Alan Abroad: NSLI-Y Tajikistan Summer 2019

Today is the last day of July, and this month has gone so quickly. It’s hard to believe that just 5 or so weeks ago I was leaving Boston without speaking hardly ten words of Tajiki. Now I feel comfortable here, interacting with my host family, peers, teachers, and host country nationals. My comfort with the language has also grown exponentially.             We had rehearsal for the farewell party tomorrow with the ERLP students today, so got to be out past curfew, since they have class until 5pm. When they came they were all speaking Farsi since they have a language pledge. But they switched the English when we asked them to. I am also starting to get the sense that Farsi isn’t has mutually intelligible as people make it out to be. I couldn’t understand quite a bit of what they said, though the fact that they were also learning the language probably didn’t help. But all of them had at least two years of Persian ...

I found out where my host grandfather is today. I also thought he had past away since the life expectancy here isn’t very long, and the 2 year old who said “bibi” (grandmother) never said “bobo” (grandfather). But this morning they told me he is on Haji in Saudi Arabia right now. He left three months ago and will be returning in September. Apparently the food there is very bad and he misses Tajik food. I don’t think I’ll miss Tajik food.             We got let out of class early to practice our skits and run the performance. Our class’s skits have yet to come together, after my dramatized version of a short story about a wise vizier we read in class was vetoed. But honestly the skits we are doing know are much easier to memorize.             This afternoon two other students came over to my house to study, but the night ended with them staying for dinner. It was n...

We had another day of class today, but got let out early so we could rehearse for our final performance on Thursday. We are all reciting a few poems and then singing these two Tajikistan songs. The two classes will also each do a skit. After we did the poems and recitation we got a chance to work on our skits. Our skit will be amount a King and his Vizier and based on a short story we read in class. The college students from ERLP will also be preforming at the party, since they are leaving at the same time as us. We met one of them in a store today. He seemed very friendly and spoke positively about the impending ERLP performance, though he noted he was the only one of the group actually studying Tajik here. Everyone else is either studying Farsi, Dari, Uzbek, Russian, or a couple of other languages. Apparently the HIV researchers are sick, so they couldn’t come to lunch. After class we went to Chatr again and once we got home I spent too long playing with my two...

In the morning we went to a bazaar in Khujand. I was able to buy presents for folks back home as well. In the bazaar there were cages filled with all sorts of animals, very crammed together. There were rabbits, pigeons, chickens, and little tropical birds chirping away. It was kind of hard to see. Also difficult to stomach there was the meat aisle. It was covered with a red trap, so an eerie color shone everywhere, and there were just stalls and stalls of huge caresses and massive slabs of bright red meat. Even the meat eaters in my group agreed it was an unpleasant sight. But I bought some nice apricots for my host family. I also got some funny looking Russian versions of movies, but I don’t know if the CD will work in the US.             We also got to see the Mosque, which is more the 12 th century I think. You can still see the roof, which looked authentic, but you can never tell with Tajikistan. There was hundred...

We got up early to watch the sunrise. It was actually cold in the night and early morning, which was a first for me since being in Tajikistan. The sunrise was a bit disappointing since we were in a deep and narrow valley surrounded by towering mountain. After breakfast we hit the road again. It was a five or so hour drive with at least two flat tires (we in three cars in total), since as our driver explained hot tarmac and hot tires don’t mix well. The land around Hujand was much flatter and looked very agricultural. We past many a field full of corn and other unknown crops, as well as numerous cows (most popular), donkeys (used for transport of people and stuff), goats, sheep, horses, and chickens. In Hujand we went to a park, a museum with a fast and loose relationship with the term authentic when it comes to artifacts, a river, an atlas (?) fabric store and a massive reservoir. It was so wide you couldn’t see the other shore on the horizon. Getting to swim there w...