Hellloooo Skinny Jeans

On the other hand, (compared to my previous post) I left Dushanbe three hours ago, and am now comfortably laying on a bed in the AKF apartment in Bishkek. Flying in was impressive, watching the transition from jagged snowy peaks, to rolling hills to fertile expanses of wheat.
I can’t say much about Bishkek just yet, other than that 1) it’s green (supposedly the largest greenbelt surrounding a city in the world, I assume it’s relative) 2) the rumour that girls wear skin-tight jeans is true, proven by my kind AKF host 3) there is sushi.

8 police stops, 5 car break-downs, 1 flat tire, full-blown resurgence of Giardia, pregnant lady throwing-up 17 times, 2 mixed tapes, 3000 m pass, 16 hours of driving on a dusty dirt road with 8 other people + baggage = the first and last time for me thanks.

I’m traveling to Bishkek from Dushanbe today, but I had to take some time describe the adventure of driving from Khorog to Dushanbe. Saturday morning I went to the small airport to find out if I could get on the plane. However, after waiting an hour, nobody was sure whether or not a plane was actually coming, and since the previous days plane had not flown, there were a large group of people with dibbs waiting. So I decided to take the ‘sure-fire’ car route. After shopping around at the ‘car market’ for a few minutes, Askarsho found me a seat among 8 others in a land-cruiser type thing. So I was packed into the middle of the last row. Great, now I can’t see a thing with my backpack between my legs on the floor in front of my and my oversized purse/computer bag on top of me. I was open to the idea of driving since it would allow me to see much of the Tajik countryside. But alas, all I could see were my travel companions (all extremely lovely people) and occasionally the glimpse I stole out a window would reveal a bunch of dust. At the beginning of the trip, before it came to dark and dusty, I saw children in the villages, standing on the side of the road extending bowls full of plums. An image that particularly struck me (of course, I don’t actually have an image, because it was impossible to take photos from my position), was of a little boy, no older than 5, extending his little arm with all his might as high as he could, showcasing a fish from the nearby river. The young man sitting next to me, stopped in his home village to pick up 30 kilos of apples. Now I also have 30 kg of apples beside me, behind me, on top of me, and of course I ate a bunch too. This poor pregnant woman started being sick almost straight away, and the first few times the car stopped to let her do her thing. But the third time, the car didn’t start again. So after popping the lid, fiddling around for 15 minutes and finally taping two pieces together, the engine revved and the driver told her, no more stopping.
Lunch was deemed important enough for stop, so on a tapchan in Vanj, I got to know my companions a bit better. Two of the women were on their way to Dushanbe for a 6 month trainer of trainer nurse course. The other woman was a doctor, working with an AIDS organization, the young man of course, selling apples, and an older gentleman who worked with UNICEF (those are the only ones I figured out).
Mostly because I’m lazy, I’m not going to recount the entire story in painful detail. In brief, there were a few more car break downs, plenty of police-stops (they always wanted to see my passport and search the suspicious foreigners bags). We also drove over a broken metal-plank bridge and the front tire fell through and popped. That was fixed in a relative jiffy, after which we stopped for dinner.
One of the highlights was passing over the Sagirdasht pass. Incredible flora (and any of my bio friends will all know how much I love plants…), there was a shrub that looked like a skeleton of a tree, the colour of a late evening shadow with dried flowers on the end. The top of the pass was breathtaking, despite the police check, rolling pasture sprinkled in snow, sharp peaks and lush-ish valleys below. Also interesting and jarring to the landscape are the remnants of soviet tanks.
Ah yes, not to forget. The 16 hour trip was of course made more pleasant by the 2 mixed tapes the driver had, which skipped everytime we went over a large bump.
Well by the time we rolled into Dushanbe at 1 am, my bags and my body and hair were absolutely covered in dust. My hair actually looked grey, and thank goodness I had my scarf to breath through when the dust was really bad.
In the end, I survived. But I’m sore, tired, and giardia is ___well… look up the symptoms.
Thank you Ninoska for staying up and saving my wretched body with a place to crash!

