July 16th, 2019

We have been getting so much new vocab this week, but at least we only got one new poem. It’s a lot to memorize. That’s one theme of my time here that I certainly see emerging. For lunch the Country Director joined us again. She told us some really interesting stuff again.

            After class, we had a cooking class from the woman in the house that helps make most of our food everyday, since our classes are just held in their house. We made sambosa, which are these really good pastry filled with meat normally, but we made some vegetarian ones too. It is one of very few Tajik foods I enjoy. When I say, “we made,” we really watched and got to jump in occasionally. We didn’t get a recipe or instructions to anything, but I am going to do my best to write out what I saw and what she told us (luckily I could understand most of her Tajik since we have been doing a lot of cooking/food words this week).

How to make sambosa with an unreliable narrator

1.     Get the dough and start rolling it out. I have no idea what was in the dough, but it looked like it had risen somewhat. To roll it, cover the dough in flour and the roll it over itself

2.     Try to get the dough as big as possible and very thin. Do this by repeatedly rolling the dough in circles around the rolling pin. Use flour to prevent it from sticking to itself. Once you get it all rolled in layers around the pin, use your hands to spread the dough lengthwise along the pin.

3.     Then unroll the dough, reapply the flour and repeat. Repeat several times, until very thin.

4.     Here our dough was so big that it didn’t fit on the table. She then laid a tablecloth on the floor and put the dough there and unrolled it. Then covered it with a thin layer of oil. Our dough was thin enough that we could see the design of the tablecloth through the dough was the oil was applied. She had this tin of oil and a ladle. She ladled a couple of streaks of oil from the tin and then used her hands to cover every surface with oil

5.     Once covered in oil, roll the dough up into a tube with lots of layers

6.     Take the tube and using a knife cut it into piece about the size of a small thumb in length. The tubes were about 1-2 inches in diameter I think

7.     Make your filling. For the meat ones, it was raw beef, some other kind of meat, onions, and a bunch of unspecified spices. For the vegetable ones, it was potato, tomato, onion, bell pepper, and more unspecified spices.

8.     Roll out each of these pieces until it is about the size of your hand without fingers

9.     Put a small dollop of filling into each circular piece of rolled-out dough

10.  Pull the edges together into a triangular shape and pinch the edges together

11.  Flip the sambosa over and place in on a over tray with the smooth side up

12.  Use one of those food brushed to cover the smooth side with a thin layer of egg wash

13.  Before putting them in the over, she dipped her finger into the egg wash and then into a small jar of black sesame seeds. With the sesame seeds sticking to her finger because of the egg she placed a small finger print of sesame seeds on the top of every sambosa

14.  Repeat for each little circle of dough and then put the tray in the oven for (a number of minutes I don’t know) at (a temperature) I don’t know

I also get the sense we won’t get our weekly wifi this week, which I guess makes sense since we went twice last week, but both times it barely worked. It makes sense but I have people I want to respond to and new people who I want to share things with, but WhatsApp didn’t work last Thursday. We could get messages, but not send them.

The country director from American Councils visited again. She wasn’t here to talk about Tajikistan specifically this time, but we did learn some interesting stuff.         

-       The only other large American community in Tajikistan, besides students learning Persian, is as she put it “the faith-based community.” Basically there are a large number of Christian missionaries in Tajikistan, including a group like us of (homeschooled) American high-schoolers.

-       Apparently lots of the missionaries have built have strong ties in to communities Tajikistan and have lived here for years. All of them speak Tajik and have funded a lot of development projects like factories and a women’s shelter. They also have an American-style, which we want to check out since a break is needed from Tajik food.

-       She also noted they are not very successful in converting large numbers of people to Christianity

-       These missionaries come from many different denominations of protestant Christianity

-       CLS students are told not to talk to us (NSLI-Y students) since they’ll get is trouble, which might explain why they avoid whenever they see us wandering Dushanbe, though a couple of them have been pretty rude at times in their efforts to avoid us.  

-       Our country director used to be a judge of the equivalent of the “Miss Tajikistan” TV show. While I have heard that some countries (like students in China) foreigners get asked to be on TV a lot, but Tajikistan seems to be a little different except for this instance. The show sounds crazy though. There were a tajik dress, western dress, animal challenge (every week a man from the zoo would bring some animals that the contestants would have to interact with in some way), and talent portions. This was back in 2010, so the part of the talent portion was googling something (a computer copy sponsored the show I think) about hair care or something similar. Tajik internet resources at the time were very limited, so most results were in Russian, but contestant would have to report their findings in Tajik. In this way, the challenge was a test of bilingualism.

            For what it’s worth, beauty TV show host is not the weird job we have encountered so far. The woman who flew with us from Chicago to Dushanbe and wrangled us through the airports was not only the director of international programming from American Councils but had at one point been the manager of a Russian casino. She thought she was applying for a normal “business manger” job, but since it was Russia (joke), it turned out to be a casino.