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Published: October 9th 2012
In Tajikistan, when you want grapes...
...you send your daughter up to the heights to pick them.Woefully behind am I—in many things actually. Absorbing, emailing, writing much of anything, unfortunately. After a first couple of days in Khujand trying to figure out where to buy food and how to get the minibus to stop so I wouldn’t end up miles from my destination, I have settled into the closest approximation of a routine I think I’ll get here. Every day brings something new, and lots of somethings at that (insert here my lame excuses and apologies for being lax in blog-age), all of which involve many minds starving for English.
It always tugs at me a little to know that half of that starving is a starving to leave this place and go to the U.S. I don’t know yet how to tell the wide-eyed students that knowing English alone does not a visa guarantee. I also don’t know how to tell them—in a way they will believe—that there are other places they can go, other visas to be got more easily, that there is a dark side to being a stranger in the U.S. But I know, especially as I say that last part, how stupid I must sound. “Listen, you guys, people have hard
In Tajikistan, when you want meat...
...you feed this guy every day to make him fat. times in the U.S. too. For example, sometimes the police will randomly stop you if you are an immigrant…oh wait. They do that here too, foreigner or no.”
The people I’ve met here are wonderful. This is my biggest impression at this point, and the one I think will continue to grow, long after I’ve tried every Tajik foodstuff that exists. My fellow teachers are strong soldiers of women, convincing their husbands to let them leave the house and teach, then marching home in high heels and glittering dresses to cook a meal with no electricity and clean for all the people in their husband’s family with whom they live. One woman I work with lives with 9 people in a 3-bedroom apartment, and her mother-in-law won’t let her wear the new clothes her sister buys her. Listening to these stories, sometimes the righteous indignation of my childhood (OK, and recent adulthood) starts to bubble up and I want to scream, “Get out of there lady!!” But I’m a stranger, and I come from a strange place, and watch these things and start to care about these strange people and struggle to understand how I should feel and what
In Tajikistan...
...when you have friends over for dinner and they have to cut the nuclear-powered Tajik onions, they wear goggles. I should say.
Sometimes, it’s better to say nothing, just sit. I had a great day this past Sunday. Another English teacher invited me to have the aforementioned plov (have I mentioned plov? National dish of Tajikistan? Rice and meat and carrots? No? Well be assured this is the first of about a million mentions). It turned into an epic day: salad and sitting and talking, meeting the billions of children and nieces and nephews running around, taking a walk, sitting some more, watching her daughter shimmy up the tapshan and get grapes, meeting the sheep that will soon be cooked into a yummy Muslim holiday meal, more sitting. I thought of my mom because there was a moment when I was left alone at the table and looked up and I could see the sun shining on bits of dust in the air, and I remembered that story you always tell, Mum, about how we never do that anymore.
Say what I will about the flaws and frustrations and heartbreak, they still do that in this place.
Until next time, when hopefully I will have learned more of this language. I have realized that I am, truly, a pitiful language student.
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Ma
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I love the pictures! Wow...mothers-in-law just have waaaaayy to much power in a marriage...my goodness! And...you are NOT a pitiful language student and you ARE a wonderful language teacher!! Love you... :)