Lactose-intolerant, vegetarian Celiacs beware…

August 9, 2009.
Barley = Death (almost). Our extremely-hospitable homestay chef (Cherry-man’s niece), made us delicious Barley-potato soup, along with some slightly stale wheat bread and of course Kefir. This would be solid meal unfortunately caused me a long night of suffering as I am both lactose-intolerant and Barley is my body’s worst enemy. I must say, this is perhaps one of the most frustrating elements of Tajikistan (for me). Everyone is so friendly, welcoming and generous, and I feel rude not to accept what has been so lovingly prepared. Well, after a fit-full night where I thought I was going to die in this village 6 hours from the closest hospital (thank you Allison for putting up with my groaning + shaking…Liz, sound familiar?), we woke up to a scrumptious smelling breakfast of…streaming hot barley and fresh milk. I spent the rest of the day lying under a shady tree on an almost-river-island, learning some Tajik, but mostly reading The Time Traveler’s Wife (an excellent book, which keeps me up late and night and a book I can’t wait to continue reading in the morning when I wake up).
Unfortunately, we had to get back to Khorog on Sunday, to be at work on Monday. After my weakened body somehow carried my pack to the first village, a fine young gentlemen who know I was ill, carried my pack all the way down to the bridge. There the driver was already waiting for us. The drive back to Khorog was pleasant, albeit full of detours, pit stops and tea time. The driver was constantly distracted with visiting friends and family, bumming smokes off his friends and filling up the benzene in random houses. We were graciously invited in for tea at his sisters house where we had a tasty potato-onion dish (which supposedly are like Allison’s dad’s homefries), tea, apricot jam + cyanide pits fresh off the fire and of course…Kefir. I didn’t touch mine, but Allison took one for the team. I really need to start carrying those Lactose pills. Feel free to send me some gluten-free, lactose-free, vegetarian recipes ☺. Geez, my stomach makes globetrotting a true challenge.

And when I close my eyes, the contours of the mountains are still imprinted on my eyelids.

August 8, 2009.
Sitting on a large rock at the edge of the bluest lake in the world, in between villages number 1 and 2 in Geizev, I am utterly (but maybe not completely) happy. Allison and I came down to the lake for a swim, but the sun has set behind the mountains and the water is about 2 degrees C, so there’s no way we’re going in. We promise ourselves that we will go tomorrow…
We left Khorog this morning at 8:30 (there was a honey-fair at the market, and a friend of ours picked up a jar for us). We took a Mashutka to Rushan and then up the Bartang valley (stopping in the driver’s village for some small plum-like things) until we came to a foot-suspension bridge. The bridge, like all infrastructure in Tajikistan, was rather sturdy (especially compared to rural Mada). From the bridge, we hiked up an impressive valley, climbing to 2500m (which isn’t that much, since we probably started at 2000m. The path was lovely, but our packs were heavy, probably about 45 lbs each. So we took it easy and took a few breaks—one at a cherry tree where we met a nice man who knew a couple of our ex-pat friends. So after eating about half a kilo of cherries, which my stomach is now paying for, we set back on our way. After 2 ½ hours in the grueling heat, we made it to the first village of Geisev, where we had chai, bread and jam, sugar coated peanuts and of course cookies in the Tapchan. After our second snack, we decided to continue to the second village with the ‘cherry-man’ as our guide. At the second village, he found us the perfect campsite, right beside the river at the point where the crystal blue water surrounding trees resembling mangroves in their manner of growth, turns into a rambling stream, then into a raging river in a small canyon before finally becoming the lake at which I am sitting.
The village in which we are staying has two humble homestays, eco-tourism projects of MSDSP. The guest house in which we will have dinner is a traditional Pamiri home with a solar powered light bulb and a number of Pamiri mattresses. There is also a shower close to our tent. A hose runs along the field to a green and white striped vestibule, where the hose then runs into an old water bottle, which has holes punctured in the bottom to create a shower…Awesome! The best part is that the water is heated by the same solar panel on the roof of the Homestay. We felt slightly rude and ungrateful to sleep in our tent, but we just really wanted to get some use out of our new baby!

