We have arrived. After many months of preparation and many hours on a plane our entire group of 33 people safely arrived in Dushanbe. In typical Emily fashion I got sick on our first flight as we were landing in Frankfurt. I knew the yogurt was a bad choice but no, I just had to eat it anyways. Good thing Kyle doesn’t have that gag reflex thing or we would have been in trouble. Then I got slightly dehydrated cuz I lost all the water I had drank on the plane as we landed in Frankfurt at 7am. Trying to learn from my mistakes, I decided not to eat anything on our next two flights to save myself all that pain and agony, and spare all the people sitting around me of course. Instead I just drank water and Coke. So, our next two flights went much better. When we got to Istanbul we were all completely exhausted and a bunch of us slept on the floor at the gate in the terminal for about 3 or 4 hours. I’m sure it was a comical sight, about 8 people all lined up fast asleep in front of a huge glass window. But the sleep didn’t cut it and I was still completely wiped out when we finally got to Dushanbe at 3:30am local time. After going through immigration, waiting to claim our bags, and going through security, the 33 of us crowded into 3 vans called mashrutkas and drove around the town to drop everyone, all 33 of us, off at their host families one by one. As you might have imagined, this took quite a while and, of course, I was one of the last ones to be dropped off. But my host family was very nice and welcoming and was pretty understanding that I was tired and therefore incapable of speaking coherently in English, much less in Tajiki.
After I dropped my bags in my room my host mom showed me where the bathroom was. There is an indoor and an outdoor bathroom. My host mom, Savriniso, made it very clear that I am to use the inside one which is a western style toilet and bathtub, and not the outside one which is only for the family to use. I’m curious to see what the outside one is like tho but I haven’t peeked inside yet. I had some difficulties taking a shower because there wasn’t a stopper for the bathtub but there wasn’t a shower curtain to contain the water from the hand-held shower head either. In an effort to keep the water from spraying all over the floor, I ended up awkwardly kneeling in the tub and washing my hair upside down. I’ll have to work out a better system for the future. The rest of my morning was pretty peaceful, had some breakfast and then napped for about an hour and a half before I had to meet up with the group at the American Councils office. Of everyone in the group, I live the closest to the offices and where my classes will be. I live across the street lol. So, I will be able to leave my house and be sitting in class in three minutes.
My host family is comprised of a mom and dad, their two children, a daughter, Nodira, who is 25 and a son, Dilshod, who is 27, a daughter-in-law, Nasiba, who is also 25, and their two children who are 3 and 1, a boy, Azamat, and a girl, Amina. The little boy is incredibly energetic, as I guess I should expect a 3 year old boy to be, and talks almost not stop. I can understand some things that he says but normally he talks too fast for me to catch it and also he can not pronounce the letter “R” yet so instead they come out as “Y” or “W” which is pretty confusing. While I was in the shower my first morning he was banging on the door to be let in and I could hear his mom and grandmother trying to sush him saying “No! You can’t do that!” My section of the house is also where they used to store things, including his juice boxes, and so he kept asking last night after dinner to go in to the “juice house.” The little girl is absolutely adorable and stares at me pretty much constantly. She doesn’t talk yet but they are teaching her sounds and small parts of a children’s song so she can say “lai-lai-lai-lai” and dance to it. They also have a dog named Filya who stays in the courtyard he’s not allowed into the house. Last night after dinner the little kids were playing in the street and when they opened the gate to go out Filya ran out behind them. So then the daughter and daughter-in-law had to go after him to bring him back. They caught him as the son was coming home from work. He is a car driver, I’m not sure if this is a taxi driver or if his car is rented for day trips or something.
The house is comprised of three buildings that surround the courtyard which has a flower garden and a pool (unfortunately its empty) and then a large area with a grapevine canopy covering a small outdoor kitchen and a place where they eat outside. There is one building with a small kitchen and eating room which is where I have breakfast in the mornings. Then there is the main house with the bathroom, family room, kitchen and their bedrooms upstairs. The third building is mine and has two rooms, one is empty of furniture except for a bookcase with a tv and then the other is my bedroom. When I first was shown my bedroom my first thought was, “Wow, that bed is really small. Am I going to fit on that?” The bed is possibly half or 2/3 the width of a normal twin bed and much shorter. When I lay with my head on the pillow and stretch all the way out my feet hit the end of the bed. But I have a closet and dresser, nightstand and desk which is very exciting because I was not looking forward to living out of a suitcase all summer.
