September
26, 2002
Chirchik, Uzbekistan
Six weeks and still here: A day in the life
of an Uzbek-14 trainee
6:30
a.m: The alarm goes off. I hit snooze for about 15 minutes
then finally get out of bed. I get to the bathroom before anyone
else. The kids usually don't wake up for another 15-20 minutes.
I wash up and get dressed for the day. I try to save my nicer
skirts and shirts for Mondays and Thursdays since I teach classes
at a local school. On these days I also wear close-toed shoes
instead of my usual Teva sandals. They are less comfortable for
the amount of walking I do every day, but they look nicer.
7 a.m: The family heads to the kitchen for breakfast. Uzbeks
don't greet each other in the morning until everyone has washed
up. So the first words of the day are usually exchanged at breakfast,
and they usually consist of "Assalamu Alaikum. Did you sleep
well?" Breakfast is simple: homemade bread that was made
in bulk earlier in the week, butter, and several piyolas
of choi.
Then my host mother, Roziya Opa,
says a quick Omin,
and we all prepare to leave the house. I fill my water bottle
with cold, distilled water, take my vitamins, grab enough money
for the day and walk out the door.
7:30 a.m: I head down the street to catch a marshrutka
in front of our local bazaar. By now most of the people in Microdistrict-10
know about me and even know my name, although I only know a handful
of their names. As I wait for my marshrutka, I am often greeted
with Uzbek and Russian hellos as well as a barrage of "Good
Morning's" in English. I meet my friend Carlo (a fellow returnee),
who does his practicum teaching at the same school as me, and
we set off together.
8 a.m: We arrive at school and go to the zavooch's
office to get the keys to our classrooms. We are on our own these
days because the English teacher with whom we have been working,
Gulora Yuldasheva, left last weekend to pick cotton for about
15 days.
It is cotton season in Uzbekistan, and for the next few weeks
secondary and university students, school teachers and an assortment
of other people will head to the fields as they are required to
do to pick cotton. The work is hard, the living conditions are
horrible (they must bring their own cots and food), but the pay
is much needed. In one day, a person can earn about 1,000 sum.*
Also, picking cotton is somewhat of a requirement. My host mother
also was required to go this year, but didn't want to leave her
children at home alone (their father is working in Russia right
now). She had to pay 25,000 sum
instead. I'm not quite sure who this money went to, but she also
had to buy food for other people who went in her place. It's a
crazy system that I don't fully understand yet.
Back at School 18, Carlo and I teach three English classes in
a row to students anywhere from 5th to 8th grade. Practicum has
been my least favorite part of training. The kids are exhausting,
and I don't quite know how to be a good English teacher yet. I
have two years to figure it out.
10:30 a.m: Signing autographs in kids‚ notebooks on
my way out of the school, I take a 5-10 minute walk up to the
nearest major bus stop. After waiting for about 15 minutes, I
board a bus and head toward the center of Chirchik. The buses
are old Soviet-era contraptions that serve as a constant reminder
that I am in a developing country. The buses are mostly full of
weary-looking people: wrinkly-faced babushkas
in flowery headscarves dragging home sacks of fruits and vegetables
from the bazaar, school children dressed in black and white, young
men and women commuting to work in other towns.
11:30 a.m: By now I have arrived at the children's music
school in Chirchik. I meet another fellow trainee, Jon, in front
and we go in for our lessons.
A new element to training this year is self-directed learning.
We are allotted time each week to pursue anything we want. Jon
and I wanted to learn how to play traditional Uzbek instruments.
With the help of some of our training staff, we managed to get
free half-hour lessons twice a week. Jon is learning the karnai,
a crazy Uzbek horn that is played at weddings and other celebrations.
I am learning to play the dutar, a two-stringed guitar with a
long neck and a hump in the back. I am hoping to purchase a dutar
in Tashkent by the end of the week.
Today is my second lesson. My teacher is a 30-something Uzbek
woman named Nilofar who also is the director of the school. She
is very cool and an amazing musician. She is also an incredible
teacher. Our lessons are entirely in Uzbek. Today she teaches
me a major scale and the opening section of a song. I leave very
excited; I can't wait for the next lesson.