Licorice, peas and explosions

I had an incredible day in the field yesterday. We traveled to Ishkashim to choose sites for a cross border river erosion project. The road to Ishkashim is along the Pyanj River, which also acts as the erratic border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The scenery is constantly breathtaking, especially as one catches the first glimpse of the Hindu Kush. We stopped for a while at the bridge which is a border crossing, just outside of Ishkashim, to wait for a co-worker from Afghanistan. I was slightly overwhelmed at the thought that I was standing at one of the focal points of the opium trade. After getting in trouble from a few large border guards with AK-47s slung over their backs, we decided to head to Ishkashim without our co-worker. On the drive down, the locals in the car were surprised at the heightened level of military personnel scattered along the road, presumably due to the ‘rising militants’ in Tajikistan and the summit meeting which took place the day before (the third bomb in a week exploded in Dushanbe last night).
At the office in Ishkashim, we were greeted with chai and cookies as we discussed with the engineer where the erosion is the most severe. Within our timeframe we decided it was a better idea to slowly head back to Khorog and stop at villages on the way, rather than venture further into Ishkashim territory. On the way past the border-crossing, we were finally able to connect with our co-worker who explained crossing was unusually slow, once again due to the heightened security.
The first two villages we visited had a similar story: a dam and canal was built in Soviet times but has since been washed away. The only thing that is predictable of the mighty Pyanj river is that it constantly changes its course. As I walked along a precarious river bank, half of which had recently crumbled into the roaring river below, our engineer described how the land now under water was once a forest. The same story applied to the next villages that we visited along the river.
Upon returning to the car, we were shown how to dig up licorice root and chewed on it for a few minutes to extract its sweet juice.
The driver (who loves the fact that I have a Muslim name) insisted that I see the hotsprings along the road. So we stopped in a small village and walked through a run-down garden to two small buildings, one marked with a M for men the other with the Cyrillic zu for women. The hotsprings themselves were rather gross and small…I definitely was not enticed to jump in! But the garden did have apricots trees, and by this time were all starving and there was no prospect for food up the road. So we shook the trees and ripe apricots came crashing down, cracking as the hit the dirty ground… I ate them anyways.
We then stopped in a village which had some representative high pastures and hillside erosion problems. The community had experimented with terracing which had been successful for a few years, but now was also succumbing to erosion. Shortly thereafter we stopped at a mineral spring, where a women was frying some fresh caught fish from the river named ‘Malinka’ which I’m pretty sure means small… they were delicious! So after being refueled by fish, bread and chai, we visited our remaining sites. One high pasture site was off the main road up a valley. The road was uncomfortably precarious …one of my local co-workers repeatedly warned the driver to turn around (this was after we saw the remnants of a tractor which had fallen through the road, crashing into the rocky river bed below). But no, the driver just kept going. At one point, we were driving behind the world’s oldest bull-dozer type thing, that was creating the new road to replace the one that now lay 100 feet beneath us. Seriously this bull-dozer was ancient, I was told it dated back to before the Russian revolution, and I believe it > photo to follow!
Anyways, we made it to the village, whose road and bridge were built from the compliments of CIDA.
On the drive back to Khorog we were once again held up by a road block, this time because the Afghans were dynamiting the mountain facing us to build a road. So after waiting a few minutes (we found some wild peas in the wheat field beside the road) we saw a huge explosion and giant cloud of dust. After passing, we stopped in a co-workers village outside of Khorog where we sat in an orchard oasis, eating kilos of ripe apricots and white mulberries (Tajikistan’s specialty). Grassy green slope with a small stream running through to the village below, children climbing the fruit trees and learning that one must eat the inside of the apricot pit to avoid getting a stomach ache after eating so many of the sweet fruits… it was a perfect ending to the day.
After arriving in Khorog, Allison and I were invited out to the ‘Mafia’ pizza parlour (still not sure why it’s called that, but I’m afraid there’s a good reason for it), where we enjoyed too much greasy cheesy pizza and too much vodka, before the restaurant was turned into our own private dance floor.

I hope these berries are OK to eat…

I hope these berries are OK to eat…
I hope this water is OK to drink…
I hope this severely eroded hillside is OK to climb…
I hope this food we are eating with these random men is OK…

Sitting in our landlady’s fruit garden studying our Tajik notes, we are being attacked by white mulberries. These mulberries are very sweet and tasty, but Allison said they look like Larvae…so I’m a bit turned off. Today we hiked up to the botanical garden of Khorog, the 2nd highest botanical garden in the world. The trek there was long and hot and dusty. We cut off the road and hiked straight up a beachy-looking hillside…we survived. The gardens themselves are quite wild and we ate lots of fruit off the fruit trees. Cherries, white, red and black mulberries, apricots, sour un-ripe apples and some strange little red berries… I tried them all. Hopefully I’ll survive. We also ran out of water, so we just drank water coming out of a hose up there… hopefully we’ll survive. On our way back, we were invited by some old men eating lunch getting drunk on the roadside to join them in their feast. We did. Although we were able to avoid the rancid looking looking chicken and just ate their watermelon. Somehow, with a few tajik words, we were able to have a fun conversation with them. After our watermelon feast, we headed back on the road to Khorog. Thankfully after not to long as mini-bus stopped to offer us a ride, which at that point we were more than happy to accept!
Our Sunday was topped off with hand-washing all of our laundry, making hummus and dinner (chick peas and pasta) and apricot jam! We’ll see how the jam turns out…we have neither lemon nor gelatin. I expect it will be sweet soupy mess, but it will definitely beat the dry non with nothing on it we’ve been eating every morning.
Also, check out my roomies blog, she has a link to tons of awesome photos! Which her techno-perseverance has allowed her to link to flickr.
http://akurahashi.wordpress.com/

