Dushanbe miram Dushanbe: 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