Tajikistan

Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. It was hot there, but it's a nice quiet city.

Hissar, a fortress outside Dushanbe which was used up until the Soviet period.

Robert, Emiko, and the van we were in for 20 hours. I had the back right corner.

APC hulk left over from the civil war. We saw one tank and four or five of these APC's, none of which showed any evidence of a violent end. They may have just broken down.

Khorog, the start of the Pamir highway. Though this one looks calm, the rivers in this part of the country were the roughest I've ever seen anywhere.

Khorog at sunset. This is what the western part of the autonomous region looks like: steep valleys and small areas of greenery (that's an orchard in the foreground).

Our UAZ Russian jeep which we hired (with a driver) for a week. You need a jeep here.

Gas station. At least they weren't smoking. There weren't any stations in the autonomous region, just trucks on the side of the road. And how else are you gonna measure the gas except to pour it in a bucket?

In states in America where they require full service (Oregon), they should make the attendants pump gas like this.

Emiko, Robert, and Me. The river is off to our left and Afghanistan is in the background.

Afghanistan

Roadside Shrine. The horns are from the Marco Polo Sheep, which is endangered. Maybe it's just me but I think they're endangered because all their horns end up in roadside shrines.

A Pamiri house that we stayed in for a night.

This little guy was our guide around the village of Ptup for an evening. I told him to look tough in the picture. Overhead are more sheep horns.

Hi everyone,

I got back to my site this week after traveling around for the months of June and July. School starts in September, so I have a bit of time to relax and prepare, if I’m motivated enough. And study some language, too. And by the way, it is hot here. It’s been around 40 Celsius (104) all week, which is kinda difficult without air conditioning. But I count my blessings: there aren’t too many mosquitoes (flies are a different story) and it’s a dry heat, no humidity. But as I was laying in bed sweating last night at 3 in the morning I was thinking, “Somewhere there’s a land with air conditioning, where you can take two showers a day, where there are ice cold drinks instead of hot tea, where I won’t be stinky and sticky like I am now” I went to the bazaar and got a fan today, so as long as the power stays on I should be better off. Now for a summary of my travels in Tajikistan.

I went to Tajikistan with two other volunteers, Robert and Emiko. No matter how much I write here, Robert is always more thorough in describing things on his blog (http://robertkazakhstan.blogspot.com) so if you’re really interested in what we did, check that out.

Tajikistan is a former Soviet republic to the south of here. It was the southern flank of the Soviet Union; it has a long border with Afghanistan to the south and a shorter one with China to the east. During the 1990’s after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan endured a decade long civil war between various warlord like factions. Tajikistan is a small country with no great natural resources (unlike Kazakhstan’s and Turkmenistan’s gas and oil reserves) and really nothing other than hydroelectric power to base its economy on. It only has six or seven million residents; a million Tajiks work in Russia and their remittances account for at least half of Tajikistan’s economy. A civil war was not what they needed. But the country is peaceful now, if not the most democratic or market oriented. On the cultural side, Kazakhs (and Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Turkmen) are Turkic peoples and speak Turkic languages. Tajiks are not Turkic; they’re related to Persians (Iranians) and their language is Indo-European. Tajiki (Tajikistan), Farsi (Iran), and Dari (Western and Central Afghanistan) are all pretty closely related languages. Anyways, I don’t speak Tajiki, so I had to get by with my pigeon Russian, such as it is.

Emiko has a friend from college who works in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. He coordinates short term programs for graduate students studying language and doing research. The students come over for six or eight weeks and get intensive language practice in Tajiki, Farsi, or Uzbek. So we were able to crash at his apartment and relax at the beginning and end of our trip. In the middle we did a big loop through the Pamir mountains in Eastern Tajikistan. We left Dushanbe for the town of Khorog (which is the start of the Pamir highway) via a horrendous 20 hour van ride. The roof was low enough that I couldn’t sit up straight and Robert had to sit facing another guy with legs interweaved. There were plenty of stops, including two hours for the driver to take a nap, but it was still a long ways. The Eastern half of Tajikistan is composed of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous region. The altitudes are so high here that not too many people live here. In the West of the autonomous region there are many rough valleys and canyons with raging muddy rivers (the roughest I’ve ever seen) racing through the bottom. In the East, there is a high plateau, too high for anything except stubby grass to grow. Nomadic Kyrgyz herders inhabit this part, along with Chinese long haul truckers bringing stuff over the passes from Western China. The part with the river valleys was really pretty, but out on the plateau it looked like, um, Eastern Nevada… except the air is thinner.

