Me-go: Around-the-World

Alichur, Tajikistan | 29 September, 2009 | $8.75

We arrived in Alichur with an hour or two before sundown so I went out exploring. I took wonderful photos of the local kids and the father and daughter I had tea with in their home. Unfortunately, this is the one memory card in my camera I managed to erase by mistake. When I got back to the house I learned that one of my travelmates had been sent out to look for me since I was a woman alone and it was almost dark. Staying with Rahima and her daughters was a great experience. She was a teacher at the town school and a transplant from Dushanbe who spoke passable English! It was wonderful to finally learn about our driver and the Tajik culture without pantomime.

I took down Rahima’s address hoping to communicate with her in the future. Amazingly, my friend David was traveling through Tajikistan recently and hand delivered my photos to her and a few other people in the towns along the Wakhan Corridor. You can read about his quest to find the people in my photos here at his blog.

At this altitude the nights were bitterly cold and we had drunk a lot of tea. The house was small with a narrow entrance hallway where the driver slept, the main room with the stove and a platform where we slept and a small room where the Rahima and her three daughters slept. The baby was colicky and up most of the night crying but I had trouble sleeping for other reasons?imagine waking up in a dark house at a high altitude and trying your hardest to go back to sleep instead of going to the bathroom. After an hour you give up and put on your clothes, boots, coat, hat and gloves. Once you find your flashlight you make your way outside and navigate the frozen dirt path to the public toilets a few doors down. You have to hold your flashlight to make sure you don’t step through into the pit (see the photo below) while looking out for any animals or neighbors.