The Unexamined Life

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.

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…