So in Khorog we hired a driver and 4wd Russian UAZ jeep (think old school Land Rover) for a week and set off down the Wakhan Corridor, which is a valley cut by the Panj River that separates Tajikistan from Afghanistan. For about three days we could always look across the valley and see Afghanistan. Robert made quite the (futile) effort to get over to the other side, too. In the end we just tossed a few rocks over. (There’s not too much to tell you that it’s a different country on the other side. On the Tajik side every now and then you pass a checkpoint or a pair of border guards with AK’s who look like they’re about to enter the 8^th grade, nothing like the spy movies.) An NGO in Khorog has a small tourism initiative. We hired our driver through them and they gave us a list of families along the way who would host guests (there aren’t any hotels). So each night in the Wakhan we would pull into a village and the driver would ask around until he found one of the houses and that’s where we would stay. The families were really nice; along the Wakhan they are Pamiri (which is a distinct ethnicity from Tajik). Two really interesting things about the Pamiris: 1) Their native language, Pamiri (there are a bunch of dialects) goes all the way back to the ancient Soghdians, who Alexander the Great conquered when he whipped through here. (Marco Polo also came through the Wakhan and over the Pamirs on his way to China) 2) They are Ismailis. If you’re really interested, wikipedia it, but basically it is a sect of Shia Islam. Their spiritual leader (equivalent of the Pope) is the Aga Khan. He runs a huge charity organization called the Aga Khan Foundation, which seems to be single handedly responsible for the level of development in the autonomous region (much more than the government). It is said that during the civil war the Aga Khan basically kept the Ismailis from starving. Anyways, very interesting people and they were very kind to us.

After the Wakhan we stayed one night near a high altitude lake called Bulun Kul. The area was rough and very wind swept, but I got some pretty good pictures there. In the winter months I would not want to be there, though. Next we took the Pamir Highway to the frontier town of Murghab, which was a former Soviet garrison town (that’s the only reason there are any paved roads, power lines, or bridges out here). We stayed one night in a Kyrgyz yurt, then walked over a mountain pass (hiking at 14,000 feet, amazing we all made it) to another Kyrgyz yurt where our driver came around to meet us. The Kyrgyz herders spend the summers on these high altitude pastures fattening up their herds. In the winter they live in villages in the surrounding area. We actually ran into some German doctoral students in geography with GPS units who were in the middle of three consecutive summers mapping the pasture land in the area and interviewing the herders.

After the hike, we spent a couple nights at a hot springs nearby, basically lying around between dips in the hot water. Then we headed back down the highway to Khorog. We spent a night there and decided that we did not want to do the 20 hr ride back to Dushanbe. So since the van ride cost about $50 and the Tajik Air plane flight cost about $70, we went for the plane flight. The Khorog to Dushanbe flight has quite the reputation for being an exciting flight. Apparently Soviet (civilian) pilots were given danger pay for flying the route. (Khorog’s runway is, uh, short) To add to the story, Tajik Air treats their flights like a mini-bus ride. You show up early in the morning and get on the list, then wait around all day before you’re told that you made the flight and can pay your money. On the plane (an Antonov-28 turboprop) the co-pilot actually rearranged the 14 passengers to even out the weight. The plane never actually gets above the mountains; it really is a flight through the mountains. I never really felt like we were gonna brush the mountain side, but it was interesting. And no one shot at us from the Afghan side. It’s all about perspective. (Though I was a bit worried when it looked like we were gonna take off with only one pilot. The co-pilot (who looked my age) came along shortly, though.)