Roof of the world festival

The goal of the festival is to increase dialogue and cultural awareness among various central Asian countries: Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Kazakhstan; as well as promote sustainable alternative technologies and natural resource management practices. The evening was wrapped up with a beautiful traditional Pamiri concert.
At the festival I was put in charge of the solar panel/light bulbs for a while. A group of men came by from a village high up in the Bartang valley. They explained that they had no more power, since their supply from the hydro dam had been damaged. So two villages are without any electricity and they are interested in solar panels, which I found totally awesome! The price is $1000 per unit, or $10 per watt, which is pretty steep. I will follow up on what we can do for them.
The festival was also a great place to meet people. Over 1000 people were in the park, from Khorog and surrounding villages, as well as many tourists. Manfred, a German whom I met the day before, biked from Dushanbe to Khorog and on to Murgab, KaraKul, Kyrgystan, China and then to Islamabad. Amazing! He met a French couple who have biked here from…. FRANCE. That’s over 8000 km, and I don’t even want to start thinking about the altitude…

First week= Field week!

I was extremely lucky this week, since we had a ‘donor-visit’ which meant that I was not only introduced to many of the projects in the area, but I also got to go into the field every day.
Yesterday we drove south along the border to Ishkashim, one of the most beautiful drives in the world. Driving along a roaring river, passing through canyons and remote villages we took GPS points along the way (go figure, there were always 8 or 9 satellites available). A few things struck me on the drive down. For the most part, we were driving on a paved road while the road on the Afghan side of the river was either non-existent or dirt. The Tajik side was further characterized by electrical lines and tin roofs in the villages, whereas the Afghan side had no electrical wires at all, and all the houses were made of manure paddies. Perhaps the starkest difference was the green lush fields on the Afghan side compared to the rocky dry Tajik soil.
In Ishkashim we had a meeting with an NRM specialist. A co-worker asked why the Afghans seemed to have greater success in terms of crop yields. The man translating was immediately offended and exclaimed “what do you mean better?!” so we hastily mentioned that the land appeared to be more productive. After the translator overcame his initial indignation to the question, he repeated it to our interviewee, who replied that the Afghans are experts in agriculture as they have been doing it ’forever,’ whereas Tajiks often held other jobs such as teachers or doctors and therefore are less experienced farmers. The second answer he gave was that Afghans have always owned their own land, as opposed to Tajiks who shared communal land for many years (this is still sometimes the case; eg. village pasture land).
One of my main observations this week is this cultures reluctance to share information. In a land committee office, we had to work very hard to receive any maps at all, since for a long time the maps had been classified, confidential information. This mentality passes over into workplace, re. organizational capacity.

Conservation vs. Development

The age-old adage. Had an interesting discussion with a co-working about conservation in a development context. We were both frustratingly wondering how to promote the idea of conservation in a community struggling to survive. Obviously I don’t have the answer to this question, but from what I’ve observed, there aren’t too many options.
The bridge between policy and conservation science is key. No matter what the communities attitudes are towards conservation, without a solid policy framework, not much conservation can take place. My observation in Madagascar was that communities made the link between conservation and their livelihood on their own. The intrinsic value of the forest to them was not only a cultural one, but they expressed their need of external help to preserve their watershed. Under a strong national conservation strategy, the community worked to preserve their forest according to national restriction. Within that context, environmental education was relatively simple.
Take away the government, take away the conservation policy and the community, no matter what their feelings are towards the forest, are vulnerable to external exploitation—a more lucrative endeavor than the free boots and jackets forest wardens used to get for protecting the forest.
This isn’t quite so simple. Under Ravalomanana’s rule, there was a lot of state-supported illegal exploitation. However, this was rather indirect, and not compromising the conservation attitudes of the individual farmers.

Conservation vs. Development

The age-old adage. Had an interesting discussion with a co-working about conservation in a development context. We were both frustratingly wondering how to promote the idea of conservation in a community struggling to survive. Obviously I don’t have the answer to this question, but from what I’ve observed, there aren’t too many options.
The bridge between policy and conservation science is key. No matter what the communities attitudes are towards conservation, without a solid policy framework, not much conservation can take place. My observation in Madagascar was that communities made the link between conservation and their livelihood on their own. The intrinsic value of the forest to them was not only a cultural one, but they expressed their need of external help to preserve their watershed. Under a strong national conservation strategy, the community worked to preserve their forest according to national restriction. Within that context, environmental education was relatively simple.
Take away the government, take away the conservation policy and the community, no matter what their feelings are towards the forest, are vulnerable to external exploitation—a more lucrative endeavor than the free boots and jackets forest wardens used to get for protecting the forest.
This isn’t quite so simple. Under Ravalomanana’s rule, there was a lot of state-supported illegal exploitation. However, this was rather indirect, and not compromising the conservation attitudes of the individual farmers.