My Stub

I sat looking at a little strip of paper for a while the other day and chuckled to myself.

The guy who always stands at the middle set of doors on the trolleybus (or the bus) to take people's money as they board gave me a ticket stub in return for my 50 diram -- the first time that has happened in my experience since we arrived here almost 4 months ago. (100 diram to the somoni; I guess at the current exchange rate that makes the bus fare about 13 cents per ride.)

I guess it just struck me as really funny that, while apparently it's OK just to run the transportation system informally and take people's change and not give out tickets, which never bothers anyone, for some reason it is actually important enough to print up some tickets and go to the trouble to rend them with a little tear and give them out for just one single afternoon. (I ride the city bus system on average at least once a day, and I've only gotten the one stub -- it's not like they continued to give them out all month, or even all week, after starting on that particular day.)

Of course, this amusingly small sign of the poor reach and function of the government here is nothing next to the electric situation in Tajikistan this late winter. Power cuts have been ongoing throughout the country all winter (in the south and in the north, from what I hear, it is typical that communities receive 2 hours of power in the daytime and 2 hours at night). But the government recently was forced to extend them to Dushanbe, too, due to Uzbekistan's policy of blocking the electricity Tajikistan purchased from Turkmenistan from crossing via the Uzbek grid.

Different sources apparently give different prognoses for how the remainder of the cold season (which, thankfully, reportedly only lasts until mid-March) will play out in electrical terms, but some have recently said there are only 2 weeks left of water in Tajikistan's main reservoir, which produces the electricity. What will happen after those weeks are past? It's a good question that I don't have the answer to. Since we are fortunate enough to be equipped with a generator, I certainly can't complain about the current or future situation, but I can sit on the sidelines and shake my head in bafflement at how Tajikistan got into this mess and just how it will find its way out...