So anyways, that was our trip. Now for a few random thoughts. 1) We ate at a Georgian restaurant in Dushanbe (as in Georgia the country in the Caucasus next to Armenia and Turkey, not soul food) and I now want to go to Georgia. They have good food and wine there. I’m not sure what else but it doesn’t matter. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan are not culinary destinations, my taste buds are dying. And they have Peace Corps in Georgia! I could have been drinking wine instead of vodka. (Actually my host family’s religious so I’m not forced to drink too often.) (Glamorous PC postings/aka Posh Corps: Georgia, Fiji, Ukraine (PC Ukraine nickname: Marriage Corps)) PC Kazakhstan is somewhere in between, we’re definitely not as hard core as PC Africa, but give us some credit (he says as he types his blog and checks his cell for text msgs) 2) Despite the picture of the rusted out APC, there was not much evidence left over from the civil war. We saw one rusted out tank and four or five APC’s along the road side throughout the whole trip. None of them really looked like the met a violent end; they may have just broken down and been abandoned. There was also one mine field, clearly marked by a perimeter of painted red rocks. 3) Before you gasp and worry about my safety, let me identify the real threat to my well being for you: yak milk. It didn’t actually taste that bad but it had my stomach doing summersaults for a good five days. And when yaks grunt it sounds like they’re farting. I don’t know what it sounds like when they fart. (You know that was your next question.) 4) During the President of Tajikistan’s re-inauguration/coronation ceremony (he probably got 100% of the vote) they played the Imperial March, from Star Wars. No joke. I think the Empire has always gotten a bad rap anyways. Though I’m not sure you could compare Tajikistan to the Empire… maybe some combination of Hoth and Tatooine. 5) Quite a few other volunteers took some vacation time this summer and went home to the States for two or three weeks. I would love to visit home, but I’m really glad I did not do it. Getting back on the plane to come back here for another year would probably be one of the most depressing things I’d ever do. It’s not that bad over here when you don’t know what you’re missing out on. Just keep sending me pictures of your kids so they don’t have to wear nametags when I get back. 6) Future travels. These are all just ideas right now, I have the whole winter to plot details. But it seems that it would work well to have my parents come over and visit me here in June of next year. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would be a nice introduction to the region without too many logistics. Then I may try to go somewhere (maybe Georgia and Armenia?) in July or early August, basically to stay away from the oppressive heat I’m sitting in now… with my new fan, oh the joy of cheap Chinese manufactured goods. And then there is the post-close of service (COS) trip. Assuming I’m not too homesick and am willing to travel a bit, I could see a few places on my way home in November 2009. I definitely want to give an Uzbekistan visa a shot; if they let me in I’m going there. Then India seems the most logical for that time of year, Russia and Western China might be too cold. I could spend a month there and be home for Christmas (great time to arrive home and deal with culture shock… consumerism!!). And then I could fly home via Singapore (Singapore Air) or Hong Kong (Cathay Pacific). Who the heck wants to fly an American airline all the way home anyways.

Now that I’ve put down my hopes and dreams for the next year, I’ll go about relaxing for a few weeks and then attempt to survive the Fall semester. I should get a site mate in November, too. This means talking to an American face to face more than once a month. Not sure how I’ll deal with that. I’ll just have to wait a few months until he/she starts becoming a little weird, too. Then we’ll be cool.

Thanks for reading all this if you did, have a happy August and enjoy your air conditioning. I have my Chinese fan so don’t worry about me.

Take care, love, Eric

One of the houses we stayed in, lit up by the moon.

The central room of a Pamiri house. Every house has a room like this with five pillars: one each for the Prophet Muhammed, his daughter Fatima, her husband Ali, and their sons Hassan and Hussein. Pamiris are Ismaili (wiki it), which is a branch of Shia Islam. Ali, Hassan, and Hussein are much more important for Shias than for Sunnis.

Father and son at one of the houses we stayed at.

