I am writing from my second of three flights today (sort of today… the time change plus the 25 hours of flying sort of messes with my perception of time), heading from Istanbul to Paris. Frankly, I think it’s a miracle I made this flight, but more on that later.
This was too fast. The semester, not the flight. I am not ready to leave. While I’m certainly glad to be heading home for the holidays (and I there aren’t many people on whom I would wish a Tajik January), I really wish I were coming back. I’m not great with goodbyes, and it has been a hard last couple of days. Even doing the “this is my last Mass Media class ever” thing left me in tears. On Friday night, we had a going away party in lieu of our December group dinner, at a new Persian restaurant opened up by the host parents of one of the students. All but one or two of our professors came, plus the people who work in the office and are just generally always around. Only three of us (out of eleven) are leaving for good this semester (though one of the three is coming back to Tajikistan in January, just not with the program), so it was more of a “goodbye for a few weeks while we recover from Tajikistan and then come back all ready for more” party for the rest of the gang. I’m jealous that I won’t be back here in six weeks, but I must stay focused on Kenya.
The rest of the weekend was mostly packing and getting things in order to leave today. I assumed it would be a quiet two days, just chilling with the family, but when I awoke on Saturday morning it was to the familiar chatter of my host mother’s gossipy group of ladies and to the delicious smell of Osh cooking away outside my bedroom. Side story: On Wednesday, we had a big party to celebrate my host nephew’s fortieth day of life. This is a Tajik thing, because, if you recall from September, when I learned from the last host sister of mine who became a mother of forty days, generally women stay with their mothers after they have a baby for forty days learning the ins and outs of motherhood, until they are fully prepared and move back to their husbands’ houses. There’s a big party to celebrate the moving back, and people bring baby shower-type gifts. The mother of the nephew we were partying for on Wednesday though, has a slightly different situation. She’s been living in Uzbekistan for I don’t know how long. She came back home with her husband to have her baby, and after the baby was born, he went to Russia to look for a job, and she’ll move there as soon as he finds one (though shaky tensions with Russia right now make me a little nervous about the likelihood of that). Since she’s moving, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for friends and relatives to bombard her with cradles and toys and such, so everyone did the logical thing and just brought food. We ate all day Wednesday, and then more guests showed up on Thursday with more food, so the party continued. End of side story. Saturday morning, I assumed the Osh-cooking and gossiping was just a continuation of Wednesday’s party, but it turned out to be the baby’s circumcision party. Busy week for a 40-day-old baby. Also, let it be noted that my circumcision party count is up to three in less than four months. So I spent most of the day on Saturday sitting with the ladies (quietly at times, so they could hear the baby scream and cry and nod with approval at one another), trying to avoid being married off to one of their sons (although I’m not entirely sure I succeeded, since the conversation happened in very Uzbek-influenced Tajiki, and I didn’t catch a lot of it, and mostly responded by laughing a little bit). The party went well into the evening, finally boiling down to just the four sisters, one brother, three brothers-in-law, three nephews and a niece and I just eating the left over food (I was scolded for thinking that it’s normal to only eat when you’re hungry. In the words of my ever-wise host mother, food is for eating, not for curing hunger).
Sunday, then, became my day to do final packing, which didn’t take too long, since most things had been packed since Friday, when I finished my early morning exam and realized I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, and after that, I just spent the day watching weird, weird Russian TV shows with the family. I’ll miss those… We lost power for a few hours, which was just a terrific ending to the semester. Not sarcasm. I really appreciate eating and talking by candlelight, all bundled up in fleece blankets because the space heaters (which don’t provide all that much heat anyway) aren’t working. Planning to depart for the airport (via American Councils pickup) at 2:00 am, I decided to try to nap a bit around 10, after being assured by my family that they would wake up at 1:30 to say goodbye.
So begins the fiasco that makes my being on my way to Paris a miracle. Not twenty minutes after I got into bed Sunday night, just as I was dozing off, Jake, our director, called. He said, “Have you heard the news?” and I said “No,” to which he responded, “It’s not good news.” He then proceeded to tell me that Turkish Airlines had contacted one of the students and told him that our 5:30 am flight from Dushanbe to Istanbul had been cancelled, and that there would not be another one until December 26. He assured me that nothing was sad darsad (100%), but that it wasn’t looking good. When I hung up, it took me about eleven seconds to go through all the reasons I did not want to stay here for another eight days. A few examples:
1. That would mean going straight home instead of hanging out in DC for a few days, which is my plan.
2. That would mean missing Christmas. Again.
3. That would mean only having less than a week between Dushanbe and Nairobi.
4. It is cold in Dushanbe, and without classes or exams to study for, I don’t know what we would do.
5. It is cold in Dushanbe, and I threw out my sneakers today, which were my only closed toed shoes.
After that, I thought about why I might want to stay in Dushanbe until the 26th. Just when I was convincing myself that Christmas in Tajikistan with all of the students would be fun, Jake called back, with better news. The flight wasn’t cancelled. The Dushanbe airport was dealing with a fuel issue. Possibly we would be delayed, or possibly we would stop somewhere before Istanbul to refuel, since we didn’t have enough to get all the way to Turkey. Thus, we headed to the airport at 2 am in much higher spirits than we might otherwise have been.
When we got to the airport, I learned that we would be diverted to Azerbaijan for forty minutes to get fuel, but that we should arrive in Istanbul only an hour late. I had a somewhat tight connection planned in Istanbul (a little over 2 hours) so I was a little worried, but figured it would be okay. The Istanbul airport Starbucks coffee run I had been planning for literally weeks might be impossible, but I suppose one must make some concessions to avoid Christmas in Dushanbe. We took off a little late, which made me a little more worried about my flight to Paris, but I figured that if necessary, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a replacement flight out of Istanbul that would get me to DC tonight. It took us about two hours to get to Azerbaijan. You know what is not an interesting place? Azerbaijan. But we only sat there for a short time before we were moving again. We landed at 9:40 am, and my next flight was scheduled to leave at 10:20. Luckily, people sitting around me were understanding and willing to let me go ahead, and even more luckily, when I got to the exit of the gate, a guard was standing there collecting people going to Paris. There were surprisingly a lot of us off of the Dushanbe flight, so they were able to hold it for us, and we only took off about ten minutes late. If after all of the terrifying phone calls last night, having to dash through the Istanbul airport is the worst thing that happens, I will be very pleased. Also, there is no one on this plane. I have an entire row to myself. No, I do not mean I have three seats; I mean I have three seats, an aisle and three more seats. It’s great.
And now we are flying over Austria, about an hour before we are set to land, and I can’t believe I am flying home. I know I have complained about a lot of things, especially on the phone and over Skype (the weather, mostly) but I really love Tajikistan. I have had the most incredible semester, I had a wonderful family, fantastic professors, and the greatest classmates, and I really have fallen in love with Dushanbe.
Also, just a heads up: this is my last post on my adventures in Tajikistan. However, if you check back in a couple weeks, you will find the beginning of my adventures in Kenya!
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