Small World

I may have on my honeymoon goggles, but I dare say Dushanbe is starting to feel like home.  When you run into folks that you know on the street (granted the only people I recognize work indirectly for the Fulbright program or are friends of these people) then a place starts to feel cozy.

This was our first weekend in Dushanbe and it was a warm, full two days spent running into new friends.

Sunday, we attended a nationwide dance competition held in Dushanbe.  As official sponsors, the US Embassy Public Affairs Section scored an entire row of free seats.  Kyle (a girl, my fellow Fulbright ETA, and current roommate) and I took advantage of this offer and arrived just in time for the first round of dancing.  We had our fill of cute 10 year olds swinging to latin beats showing off their salsa and tango.  We ooh’d and ahh’d at the B-Boys from Khujand and Dushanbe City and I was again struck by the ubiquitous legacy of Tupac Shukur (also to be found in Jordan and Syria).  We braced ourselves for 5 rounds of “techtonik” dance, which we still can’t understand, but maybe, one day, will better appreciate.  Kyle and I ducked out before the rounds of “electronic boogie” took the stage.

Walking down the road to a fairly westernized café for some iced coffee, we ran into two fellow Fulbrighters.  We slipped into a fresh, corner booth next to them and chatted away as they paid and left.  On the way home, we decided to stop at the nearest ATM to reload of Somoni. 

Just as I cautiously slipped around a $100 worth of Somoni into my black wallet, I felt the tug of an angry stranger on my left elbow.  The grip was stronger than Kyle’s and the voice of a strange man shot my nerves.  I turned around panicked, unable to take further action. 

It took protracted second and a half before I realized the man was an American friend of ours who worked as a security officer here in Tajikistan.  “Was that a test?!” I squealed at him. “Because, if so, I failed miserably.”

He chuckled with a half-empty Baltika in tow.  He and his friend  (also his predecessor in Tajikistan) were going to the new pool in Dushanbe and apparently it was not to be missed.  Reluctantly, Kyle and I agreed.  Despite our adventurousness, both of us are not ones to shift gears recklessly.  However, they were insistent and the general motto when traveling abroad is “say yes to crazy, new experiences.”  This experience turned out to be, without a doubt, astounding.

Let’s just say, I did not expect my first weekend in Dushanbe to be spent at a hip hop dance show and then at a brand new, shining water park complex complete with a bar, electronic lockers, and 6 ridiculously fun water slides.

We were like kids again.  My friend’s 4X4 bumped along the poorly paved Dushanbe streets like a Fisher Price motor vehicle.  As we pulled up the this pool/water park, I realized we were approaching what looked like an adult-child’s summer paradise.  Never mind that it was “spouse day” at the park and our group just happened to consist of two guys who were recently acquainted with two girls, and we all just happened to run into each other at an ATM.

Everything went swimmingly.

A conversation I will never forget occurred after 10 continuous turns down the park’s rainbow colored slides while we started drying off.

My new friend mentioned he spent time training in DC.

I responded I, too, had lived in Washington DC while working at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

He told me that on his first date after 9 years, he decided to take this girl to the Center for the MLK Special featuring Bobby McFerrin. 

I told him I was at the same concert as January 16, 2012, was my first day in DC and the day before my internship started. 

He said it was a great show and he sat on the tier just above the Obamas. 

I said I too was on the tier above the Obamas, and that I distinctly remember a government agent-looking man in his early 30s, who was also clearly on a first date, telling me to look over the balcony to see President Obama’s head. 

He said he was in the front row and encouraging people next to him to look over, while taking pictures of the President’s head. 

I widened my eyes and said, “I think I was sitting next to you…” and I excitedly recalled a memorably cute kid two rows back who kept making noise throughout the concert. 

He told me he remembered that kid and how the young boy’s mother kept shushing him. 

