January 11, 2012
Another cloudy day with little visibility of the mountains and their snowy peaks. Arrived early at Operation Mercy to speak to Linda as previously arranged, but she wasn’t in. Instead, I got to chat with Zach, from Oregon, who’s here doing horticultural work in the Pamir region trying to get a fruit drying process going so local farmers don’t continue to waste up to 70% of their apple crop for lack of transportation and markets. So far, he has three farmers drying apples using a solar-powered dryer and he hopes to start marketing the dried fruit in the near future.

When I got the classroom, the students were about to start a game of “Chutes and Ladders” and students were assigned to a group according to the type of fruit they drew: apples, bananas, oranges and pears. Each group had a teacher or English-speaker person assigned to it so we could provide instructions on playing the game. Shoria explained the rules and Jason wrote the vocabulary related to occupations on the board. As we any other group that I have tried games here, the most fluent students would not wait for the other ones to answer and shouted their answers first.

                            Playing "Chutes and Ladders" with the Access Program's students

The presentation went much better now that they had a caption for each photo that they could read instead of just listening to me. The Q & A period was almost as quiet with just two students making a comment about the Vietnam War Memorial and Obama. I turned down the invitation for lunch as I only had half hour to go to Caritas and felt it’d be better to just wolf down my usual bowl of soup and flat bread that to try and extricate myself from the dining room in a speedy fashion.

Johan offering water to a student to wash her hands before lunch

                                      Access student with a skin condition I'm not familiar with

We talked about dating in Tajikistan and I was surprised that both men and women seemed open to this topic and were quite frank in their opinions about likes and dislikes and expectations from their partners. It was a great session. Takmina gave me several posters from previous calendar years that her organization has published and which I wanted to laminate the photos for my students. Hurshev tweaked my Skype program until, I think, he got the sound to work. At least we tried it in the office and I could hear Furkat on the other end. We’ll see what happens when I call Florida early tomorrow morning.