Intermediate/Advanced Persian, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 2011

Indiana University at Bloomington (MA programs in Central Eurasian Studies and Folklore & Ethnomusicology

I first learned about the CLS program the year it started, but I wasn't accepted into the program until this year.

Persian was and in many ways still is one of the most important languages of the Central Asian region, my region of specialization and interest. It was a lingua franca historically and has heavily influenced the other major language group of Central Asia, the Turkic languages. Anyone who wants to be a decent Central Asianist needs a good mastery of Persian.

I'm interested in traditional arts of Central Asia and how they might fare in the face of increasing technologization and globalization, how they might be utilized for the economic development of the region, and what Central Asian traditions can teach the rest of the world. Tajikistan is the poorest of the Central Asian post-Soviet states and there's a great potential for the economic empowerment of people in Tajikistan through the sale, teaching, and exhibiting of traditional arts and handicrafts, as well as through increased heritage tourism in the region. Knowing Tajiki Persian will help me work in these areas.

I plan to stay informed about developments in Tajikistan and Iran through reading the news from those countries in my target language. I also have Iranian friends I speak Persian within the United States.

I'd like to use Persian in my career, particularly the Tajiki dialect. I'm interested in doing work in Tajikistan that can benefit the people of the country while also making a useful contribution to the academic community in the fields of Central Asian studies and folklore studies.

Participation in CLS hasn't significantly changed my goals, but it has shown me that Tajikistan in particular has a lot to offer and could be a great site for doing work on traditional arts. Before I participated in CLS I hadn't really considered Tajikistan as a potential place to live or work.

My favorite part about studying in Tajikistan is the people! Tajiks are incredibly friendly, hospitable, and warm. I've stayed with three different Tajik families during the last month and a half, just people I met at the bazaar and became friends with. No one in the United States would invite someone they met at the grocery store over for dinner, much less to be an overnight guest. Tajiks are some of the nicest people I've ever met.

The political and economic problems here are a lot different from what I could have guessed living in the U.S. When you read in a book or article that unemployment is a huge problem, that doesn't have nearly the same effect on you as seeing your friends kicked out of the bazaar for not paying the right bribes and thus losing their sole source of income. I never could have guessed just how little concern the Tajik government has for the people who live here or how flagrantly they flaunt their ill-begotten wealth while the people lack even the most basic social services. I'd like to come back and try to help in some way in the future.

I spent a weekend with a Tajik family in the countryside on what used to be a collective farm. Tajiks try to make guests feel comfortable and don't like them to work or help out, but I was insistent, so they let me chop onions and carrots and go with them to get water upstream. They laughed a lot because I kept spilling the water out of the bucket as I walked. They asked if we didn't carry water in the U.S. and I said I never had. It must have been quite a scene, an American woman carrying water but not knowing how to do it right.

My favorite word in Tajiki Persian is "mayleh" or "maylaysh" ("MY-lee," "MY-lash") which just means "okay." It's different from the Farsi (Iranian) Persian word for "okay" which is "baashad." Learning two different dialects of Persian at once has been really tough and sometimes I've thought my brain couldn't possibly handle such a daunting task, but the differences in the two dialects make the language a lot of fun.

I grew up in Texas but went to college in Oregon so I don't have a Texas accent anymore. In addition to Persian I also speak Turkish and whatever remnants of Chinese I still have from studying it as an undergrad.