Summer in Dushanbe Is...

• A month-long break from sadik.
• (In connection with the former:) Visits to the many new indoor play centers that have opened recently in our fair city, replete with those pools filled with small plastic balls, jungle gyms, climbing apparatuses, rides, little huts to play peekaboo in, etc.
• Rides in just about the only elevator in town -- and humorously quaint views out the window. (Elevator conveniently located in the same shopping center as one of our favorite play centers.)

• New nightgowns -- we love Hello Kitty.
• Hot sun. And a new bit of shade in our formerly burning hot, shadeless yard (see below -- the white canopy, just a corner of which is visible).
  
• Pools, small and large. With and without views of the mountains. At home and away.

• Watermelons!
• Qurutob* (I'm ashamed to admit that this summer I have had only my first taste of this salad, despite its widespread popularity here. I've been very tempted to order it out, but both years we've lived here, by the time I've gotten around to really wanting it, the warm season has already arrived and with it a serious increased danger of getting food poisoning from something like that. This taste was much better: homemade by our housekeeper in a home-based Tajik cooking lesson.)
  

* Qurutob, a south Tajik bread salad
serves 4

3 medium ripe tomatoes
3 medium cucumbers
4 small onions
5 green onions
2 bunches of cilantro
1/2 liter of plain yogurt
1 loaf of fatir (crispy Central Asian flatbread made with oil -- fairly different from Middle Eastern or Arabian fatir, as far as I can tell)
1/4 - 1/2 cup of vegetable oil or butter

1. Seed and finely chop tomatoes and cucumbers, and mix in a bowl. Set aside.
2. Cut onions into small, thin moon-shaped slices, or simple half-circle slices. Divide in half. Set aside.
   
3. Chop the green onions and cilantro finely, mix, and set aside.
4. Warm the fatir in the oven on low heat, if it isn't already warm from having been homemade. (Yeah, right. Although where exactly are you going to get the fatir in the US if you don't make it at home?) Remove from the oven and rip into bite sized pieces, placing the pieces into a large bowl. (If you have a flat-ish wooden turned bowl made out of walnut from the mountains of Tajikistan, all the better.)
5. Pour the yogurt (it works best if it has a moderately liquid consistency; if the yogurt is pretty thick, add some water and stir well) over the fatir pieces and mix so that all the bread gets some yogurt and soaks in a bit of liquid.
6. Arrange in layers on top of the fatir-yogurt mixture: first the cucumber-tomato mixture, then the onions, then the greens/green-onion mixture.
7. Put about 1/2 cup of butter or vegetable oil in a small skillet, and warm on medium-high heat. Add onions when oil or butter is fully warmed and/or melted, and stir and fry for about 5 minutes, until translucent. (At this point you can add salt and pepper to taste.) Pour the onions and the oil all together over the salad mixture, so that the oil can evenly trickle down throughout as a kind of warm dressing, and so that the fried onion is evenly distributed on top.
8. Serve immediately -- especially when made with butter or butter-like ghee, the oil will congeal and make it less appealing if you don't. (If you really want to get Tajik, eat out of the common large bowl in the middle of the table, using your hands to take a little bit from your edge, mixing the layers together, and lifting up carefully to your mouth. Repeat until you're full of qurutob!)

Sadik Graduation: A Bit of Cultural Context

I posted a video clip and some photos today from Anya's preschool year-end pageant. There were a whole lot of dance numbers and a wonderful spread of food, with the landlord's plov as the centerpiece. The evening was a lot of fun, not least for us personally because of how Anya showed to what extent she has come out of her reserved shell in the last several months, capping this year in preschool with a dance "solo."

I guess I feel the need to explain a bit, though. There was one number that made us feel a bit uncomfortable for the way race played a role, and although I loved Anya's own Eastern dance number, it occurs to me that it's possible someone unfamiliar with the cultural context might wonder what was happening with her short routine.

