June 23, 2012

The heat had been relentless and I was up at the crack of dawn when the roosters in the courtyard started their racket at 4:30am. I went out looking to see if anybody was up and then overheard the husband conducting his Muslim prayers and went back to bed to wait until a more decorous time to importune someone with my need for coffee. At six, I found Subhi, wearing the same outfit as the night before, coming out of one of the rooms and then her daughter, also in the same dress, coming out of yet another one. She turned on the propane gas stove and I was able to have my caffeine fix. Water was heated for my bath and breakfast, French fries and two fried eggs, was prepared for me. In the meantime, I transferred a pile of documents and presentations along with games for Subhi to use with her classes.

We proceeded to her university where an informal teacher training session took place with some of my favorite activities and games. I was then given a tour of the facilities including the many listening labs equipped with computers and Internet access and the library, where a card catalog reminded me of the year when first started college. We went to the canteen for a bite to eat, soup, salad and bread, before returning to her house so I could pick up my bags and leave for Istaravshan. When we into the mini-van to go to her house, a thin woman asked me in English if I had ever heard of the Jehovah’s Witness religion and wanted to invite me to become part of her group. I was stunned as I had never been approached in public about joining a religious group and curtly told her I wasn’t interested. She insisted on asking why and I told her I was not a believer to which Subhi quickly interjected that I was a believer, but not in her type of religion. She seemed to be at a loss for words and mercifully, our stop came up next and we were able to get rid of her presence.

Subhi spotted a taxi just waiting for additional passengers to depart for Istaravshan and negotiated that we be taken to her house for my luggage and then to the city for 30.00 somoni as I’d be paying for two passengers. The front seat was already taken by a woman carrying a large tray with an enormous cake on it while her child rode standing up between her legs. The other rear seat passenger was a woman with a baby in her arms and a little girl by her side. The woman could have been the grandmother as her weather-beaten face showed only tiredness and she promptly fell asleep for the entire ride. The little girl stared at me while the driver and the front seat passenger chatted all the way to the city.

I had called Nigora so she could tell the driver where to drop me off and as she was at a gathering of prominent women from the city of Istaravshan, she asked him to bring me directly to the restaurant where they had reserved a room for the occasion. There was the usual table laden with food, a flat screen TV playing Tajik music videos and an assortment of middle age women who worked as bankers, doctors, nurses and so on. I was urged to eat and they wouldn’t listen to my saying that I had had lunch not even two hours prior to arriving there. Meatballs were ordered for me, juice, fruits and nuts and even slices of watermelon, which did have, we did the perfunctory dance and I received lots of invitations to visit their houses before returning to Dushanbe.

Nigora took me to her house so she could pack, and I asked her to allow me a 20-minute nap before heading out to the camp as I was very tired already. She took me to a bedroom and immediately attempted to turn on the TV, but I dissuaded her from doing so but was glad to have a powerful floor fan to help with the heat. Nigora reassured me that the camp was located at some distance from the city and it’d be decidedly cooler there. I slept for a bit and then got up to make myself a cup of coffee. The taxi showed up right after that, a miniscule car where my legs barely fit over my shoulder bag and where Nigora, a stout woman to begin with, had to wrap herself in the back seat. We then stopped at the place where her NGO operates and she gave me a brief tour of her classroom, the sewing room where girls are trained to become seamstresses and her office. She had just received five notebook computers from a German NGO. We picked up two other passengers and I don’t know how they were able to cram themselves into the car. We drove 15-20 minutes out of town and into this so called “resort”, a two-story building dating from the Soviet era, but undergoing some of the shoddiest remodeling I’ve ever seen. The weather did feel slightly cooler than it had been in both Khujand and Istaravshan.

I had requested a quiet room and was given one on the second floor containing a sitting area, balcony and attached bathroom. Everyone seemed taken aback by my insistence in having the entire room to myself and the one student helping with my luggage wanted to know if I weren’t afraid to sleep alone at night. The door leading to the balcony had no lock, the bathroom stank to high heaven and the bottom portion of the water heater had detached itself, the key to the front would rotate but not open the door and the lighting was not good enough to doing any reading, which I was hoping to be able to do during the week.

Dinner consisted of dumpling soup, mashed potatoes and fried chicken, which I quickly passed on to Nigora, and more tea. I could hardly eat as it was given the three meals I had already consumed, but politely took a few sips from the soup and ate the mashed potatoes. Students accompanied me back to my room as they wanted to practice their English as much as possible and stayed for about an hour before being called to help out with the decoration of the camp. I read long enough to finish “The Tiger’s Wife”, an unsatisfactory ending for that matter and was obligated to listen to the racket next door until almost eleven.