Afghanistan across the valley.

Rough valleys with small areas of greenery interspersed.

Most people have cars, too. But tourists don't take pictures of cars, they take them of donkeys.

Pointing to a scratch I got hiking up the hillside for an hour looking for petroglyphs.

Petroglyphs. Looks like a hunter and a Marco Polo sheep. Wonder if the horns ended up in a shrine.

Rob throwing a rock at Afghanistan. That's just so childish... couldn't find a picture of me throwing.

Camels on the Afghan side.

Rob and Emiko. The little settlement of Bulunkul is off in the distance.


Kyrgyz yurt and a yak.



Rob playing with my zoom lens.

We walked up this, makes me lose my breath thinking about it (14,000ft).

On the other side on the way down. The rocks were all loose, so where there wasn't a goat trail we basically surfed our way down.

An-28, actually not as old and beat up as I expected.


Me and a kid watching the morning flight take off.

You can almost reach out and touch them.

Pictures from Eastern Kazakhstan

I just finished a kids camp in the town of Georgievka, which is a couple hours south of the city of Ust Kamenogorsk in Northeastern Kazakhstan. It's really pretty up there right now; there are lots of trees, everything is green, and the temperatures are nice and cool. The trade off is that it's basically southern Siberia and the winters there get down to 40 below. We taught english and played sports with groups of 5th and 8th graders. The most interesting pictures are from playing baseball, which the kids really liked. Tomorrow I'm going to Tajikistan for a couple weeks with a couple other volunteers. After that I'll return to my site and resume my boring life. Or at least not quite as exciting as summer is. I hope everyone's doing well.

Volunteers Chris, Emiko, McKenzie, a student, Kimi, and Robert. This isn't the greatest picture in the world, but I didn't have any other group ones. We all stayed in one room the whole week in that house over Chris' shoulder. Also, this is kind of Kazakhstan's equivilant of "Big Sky" country, lots of clouds and open space.

Baseball with wiffle balls and plastic bats (sent from America). Chris played in college so he was the coach for the week.

I play basketball, McKenzie's into fencing. So our baseball coaching consisted of yelling "run that way!!" over and over. Everyone had fun though.

This girl did not want to stop playing. We were all ready to stop for the day and she kept wanting to hit again.

In the classroom we made arts and crafts, braclets, origami, collages, and other cool stuff along with teaching english.

Origami. Notice that none of the guy volunteers are giving instructions. I've excluded the pictures of us (guys) later asking the students for help.

Baseball

Coach Eric: "Make a fist like this. Now hit the fist in the glove like this. Now yell 'Hey batter!"

One More Thing

Me, with a perfect marshmallow. Yeah, I know I need to gain weight, I eat everything in front of me, I swear.

A friend of Emiko's host family. Thought bubble: "What the hell?"

Emiko's host mom (right) and friend. They seem to have the idea down. By the way, the metal trough we did this in is normally for shashlik.

I forgot to mention one funny story. Sometimes volunteers give the local cuisine a hard time. The food is good and hardy, but tends to be a bit bland. I get plenty of soup, potatoes, meat, etc. And except for shashlik (bbq'd shish kebab) almost all meat (in Kazakh, Uzbek, and even Russian tradition) is boiled. No pan frying, stir frying, baking, or anything. If you don't boil it, then it's not cooked.

So with this in mind, my story. Emiko (another volunteer) had her mom in the States send her a ton of supplies for making S'mores at her camp in Alga. This we did. The reaction of locals to marshmallows is predictable, they just kind of stare at it. In Alga they all seemed to like S'mores, though the cooking of the marshmallows was pretty funny, mostly because the volunteers all got into an argument over where to cook them over the fire and for how long. Result: One Kazakh kid is munching on a hunk of charcol and another has one toasty brown, just because that's the way their volunteer mentors like them. So when we went down to Aksu for my seminar, we brought along the extra supplies. My counterpart saw them and held up a marshmallow in his hand, studying it. "Do you boil it?" was all he asked. This may not be funny to you, but it's hilarious to us. I think I've been here too long :)

