Welcome to Yuz-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan (also known as Uzbekistan)

A few months ago it was announced that the mid-year conference for all the English Language Fellows in the South Central Asia region would be held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.  I was hopeful that I would get my Indian visa on time to be able to go because I have always wanted to see the 'Stan countries.  Luckily, I arrived in India two weeks before the conference.  I needed to get from my city of Vadodara to New Delhi to catch a flight to Tashkent.  Unfortunately, that morning I got a message saying the flight had been cancelled due to heavy fog in New Delhi.  I was eventually rerouted through Mumbai and then got stuck in the Mumbai airport.  I watched as mobs formed to shout and chant at airline workers every time another flight was delayed or cancelled.  Since all the airplanes were grounded in New Delhi, they couldn't be sent on to other cities, so air travel in the whole country was affected.  Finally, at around 4 in the morning the flight took off.  This was the view of the wing as we landed in New Delhi:

I had already missed my flight to Uzbekistan and the next one wasn't until the next day so I got a hotel near the airport and booked a new flight to Tashkent.  That night I was watching the local news and there was a segment about all the stranded passengers and an airline worker that was assaulted in the Mumbai airport.  I didn't see the assault, but I wasn't surprised after seeing how angry the people were.  The next day the fog had mostly cleared and I got to travel on a new airline to a new country!

I got to learn airline safety while also learning about Uzbek culture.  No smoking on the flight or the ghosts of the Silk Road emperors will come to haunt you and put out your cigarette!

It was interesting to watch the route the plane took over the Western Himalayas.  We flew over northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan before touching down in Tashkent.

The view was incredible over the mountains.

Every time I hear the name of the country I am reminded of this interview with Herman Cain, a presidential candidate back in 2012:

A lot has changed in Uzbekistan since then.  They got a new president in 2016 and were named 'Country of the Year' by The Economist in 2019.  The people are eager to learn English and develop their tourism sector, and the U.S. is supporting those goals by placing English Fellows all over the country.

We stayed at the Radisson hotel for our conference.  The Fellows all came together from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, India (only me), Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. It was fun to see the other teachers that I hadn't seen since our training in Washington D.C. last August.  Back then, we formed WhatsApp groups to keep in contact and be able to commiserate when we struggled with adapting to our assignments.  It was nice to finally spend time together in person and learn from each other.  

In the evenings we were able to go out and explore the city.  I wasn't really prepared for the cold, so I brought every jacket I had packed with me to India (mostly rain jackets for monsoon season).  I just tried to enjoy it because India is already starting to get hot and humid after a mild winter.

There were some cool buildings in the old part of town.  The actual site is hundreds of years old, but much of the buildings have been restored at various times because Tashkent is prone to earthquakes that tend to knock down a lot of the brick structures.  Apparently the oldest Koran in the world is here, but we didn't make it there until after closing time.  This was a REALLY BIG DOOR.

One of the evenings we went to a cultural center to participate in some activities.  We got to meet a music master who played the Sato for us.  His grandfather was part of a movement to reintroduce the making and playing of this instrument, and he passed the tradition down to his son and grandson.

It was beautiful to hear.

We also had a chef come and teach us how to make the national dish of Plov, which is meat, rice, and vegetables cooked slowly in lamb fat over a fire.

I'd like to think I was helping, but there is a specific way to stir it to keep the greasy fat on the bottom, the layer of vegetables and meat in the middle, and the rice on top.  

I did my best not to ruin it and in the end it turned out to be delicious.  I also loved the pastries stuffed with meat and potatoes.

Another famous food in Tashkent is the bread.  Each baker has their own stamp to brand their bread with their design.  I learned that the way they ferment the yeast means the bread can last months without spoiling.  People will travel to Tashkent, buy bread, then take it back to their village and steam a piece of it to make it soft again.

Tashkent is one of the few cities in the region that has a metro system.  It was built in the Soviet era, and some of the stations were built to look more like palaces than a metro stop.

After our three-day Fellows conference we then had another two-day conference which was sponsored by the English language teachers in the country and held at the Uzbekistan State World Languages University.  We were all asked to present and attend the presentations of English teachers from around the region.  For a lot of them, it was their first time presenting at a conference.

Even the U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan was there the first day to open up the conference and meet the teachers.  Times like this remind me of how important the role of soft diplomacy is in the region.  I believe that peace in the world isn't just about ending conflict, but comes from gaining a better understanding of each other, which takes a lot of time and work. 

One of the friends I've made is Sharon who happens to be from Erda, Utah.  It was fun to hang out with her this week.  She is posted in Tajikistan and it's been interesting to compare the differences in our experiences. 

The conference provided lunch for us, and we got to sit and share a plate of Plov with the Uzbek teachers.  It was nice to be able to chat with them and find out about the different types of students they were teaching.  They all spoke English, too! 😆

On the last night the teenage students in the Access English program put on a show that tied in the history of Uzbekistan with the history of America.  