12 p.m: Jon and I get on a marshrutka
and make our way back to Micro-10. We go to our usual lunch place,
a local eatery that serves all the national dishes and cold Sprites.
We eat here almost every day. I have learned enough restaurant
Russian to successfully order lunch and communicate with the waitresses,
who tend to be Russian women who don't speak Uzbek. We eat and
share practicum stories, and inevitably other local trainees will
arrive and join us for lunch. This place has become one of our
local hangouts.
1:30 p.m: I leave for my language class, which is at a local
college just down the road from our lunch place. A few times a
week, I meet with another trainee, Nate (also a returnee), and
a tutor, Sayyora, with whom we study advanced grammar and practice
conversation. These days we are reading Uzbek fairytales. Most
of them are about donkeys and lions.
I am overwhelmingly fascinated by the Uzbek language. To me, Uzbek
seems to be a combination of several other languages. There are
many words taken or derived from Arabic. There are also many words
from Persian, Turkish and of course Russian. I am constantly wondering
how all of these languages came together and why certain words
were taken from certain languages.
For example: In Arabic, the words for maternal aunt and
paternal aunt are the feminine forms of the words for maternal
and paternal uncle. In Uzbek, the aunt words are
taken from Arabic, but the uncle words are completely different.
Why/how did the language come to adopt the aunt words and
only the aunt words from Arabic?
This is just one example. I come across at least a dozen similar
linguistic conundrums every day. And it all fascinates me. At
some point, I would love to do research on the linguistic history
of this region. I would like to find out which languages influenced
others, what came first, etc. And what was being spoken before
the Russians, Arabs, Persians or Mongols came through here?
I am pretty comfortable communicating in Uzbek. I have also been
reading some beginning Russian textbooks in my free time and very
slowly teaching myself Russian. I have learned enough to impress
Russian speakers when I first meet them, but after about two minutes,
I end up admitting that I don‚t know any more Russian. At
that point the conversation either switches to Uzbek or just ends
because the other person doesn‚t know any Uzbek. Learning
Russian is mostly a hobby for now.
I am also having very, very basic lessons in Tajik once a week.
Tajik is very closely related to Persian and written in Cyrillic
script. The Bukhara region, where I will be living for two years,
has a high Tajik population. Lonely
Planet Central Asia says: " Note
that the people of Samarkand, Bukhara and south-eastern Uzbekistan
don‚t speak Uzbek but an Uzbek-laced Tajik (Farsi). Some
members of the ethnic Tajik minority wish Stalin had made the
area part of Tajikistan, but the issue is complicated by ethnic
Uzbek cityfolk who speak Tajik.'
I am having a lot of fun learning the languages here. What can
I say? I really am a language nerd. One of the main reasons I
wanted to come back here was to learn these languages.
5 p.m: We finish our language lesson. The college is also
the site of the PC's training offices. On my way out, Sergei,
who handles our money during training, tells me he has just come
from Tashkent with a new batch of mail from America. I look through
the pile of envelopes and packages and see that I have received
two letters! Today is a happy day.
The letters have been opened already by security at the American
Embassy in Tashkent. I'm not quite sure why, but all of our mail
spends a few days there before coming to us. To all of my Arabic-speaking
friends, if you write me letters in Arabic, it is possible that
I won't receive them.
To those of you who have sent me letters, know that receiving
mail from home is more exciting than drinking a cold Sprite. You
have made my day. If send me a letter, I promise I will send you
one in return. It just might take awhile to reach you. Also, I
will have a new mailing address after I move to my permanent site
on Nov. 2. I will try to have the new address posted on the Web
site as soon as possible. But if you continue to send letters
to the Tashkent address, I will still receive them eventually.
5:15 p.m: I go to our other major hangout in Micro-10, a small
underground café down the street from my apartment. A group
of us congregate here nearly every evening. The waitresses here
also know us, and they also serve cold beverages.
I sip my cold Sprite and read my letters. We talk about our days,
vent our frustrations and laugh at each other's cross-cultural
mishaps. Training is half over. Six weeks have passed so quickly.