Seminar

My teacher training seminar last week was a great success. There were the inevitable bumps along the way, but all of my students loved having five other volunteers in town to talk with. We taught them a bunch of teaching methodologies and games that they can use when they become teachers. And of course they had plenty of time to practice speaking English. Now that I'm finished with the seminar (and can relax), I'll travel first to Almaty and then to Ust Kamen in the East of Kazakhstan for another kids camp. This is my month off; after Ust Kamen I'm going to try to go to Tajikistan and/or Kyrgyzstan with a couple other volunteers. I'll keep you updated and try to post some pictures. The following are some pictures from last week's seminar at my site.

Nate, my host sister (and best student) Guzal, and Kimi

Matt and Nate with the best meat I've had in country. The first pork I've eaten, too (it was at a Russian family's house). Juicy pork chops, mmm.

Opening Day for our seminar. I did a tv interview, though I never got to see it.

Emiko teaching some students how to write a lesson plan.

Robert playing a vocabulary game with some students.

Kimi, my youngest host sister Medina, and Emiko. Medina loved having more playmates.

More Pictures

Camp is over. We all had a great time. Here are a few more pictures. Tomorrow (saturday the 14th) I'll take the train back to my site in the south, Aksukent. Next week I'll have my teacher training seminar... hopefully there will be teachers and training, we'll see.


Two of the school's dancers in traditional Kazakh dress.


Besh Barmak, which means five fingers, because it is traditionally eaten without utensils. It is the national dish of the Kazakhs, and they are very proud of it. (The Uzbek national dish is polow, which is similar to fried rice) Besh Barmak consists of long wide noodles, potatoes, onions, and lots of meat with a broth poured over it. It is very tasty, and anytime you are a guest at a Kazakh's house there's no need to even ask what's for dinner, it's always Besh Barmak.


Roman was our Kazakh language teacher during our training in Almaty. He is an English teacher here in Alga. He is playing the Dombra, which is Kazakhstan's national instrument. The Dombra is a two-stringed instrument that is smaller than a guitar.


My group at the camp. These are eighth grade students. We were team Great Britain; and our main achievement during the last few days of camp was not finishing in last place on the ten team scoreboard. But all of them are good kids.


Me, sitting around during the closing ceremony. I've taken four or five hundred pictures over the last two weeks. I think a couple of them are even good.

Summer Camp

Girls I’ve been playing basketball with here. They’re pretty good, I started teaching them the pick and roll yesterday.

Some of our students, these girls are in 5^th grade. The group I teach is in 8^th, but we all do sports together.

Some volunteers and locals after playing basketball. (America won, if you’re wondering :)

Me trying to get an expression out of my local counterpart teacher for the two weeks I’m up here. She’s a little, uh, stoic.

Hi everyone, it’s summer here and I’m up in the northeast of the country at a kids camp. I’m in the town of Alga, which is near the city of Aktobe. This area is actually as close to Moscow as it is to Almaty. The north shows a lot more Russian influence and none of the Uzbek influence that I have around Aksu. The weather is a lot cooler, too; which feels really good. In fact, all the guys from the south including me did not bring a jacket (or anything long sleeve) up here because down in our sites it’s so warm right now.

There are ten volunteers here (most of whom I learned Kazakh with in Almaty last Fall) and we’re running a summer camp for a hundred local school kids in grades 5 to 8. In the morning each of us team teaches an English class with a local teacher. In the afternoons we play games and sports with the kids. We do quite a bit of work, but it’s good to be around all my friends again. And the kids make friendship bracelets for us, never got one of those working at a college with older kids. And the school has a basketball gym with two functional hoops. One of them is bent enough that I can dunk on it, which really impresses the kids. It feels good to play basketball again, though I seem to pull a different muscle every day (calf yesterday, neck today… while trying to dunk). There is also a ton of donated sports equipment that volunteers’ parents have sent from home, including enough baseball equipment for a whole team. We are warming the kids up to baseball; this week we’re just doing kick ball.