There was a lot of cultural appropriation going on at certain points.  And despite the cheesiness of the finale where all the students held hands and sang 'We are the World', it was well done and they had clearly had worked very hard on it.

After the conferences were done I had one day to spare before returning to India.  At the recommendation from one of the teachers I booked a one-day tour to the city of Samarkand, the old capital of the Timurid Empire.  The train took about 2.5 hours and then a guide and driver picked me up at the station and took me around to all the sites before returning on the evening train back to Tashkent.

There are a lot of REALLY BIG DOORS in Samarkand.  In fact, it's famous for them.  My neck was sore by the end of the day from staring up at the intricate tiles.

Even when you went inside the door, the beauty didn't stop there.  It reminded me of the Alhambra in Spain, on the other end of the Islamic architectural world.

This is the tomb of Emir Timur, also known as Tamerlane or Tamer Beg.  A descendant of Genghis Khan, in the late 1300s he went on a conquering spree all over the region.  He made it from the southern part of Russia down to the northern part of India, from the western edge of China over to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.  He brought back riches from all across Asia to build his own mausoleum and is considered to be the father of Uzbekistan.

His grandson is also buried here, the great astronomer Ulugh Beg, who wasn't quite as fierce a leader as his grandfather.  He was a thinker.  He brought scholars from all around the Islamic empire to teach math and science at his big madrasa, or school.  It was built on Registan Square in Samarkand and has a lot of REALLY BIG DOORS.

The students who studied here would receive scholarships to come and study for two years.  These were their dorm rooms - much nicer than mine when I was in college.

I couldn't stop staring at the tilework.  It was amazing.

 At some point someone introduced the color green into the tiles.  Not a door, but a REALLY BIG WINDOW.

Like Tashkent, Samarkand is prone to earthquakes that like to knock things down.  This is a picture from the 1930s of people trying to straighten out one of the pillars.  

As you stand in that same spot today and look up at it, it's still a little crooked.  I definitely wouldn't want to be standing under it when a big earthquake hits.

It's interesting to note that while these scholars were Muslim and used Arabic as the language of science, many of the strict religious clerics of the day did not always approve of their emphasis on scientific knowledge rather than on faith.

These REALLY BIG DOORS were all squished together at the mausoleum of a cousin of the prophet Mohammed.

It was hard to tell the difference between a madrasa (school), a mosque, and a mausoleum.  Luckily I had a good tour guide to let me know which sites were which.  Oddly enough, when he asked me where I was from and I said Utah, he immediately asked if I was LDS.  He said when he was in high school he was a foreign exchange student with an LDS family in Maryland.  He is atheist, but he told me about going to church with the family and seeing the Washington D.C. temple.

Of course, you can't visit a main hub on the Silk Road without seeing some silk carpets.  Nowadays most of the rugs are made in factories with synthetic silk.  The real ones (and even the synthetic ones) were way outside my price range and hard to stuff in a carry-on bag.

We then went to another part of town where Ulugh Beg built his astronomical observatory.  Here he made a lot of the discoveries that propelled scientific knowledge about the universe between the eras of Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe.

Ulugh Beg didn't have a telescope but he built his sextant big enough to able to measure the most accurate length of one year that anyone had ever calculated before.  

I kept thinking about how I don't really appreciate how much of our world is built on the knowledge of others.  I sit and type on a computer, but I don't really know how it works on the inside.  We have a lot of information about science that came from those before us that I often take for granted.  The guide and I both wondered what Ulugh Beg would have thought about the flat-earther movement today.

The last stop on the tour was the mosque and mausoleum of Emir Timur's wife (well, at least his favorite one), Bibi Khanom.  This one is now the poster child for the debate on how to best preserve the old buildings of Samarkand.  The guide told me when he was a child he used to play among the ruins of this mosque.  This picture shows the different stages of restoration.

Unsurprisingly, it also had some REALLY BIG DOORS.

I enjoyed my time in Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan and hope I will get to see more of it someday!

Finally back in India!

After spending two months in the U.S. trying to get a new Indian visa, I finally got the correct one just after Christmas.  It was so nice being home for the holidays, but it was also stressful not knowing if I would make it back to India to finish my Fellowship.

My first week back there was a holiday celebrating the birthday of the Maharaja who started the university, so we got a day off.  Some of the teachers in the Environmental Science department planned a picnic outing and invited me to join them.  We left in the morning and stopped along the way for some fried street snacks.  It was a busy stall and the food came out fresh, so I didn't worry too much about getting sick (and I didn't, thankfully).

We kept driving for another hour or so and reached the Namada River.  We wandered around for a while and then took a small ferry boat to the other side and back.  It was really nice to get out of the city and see some nature.

