It is nine in the morning on my last day in Dushanbe. I have been here just 14 days and in eighteen hours I will start the journey back to Ireland. I had originally hoped to take the train from Dushanbe to Moscow and document the trip that many of these labor migrants take. Unfortunately the process for securing all the correct visas (you travel across four international borders) takes nearly three weeks to complete.
I do not have the time or the money right now to wait three weeks in Dushanbe while the visas are arranged. Perhaps in the spring I will try and make that part of the story happen.
Tajikistan is a beautiful country. Its terrain and climate remind me very much of California, particularly the Bay Area. It is a mostly mountainous terrain with one large valley in the Southwest part of the country which is where Dushanbe is located. The city itself is a fairly new creation having been build by the Soviets only 70 years ago. There was once a small village and market located here. In fact the name Dushanbe simply means “Monday” in Tajik as this was the site of the “Monday market”.
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I am sitting in a hotel room in Dublin waiting to head to the airport to board a plane for Dushanbe, Tajikistan. It is the next step in my story on Russian migrant workers from Central Asia. 
As you know I spent two weeks in Moscow and got some good work done there and made some very good contacts.
My next trek to Tajikistan will help to round out the story. I want to show where the workers are coming from and the families that they are leaving behind. To do this I will spend about two weeks Traveling around Tajikistan meeting and documenting families. The final piece of this journey is to take the four day train ride from Dushanbe to Moscow.
My plea to you is for financial assistance. If you remember reading my previous post on my new ideas to fund documentary photography you are familiar with my concepts. If not you can find them here. I have reopened the Pledgie page and would love for everyone that read this to send as much as they can afford. Even $5 would help.
Now it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. If you really feel my photography is good and that this story needs to be told then step up and help me make sure I can finish shooting this story and get it sold. After spending two weeks meeting these people I feel now more than ever that their story needs to be told. Please help me click the link above and make a pledge.
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I have been back in Bantry for just over a week now. Things in Russia went very well. I had a wonderful visit with Sergey, Katya and Vasya. Vasilly was quizzing Sergey over the past two years wanting to know when Uncle Neal would be returning to Moscow. 
And then there I was! I brought him a toy robot that I found in the toy store here in Bantry. He loved it. He has learned a lot of English since I was there in 2007 and we were able to make up the gap using Google Translator. It was a short visit but I think we all liked it.
I met many people from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who were willing to share their stories with me. Many of them are helping me get connected with friends and family back in Tajikistan when I head there in less than a week. That is assuming I get there on 5 October.
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Hello all. Just a quick update to let everyone know I made it safely to Moscow. I have a meeting in the morning with one of the aid organizations that helps the Tajik migrants here in Moscow and Mansur gave me a bunch of information today that should get me started. I’ll update you all once I have more info.
It has been nearly a month since I last updated. It seems as though not that much has happened but then at the same time I have been too busy to post an update. In the past three weeks I have seen the Jameson distillery, took a hike around Whiddy Island, saw more of West Cork and got to shoot the Liverpool FC reserves team as they played a friendly match with the Dunmanway team. I have also booked my flight to Moscow.
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It has been a busy week-and-a-half here. Since landing I have celebrated Cillian’s ninth birthday and Richard and Leonie’s tenth anniversary. I have seen much of West Cork and a corner of County Kerry. I have Watched Shauna maddeningly getting ready for her “debs”. Had, and mostly lost, a small cold and started on the path to being a regular at Ma Murphy’s pub.
After a few days settling in here we had a “grand” celebration on Friday for Cillian’s ninth birthday. 
This day also happens to be Richard and Leonie’s tenth anniversary. As is the case a nine-year-old’s birthday takes over the house. After the little man’s football camp (Irish football) he and I walked down to town to the toy shop and got him my present, a Power Rangers helmet and a Matchbox car. When we got back Leonie prepared a feast with hamburgers and sausages cooked on the grill and a homemade cake. Cillian’s grandparents (Richard’s Ma and Da) came to visit from Blarney which was a surprise for him because we had not told him they would.
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I finally made it to Ireland after 14 hours on planes. I missed my connection to AerLingus because US Airways decided to have us sit on the tarmac for 45 min waiting for a gate before they just brought out the stairs and unloaded us. 
After being grilled by UK immigration—which I have yet to figure out why since I was not staying there—I was booked onto the next flight to Cork.
Leonie and her kids Shauna and Cillian picked me up at the airport with creamy, sticky Starbucks in hand. A little over an hours drive through the very green CO Cork country side and we ended up in Bantry. We had a quick tour of the town before settling in at home.
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Number 3 is empty, the car is in Sara’s care and the homeless folks around SJSU had their fun picking through my trash for the last week. Now I am sitting in SFO and will be boarding my flight in about an hour. Thanks to everyone who showed up at O’Flaherty’s last night. That was a wonderful send-off and certainly makes getting on the plane a bittersweet moment. I will be updating everyone here on my goings on in Ireland an later in Russia and Central Asia.
If you look to your right you will see a small bug from the website pledgie.com. The purpose of this is to allow my readers to help me fund the story I want to complete in Russia and Central Asia. The Pledgie website allows you to set-up a cause and solicit funds. The advantage over just using a PayPal donation is that the Pledgie causes are searchable on the internet and will hopefully reach a larger audience. (more…)
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It has been a while since I have posted anything to the blog. Its original purpose was to send updates from my 2007 trip to Russia and it has not gotten used much since then. In fact I accidentally deleted all the wordpress files while I was updating the main waterphoto site (oops). Luckily the database was still intact so the stories were left untouched. I plan to update this more frequently—all good bloggers pledge to do when they neglect their blogs. But that is not why Im writing today.
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