We’re staying at a hotel-like place just down the street from the school we’re working at. A daily hot shower is an amazing thing, I feel a little too clean actually. Alga is a little smaller than Aksu, but it’s really nice. A lot of volunteers get placed either in mid-sized cities or in po-dunk villages; I’m really happy with my site, though it is nice to get away for a bit. The large village is the best of both worlds: small enough you can walk to work and always see people you know, but big enough to have a bank and markets and stuff. After two weeks here I’ll head back down to Aksu (27 hour train ride) for my one week teacher training seminar. I’ve got five other volunteers coming in to town for that. We’ll (hopefully) be teaching 10 school teachers and 15 of my students (future teachers) new methodologies and giving them English speaking practice. I’ve planned a bunch of stuff so hopefully it will go well. I’m really excited for my girls to be able to talk with Americans other than Mr. Eric.

After that I’ll go to another kids camp in the Northeast of Kazakhstan, near Ust Kamenogorsk (I’m getting the grand tour of the 9^th largest country in the world). Then I may take a trip to Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan with a couple other volunteers, we’ll see. Taking the larger perspective, I’ve made it through the first of two school years here and one winter. Ahead of me is a summer of various non-work activities, a full school year, next summer, and a few months of the 2009 school year before I go home in November 2009. There are always little things that bug you, but it generally gets a little easier as things become more familiar. And doing this with a bunch of other people in other sites around the country is definitely a life saver. We can commiserate together and it really puts things in perspective: there’s always someone who has it worse than you. Anyways, that’s what I’m up to this summer.

I’ve got a little extra time, so I want to talk about trains in Kazakhstan. This country is huge and we generally don’t get paid enough to fly places on the (very good) domestic airline, Air Astana. So we take trains. For days at a time. The train system is actually pretty good. If there’s one thing the Soviets could do well it was lay heavy infrastructure and industry. They put tons of factories in tons of places which made no economic sense, then built the train tracks to move that stuff around. Around my oblast (state) I can take buses. If the trip is 12 hours or less then the bus is a little cheaper and you can buy the ticket 5 minutes before the thing leaves. The train is for longer trips (which can be up to forty hours depending on where you’re going).

There are two classes: Plazcart (economy) and Kupe (cabin). As you walk through a Plazcart car, the aisle is on the right third of the width of the car. The car is divided into open sections. In each section there are two bunks horizontally abutting the aisle on the right side. To the left is a small table and open area with two sets of two bunks facing each other. These bunks are perpendicular to the direction the train is going. Hopefully that makes some sense. Anyways, Plazcart is a communal experience. You talk with lots of random people and share food and tea with them. This can be good or bad. If you’re in the mood to talk it’s a good way to pass time, but it can be a little overwhelming. This is especially true for girls. Kazakh men can be very overbearing and obnoxious towards any female, especially those who are decent looking. I don’t really have that problem, so I can chat and share my life story and practice Kazakh a bit more freely. Gender roles. Old Kazakh women are fascinated by random foreigners who speak Kazakh but not Russian and don’t really look American. (I have about the same conversation four or five times on one train trip)

The second option: Kupe. This is a separate cabin with a door that closes. Each cabin has two sets of two bunks facing each other. The beds are bigger than Plazcart and there’s a little more privacy. It works well if you’re with a group of people. Examples of prices: Aksu (my site) to Alga (where I am now) is a 27 hour train ride. Plazcart (which I rode) costs about $22. I heard Kupe costs about $30 or $35.

The trains can sometimes be overbearingly hot. At other times a flood of people will cram into one car, apparently because the conductor on that car is selling seats that don’t exist on the spot. I’ve ended up crammed shoulder to shoulder in a hot car with a hundred of my closest friends. On top of that, everyone’s drinking hot tea. This is the only beverage. People just don’t drink things cold here; a lot of times lukewarm is the best you can hope for.

That’s all I have time for now, included are a few pictures from the last week. Take care and have a great summer.