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