A day in my life and the story of "jeesh" / як руз дар зиндагии ман ва достони чиш

This post is primarily to let you all know what a day in my life looks like, but I'm going to start with a funny story:

Yesterday, me and my three year old host sister Mahvash went on a walk, aka "pogudka" (this is her mispronouncing the Russian word for walk "progulka"... adorable). It was just the two of us, and we went to a park near my house to play. All was going well until Mahvash ran up to me and said "Lindsay, jeesh." I didn't know what jeesh meant, so I asked her "Mahvash, what is jeesh?" In classic three year old fashion, she just said louder "JEESH!" I thought it was a game, so I too started shouting "Jeesh! Jeesh! Jeesh!" Then I noticed a puddle forming around Mahvash's feet. And that my friends, is how I learned how to say "pee" in Persian. I felt pretty bad for Mahvash but fortunately she seemed to be more upset about our "pogudka" coming to an end than she was about the jeesh itself. Thankfully, my host family was nice about it as well.

Anyways, time for a day in the life: the day I've chosen to share with you happens to be Thursday, also known as panjshanbeh.  Welcome to panjshanbeh.

7:00am: I wake up, mess around on my phone for a while, answering the messages that came in from the day in the US also known as my night. Sometimes I do a bit of homework. I get dressed and ready for the day.

8:00am: I go into our living room and sit on the couch. The TV is on the national channel, called “Tajikistan”, which pretty constantly alternates between beautiful nature shots, news, and children reciting poems and giving flowers to the president. The table in our living room is set with fresh bread, halvah, and syrupy fruit preserves my host mom makes over the summer. As family members come in and out at different times, they help themselves to these things as well as a warmer breakfast item, which my host mother cooks for everyone. I usually eat either kasha, which is basically a Russian form of oatmeal, or fried eggs. I casually talk to my host mom while I eat and around 8:30 or 8:45, I leave.

9:00am: I walk about 15 minutes from my house to my language school. I usually arrive, make myself a cup of tea, and do some homework.

11:00am: It’s time for my first class. Today my first class is called mass media, which essentially is talking about current events in Farsi. Each class, I’m supposed to bring in a news article and summarize it, and then my teacher Sareh, a very smart Iranian woman with an impressive degree in Farsi literature and very high expectations, asks me extremely difficult questions about the article that would be hard for me to even answer in English. That’s how you learn apparently. This class lasts two hours with a ten minute break in the middle.

1:00pm: It’s time for my second class. It is called conversation, even though I think it’s more of a vocabulary building class than a conversation class. Every day I’m supposed to read a chapter in our textbook before class, and during class my teacher Rustam and I go over what was in the chapter and talk about it. Rustam is a thirty something Tajik man, who also has an impressive degree in Farsi literature and enjoys having philosophical conversations with me that usually turn cynical and I’m not sure if that’s his doing or mine. Each chapter covers a different subject (for example forms of government, or economics), and the idea is that by the end you’ll have vocabulary for a wide range of things.

3:00pm: My classes are over for the day, but the learning is not. After I get out of class, my language partner Saodat, who is half Iranian half Tajik, is waiting for me outside. I meet with her once a week and we usually go to a cafe, or go for a walk and just talk about literally whatever we want. My classes focus pretty heavily on more academic Farsi, so I think the point of these meetings is to get more of the everyday stuff. In a normal study abroad program, I could get the everyday stuff from my everyday life, but due to the dialect difference most of the day to day vocabulary I hear in my host family would be completely incomprehensible to an Iranian.

5:00pm: I finish with Saodat and walk home. I take a shower when I get there and put on my house clothes (here, like Russia, it is not really acceptable to wear your street clothes in the house) and go to hang out with my family. I watch a mixture of Russian and Tajik tv with them, play with baby Mahvash, and around 7 or so we eat dinner.

7:00pm: Dinner could consist of lots of different things. My favorite so far happens to be a staple Tajik dish called Osh, which is this greasy rice with carrots meat. Osh is a good representative of the traditional Tajik food I have eaten here so far, in that it is very heavy, very delicious, and quite bad for your health. Not so fun fact: In Tajikistan, more people die here of heart attacks than of car accidents.

9:00pm: Around 9pm I usually say goodnight to my family and head to my room where I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of an Iranian TV show before bed. The show is called Shahrzad and it is a romantic / political drama that takes place in the 1950s. I find it super interesting to see how the director, who lives in post-revolution Iran, looks back on that time period, and how the censorship limits the extent to which the past can be portrayed. The plot is also pretty great and sometimes my inability to understand it creates for super surprising plot twists. One time I watched this show with my host mom and we both laughed about who was able to understand more of it: her as a native speaker of Tajik, or me, a student of Farsi. She definitely got more, but we were both having some difficulties.