First, race. The kids did a group routine to the tune of "Chunga-Changa," a song from the Soviet-era cartoon "Katerok (Little Boat)." You can see the original 1970 animated version here. When we saw Anya come out together with her classmate O. to dance in costume amid their peers, we were a little surprised that the one child with an African parent was cast in a piece with that name, in outfits made to look like classically imagined "native dress."

The song is a little paean to a simple life of plenty on the desert isle to which the Little Boat in the cartoon gets blown off-course in a storm: the lyrics celebrate the "miraculous island's" blue skies, year-round summer climate, and the diet of coconuts and bananas that one apparently adopts once one is grounded there. On that level, one can probably read the song and the cartoon scenes as a simple daydream about escaping the life of shortages and difficulty in the Soviet Union. The trouble for a person born in the post-Civil Rights United States comes in where the somewhat stylized figures of black children enter (which is almost immediately), complete with curly heads of hair and what look like grass skirts. To me this looks like the product of a centuries-long distance from African and Afro-Caribbean colonialism, and the twentieth-century relationship of the Soviet state to the Third World and Africa and the Caribbean, with a dash of Russian old-school Romantically informed views about the immutable and inherent qualities of race (and, for that matter, gender).

Obviously, cultural relativism in this situation could be seen as no different from agreement and support. I'm still honestly not sure what to think of the way the teachers staged this piece, but I guess for now I think it's best to assume that this is primarily about a fondly remembered Soviet-era cultural artifact and that the bit was being staged with all the best intentions, and basically to leave it at that. (After all, so much of what the kids in our sadik do, especially at their pageants, comes from exactly the same nostalgic place: witness fondness for the Soviet incarnation of the Ded Moroz-Baba Yaga story that people in the post-Soviet world are truly loathe to part with.)

(I should mention too that this dance number at the preschool was preceded by an intro about how delightfully international our particular group of kids is, and more generally praising in broad strokes the multitude of difference kinds of people and nations in the world, complete with each kid waving the flag of his or her parents home country. Never mind that that becomes complicated with so many of our preschool's families in dual national households: the point was just to do one of those simple celebrations of the "thousand flowers" blooming together, to praise the "friendship of the peoples." More Soviet-era concepts re-imagined in the post-Soviet (re-)developing world, where expat NGO and diplomatic families and some locals can afford to pay for a better quality private day-care/preschool than what is offered officially on the local market.)

True, after seeing the dance number, there may be a place for commenting to the teachers about the role they chose for O. (I will note that O.'s European mother didn't seem to mind a bit that her son was cast in the piece, although she could have simply been keeping her reaction inside. When I talked to some of our fellow parents about it later, we all agreed that she and her family have to be used to the very different views about race that people hold in the former Soviet Union. Whether that makes it OK is a different question, but I wouldn't be surprised if in fact she wasn't phased by it.) But are our own American views and cultural associations with race so perfect that we can go around lecturing to Tajiks or Russians about their assumptions?

It might also be appropriate for us to engage our kids in conversation about race after the performance, but I tend to think that 3 and a half is young to have a talk about these things. I think my view is that here, as in other aspects of our social relations, it's probably better just to model tolerance and openness to our kids, rather than to have overt discussions about how the world works (and ought to work), to show by doing rather than to instruct by talking. (Part of that I hope is the way we interact with O., and I do think that part of the reason it took me a split second to notice the weirdness of the casting in the dance number precisely because I don't notice O.'s race. It's only because of the dance number that I'm even thinking about his skin color, really.)

Incidentally, if you want to know more about how race is discussed in Russia and in the former Soviet Union's cultural sphere, this Russian-language article on Wikipedia is actually quite insightfully written. There are a few spots where I start to wonder what the author's own biases are, but for the most part I think it explains really well the differences I've noticed in over 20 years of direct contact with Homo sovieticus and visiting his (and her) habitat.

OK, with all of that as prelude, just take a look at the photos and videos for yourself. I will try to explain my position on 3-year-olds doing something that resembles belly dancing next time, but in the meantime I'll just say that I look at the whole belly dancing thing as an art form, and one whose moves and shiny costumes truly fascinate kids. I'm really glad that Anya, whose dancing always has an Eastern flair to it, probably because she's spent these formative years in Central Asia, did this particular dance for her little year-end solo.