Now that we are both doubly astounded, we start laughing at the touching serendipity of it all.  I tried to wrap my brain around meeting a total stranger twice.  I tried to stretch my brain even further to encompass all the times I have possibly encountered strangers multiple times throughout my life travels.  It was enough to give me chills.  When he dropped Kyle and I off at home, he waved good-bye and asked me to kindly stop stalking him.  I laughed and waved back, thinking to myself, at this rate, I can’t make any promises.

This first weekend in Dushanbe closed in the very epicenter of hospitality: my host mother’s kitchen.  Other Fulbrighters joined us for a giant meal and we finished the night with a photo shoot in the living room and melodious renditions of Les Mis.

I know there is so much more outside these walls, and I’m not sure how I received this opportunity, or how the days and months ahead of me will play out.  But at this moment I am filled with so much gratitude to have landed in this tiny niche, in this tiny country, and in this eclectic mix of people, ideas and random rendezvous.

Road trip pit stop

Mighty Mouse

Our first days in Dushanbe have been drenched in warm laughter and comic relief, which alleviate otherwise serious situations.  More importantly, a fellow Fulbrighter and I have been graciously afforded housing with an unbelievable generous, genuine, and compassionate host mom, who I will henceforth refer to as Mighty Mouse.

 

Who is Mighty Mouse?  She is a single, Tajik mother who, despite all cultural taboos and a combative family, still chose to divorce her husband after learning he secretly took another wife.  She is someone who has bucked the system that she grew up in.  She is someone who survived the Tajik civil war and watched her closest, brightest friends leave their country with their families.  She is someone who has worked her way up to a responsible position at one of Tajikistan’s most prestigious foreign institutions and earned enough money to sustain her daughters.  She is someone who has managed, through her work, to travel to Paris, Bangkok and New York (places up to 90% of her countrymen will never see).  She is a woman who still loves her country despite the hardship she has endured and despite the pessimism she feels while looking up at the second highest flagpole in the world (which is currently in downtown Dushanbe) and passing the unremarkably gilded mega-monuments that her so-called chosen government has erected.

Mighty Mouse is my uneven lens into Tajikistan.  Could some of her observations be skewed?  Perhaps.  But she is an anthology of women. 

Smoking her fifth Esse Light Elite cigarette, she talks to us about the differences between our respective cultures.  She shuts her eyes while recounting another hilarious cultural conversation she had, “I once was talking to my friends in Russian about living with a man, and I said to them scratching my head, ‘So I don’t think there is anything wrong with a man and women living together before marriage!”

Her friend, also a Tajik, replied in deadpan tone, “you are saying you would let your [oldest daughter] live alone...with a man?”

A flood of childhood innocence rushes to her eyes, and anyone watching her closely can see that this youthful certitude has been protecting her throughout the meanest of times.  She gasps, “No!”  Because she is Tajik, after all. 

We continue to talk about the reality of life in Tajikistan.  I try to engage her with tales of my mother and father, about my sister who is sixteen like her younger daughter.  But my heaviest stories are just unnecessary details compared to her long-lived, deeply felt and guarded experiences. 

“I don’t trust one doctor in this city,” she continues,

“Once my daughter was suffering all night from fever.  I awoke to check on her and realized her tongue was stuffed back in her mouth, her eyes had rolled upward, and she was not breathing. I wailed in fear so that the neighbors heard me.  One man jammed his hand in her mouth and rolled her on the side to open her airways.  I rushed her to the hospital down the street.  By that time my daughter had bit my index finger down to the bone as I tried to keep her from choking on her tongue.  The hospital gave her an injection to calm her down and sent us to the specialist. 

Rather than rushing to help my daughter, this specialist yelled at me. ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU COME TO US FIRST?! YOU SHOULD BE PAYING US YOUR MONEY, NOT THEM, FOR THAT INJECTION.  WHO TOLD YOU TO GO THERE?!’

Aghast, I shoved my finger in the doctor’s face.  ‘Do you know how to treat this?’ I asked him.

