Tursunzoda Torn Up

One of the downsides of getting back and forth to sadik during the week these days is the fact that one of the important north-south arteries in the older section of town is all torn up for some thus-far not-totally-comprehensible construction project.

(Actually, the irony here is that, not only did they block traffic along that artery, Tursunzoda Street, for a good part of July, only to open it now to slow, partially hindered movement, they also now in August decided to major work on the real main north-south artery in this section of town, Rudaki Avenue. It's city planning at its best, here in Dushanbe.)

The thing about driving up and down Tursunzoda that depresses me, though, is not that for a good portion traffic slows to a sometimes one-lane trickle over gravel and dirt and around large construction vehicles. (It doesn't look so bad for instance in the first picture here, but on a weekday morning right now traffic has to pick its way slowly through a lot of debris and activity.) What really bothers me is the treeless moonscape they have created where a slightly lazy, tree-lined secondary street once extended.

This at right is what the street used to look like, and in its northern stretches, nearer to our house, (so far) still looks like.

But in the section closer to the center of town they have uprooted the huge old trees that lined the road, apparently in order to refurbish the gutters and, some are saying but who really knows, to widen the actual roadway.

This below is actually not Tursunzoda itself but a smaller street, one of the only ones that ran all the way through to join the two parallel north-south avenues of this part of town, and therefore was actually a very useful street until they completely blocked traffic on it, too. It was also a nicely shaded street before, one that led part of the way to sadik and was pleasant to walk on to run an errand in that neighborhood.

This summer in Dushanbe has really taught me the value of trees in a place like this, even beyond all the more fundamental reasons that any rational person knows they are important and shouldn't just be chopped down without good reason. In a place that typically sees 40 to (luckily not this summer) 45 degrees C (105-115F) yet is quite dry, and where average homes are rarely equipped with air conditioners, shade is an extremely important factor. More generally, of course, one of the charming aesthetic aspects of Dushanbe (and it's not like it's dripping with those, although it is much better in that regard than Vladivostok) is its tree-lined avenues.

I don't know who made the decision to destroy so many old trees, and I doubt he's got an effective plan to replace them with equivalents. I just feel so sorry for the people who live in these neighborhoods, whose houses and walks to the bus stop or corner store are all of a sudden depleted of the shade that surely made them bearable -- maybe even pleasant -- in summer.

Of course, then whoever is overseeing the construction project apparently just lets the trees and root structures sit in the street, and neighborhood people then pillage the wood for their own purposes or to sell. One speculation about the tree part of the project that I've heard several times is that the wood was just worth more out of the ground than in the form of a tree. But by that measure, and by typical Central Asian logic, someone much higher up on the food-chain than Dilshod-on-the-street ought to be making the profit off of the trees. And maybe they are -- maybe the bulk of the trees destroyed were taken away to build fancy dachas or to floor new mansions, and we just see the bits and pieces left to the neighborhood to hack up and use or sell.

Back to School, Back to Work

Sadik began on Monday; today was the end of week 1 following summer vacation 2009. And they went back not a day too soon.

Not that I'm really seriously complaining, and I realize that surviving a 1 month break is nothing compared to steering an older, more bore-able kid through a typical American summer. (Although, on the plus side, I imagine there are all sorts of interesting activities to keep one busy through the summer in US school districts that we are lacking here.)

It was fun to spend a bunch more time with Anya, apart from the fact that during the latter three weeks of July she apparently lost all interest in the potty training we had done so well on from March to June. (Amazing! In June she makes it through multiple long road trip days in the car without an accident, and by late July we are struggling to keep our wet-undie count under 5 per day?!)

And apart from the fact that Anya somehow found her inner whiner, and that some little (yes, truly little, but feisty!) protest demon sprouted inside of her, too.

I don't know whether it was "just a stage" that happened to coincide with summer vacation, but remarkably all of that protest crying and angry refusal to go to bed on time really seem to have vanished just in this first week back. She starts each morning saying "it's not time for sadik," but she clearly is having a ball back with her friends and some new kids who've joined our little group this season.