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!

Heard Recently Inna Biiig Dushanbe

Anya is in a phase where she likes to associate things with people. And the funny thing is that when she is wearing or using these things, she also likes to say "Anya's named [insert associated name]."

Hence:

Steve shirt = for some reason this stripey long-sleeved waffle-knit number I bought on Old Navy (Steve is the main human character on "Blue's Clues," a show that Anya has really only seen a handful of times, and the last time was probably in about December, but evidently he makes a big impression), and, when she's wearing it: "Anya's named Steve!"

Barno shirt = anything that has a turtleneck, because Barno from sadik wears turtlenecks, obviously.... And, when she's wearing them: "Anya's named Barno!" (etc.)

Azizullo hat = the pink knit hat with earflaps and pom-poms that our nanny gave A. for New Year's. I was amused to see, when we were huddled in the cold puppet theater with all of our coats and hats etc. still on, earlier in January, that it really is true that her classmate named "God is dear" in Tajik has the very same model, only in light blue (he's a boy)

Sodal bib = the yellow-green (its full name for Anya is in fact "yellow-green Sodal' bib") rigid plastic bib with the little lip for catching food, which A. refused to wear in Vlad, but now that it apparently resembles something that Sodal has -- well, all bets are off. (S. is one of the older little boys at playschool who, at about 4 years old, kind of rules the roost. He likes to help Anya take off her shoes and put on her slippers when she comes in in the morning.)

Daddy undies = white underpants. We've been back in diapers pretty much full time now for a few weeks, until the weather warms up, since we just weren't able to hit the pot much of the time. But apparently, nevertheless, white briefs are very much a Daddy thing. (And, yes, at the right time: "Anya's named Daddy!")

And, for those who have asked, the phrase "inna biiiiig Dushanbe" was coined when we arrived for the first time at our house at roughly 4:30am off the early morning flight in from Istanbul. We were dropped off at our courtyard, and we sort of stumbled in to discover the huge facade and house that is the main place where we live, situated across the courtyard from a smaller little outbuilding. Anya's understanding of the situation, given all the talk about this thing called "Dushanbe," was that we had arrived at said Dushanbe, and that this one here was the "biiiiig Dushanbe," while the other one across the way was the "li'l Dushanbe." She has gradually come to understand better the breadth of the term, but the phrase has stuck, and will probably never get unstuck.

An Early New Year's

Tomorrow they are organizing a New Year's party at sadik -- so many kids will be leaving for the holidays that they decided this was the best way to include everyone. They have been getting the kids ready for the past few days by bringing out the Santa (Ded Moroz/Father Frost in Soviet tradition) costume and putting it on.

Apparently Anya is the only one of the 10 or so kids there who was afraid (or maybe just didn't like so much) when the teachers and kids tried on the fake white beard. (Despite my having dutifully taken her to her first post-Sov "yolka" New Year's party last year in Vlad.) The suggestion was that we talk up Santa a little bit at home, so she won't be scared at the party, but have fun with the rest of the kids instead.

Since part of getting ready for the Embassy Christmas-New Year's party in several days is to color in a picture of Santa and some presents, I figured why not use that as the occasion to talk about Santa (as if she won't have her whole childhood to hear about St. Nick and the presents he brings to good boys and girls...). I showed her the drawing, asked her who that is, and she promptly told me: "Is it Nargis [sadik teacher] wearing a beard?" Smart kid.

The Day the Nanny Quit

Perhaps that title offers a nutshell explanation of why the blog is still sporadic in nature. True, even in Vladivostok I never got myself together enough to post as often as I'd have liked, but establishing a routine for myself in Dushanbe is proving even harder for me (or maybe my memory is just fading).

My trip to the US was great -- an amazing break and weeklong opportunity to sort of go back in time and experience independence for an extended period of time, reconnect with friends, family, colleagues, professional networks, etc. Probably even Dan has not really ever had an equivalent experience since Anya was born, despite his more frequent short trips for work. (And added culinary and shopping benefits on two continents: several hours wandering in Istanbul in addition to three east coast US cities.) No complaints there.

