21 September 2001
Chirchik, Uzbekistan

 

    Dear friends and family,

     Hello again from Uzbekistan. I think by now you all must know where Uzbekistan is; I hear maps of this area have been on television and that President Bush mentioned Uzbekistan in his speech to Congress yesterday. Thank you all for your wonderful e-mails in response to my last message. I've read them all with care. I'm sorry I can't write back to everyone individually, but internet access here is slow and expensive and is seldom available to me; it's much easier for me to pre-write one long note on my computer at home and bring it to the internet place on a disk on one of my few trips to Tashkent. Snail-mail letters are probably a better bet.

     I'll start with what you all probably want to know. Bottom line: I feel very safe right now in Uzbekistan. Don't believe anything the news is telling you about Central Asia right now; it's probably wrong.

     I can only imagine how crazy things are in America. But here, Peace Corps life seems to be carrying on, with a few adjustments. Let me start from the beginning. Around 8 p.m. on Sept.11, I was having dinner with Tamar, a trainee who lives downstairs from me, and Kevin, another trainee who was visiting. We were just sipping tea and chatting when Tamar's host mother yelled from the living room that America was on television. We didn't think much of it, and only Tamar got up to go see what it was about. She yelled, "Oh my God!", and Kevin and I joined her in the living room. That's when we saw for the first time (on CNN dubbed in Russian) pictures of the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the aftermath in New York and Washington. That night Tamar and I stayed glued to my shortwave radio (Bless you, Mr. K!) for several hours.

     I know many of our families are concerned because Uzbekistan is so close to Afghanistan, but I'm pretty confident that Peace Corps and the State Department is doing everything they can to keep us safe. The Peace Corps in any country has what's called an Emergency Action Plan. There are three steps. The first is Standfast, in which everyone in the country is advised to stay in their site and not travel to other parts of the country. Life and work and projects carry on as usual, but no one can leave their sites. The second step is called Consolidation, when everyone is called to their regional capital and all the volunteers are then consolidated for at least 24 hours in a few areas of the country. The final stage of the plan is Evacuation. That's pretty self-explanatory.

     Right now we are in Standfast. As PC has explained it to us, there is not evidence of any specific threat to Americans here at all. But we are in standfast right now to keep our communication at the most efficient level. If we are all at our sites than everyone in PC's chain of command here knows exactly where every trainee and volunteer is just in case something happens and they need to contact us. PC in Turkmenistan is in consolidation right now because phones and things there are harder to come by than they are here, so to keep their communication base high, they've consolidated all the volunteers. We are in standfast. Many of our scheduled excursions during training have been postponed, or possibly cancelled all together. We were supposed to visit Samarkand last weekend, and this weekend we were each supposed to visit a volunteer somewhere in the country for a four-day observation of how volunteers live and work in different parts of the country. But none of this is happening and we're pretty much confined to Chirchik for as long as we are on Standfast. So how long will we be on Standfast? Nobody seems to be able to answer that.

     The Peace Corps has been doing its best to keep the trainees informed and in good spirits. And generally, we are all doing well. I think everyone feels really safe here. The Uzbeks have been very understanding and people constantly offer us their condolences and tell us how much the terrorist attacks have affected them as well. The other day I was walking with another trainee, and a random Uzbek woman approached us and asked (in Uzbek), "Are you from New York or Washington? Is your family okay?" And the women who work in the shop where I buy Coca Cola every now and then asked if Chicago was close to New York and if I had spoken with my family. So people here are very nice and very concerned, in general. Of course there are also the kids who yell "Bomba Bomba!" at us in the street and laugh. But we figure they just don't really understand.

    So everyone feels pretty safe, but the big frustration for both trainees and volunteers alike is not knowing the future of Peace Corps Uzbekistan. Some people really believe that we will be evacuated within a few weeks. Others think we'll be out within six months. And then there are people who think any talk of evacuation is ridiculous and that there's no reason our program in Uzbekistan should stop working. Uzbekistan does not support Afghanistan and there hasn't been any talk of Uzbekistan offering air bases to American or anything like that. So right now, there's no direct threat to Americans in Uzbekistan. I personally go back and forth with my thoughts about evacuation, but I try not to grow attached to any one idea. The hard part for all of us is just not knowing. Our activities are being "postponed", yet we are told to go on with our training as usual. But personally, I would like to stay. I'm having a really great, valuable experience here. I really like the other trainees, and certainly we¡¯ve all become much closer since last week.