For me, though, the fact that I've gained time to direct my attention elsewhere hasn't yet really translated into getting much of what I want to get done done. Unfortunately the organizer of our little informal preschool decided spontaneously (and partially due to a grave misunderstanding that I was unable, despite strenuous attempts, to disabuse her of) to give up her role as Dear Leader, which meant that I, as her helper and the mother of what appears to have been the only sadik family remaining in Dushanbe at the time, was left holding the bag.

I'm hoping that my time spent this week on sadik bookkeeping, new student recruitment, and house-hunting (on top of everything, preschool's homeless as of Aug. 30) won't repeat itself anytime soon -- that this is just me on the up-slope of the learning curve and investing some time up front in solving problems that, once out of the way, shouldn't deserve attention again for a while. And I damn well intend to gather all my fellow parents very soon to let them know that I'm not going to be the sole organizer -- that's not what I bargained for! Recalling how ready parents were last year to even attend a meeting, let alone take on small administrative tasks, I know this is going to be an uphill battle. But I'm hoping we can come to some sort of solution that takes the full burden off of me, since putting Anya in daycare only to have all of my "me" time sucked up by volunteer work to keep that daycare running isn't my idea of a fair trade!

First Road Trip of August 09

Somehow we don't seem to have taken nearly any pictures nor gone on any drives over the course of July. I'm not sure how that happened, since summer is the time in Dushanbe when people tend to escape the heat of the city for the cool of the river valleys outside of town. I guess we can chalk it up to an extremely full social calendar here in the city, from the weekend of July 4th all the way down to last weekend, as the US ambassador to Tajikistan prepared for the end of her posting here.

This weekend we took our first drive out to the east of Dushanbe (or at least Anya and I did -- Dan had been a few times, to visit the dam at Nurek and to see Gharm, in Rasht Valley). We went in neither of those directions, though, instead going up the smallest road that spokes off from the little hub that is Vahdat (aka Kofarnihon), a town due east of Dushanbe (that is being somewhat kind, I hope you realize): we took the northern spur into Romit Valley (that's Romit like "raw meat," although if you're following along at home with Google Maps, apparently it's "Ramit").


It was very pretty and very different from the Varzob river valley that runs directly north of Dushanbe and through which we have driven already too many times to count. (Road construction work on various tunnels and road surfaces makes that trip a little tiresome.) It was also quite different from the valley that runs north of Shahrinav, out west of Dushanbe, although it's possible our experience of that terrain was unique because it was springtime and a very wet one at that.


Romit in summer had brown hills, but a wide rushing river the color of jade or celadon. The further up we went (and according to the GPS we turned around to head home right here, at 38.90 x 69.28), the wetter the landscape got -- actually kind of surprising given how dry it is for the most part where we live.

In the valley that runs due north of Romit village, the roadway was lined at almost every turn with carefully constructed rock walls and fences woven out of spindly branches, evidently delimiting orchards and garden plots and grazing land. Some of the road wound under full tree cover where the ground was wet and the walls were covered with moss. (Moss!)


The unpaved roadway up the valley was surprisingly smooth, given our experience elsewhere in Tajikistan so far. Someone had clearly been through with a grader or something since the end of the spring, when all the rainfall we saw here would have covered the route in rockfall and mud. But there were still sizeable stretches of our trip where we were bump-bump-bumping along, which you realize only near the end of your journey is actually quite exhausting. I think maybe if there was a clear destination we were headed to, I'd endure that jostling a little better. (I think of the poor souls on that 22 hour car ride I have heard about between Dushanbe and Khorog, and I wonder if actually I'd be pulling my hair out even with the anticipation of seeing the Pamirs.)

But our usual road trip M.O. is just to head out merely for the sake of exploring, and more often than not Dan's interest in what lies beyond that next rocky outcropping is greater than mine, although he -- by mutual agreement -- invariably holds the steering wheel. Maybe the next time we hit some terrain cooler than Dushanbe, I'll push for less driving time and more footpath exploring (or picnicking), to break up the journey a bit more.