Any doctor or trained nurse should have learned this simple procedure.  But this doctor looked up above my head and asked the crowd, ‘Can anyone fix this?’

I told him right then, ‘Take my daughter, and I can take care of myself.’”

As Americans, as well-off Americans, well off, well-educated Americans, we were humbled.  This is why we came to Tajikistan – to better understand the reality on the ground and have honest conversations.  Teaching English felt like a meager contribution when one considered the gravity of interlinked problems in the country.  But we still tried in our own way to comfort her, and mostly show the tremendous respect we had for her.  I wanted to ask even more about the experiences in the war and her time in college.  We wanted to understand how her daughters were spared from the other Tajik students who endured corruption and bribes in schools.  We also explained how conservatism sometimes barred women’s rights in the States, and how some Americans grew up governed by policies set by behemoth financial institutions, were financially illiterate and unwittingly plagued by consumerism.  We hadn’t necessarily lived enough to know what true hardship was like.  However, as we kept a subtle understanding of the ever-present inequality in this situation, we felt something of a real awakening.

Regardless, what will always stick with me about the amazing conversation we had tonight was the strength of Mighty Mouse.  I will always think of her has a role model, whether she realized it or not.  I think she will probably not, because she is too humble and too concerned with empowering us in other ways.  But by being herself and sharing her experiences, I feel a little more grown.

Disclaimer: I snapped a pic of these finely dressed, little girls in Kulob, not Dushanbe.

The Art of Schlepping (or Four Days in Istanbul)

Istanbul was a hodge podge of outrageous activity and quiet, beautiful normalcy.  We arrived in Istanbul 2 hours late, waited out the line at customs and the first thing my travel buddies (two fellow Fulbright ETAs) and I noticed was the mixture of nationalities around us.  The second thing we noticed about Turkey as we walked out to take a taxi: there are signs in English!  

As three self-proclaimed travel lovers, anxious to understand the world by its roots and not just take it by storm, we concluded that a $40.00 taxi ride to our hotel would not be nearly as trying and exciting as taking a cheaper metro (4 Turkish Lira).  So we patiently rolled luggage (which contained enough clothes, books, and goods for a year in Tajikistan) across the airport concourse level, down a ramp, down an elevator, and to the “Jeton” machine only to learn we did not have the right bills. 

I will not lie, in that moment, my year living in the comfort of Boston, then DC, amongst working professionals who are nothing if not efficient got the better of me.  I searched my travel buddies’ eyes and hunched shoulders for signs they would yield and take a taxi.  Nothing doing.  It dawned on me that two years ago, an extra hour or two to take the long way and save $35 would have been absolutely reasonable.  It was an eye opening moment, where I began to again appreciate the lifestyle and priorities of the traveler. 

So on we went for two hours from Ataturk airport, crowding the metro with SIX bags, through two train transfers, enjoying polite conversation with a French weekend traveler on holiday with his son, climbing uphill in the old city’s cobbled streets, and arriving huffing and puffing to the Blue Tuana Inn.   From the balcony, I saw the Blue Mosque just a stones throw away, and suddenly, the last 24 hours of traveling where worth it.  It was a little after 6 o' clock and the hazy sun was beginning to nestle into the horizon and it was at this time of day that the skyline of Istanbul is was best viewed. 

Our very first stop that evening was the Blue Mosque.  The Mosque of Sultanahmet, as it is also called, was built in the early 1600s by Sultanahmet to outshine the Hagia Sofia that is around 500 meters in front of it.  Standing between the two towering mosques, I was simultaneously enchanted and mortified by their grandeur.  What an unbelievably beautiful feat!  What a stupefying culmination of imagination and artistry!  And what unquenchable, power wielding regime must have existed to conceive and execute both of these buildings?   

