March 13, 2012

It was not too cold outside, which was good as the snow didn’t have a chance to crystallize into ice yet. I took the mini-van directly to printing place and got the mini-booklets for the teachers’ conversation class along with other photocopies needed. They were gracious enough to give me another receipt to substitute the one lost when my wallet was stolen. Nigina made the comment that one time while riding the trolley someone just sliced her purse away from her shoulder and she didn’t even feel it. Walking back to the PedInst, I noticed the female crews frantically shoveling the snow away from one of the government buildings. The same thing was happening yesterday in front of the presidential palace. Apparently, the rest of the citizens don’t deserve the same level of service.

                                 Snow shoveling in front of one of the government buildings

Pariso sidled up to me as I was entering the building and wanted to know if the fourth year students were vastly superior to the first year ones. I told her that wasn’t the case since these students were also being taught in Tajik or Russian and had no familiarity with the sounds of English.  She also wanted to know about the level of the teachers participating in the conversation class, but I avoided the subject. Speaking to one of the students in the interpreters’ program, I noticed she didn’t even know how to pronounce the names of different languages. We played a couple of rounds of the game Tic Tac Toe for “Countries, Languages and Nationalities” only to show their level of ignorance regarding other countries.

While talking about the lack of reliability of the electrical service in Dushanbe, I mentioned  to the group at Caritas that I needed the services of an electrician to repair the damage done to the outlet in the living room of my apartment and Hurshed felt it might not be a serious problem and he was willing to take a look at it after work. I felt immensely relieved. As I was walking on Rudaki to go back home, Furkat came by in their SUV and gave me a lift. 

Hurshed and the driver came by and promptly removed the melted power strip from the outlet, removed the cables from the other one that had burned before and plugged into another outlet high on the wall. Within minutes, power had been restored and my wall unit was heating up the space. TV, DVD and satellite box were all working fine. My relief was palpable as I had been concerned about all these appliances been beyond repair. Hurshed asked me to buy a new outlet and he’ll come by to replace it. I couldn’t have been happier or more appreciative of his efforts.