I had always assumed that the burning of the bodies only happened at the Ganges but apparently not.  On the shores of this river there was a metal pyre set up for the cremation of the dead.  

There were also a lot of little scraps of clothing and trinkets strewn about along the banks.  I bent down to look at them closer and one of the teachers told me, "Don't touch that.  People put in their wishes and prayers for both good and evil, and you never know what type of spirits the item might have attached to it."  What I thought was just careless trash was actually a part of someone's way of worshipping.  It reminded me that  there are probably many things in India that seem to be one way on the surface but actually have deeper meanings I am unaware of.

We left the river and stopped in a town where there were a lot of monkeys.  There are monkeys in Vadodara, too, but I don't usually have the chance to get pictures of them.  

In the town one of the teachers bought the supplies for our picnic lunch.  There were no sandwiches or chips on this picnic.  We made chicken korma in a pot slow-roasted over the fire.  I watched as they added the spices.  There were multiple types of chili powder that went into the pot.  A few times they said, (in English for my benefit since most of the conversations were in Hindi) "Don't put too much in.  We don't want to make it too spicy for Alana."  Then when it was ready they asked me to taste it first to make sure it was Ok for me.  It was, of course, too spicy so when I hesitated, they thought it would be a good idea to add a bunch of water to the pot.  I stopped them because underneath the spiciness it was delicious, and adding water would not have helped with the spice level.  I assured them I would be fine. 

I enjoyed helping them build the fire.  The other teachers told me I should just sit back and relax, but I told them how at home, my husband and I like to go camping and make campfires.  I hope that their acceptance of me helping indicated a little bit of the transition from 'visiting teacher to be treated like a guest' to 'she is now one of us'.  

A few days after the picnic it was my birthday.  I don't normally like to make a big deal about birthdays, but it's tradition that the teacher who has a birthday should provide lunch for the teachers and staff in the department.  Somebody will then provide a cake for the birthday person.  I found a restaurant nearby that I had been wanting to try and ordered enough food for 20 people in advance.  I got some different types of breads and a dish called Dal Makhani, which is lentils in a smoky dark sauce.  It's supposed to be less spicy than other dishes, but you know how that always turns out for me.  

During class in the morning I let it slip to my students that it was my birthday, and at break time one of the students mumbled some excuse that he had to go take care of something.  He came back a little while later with a birthday cake for me!  Instead of calling their teachers Mr. or Mrs. and their last name to show respect, they use the teacher's first name with ma'am.  So, I am called 'Alana ma'am'.  Or in this case, 'ALANA MAM'.

I then learned that in Indian culture when someone has a birthday, after singing and blowing out the candles, the birthday person is supposed to cut a small slice of cake, hand it to a guest, and the guest feeds it to them by hand.  I also learned that some guests will take the chance to smear the cake in the person's face (the way we do at weddings).  Luckily, my students informed me that they would not be doing that to me.  However, I was then informed that I had to cut a small piece off for each student to each feed me a bite one-after-another while they individually gave me their best wishes for a happy birthday.  I'll admit it was pretty awkward and funny at the same time.

After being hand-fed many small pieces of cake in my morning class, it was then time to have lunch with the teachers.  After lunch they brought out another cake and I was happy to see it was at least a different flavor, and a relief to know I only had to be fed by one of the teachers instead of all of them.

I was happy it was successful, especially after how many times I have been provided lunch on all the other teacher's birthdays.  The following week there was a festival called the 'kite festival' where people fly kites all over the city and in competitions.  I didn't see as much of this as I wanted to, but I did see some kids practicing flying their kites the day before.

Around the same time I started preparing my students for some project-based learning.  In the previous unit I had them write an essay that answered the questions:  'Why should people care about the environment, and why do some people choose not to care about the environment?'  Since many students said they felt it depended on a person's education level, I told the students we would do a project to survey the public to find out if there really is a correlation.  

I prepared them by discussing qualitative and quantitative data.  Then I put them into groups to create surveys on Google Forms together and designated a day that we would go out into the city to ask members of the public to take their surveys.  I coached them on how to approach strangers and what to do if people say no or ignore them.  We also divided up the areas around campus so that different groups wouldn't be asking people in the same areas.  I accompanied some of the groups and watched as they started out very nervously trying to talk to strangers.  

When we gathered back together at the end of the class, they were all excitedly talking about the people they had met and how friendly they were.  One student said his confidence grew and grew with each new person that he asked, and when he would get rejected he remembered my advice to not take it personally and just move on to the next person.

They discovered that people are more aware of environmental issues than they had realized, and many people do make an effort to recycle and reduce the amount of plastic they use.  It was amazing to see the students grow in confidence and better understand how knowledge is gained, and I was happy to help them acquire some of the skills I learned at their age as a missionary many years ago.