Tajikistan Travel Blog Throwback #1

Because only by looking back can we see how far we've come, or another great subtitle: Scatological and Geographical Excursions to the Roof of the World

Jan 20, 2024

This series will be an edited reposting of a blog I sent out into the Digi-verse in 2010-2011 when I studied Persian in Tajikistan as part of my Master's degree in that language. Iran and Afghanistan being off limits to Americans then as now, the closest us students of Persian-Farsi could get was to Tajikistan, the Central Asian country of 7 million, which at least borders on Afghanistan. They speak a dialect of Persian that uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is heavily influenced by Russian and Uzbek. The first word I learned in my host family was ‘piola’ for some cup or bowl, which I couldn’t find in any Persian dictionary because it was apparently Russian or Uzbek. This happened for nine months. Tajikistan was once part of the Soviet Union and remained the poorest former state. Its history, culturally, economically, and politically, is impossible to understand without knowing this. I didn’t appreciate that fact when I first arrived.

I wrote a blog about the situations I encountered and posted it on ‘Posterous’, a platform that has since gone the way of many a blog. Poof, offline. Thankfully, I saved my posts for some later use, and that later is now. Time is a construct, but in looking back at my hastily composed blog posts, I can see that in the intervening time (14 years, after all) also did help me understand a few things about grammar.

September 2010

I’m going to Dushanbe, Tajikistan for a year of study abroad! Woohoo! Most people—from America at least, and myself included—were not raised with much awareness about this Central Asian nation and thus were not imbued with a burning desire to travel there.

I’ve already had people say to me, “Oh, I know so-and-so's daughter who went to (fill in Liberal Arts College here), and she went there for (fill in international slumming activity here).” And then they add, “Oh, wait, I mean, I think it was...one of the ‘Stans. Maybe Kurdistan.” To which I say that there is no such country called Kurdistan, although plenty of people are trying to change that, so perhaps it was Uzbekistan? Or Turkmenistan? That usually clears things up a bit. I laugh, but until recently (and by recently, I mean very recently), I was in the dark myself as to the exact location of Tajikistan. I was also telling people that it was a country of about 20 million inhabitants. Hah! Was I wrong, make that seven million. There were many things I was going to learn in this mountainous land.

On the first flight from D.C. to Frankfurt, my seatmate was an Iranian-American on his way to Iran, and the inevitable conversation that ensued included him suggesting that Tajikistan bordered on Iran (it does not). It's good to know even Iranians are as ignorant of their fellow Persian-speaking cousins as Americans are! Tajikistan is surrounded by Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and Uzbekistan to the west, and most of the country lies above 3,000 meters.

3 September

During the flight to Dushanbe from Frankfurt, I sat beside an American visiting his missionary sister and her family. They do missionary work under the guise of aid work, a common theme I'm seeing. We arrived at 5 am, and the madness began. All international air travel standards went out the window as everyone got up to retrieve their carry-ons from the overhead bin before we even reached the gate. The steward lamely intoned, “Um, please sit down,” to no effect, then switched to “Be careful” for the five minutes of taxiing to some other location on the tarmac, where we were met by a bus and taken to customs. The Tajiks involved in the customs process ranged from fully uniformed, austere fellows taking their jobs seriously to a very tall and large Tajik who took a shine to me when I tried to ask where the bathroom was. He followed me to the luggage carousel and asked if I had a lot of luggage. I was worried for a minute that he was someone with an actual function, but luckily, he disappeared when my suitcases arrived.

Then there was a random guy (not in uniform) checking the luggage tags. This was especially ridiculous because never once in the States, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, have I ever actually seen anyone checking whether you’re making off with someone else’s luggage. And of course, I couldn’t locate my tags after two days of travel, tired and befuddled as I was. I showed him my passport and said look at my name; it’s the same as on my luggage. He then proceeded to quiz me about my vocation and intentions. He wanted me to write down “University of Maryland” which I did, and then he asked, where is that? I said, Maryland. Finally, I had to show him my student ID card. After all that song and dance, it turned out he was just harassing me for fun and had no official say in anything! At least he helped me put my monster bag on the X-ray belt. At that point, I was sweating and blushing like an idiot as the crowd looked on in mild curiosity. I made it past the gaggle of taxis and other onlookers (surprisingly, so many for so early in the morning) and found the liaison for my study abroad program, much to my relief.

Three Days In Country

By 3:30 pm, I was thanking my friend Andrew, a graduate of this same program, for his goodbye gift of Bismuth tablets. Who knew explosive diarrhea could be even less fun when there’s no toilet paper? I find only little pieces of torn school notepaper in my host family's bathroom—with staples still attached. I guess on the bright side, since the conditions are already so … primitive, I know I’m not adding to the filth. For the next 24-36 hours after that special adventure, I have been experiencing what it feels like for all 25 feet of my intestines to be repopulated with Tajik bacterium, one inch at a time; gurgle, gurgle. I had planned on going shopping finally this afternoon to buy shower shoes (yes, it’s gross, don’t ask) and other necessities like ‘courtyard and toilet shoes’ which you only wear outside and to the toilet, but I was busy writhing in pain and delirium in my room. My host mother, Bibi (a generic title for a woman of rank, the matriarch), made me take some unlabeled Russian medicine, which she said was ‘Amodium,’ after assuring me that it was the change in the weather and the heat that was, in fact, making me sick. I told her I had already taken Imodium, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take some mystery meds, too.