10:00: Around 10, or sometimes a bit after, I go to bed. I find that 4-6 hours of one on one classes plus speaking another language all day is pretty exhausting, so I usually fall asleep in seconds.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of cool pictures due to my phone being stolen, but let's not focus on the negative. Enjoy these three random pictures I do have:)

A very classic Tajikistan shot

Soviet Era public art

A snowy mountain from our ski trip a few weeks ago

First few days / рӯзҳои нахустин

Hi everyone! I have arrived. Here are some scattered comments (and pictures!) from my first week or so:

Host family: In Dushanbe, I have the privilege of living with a host family, which is awesome for language learning, as well as getting a chance to actually see what life is like for a Tajik family (or at least what life is like for this Tajik family in particular). My host family is made up of my host parents Muhabbat and Juraqul, their thirty four year old daughter Dilafruz, and her two sons Azim and Akbar, who are ten and thirteen. They also have another daughter Dilnoza, who doesn’t actually live with us, but she comes almost every night for dinner, and her trouble maker three year old daughter Mahvash stays with us during the day while Dilnoza is at work. Mahvash is absolutely adorable, and enjoys disrupting family activities in any way she can, including singing the Tajik national anthem as loud as she can when we are watching TV or insisting that everyone sticks post-it notes on their faces.

The physical house that they live in is pretty different from anything I’ve seen in the US: when you walk in the door, you are actually outside, in a central courtyard. The central courtyard then has doors which lead to different parts of the house. This became extremely relevant a few days ago when we got a few inches of snow, and in order to get from my room to the kitchen I had to walk through it.

Classes: I’m on my third day of classes and they are awesome! All of my classes are intensive language classes at the language center of my program. I am taking a Farsi grammar class, a Farsi conversation class, a Farsi media class and a colloquial Tajik class. Due a combination of factors, I happen to be the only student in all my classes and I cannot understate how useful that is. Some of my teachers are Tajiks who went to college in Iran and others are Iranian. They are all quite brilliant and have high expectations which I appreciate. What do I mean by high expectations? So you can get an idea, here’s a sampling of some of my homework assignments:

-write a paragraph (in Farsi) detailing several ways that a country can ensure a stable and enduring democracy

-prepare a 15 minute oral presentation (in Farsi) on the similarities and differences in the Jewish and Muslim concepts of community

-read an article about child labor and come to class prepared to discuss how views of child labor may differ depending on cultural context

Language: As I mentioned in my previous post, I came to Tajikistan to learn Persian. The Persian that I have studied up until now was mostly the Iranian dialect of Persian, which is called Farsi. In Tajikistan, they speak a different dialect of Persian called Tajik, which is written with the Russian alphabet and is just about as different from Farsi as Spanish is from Italian. ُTo understand the situation I am in, imagine going to Italy with an intermediate level of Spanish. In other words, there’s a lot that I don’t understand yet.

After a week, I am beginning to understand more and more Tajik, but when I speak it still sounds very Farsi. Yesterday I was talking to the woman sitting next to me on the bus and she asked if I was Iranian, which I found quite hysterical because I do not look Iranian at all, and I’ve been told by many Iranians that my accent in Farsi sounds pretty American. I guess though to a Tajik woman who is not used to talking to foreigners, it does make sense. Due to the country’s Soviet past, most Tajiks see a white person and assume they are Russian. So, a lot of people on the street speak to me in Russian, but then when I answer them in Iranian Farsi, I see how it could be a bit confusing.

Speaking of Russian, I decided that in an attempt to really work on my Persian, especially in the beginning, I would not tell my host family that I speak Russian. That fell apart pretty quickly. On my very first day, my host mother said something on the phone in Russian which I unintentionally reacted to, upon which she instantly asked me “To rusi mi duni?” (Do you speak Russian?). I told her I did, but that I really wanted to practice my Tajik, and so far the whole family has been very respectful of that. The Russian also has come in handy, because when I don’t know a word, I can ask them what it is in Tajik using Russian (whereas my classmates who do not speak Russian have a lot harder time, because their host families usually do not speak English). I have also found it very interesting to observe when people speak Russian here versus when they speak Tajik. In my host family, I have found that they never really have entire conversations in Russian, but rather they pepper their Tajik with Russian words and phrases. For example I have noticed my host mom always inserts the Russian phrase “nu konechno” (“well, of course”) in the middle of her Tajik.

I could go on and on about this for pages probably, but this post is getting long, and I imagine my average reader is not as passionate about code switching as I am, so I’ll stop here for now. If you have any questions for me or things you’d like to hear about in a future post, shoot me an email or comment below.

 See you later / до втсечи / تا بعد

-Lindsay / Линдси / لینزی

The snowy courtyard of my host family's house. The doors are to different rooms.

My bed.

A big tea house 

A market

Mahvash and I. She is my best friend in Tajikistan right now.