Highlights (yes, I admit again, a culinary theme):
* a series of visits at home and out on the town, with friends and family, all up and down the East Coast, starting with a cozy burger and beers with Auntie and Uncle on a cold fall night in Bethesda
* gourmet-street-fare-inspired Mexican -- including grasshopper tacos, which I admit I didn't try, and spicy chocolate cake, which of course I did -- at DC's Oyamel
* the whirlwind experience of the Slavic conference for the first time in 4 years
* Chungking Garden restaurant, Philadelphia's Chinatown -- cheap and excellent (and the company wasn't bad, either)
* Reading Terminal food market in Philly, for an eye-popping shopping browse -- through baked goods, fancy cheeses, cured meats, and the entire gamut of takeout foods -- especially fun for someone visiting from the former Soviet Union
* the pierna adobada (spicy pork) platter at Viva el Mariachi, in Astoria, Queens -- alone, but thus with all senses alert!
* hot-hot-hot Thai dry spice paste tofu and green beans in midtown Manhattan while catching up on 12 (12?!) years gone by with a dear old friend
* walking through Beyoglu, the area southeast of Taksim in Istanbul, for cafes, people watching, browsing through the boutiques and sellers, admiring nineteenth century Euro-influenced architecture

My 2 new addictions, thanks to Turkish Airlines:
* hazelnuts
* sour cherry juice

But then I got back home to Dushanbe, and while it was wonderful to be reunited with Dan and Anya, I've found the transition back, even though (or because?) we've only lived here a little under 2 months, a little bit harder than expected.

The nanny lent indispensable help during my absence, but already there were signs that our communication with her wasn't great, that her expectations were different from ours and that despite our attempts to clarify, certain information wasn't totally making it through. When we spoke about things the first Monday after my return and she was ready to leave, I wasn't inclined to protest or make it worth her while to stay. Luckily, Dushanbe is more of an employer's market than what we experienced in Vladivostok, and we already have 4 potential candidates in mind for Round 2 of The Nanny Hire.

But, in another wrinkle: Anya began pre-preschool on Monday! This is a major step for us. It's a little daycare/preschool run by expat parents in Dushanbe, with space for about a dozen kids between 2 and 4. A spot opened and we decided to give Anya the chance for some social interaction. It's held on weekday mornings in part of the house of another expat family here in town, has two Russian-speaking Tajik teachers, and apparently includes some lessons or activities in music and crafts with teachers who come in during the course of the week.

We're still in the getting-used-to-it stage, of course, and this morning yielded the comment "Want an English sadik [preschool]?!" (which was then followed by commentary on a "lady in an orange shirt" that made me realize it might not be the language so much that she is protesting, so much as that Anya thinks it would be more fun to be at the house of one of her peers than with him amid all the hubbub of sadik -- when we first met him, we spent the morning together at home and his mom was wearing an orange sweater). Anya had a lower level of enthusiasm for the hour that I stayed at school this morning, but I'm hoping that we'll gradually get on track and learn to like the new regime.

What we're reading:
* just finished "March," another very good historical novel by Geraldine Brooks
* haven't decided what's next for the nightstand, but now will dig in to several non-fiction books on Central Asia as soon as they arrive in the mail

What we're saying:
* "[you] want me to help you" -- quickly followed by the requested correction: "*I* want you to help *me*.... pweeez!"
* "Bear's a good-girl"
* "I'm a girl"/"Ia devochka"
* bioo-ful (as in "Anya's bioo-full hair" or "Mommy's bioo-full hair")

What we're eating:
* tunafish and bear[-shaped] crackers
* homemade yogurt (even without the yogurt maker! the old-fashioned way, setting the milk in a jar close to the radiator overnight, yielded surprisingly positive results!)
* Dushanbe burritos (more authentic than you'd expect, between the contents of my suitcase and consumables borrowed against future shipments from our colleagues)