Dear Friends, Googlers, and Stoppers-By,

My Mac was broken and I did not get it back for several months. In addition, it is way harder to sit at the computer with a baby crawling around. Finally, I have commitments that I need to fulfill before I blog.

I am getting my blog on as soon as I end my present commitments and will be able to better concentrate on online modes of communication and income-generation. Until then, please continue to read from the blogroll, and please do let me know of changes to your blog address, new blogs, and so on.

Happy web surfing.

I’ve moved to Cacambo.

I haven’t been blogging much lately. It’s not because I don’t have much to blog about, or even because I don’t have much time. I do have time, at least after my baby goes to sleep. I am sure I could manage at least a couple of entries a week if I wanted.

The truth is, I find it hard to fill my mind with anything other than facts about my child. Now I see how so many blogs turn into mommy blogs.

A lot of extremely interesting things have happened lately. Like Putin’s trip to the U.S. Rahim’s new name laws and the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan. I learned to make qurutob and shakarob and plov (osh).

But since I spend most of my time thinking about my daughter’s newfound propensity to pull herself up on anything- the walls, our knees, the furniture- I just can’t be bothered to analyze or record anything else. Why discuss the fact that it costs more to repair a sewing machine than it does a satellite dish in this country when I could take pictures of my precious little girl and upload them to Flickr (and organize them in a gazillion ways because I could just look at them all day long)?

Young Husband from The Coming Anarchy helped me put my blog in a new format, and it’s getting all pimped up for you folks to see. I’m hoping that once I get a new outside, my inside will change too. This is unrealistic and shallow, I know, but it’s a habit I developed in the sixth grade and haven’t been able to shake it.

There is a song by the late Muboraksho, a famous Tajik singer from Badakhshan, called “Chor Javon.”

It’s about four young men who, against the advice of their parents decide to go on a trip in wintertime. They are killed by an avalanche. The song has recently been covered by a rock group and I can’t stand the new version but it keeps running through my head as I think about what happened to my husband recently.

My husband works in a certain city in Afghanistan. Given the present climate there I’m not going to say which one, but in any case, he’s become well-known to the people there as a Tajik who will help other Tajiks (as in, people from Tajikistan, not Afghan Tajiks, since he is obligated to remain neutral in that respect).

Over the past several weeks, as you may know, Iran has been expelling thousands of Afghan refugees. It seems that anyone caught in the net without papers is summarily expelled, without the chance to so much as return to his apartment to get his papers.

Among the thousands were three Tajik teenagers who had lost their passports and had copies of their passports in their apartment. They had gone to Iran to engage in religious study at a madrassa and had only been there a couple of months. The police picked them out as non-Iranians on the street, and when they didn’t have their papers, they got put in the truck and driven to the border. They were dumped on the other side for UNHCR to deal with.

At least, I hope UNHCR was there. There have been a lot of deportations lately.

Somehow, they made it to near the border with Tajikistan. They hoped that there, their fellow Tajik border guards would let them across. However, the Amu Darya separates Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and the Afghans wouldn’t let them across to make their appeal.

They returned to the nearest Afghan city, and were directed by the police to my husband, who housed them and sent their papers by courier to the Tajik consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif. They hoped to get a letter to eventually return to Tajikistan.

When my husband made his weekly trip to Tajikistan, he told this story to his family. That was when he learned that one of the boys he gave shelter to was the grandson of the mullah who took care of his mother when she was orphaned as a child.

Update

The young people are back home. Their things have been sent (presumably by friends at the madrassa) Chinese faux Adidas gym bag after Chinese faux Adidas gym bag, across the border to Herat, over through Hazarajat to Kabul, through the Salang pass up to Kunduz, and finally, dragged by my husband on to the barge to cross the Amu Darya and get stuffed in a taxi up to Dushanbe, where they sit in our apartment waiting for some relative or other to pick them up.

Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.

This is what the citizens of the former U.S.S.R. say regarding the Second World War. It is also what is written on nearly every monument to the veterans, heros and victims of the war. It explains why, if anybody does more WWII documentaries than The History Channel, it’s Russian television.

Last year I did a big post on the TV specials. This year, we went to Park Pobedy (in Tajik, that’s Boghi Ghalaba) to see what was there. The funicular was still working, though it has no windows and the operator looked a little sketchy. We took it up to the top of a hill overlooking all of Dushanbe. Artemis gets so hot in the carrier in this weather so I let her whole top hang out. However when she falls asleep she kind of flops about as sleepy babies do so I wasn’t hands-free as usual.

She was awake for the funicular, though. She didn’t seem to get any thrill of being high up, possibly because she has no concept of falling.

At the park there was a much higher proportion of Russians than one usually sees in Dushanbe these days. There were also the children of jugi (the local name for Roma) stealing the flowers that the Russians set down near the eternal flame.

This year there were no parades here, just a small official ceremony up at the park for the veterans. We also didn’t get a May Day parade. Is Rahmon- he took off the “ov” from his name and now he’s just Emomali Rahmon- trying to distance Tajikistan from its Soviet and Russian periods as part of a nationalistic push? Or does he just want people to forget how happy they were?

We walked around the park in the searing heat, saw the monuments, said hello to some people my husband knew, then went to a little outdoor restaurant with nice wooden picnic tables and tropical straw hut-type shades, and had ice-cream and beer and then went home.

This is what Victory Day has come to, in Dushanbe.