Lately the little voice in the back of the traveler’s head
that continuously nags the traveler to document has been getting louder.
I am guilty of not reflecting even though I know documenting
now is the only way I will make sense of this experience (to myself and others)
later. It's just that I don’t feel those erratic shifts of time and place that usually prompt a crisis, a lesson, a rip in my personal space-time continuum...
The quotidian incidents in Dushanbe still make the city peaceable
and onerous. These are occurrences
such as a quiet, but stern-faced waitress insisting we finish the food we
ordered before we leave the restaurant; a trio of bumbling, underpaid policemen
creating trouble for a noncompliant taxi driver over a three somoni bribe (roughly
70 cents); or a small pack of Tajik teenagers, blasting Justin Beiber,
exchanging a laugh over the foreigner with a giant backpack taking up as much
space as the four of them on the street.
But as I examine these moments now, they all seem like
facets of real life. It
isn’t strange to be called out for taking up space. It isn’t impolite to ask that we finish the food we ordered. I don’t even miss the regular shopping
trips I could take if I were in a more commercially open country. Instead, I like that I spend a lot of
my time talking to friends and colleagues about absurdly regular things. Work deadlines, movies, love lives
(who’s getting married and who isn’t), news headlines, food issues, weekends,
men, lack thereof…and none of it seems terribly out of place.
There are moments when taking a mashrutka to work, smothered
to the right of a gold-toothed 25 year old who is carrying a 6 month old under
her striped Chinese shawl, and to the left of two adolescent schoolboys in
black and white pressed uniforms, sitting nearly one atop the other and paying
the fare for one rider, that moment is more normal than jumping onto any sort
of rigorously scheduled subway from Pentagon City or GPS-located bus down
Newburry Street.
I smile knowing that in maybe half a year, I will be walking
through a glazed mall in Sugar Land, Texas, eyeing aisles and aisles of shoes
and overpriced jewelry, and thinking, “where am I?”
Five months ago, everything was “charming” or “remarkably
post Soviet” or “undeniably Persian” or the “mark of crumbling infrastructure”
or “the outcome of recent civil war.”
But, for better or for worse, I have let my background (American Fulbright Teacher from Texas/Rhode Island) and foreground (foreign teaching assistant, aspiring communications professional in Tajikistan?) blur together. Maybe it’s out of a desire to not feel out of place anymore that I have let the focus lens soften.
But, for better or for worse, I have let my background (American Fulbright Teacher from Texas/Rhode Island) and foreground (foreign teaching assistant, aspiring communications professional in Tajikistan?) blur together. Maybe it’s out of a desire to not feel out of place anymore that I have let the focus lens soften.
Granted, there is still a constant flow of projects: a new
hybrid contemporary Tajik jewelry line that I want to help produce and retail, a
new grant proposal to sponsor national debate tournaments, discussion clubs,
welcome dinners for new arrivals, Tajik classes, laundry Sundays, Jamatkhana
Fridays, recipes, gossip. And
though I should, I can’t stop to examine what seems unusual or novel, because
it’s much more interesting to just be living it…
