A former colleague called me recently to say he was in town. He wanted to arrange to meet up sometime before he went back to Afghanistan, so we set a date. I asked him if he had enjoyed his time so far, and he said he hadn’t been here for long but that he was really enjoying the city. “It’s really nice to see trees and women,” he said. He’s not a sex addict: women make the exact same comment when they come up. It’s the first thing I used to notice as well.
When I came to Tajikistan on my first assignment as an “aid worker”, my main aim was to work on something meaningful in the former U.S.S.R. I enjoy travelling and I love the culture of many of the countries in the former U.S.S.R. I didn’t come to find excitement or save the world. My motives were fairly common among my foreign colleagues, many of whom also just enjoyed travelling and at the same time who did not want to spend their time working for a multinational corporation. Though there were some of the typical missionary/mercenary types, they usually left pretty quickly as it’s much harder to take advantage of the population or pretend that you are someone special here.
Unlike, say, in Afghanistan. People go to Afghanistan for a variety of reasons, but it’s rarely just to see the country and make a living at the same time. People who go there are often trying to save the world, or make a huge amount of money on a consultancy which is almost certainly going to leave the country exactly $60,000.00 poorer than before with little to show for it, or possibly to achieve something vaguely political in nature. I went there- I admit it- because I hoped it would advance my and my husbands’ careers to work there together (I was right). In that sense, it was totally different from all my other trips abroad.
The whole time I was there, I was fully aware that Afghanistan is, unfortunately, not a normal country. I am not talking about traditional Afghan society, many aspects of which have all but disappeared, along with the trees, and much wildlife, as well as a normal economy. I mean Afghanistan, as it stands now, with all the poverty, post-traumatic stress syndrome afflicted people, psycho drug economy, and violence. Perhaps this is not the “true Afghanistan”, and it’s definitely not the Afghanistan of Nancy Dupre, but it’s the only Afghanistan I know.
Now, when I was there, I couldn’t help comparing it to the countries I’d been in before, in particular, Tajikistan. The level of education, and depth of understanding of such things as human rights, supply-and-demand, personal responsibility, and Islam, are light years above those in Afghanistan. This is thanks not only to positive progress but also to the fact that the entire population has not suffered the equivalent of being hit over the head with a iron rod a hundred times, which is the impression that many poor Afghans give off. Who can blame them? But it’s still not so interesting.
But when foreign aid workers come to Tajikistan, the human factor is usually not the first thing they comment on. Although it is probably the most important, the first things people usually notice are:
Flowers and trees along the streets. This is luxurious Dushanbe, but there are few district capitals that don’t at least make the effort. “I feel like I haven’t seen green in years…” Well, it’s only been months, but I know how they feel.
And then there are the people. Women wearing modern clothes, Islamist dress, traditional Tajik dress- you’ll find it all. The guy in the picture above is Tajik chav… there’s no other word for it. More men prefer plain white or blue collar shirts, black pants, and black moccasins, but unfortunately the sugar-daddy as shown above is not as uncommon as many would hope. Well, anyway, he’s not wearing a turban. (Though if you had to choose between a turban-cum-pirhan-tumban, and this, I think you’d agree with me that Tajik men could take some advice from the Taliban…)
Best of all, there are people having fun. People swimming in canals is much rarer in Afghanistan, though occasionally you’ll catch someone having a bath. Here, you will see several multi-story buildings standing in rows; children playing in the river; and water flowing abundantly through the city. Ah, the joys of normal life.