     Another frustration, and possibly a blessing too, is that we don't have the much access to news here. My family's television gets about 4 channels and there's only about 1 hour of Russian language news a day. But I'm lucky enough to have a shortwave radio, so I tune into BBC and Voice of America whenever reception is good. Some trainees live with rich family and they get CNN and other news networks in English. Anyway, I think most of the speculation that's on television these days might be causing unnecessary panic for our families, so sometimes, I'm glad we don't have that here. One trainee¡¯s family fed-exed him copies of the Columbus, Ohio newspaper from every day last week, so we all go to see some photos and read about things that were still news to us.

    Our country director and safety officer have come to talk to us several times since the attacks. Their aim is to keep us posted on anything they hear from PC Washington. But basically the message is always the same: they don't know what's going to happen and we all just have to wait. I guess it all depends on how and when America retaliates. Today, our medical officer came to talk to us about stress management and how we've been reacting and "feeling" about everything since last week. So PC is going to wonderful measures to take care of us all, and I for one appreciate it.

     So beyond all this, our training life goes on. I started a teaching practicum a couple weeks ago. I teach two English classes on Mondays and Wednesdays at a Russian-language school in Chirchik. No, I don't speak Russian, although I know about five words now. It's been a very interesting experience. The classes I teach are 5th form and 6th form, which roughly correspond to 5th and 6th grade. There's a longstanding tradition of corruption in the former soviet union, which includes paying for good grades and sharing answers. There's still a lot of evidence of all that in the classrooms that we are teaching. It's very hard to encourage every kid to get up and talk or answer a question, when the rest of the class can't stop shouting out the answers or telling each other what to say. But all that is what we're here to change, I suppose. The textbooks that they have are filled with Soviet propoganda, but the teachers still use them. Creativity and independent thinking are still new concepts here. So when we play games in class or sing songs, students are still hesitant to participate because it's all so weird to them. But once they start, they really enjoy that stuff, because anything beats their other classes, in which teachers just read at them from a Soviet-era textbook every day.

    My language classes are going well, and my Uzbek is getting pretty good. We had our first language assessment a couple weeks ago, and I passed with flying colors. I still speak somewhat "broken Uzbek" but I don't really have any problems communicating with my host family anymore. My next goal (if we stick around) is to learn Tajik, which I understand is basically Persian in Cyrillic script. I've asked to be placed at a site where I can speak both Uzbek and Tajik. Next week, we find out where our placements will be. I'm not so interested in learning Russian anymore, although some "Restaurant Russian" will be necessary to get by in this country.

    Tomorrow all of us are going to Tashkent to help out with the Special Olympics, a project started here by Peace Corps within the last year. Peace Corps said it's okay to leave our sites since all the trainers will be with us all day and they will know exactly where we are. They felt like they had to let us do something because a lot of the trainees are bummed that our volunteer visits were canceled, and we're getting pretty bored in Chirchik. In the evening we are going to see Carmen, the opera, in at a big, historic theater in Tashkent. It should be interesting. At some point in the day, we'll hit the internet cafes and I'll send this letter out.

     So I'm doing well, and everything in Uzbekistan is safe so far. I hope I haven't bored anyone with all this, but I thought a description of my experience from this past week in Uzbekistan might be interesting. But I don't doubt that your lives in America right now are far more interesting. In fact, another frustration for many of us here is that we can't be at home to feel the sentiment that all of America is feeling. There's definitely a sentiment here, but it's not the same. It's all still pretty unbelievable and unreal to me, as I'm sure it is to everyone. But it's not as in-our-faces here, and it's easy to go on with our daily activites. Every morning I wake up and start to get going and then I remember that America was attacked.

     Anyway, I hope all of you are doing well and all of your families and friends are safe and healthy. I think about you all every day, especially since last week, and I really miss everyone. It's difficult to be away from home at a time like this, but I have a new American family among trainees and volunteers here, and so far, we've been taking really good care of each other. Please write if you have a chance. It's getting harder and harder to watch other people get letters and packages every day.

Peace and blessings,

Sofia Javed

     P.S. those of you who wrote me messages, I will try my best to reply individually, but it might take a couple of weeks before I can find myself with internet access again. But for now, you have this mass note. Write me letters!