When I went to go meet up with my group at 11am local time, our resident director (RD), Jake, talked to us for a little while about more practical info that we would need to function in a 3rd world country. The most important piece of information being that you can not flush toilet paper down any toilet that flushes! Instead the toilet paper is placed in the trash can next to the toilet. I’m fine with this because thats how it was in Mexico but everyone else seems to be having a hard time with this because stuff keeps ending up in the toilet! After he finished talking we went on a brief tour of the main street, Rudaki, and our RD, Jake, pointed out a good place to change money, a reliable ATM, a supermarket and land marks in case we ever took taxis so that we could tell them where to go. We all had lunch together at a restaurant with traditional Tajik food. The menu was in Tajiki and the English translation was more comical than anything else so Jake, the RD, gave us a few simple options, all of which involved mutton. Is there anything on the menu that doesn’t involve mutton? I chose the least of the evils presented to me and ordered a dish with noodles that was like of like a soupier version of chou mein with meat and vegetables.
I crashed and slept for over an hour after going back home and woke up to my host mom knocking on my door saying it was time for dinner. I was warned that most of the traditional Tajik food is pretty solid and greasy but I was not prepared to eat such greasy rice! And of course it is part of the culture to urge everyone to eat as much as possible, especially the guests, because it is a sign of hospitality. So my small portions were commented on numerous time as well as my avoidance of meat and how I only had one cup of chai (tea). But finally they left me alone, probably giving me up as a lost cause. After dinner I sat and talked with the mom for about an hour and then went to bed at 9pm. All in all a successful first day.
June 11
Today is Friday, my second full day in Tajikistan. I woke up this morning feeling much more optimistic about being here. I think I’ll survive for two months but my plan is to take everything a week at a time. Today our instructions were to meet at the office at 9am for more info on the city and then we went for another walk, this time a much longer one. We walked the other direction on Rudaki and saw the national theatre (where opera tickets are about 50 US cents) and the green bazar which has lots of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as almost anything else that we could want to buy. Then we went to lunch at an Arabic restaurant where I had chicken kabob and Rob and I shared hummus for an appetizer...yummy.
After lunch we took a bus all the way back in the opposite direction to go and visit Prospect Medical Clinic which is the best doctors office type thing they have here- best meaning most like western medical facilities. The doctor there is german but everyone in the office speaks english, tajik and russian. So, if we get sick, thats the place to go. Apparently ending up in a Tajik hospital is very undesirable so we are supposed to go to the clinic and avoid serious illnesses that would require a hospital visit. The doctor gave us some guidelines for staying sickness free during our time here. If we followed his instructions to the letter, we would all have to become vegetarians and not eat soup or drink chai at all. He was saying that meat is risky because you don’t know if it has sat out in the heat before it was prepared so it could be spoiled. The reason for not drinking chai is because the tap water is not filtered or cleaned in any way, its just made to look pretty so it doesn’t come out brown. The water that I have been drinking from the tap was boiled first because we were told that would be safe, boiling it would kill all the bacteria. But the doctor said that there is still a possibility of heavy metals in the water that obviously won’t evaporate with boiling.
The other interesting thing was that he said to not take our malaria pills. The risk of contracting malaria in the city is so low that it isn’t worth taking the pills and dealing with all their side effects. I had heard this point before but figured that, since I have the pills, I might as well take them. However, ever time that I have taken one I’ve gotten sick so I guess it won’t hurt for me to stop trying to keep them down. It would have been a good weight loss program tho! As for the water tho, I am going to just drink the boiled water, everyone else who has come before has not had a problem and I don’t think that drinking boiled water every so often for two months is going to cause serious heavy metal poisoning or anything. I’ll avoid using tap water when brushing my teeth tho and be careful when showering so as not to swallow any.
A couple interesting things- there is a water conservation conference going on in the city right now. However, to show off, they have turned on all the fountains which drains the water pressure for everyone else. So the city looks pretty, but no one living anywhere near the fountains has any water in their houses!
Last night over dinner my host dad was trying to get me to participate more in the family conversation. I appreciated his attempt but his method of drawing me in was rather awkward as he was asking me how old I thought he was and if he or his wife were older! He thought it was pretty funny tho as I protested and tried to escape from answering his questions. He also almost went into cardiac arrest when I told him that I don't eat lamb. I'm pretty sure he now thinks that I am insane!
More pictures to come later but for now, I remain your affectionate foreign correspondent.
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