Standing in the manicured quad between the two superstar mosques, one sees felt-clad, vaguely Ottoman characters, who are dressed up similar to characters in Disney World.  They offered to take pictures with interested tourists wandering about.  The youngest tourists got a picture for an especially discounted fee.  I heard the clatter of coke bottles and smelled dust mixed in with sunscreen that wafting up from tour groups.  I could point out distinct swarms of European, American, Middle Eastern, African, South Asian, East and Southeast Asian families of tourists.  As I too was a part of this mass, I felt no shame in snapping a gratuitous number of pictures in front of the same dome. 

Though severly jetlagged at the time, when I finally entered the Blue Mosque, a structure I have referenced often as a Middle East studies major, I still felt I was approaching something unparalleled in the world.  I was struck by the care put into piping each thin line of grout between each spectacular inlay of tile.  The enormity, profundity, and singularity of craftsmanship were quickly blurred by the sly irreverence of international tourists, myself included, snapping pics from the back as Turkish men prayed up front. 

In my opinion, however, of the two mosques in the quad, the Hagia Sophia is the real star.  The Hagia Sophia is a testament to interaction over time between and organizations and religions.   What do I mean by this?  Well, take a close look at the peeling paint that the Ottomon’s painted onto the vaulted ceilings, and you will see the Orthodox cross staring through in the color of dried blood.  You can easily see the grand disks reading Ya Allah Ya Ali and Ya Muhammad attached in front of the stained glass of the Virgin Mary and Angel Gabriel.  The Angel Gabriel also revealed the message to Muhammad (s.a.s.) and is a particularly poignant figure to represent.  The Qiblah, faces Mecca, and stands slightly off to the right in the existing alter – proof that both the Muslims and Christians before them, found their faith from the same forefathers.

After traipsing through the Basilica Cistern, following the masses into Topkapi Palace, taking an egregious amount of pictures of the same breathtaking skyline every angle allowable, we were exhausted of the tourist mold.

And that is why the best part of traveling always is running into old friends who know more about living in a place that guidebooks can reveal.  Indeed amongst the three of us, we had the chance to cross paths with a number of good friends in Istanbul.  I met Norah (who was studying in Istanbul) in the Old City, and four hours before we left Turkey, Norah, Javid, Alfred, Kyle and I walked up to the Galata tower to share fresh juice and creme soda under the shade of a corner café. 

We talked about old friends, rehashed our experiences together in Syria, and then my fellow ETAs and I offered Norah our unique approaches to Central Asia.   We ended with a group review of our favorite travel experiences and Iranian films.  I believe the best travel experiences are memorable because of such meaningful crossing of paths.  As much as we tried to find meaning in the tourist destinations, we wanted to make a personal connection that was unique to us in Istanbul.  For me, Norah was one such connection.

Finally we set out on a Turkish Air flight to Dushanbe (one of two flights that are available per week).   Flying is no friend of mine, and I hoped our time in the air was not grossly exacerbated.  For the first time in my life, I took a sleeping pill, which I will never do again.  Not only did I knock out for the four hour flight, but for 48 hours afterwards, I felt nothing but a sticky jetlag under my eyelids.

Arriving in Dushanbe was fraught with every kind of bureaucratic inefficiency a frightened passenger could imagine:  an entire plane load of people jogging to passport control, squeezing into a triangular crowd in hopes of making it to one of two passport officers at the front of the room.  Once through, bags were lost and people were frustrated.  But as we neared the glass doors leading outside, Tajik families were reuniting; and as we stepped out of the exit into the early Tajik sun, to our left was smiling embassy staff.  

Our short stop in Istanbul was calming and beautifully timed.  Despite the hectic shuffling between planes, shuttles, taxis, and trains, all the while porting our year's worth of baggage, the extended stop over in Turkey helped me ease into my new reality.  This reality is ten months in Tajikistan, a brand new country.  I hope this blog will be a place I can come back to, update often, and evaluate the process of living abroad as it unfolds.

Cheers,
Areebah