A year ago today I was on a plane going home. We clink bottles
in honor of not being evacuated this year. A happy day: mail from
America, cold Sprites and no evacuations.
6:45 p.m: We say our good-byes, pay our bill (which sometimes
takes awhile because Russian numbers are hard to understand) and
head home. On the way home Jon (also my neighbor) and I stop for
ice cream at a small, state-run shop. This shop is our third local
hot spot because it has the best ice cream prices in town. Ice
cream is very popular in Uzbekistan. But it is mostly in pre-packaged,
on-a-stick form in freezers on the street or in shops. My new
favorite is called Coffee Style. It costs 175 sum
and tastes like frozen coffee-flavored whipped cream. Mmm...
At home, I spend about half an hour chatting with my host family.
I tell them about my day and help my 10-year-old host brother,
Akmal, with his English homework. Then I bring out the Uzbek fairytale
I read in class today and share it with them. All this is done
as we sit in front of an old black-an-white television, which
seems to be the source of life in my apartment.
7:15 p.m: The kids bring dinner to the table (still in
front of the television). Dinner tonight is a bowl of plain pasta
and a beet and potato salad. My family is pretty poor and tends
to eat simply. They are given money to feed me, but I suspect
my host mother used half of that money to pay her dues for not
going to pick cotton.
I still have a lot to learn about the economic situation here,
but I do know that it is kind of a mess. I have noticed that things
are a lot more expensive than they were last year, but people
aren‚t making more money. Local people seem sadder and more
depressed than I remember them being last year. And some people
are slowly overcoming their fear of badmouthing the president.
"If Karimov was good, my husband wouldn't be working like
a slave in Russia right now," my host mother said to me a
few weeks ago. We stayed up late that night talking about Uzbekistan's
past, present and future. "Communism was very good for us,"
she said. "Now we have nothing." I went to bed that
night feeling very sad for her and her family.
The International Monetary Fund has been in and out of Uzbekistan
recently trying to help the country reach currency convertibility,
but the Uzbek government must meet some conditions first. You
can read more about the economic situation here on www.uzreport.com
or the IMF's Web
site.
8 p.m: I grab a flashlight and my host brother and sister,
and we go for a stroll around Micro-10. Chirchik isn't the most
attractive place during the day. In fact, it's kind of ugly, except
for the mountains in the background on clear days. But at night,
Chirchik becomes beautiful. The temperature cools, it‚s quiet,
the stars come out and the moon is often breathtaking. Uzbeks
don't leave the house much after dark, but the kids have started
to really enjoy these nightly walks. Akmal makes it a point now
to finish his homework earlier in the day so he can walk with
me after dinner. Sometimes other Micro-10 trainees (there are
six of us) and their host siblings come with us.
9 p.m: We return in time to watch "Esmerelda",
the Mexican-Brazilian soap opera that apparently is aired all
over the world. In Uzbekistan, "Esmerelda" is very popular.
My host family watches it religiously. And for the past few weeks
I have been watching it with them. I don't care much for the storyline,
but it's really helpful with learning colloquial Uzbek. Also,
since my family is poor, they don't really do anything else besides
watch television. Guesting is a huge part of Uzbek culture, but
my family doesn‚t do it much because they can't afford to
receive guests in return. The don't leave the house except to
go to school or the bazaar. Watching "Esmerelda" is
one of the few things I can do to spend time with them.
9:30 p.m: I go to my room and study languages for about
an hour. Then I look at my calendar. Tomorrow is Friday, and the
entire group will be together for the day. I look forward to seeing
the trainees from the other villages. I make a rough schedule
for the weekend: language class, laundry (by hand), bathe (by
bucket) and go to Tashkent to send e-mail and shop for a dutar.
10:30 p.m: I am fast asleep.
That was my day. I hope you find it interesting.
I am aware that there is a typo in the Russian version of my mailing
address. But I have been receiving your letters in spite of the
typo, so I'm not going to change it. Thank you for your offers
to send resources. I probably won't need much until I am at my
permanent site. In the meantime, keep the letters coming. I hope
you are all doing well.
Peace & blessings,
Sofia
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