What I Will Miss Most About Tajikistan

What I Will Miss About Life in Dushanbe

I know my last post was only a couple days ago, but I was sitting at the dinner table feeling a little sad about leaving in a little more than two weeks (since it’s December now, it’s really starting to hit!), which is odd, since I woke up this morning freezing cold, after being without power for several days, thinking “I am so done with this country… take me to Africa.” So I thought I’d write some more specifics about my life here, that you can laugh about, and that I can look back on later and reminisce about that time I moved to Tajikistan for three and a half months.

1.  Three somoni taxis, that drive up and down Rudaki Avenue, picking up Tajiks who are too proud to take the bus, and charging them about 60 cents to go anywhere along the main road. My impression is that they’re not quite legal, because whenever they approach a police officer, they remove the card that announces their route out of the windshield, and replace it once they’ve past him.
2. The store on around the corner from my house/the school where I go almost every day to get something for lunch, so the cashier knows me and the owner greets me with “good morning” (in English) no matter what time of day it is, and points out new things he has in stock that I might want to buy.
3.  My grammar professor announcing that everything we do is wonderful, and proclaiming “Your grandmuzzer and grandfazzer Iranian!” no matter the level of skill required to answer whatever question he might have asked.
4.  My host mother looking me over – and I can tell what’s coming – and saying “Emilia, Gir” regardless of the amount of food I have eaten, or the fact that I have only paused to take a sip of tea. As much as I complain about this, know that it is all in jest. It has become a running joke in my family, and these days whenever she says it, the rest of the table turns to her and says “Sir shod!” (“she’s full!”) in a “really, Mom, just leave it alone” kind of way.
5. And on that note, my host mother being unable to stop at the “y” when she says my name. Try as she might, an “a” will always follow. Just so we’re clear, Tajiki has words that end in a long e sound. In fact, they have a special letter for that, which only appears at the end of words. So I don’t understand it. But I will miss it.
6. Taking only language classes, where sometimes we play Scattegories (and I’m no better at that game in Farsi than I am in English), and other times we read stories about farm animals. Today in conversation, we discussed Farsi names for such childhood games as “Hide and Seek” (literally “Wolf to Air”), “Chutes and Ladders” (literally, “Snake and Step”), and that game where you try and slap the other person’s hand, before they can pull it away (literally “I bring bread, I take kebab”), and then we moved on to explaining folk tales. Luckily, I’m trying to take two language classes (Swahili and French) in Kenya, so the fun should continue, as long as all works out.

Also, today we went to a beer factory. It's Dushanbe's oldest and least developed, and all the machinery is operated by hand and manpower, not like those fancy Russian beer factories that use computers to do that. The room where the yeast is prepared looked, we all agreed, like the set of some bad horror movie - all filled with rusty tubs and with two feet of ice covering the blue-grey walls. It was good to have something to do, but not really a great example of the beauty of Tajikistan.