My new location

Muminabad, Tajikistan

Muminabad District is situated in the south, between one of the few lowlands of Tajikistan and the foot of the Pamir mountain range. It takes about a 4 hours drive from the capital Dushanbe to reach.

The town with its 13’000 inhabitants was constructed on the accumulated fan of the watershed of Chorvodor and Kojahakik. These rivers have their sources in the Hasr Etisi range, at the foothill of the Pamir mountain range.
Muminabad is situated on a gentle slope which ends in flat agricultural land where irrigated crops like vegetables and potatoes are cultivated.
This town makes one feel more like living in a large village, with mostly single-storey, loam plastered houses, than in a city.

I share the guesthouse of Caritas Switzerland with two other Swiss guys . The project coordinator of the project “Natural Disaster Risk Management” and the junior consultant who is working in the other project implemented by Caritas, “Local Development Muminabad”, are my fellow flat mates. Our office is situated on the upper end of Muminabad, overlooking the whole town and with an incredible view towards the upper part of the watersheds.

The atmosphere in Muminabad is very laid-back and calm. Only in the bazaar and the main square near our living house it is more lively. In the morning, when we leave for work, the women are usually cleaning the bare floor in front of their houses, while the children, always well dressed, are heading to school. When we leave the office in the evening, the livestock is coming back from the grazing. It seems as if some cows know where they live, when they trot along the streets and enter to their compounds independently.

The company of Tajik people makes living in Muminabad very pleasant. One of the big differences compared with life in Switzerland is the hospitality they maintain. As a foreigner you are treated like someone really special. They don’t even have the word “foreigner”, the closest word to it is guest. That gives me reason to think about the behavior in Switzerland towards foreigners and how even politicians argue when they talk about foreigners.

When I arrived mid September, Ramadan had just started. A whole nation or more precisely spoken a whole region of the worldneither eats nor drinks during daytime for a month. In the afternoon it was almost impossible to go for field visits since people suffered from headaches and were very tired. A whole region reduces its productivity to live their religion.
The end of Ramadan was celebrated with a party lasting for tree days. Every day since then there have been a lot of weddings. . . and in the evenings one can hear the drums from the neighboring compounds. A lot of young men come back from Russia, where they spend the summers as seasonal workers, and marry the girls their parents arranged for them. Most of them are about 20 years old then.

At this point the gender gap should be mentioned. The women wear always long robes and usually headscarf. In public the women and men eat in separate places; the women in the kitchen and the men in the living room. The women bring the trousseau to the wedding and the men pay a bride price. Apart from the fact that the women comes from an equal family, the most important is that the bride is a virgin.. I’ve heard that sometimes the groom brings the bride back to her family in the morning after the wedding and asks for the expenditures spend for the wedding from the bride’s family, because she seemed not to be a virgin…

Other culture, other customs.