My little host sister is cute, and being five years old, she doesn’t know the difference between Tajiki and Russian, so she started teaching me Russian. I finally figured out how to deal with her speaking animatedly to me in Russian and always with a tone and gesture as if she expects an answer from me: I smile and repeat what she says, and she seems satisfied. I have also learned that ‘kartoshka’ is potato in Tajiki from Russian: ‘nose’ is nose, and ‘pomodor is unsurprisingly, tomato. Another development is that my name has morphed into Bittin, or Bittini, or Ina.

8 September

Today, the intestinal revolution continued. I had to be impolite for the first time with my wonderful host family and basically refuse to join them for Eid Fitr, the breaking of the fast of Ramadan when they had guests from Latvia (who knows…that’s what she said) because I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. It was a very long day; we had two hours of Persian-Farsi class starting at 8:30 am, two hours of “Media and History” class, and then one hour of Tajiki Language after lunch. For those who doubted and to settle the debate: the language is Tajiki, the people are Tajiks. And boy, is Tajiki different from Persian Farsi! Completely different words for most everyday objects and verbs and different pronunciations of all the Persian words I know. Plus, a different alphabet, which has a handwritten script, plus a printed script both in upper and lower cases. This makes four new alphabets to learn. Also, everything in Tajikistan is in either Russian or Tajiki using the Cyrillic script. I haven’t seen a single sign written in Persian (the Arabic script). For some reason, this surprises me. Ignorance is not bliss.

Luckily, my Bibi is a teacher, very patient and helpful, and she knows how to teach me everything. She’s also done this before, as she’s hosted several American students in the last few years, so she seems prepared for the usual questions. She works like a dog—which is apparently the normal role for women here. She’s cooking, cleaning, hosting guests, fasting for Ramadan from 4 am to 7 pm, and holding down a full-time job as a grade school history teacher. Furthermore, she has arthritis, heart trouble, and other ailments, and her husband died of a heart attack several years ago. Her daughter (who would be my age) died of cancer shortly thereafter, and so my placement with her family has a certain poignancy, especially when she tells me I’m like a daughter to her. She takes care of her 16-year-old grandson Baharon, who is your typical teenager; he likes to listen to loud disco music while cleaning his uncle's precious Chinese-imported car and playing Nickelodeon puzzle games on the computer. He doesn’t understand why I’m not interested.

Some things I’m getting better at: Drinking hot liquids when it’s 90 degrees out; squatting on the Asian style toilets; being stinky and dusty; eating food that’s been touched by several people and left out overnight and all day. Oh wait, that's not true, actually; I can't do it without getting violently ill.

Another thing that will take more practice, though, is sitting/reclining on the ‘kot,’ which is something that looks like a huge metal bed frame with mats and rugs that everyone sits on to eat outside. My legs don’t like to be bent that way (not enough yoga), and just as sitting on carpets inside to watch Tajik and Russian TV is a big part of the day, I will have to learn how to properly recline on a kot.

I had decided that the approach I want to take while living here is not to try to recreate what I had in the States, especially when it comes to food; that way, I would not be perpetually disappointed, and I would fully embrace the Tajik experience. But I immediately broke my rule when I was told that the Korean restaurant down the street has good Dol Sot Bibim Bap. It is not true. They do not. I was sorely disappointed; the key spices and ingredients were missing—much like what passes for Mexican food in Europe. End of story. Back to my plan of embracing the Tajik experience. Cuisine-wise, this means meat, potatoes, carrots, rice, onions, and oil. The other day I woke up to such a stench of onions in my room, I was confused until I realized it was my own bad breath from the onions we had at dinner the night before.

The huge festival marking the end of Ramadan, Eid al Fitr, or just Eid for short, is kind of a big deal. Everyone cleans house, cooks, and cooks, and cooks all the many delicious and traditional dishes, shares them with the neighbors, and brings them along to visit family. The night before Eid, I was caught in this tradition in which they go visit family members, especially households where someone has died in the last year. Sadly, everyone seems to know someone who has died, so this meant a lot of visiting. I did not know this was the purpose of our trip when we left the house, and I ate a full dinner before we left. Big mistake. At every house we went to, I had to eat more and more for fear of being rude, and as everyone is unfortunately aware of by now, my digestive system at that point was still in recovery. I hadn’t mastered the second half of digestion, involving expulsion. I could not eat another bite without first visiting a toilet. I sat there at my host's great grandma’s house (plus half the other side of the family…hard for me to figure out how everyone was related) as they watched TV, and I watched in dread as they kept offering me more food.

I was even more dismayed when they switched the channel to Futurama—in Tajiki! I don’t even like or watch that show in the States, why would I want to watch it here, while squirming uncomfortably in a strange house, wondering where the bathroom is? I had no idea how long we would stay or how many more extended family we would visit, so I said to myself, “Self, ok, this is surely no fun. But be a big girl and ask to use the bathroom; then you can keep eating and make them happy.” So I asked my host mom, and she said, no, wait until we get home. I screamed internally. I told her, “My stomach hurts.” And she assured me we were only staying a little while longer. And so we did finally leave, and I got to go home, but I felt bad because this is one of the biggest holidays of the year for them, and I was being a total buzz kill. Well, mostly, I think my host brother wanted to watch Futurama. Later, I learned that in Tajik culture, one is never to be seen attending to bodily needs, neither by asking for a bathroom nor being seen entering one. Problematic, to say the least, given the hygiene situation here—and my weak gut.