زمستان داره می آمد

So midterms are almost done, and I figure that, with all my “free time”, I figured it’d be time for another update. And there’s so much to talk about…well, sort of. I realized the other day, as I was going through my previous posts, that I’d never actually done what I’d said I’d do after my first post (in my now defunct first blog), laying out my various plans for what I’d hoped to accomplish in my year here.

I’ll be covering that after my usual update of what’s going on in Tajikistan. Last weekend was out last major excursion outside Dushanbe for the program, and we headed to the village of Shahritus down south in Khatlon. A 5-hour drive (one way), Shahritus had its small-town charm, and there we saw Khoja Mashhad, which is the remnant of an old madrasseh destroyed by Genghis Khan, and, more importantly, the mountain springs known as “Chulichor Chasma”, which had some of the clearest (and safest to drink) water I've seen in Tajikistan.

And the fact that Shahritus is our last major excursion brings another major fact to the forefront: Winter is coming. It’s a common phrase (or maybe it’s a joke) that Dushanbe only has two seasons: summer and winter. I can see my breath on a regular basis, the mountains around Dushanbe now have picturesque snow caps, and sweaters are now the fashion in the capital, so I’m going to hazard a guess that winter is almost upon us. Now, I've described how the compound is set up before, and as winter closes in for the proverbial kill, I’m starting to realize that the short walk through the courtyard I have to take to the bathroom or, more importantly, the shower, feels like running the gauntlet through the frozen plains of hell. I’m personally waiting to plug in the electric heater that the family provided for me until things get particularly bad, but if you've ever lived in a house without any sort of heating or insulation, you don’t have an idea of how winter in Tajikistan is going to be (needless to say, I have no idea how this is going to be).

So, what are my plans for Dushanbe? Well, I've had several, and my time in the city has certainly changed what my plans have been. Most recently, I've worked out a deal with one of the current peer tutors to start learning Hindi next semester (or maybe earlier?). Why Hindi you may be asking. And by “may”, I assume you probably are. Initially, I’d planned to take Russian, as Russian is the de facto language of Central Asia, and most of the post-Soviet sphere. And yes, Russian is incredibly important in Tajikistan (as I've been learning while people angrily accuse me of being an ethnic Russian that’s just trying to make things difficult by not speaking my “mother tongue”). But for a number of young, college-age Tajiks I've talked to, Russia is old news, the option for when you need money and the threat of skinheads beating the living hell out of you because you’re a tad too dark for their liking is mitigated by the lack of options here (i.e. the parents of these college-age students, cruel realities are abundant here). For them, there’s “a new land of opportunity, and it’s not the US, it’s India”. It’s worth noting that last sentence is a quote from a Tajik I was talking to earlier today.

And it’s that which brings me to my next point, and my next focus. First and foremost, I am a student of international relations, and in Central Asia, that really means only one thing: the New Great Game. Now this isn't a political blog (or at least I’m doing my best to keep it from being one), so a basic rundown of the aforementioned idea is that every power that can swing its influence in Central Asia is trying to. From the US, to Russia, to China, to even more distant countries like Japan and Turkey, Tajikistan is at the forefront of what may be the 21^st century’s greatest (if not one of the greatest) geopolitical flash zones, where countries and ideologies and non-state groups all collide and try to come out on top. I’d hoped to do some sort of independent research on this, but given how hard it is to get people to talk about anything even remotely political (at least their politics, I get plenty of dialogue in on the American elections or the war in Afghanistan…), this seems like it might be a bit too ambitious for me on top of even just the Persian classes I have now, let alone anything more daunting. Granted, I've never let that stop me before, but as of this post, that’s been put on the backburner.

Then there are the other things, like trying to find an internship, summer plans, still trying to be involved in AIESEC in another country, reading the Shahnameh in Farsi, blah blah blah…

Any suggestions, either for topics to write about or how to get around my current research-related dilemmas, are greatly appreciated. As always: Tashakkur and khudo hafez.