July 3, 2012

The bedroom I was occupying had a bank of windows facing the east and thus I woke up at 5:30am when enough light poured through its sheer curtains. It was very quiet and no one was up yet when I walked to the open air kitchen to start my coffee. The homeowners had built some kind of open air sleeping quarters with a plastic tarp around it for privacy, and I could make out at least four people sleeping under their respective korpachas. A young woman heard my movements while pouring water into my coffeemaker and promptly got out of bed dressed in her traditional Tajik dress. Then, what appeared to be the grandmother came out from inside the building and after smiling at me, promptly set out to spading in the courtyard garden. The young woman brought warm water to a contraption hanging from a tree that dispenses water through a faucet so I could brush my teeth. I took my coffee back to my room to use the Internet since I now only have access to it between midnight and 8:00am.

I was really enjoying my second cup of coffee and catching up on my email when Matluda, the only English teacher present at the camp, knocked on my door to introduce herself. She informed me that breakfast was to be eaten at 8:00 at the school’s canteen and offered to escort me there, but I told her I had not taken a bath yet and needed to iron one of my dresses first if an iron was available. She went to speak to my host family and came back to tell me there was a communal bath available some distance from the house and that an iron was being procured. The bath in question took some 5-7 minutes to get to it and contained a sauna and hot water. I was most impressed with how clean and spacious it was and the guys who seemed to be its attendants even brought me soap and sample packets of Pantene shampoo. It felt exhilarating to take a long bath and get rid of  all the sweat and grime from the previous day. I ironed my blue skirt and blouse and accompanied Matluda to the canteen where I was given a platter of cold porridge, cold flat bread that appeared to have been baked in a pan, and butter. I hated to be so picky, but I can’t eat a bowl of cold porridge under no circumstances and I requested that it be heated up. They complied and after having had to eat many biscuits to stave off my hunger, I was able to eat the reheated porridge.

Matluda confessed she had brought no resources for the ten-day camp except for the students’ textbooks and workbooks although she too had been to the States under the Humphrey program, she in fact had been part of the same group as Subhi, and yet had no ideas on what to present to the students all this time. I once again suggested doing the Fourth of July reading if she could manage to print the handouts by the next day. She didn’t have any CDs, DVDs, games or any other resource of any kind. I made up a list of what we had used in Istaravshan and she phoned Tamriz to get him to bring them for his afternoon visit. I had the students break into pairs and introduce themselves. There were 19 of them with some as young as 13, not particularly the age I most enjoy working with young adults. There was a break for tea and then we resumed with the class playing “How often do you…. ?

Lunch was a total disaster for it wasn’t even ready at 12:30 as listed on the agenda, and when we went into the patio behind the canteen, we only saw two huge cauldrons in which some chunks of beef, carrots and potatoes were boiling in one and rice on another. Those were to be the first and second courses for our meal and supposedly only ten minutes were needed to finish them. I looked doubtful, but sat down anyway trying to keep a conversation going while my eyes began to shut themselves down involuntarily. By 1:20, some greasy and tasteless soup was placed on our table along with the same tough and dry bread I had tried in the morning. Matluda said that the flat bread prevalent in the city was not normally available in the villages and each family baked their own. I fished out the carrot chunk and potato pieces and gave up on the tough pieces of meat or the oily broth that seemed to have been started with mutton fat. Next came a plate of white rice with bits of beef on top and apparently the same broth as the soup I had just discarded. The rice wasn’t cooked all the way through and I could not stand the taste of the beef or the gravy in which the rice swam.

I apologized to Matluda and begged to go to my room where I could have some water and just go to sleep. She insisted I eat something else and requested a couple of fried eggs, but at five minutes to two the eggs were nowhere to be seen and just said goodbye promising to join the group for an outing in the village at 4:30. I was able to take a really nice nap in my cool and quiet room until someone knocked on my door to take me back to the school. The outing lacked any organization and thus we just meandered around one street or another until we got to the river and the kids started to take some photos. Further up, we found a restaurant catering to trucks and SUVs traveling to and from Dushanbe and I was able to order a bowl of razolnik soup and kolcha bread which tasted heavenly compared to the awful thing that passed for bread at the school canteen. The server even told me she could send meals for me at an additional charge whenever I felt like it. Such offer sounded like the answer to my prayers.

The students played an enthusiastic game of volleyball while Matluda and I talked about the students and how some of them led a very difficult life as many lived in a boarding school having been abandoned by their parents. Some of the boys insisted on taking a swim in the nearby river when the game was over even though the water was nearly freezing. The girls can’t swim for the most part and were not allowed to join in as their teacher can’t swim herself and she was responsible in case anything happened to them.  I said good night when they returned to the canteen at 7:00pm for their dinner. Matluda wanted to organize some kind of after dinner activity, but I told her she was on her own tonight as I was still exhausted and needed to go to bed early.

One thing I certainly didn’t realize when I agreed to come to this summer camp was the fact that everyone here would be speaking a different language, Pamiri, which is completely unrelated to either Russian or Tajik. My exhaustion after the trip must have prevented me, until late afternoon, from becoming aware that I couldn’t understand a word that was being said around me.