July 22, 2019

Monday comes again, and we head back to class. It’s only a four-day week, which is nice. On Friday we leave for our overnight trip north, but we still have a test Thursdays. We learned present if/then conditionals today, which nicely complimented the subjunctive mood, which we learned on Friday I think. I like how our ability to use verbs is really expanding, but I still kind of feel like I have hit a plateau in terms of language growth over the last week, but I still have time.

            After class today, group 1 was having their internet time, so some folks in my group (and I) went to buy presents. I am pretty pleased with my purchases and even was able to haggle down the prices some. Though, I still have people to buy presents for but apparently in Hujand things are cheaper, so I can get the rest of my presents then. The bazaar we went to was called Soom or Toom or something like that. It had three floors and with different stalls, which each contained a shop. Bargaining is encouraged since they jack up the price once they see you are a foreigner, however I wasn’t able to get the price down more than 10 somoni (about 1USD). One stall had all of this stuff from the soviet era, but I don’t think all of it was authentic. But the sheer amount of paintings of Stalin and Lenin was staggering. They were up there alongside portraits of the current president of Tajikistan. I’ll upload photos, when I get a chance. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for the soviet era. Our teacher was explaining today about the cost of healthcare. He was saying how with healthcare in capitalism it is very expensive and not everyone can have it, but back with the soviets everyone had healthcare, and now there is capitalism in Tajikistan so everything is very expensive. He also explained they don’t have insurance companies, confirming what the country director from the WHO had told us, but his portrait of the functionality of the soviet healthcare system contrasted what she had said about how it didn’t work that well.

            Another thing that our teacher was telling us today was how more and more men are having multiple wives. It is mostly rich men apparently. He said the constitution prohibits it, but men do it any way. Some have two or three wives, since there are many more women than men in Tajikistan. The country director from American Councils explained this by the fact that a large percentage of young Tajik men work in Russia. But our teacher added that many men died in war, which ended in 1996 or 1997, but there were clashes as recently as 2012. Among our group, in at least one host family there are two wives, but one of the wives doesn’t seem to live in the house with the husband and the rest of the family (of that wife).