodding. Most of the things I get from her are “eat more,” “take this,” “you eat too little,” “how can you be full?” and “good, you’re home, now eat.” I have probably eaten more food in the last three days than I have in my entire life – potatoes and soup and beef and cake and cookies and bread and fruit. Tea, too, and I’ve noticed that if I accept more tea, I am less likely to be forcibly offered more food, and honestly if I am offered another cake as an afternoon snack, I might explode.

Right now there are two sisters who are living with us, one 22 and one 14. I get along with both of them really well, and they both speak a lot of Farsi, so talking to them usually works out better than with my host parents. The 14-year-old will stay here permanently, but the 22 year old is leaving on September 10, to go back to her husband’s house. She just had a son about a month ago, and, as per tradition, she moved back in with her mother for 40 days to learn to be a mother. This time period is about to be up, so next Saturday there will be a big party before she returns. I’m a little disappointed that she’s leaving; it’s nice that there is someone around my age to talk to, and she has been sitting with me in the evenings, telling me about her life and her family. She also says that, even though her husband lives nearby, she doesn’t get to visit very often because his family doesn't really like her to come back. There is also a brother – the only son in the family – living here. He is 25, but he won’t meet my eye ever, and he won’t speak to me unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even then, he’s taken to talking to me via one of his sisters. I don’t know if this is a gender thing, or just a personal thing, but even though it made me a bit uncomfortable at first, I am getting used to it.

The cause of most of my confusion about who lives in this house – beyond the absence of my host father until yesterday – is a third sister, the oldest, whose age I don’t know. It turns out she doesn’t live with us, but she works so during the day she comes to leave her two young children with her mother, and spends a lot of the mornings and evenings with us. The kids are great – they spend their day amusing themselves by asking me questions and laughing at my accent (last night they asked my sister’s name and laughed at the word “Rachel” for a good ten minutes) and playing with my hair – and they’re pretty easy to talk to, because our vocabularies are at about the same level, and even though they’re speaking Tajiki, it’s usually not difficult to figure out what they are saying. There is another sister who is 26, who is living in Uzbekistan right now with her husband, but they are coming back next week for a while until they move to St. Petersburg.

So far, I love Dushanbe. The city itself is full of beautiful things – statues and buildings, and also the world’s tallest flagpole – and every so often you get a glimpse of the mountains in the background. The food, too, is great. We’ve been eating lunch in restaurants around the city, and they’ve all been really good, and the food that I am served at home is wonderful. I’m excited to start classes tomorrow, though; I feel like the last three days have been extremely long with a lot of free time and not all that much to do outside of orientation.

A group of students wanted to go hiking today, but last night we got a warning from the embassy about some gunshots in Dushanbe and we were advised to stay around home. Since those were really my only plans for the day, I thought I’d be really bored, but instead I chopped about twelve thousand tomatoes. And twelve thousand tomatoes is no laughing matter… I am so sore, it’s absurd. Apparently tomato season is about to end, so my host parents went out this morning to collect lots for the winter. Now we have literally four months’ worth of tomatoes, and I chopped a third of them (probably less because it turns out that Tajiks are super speedy tomato choppers and I fell a bit behind…)

My bedroom! I'll put up some more pictures of the house later too.