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”.

The area has a very tolerable climate with warm dry summers and cold winters that experience light snowfall in the lowlands. Even as late as mid-October and I am comfortable walking around in a t-shirt in the day and a light jacket at night. Since the population of the country is only about seven million it can have a bit of an empty feeling at times.

Those seven million inhabitants make up for this by being some of the most hospitable people I have ever spent time with. Every house you visit regardless of the time of day will sit you down to tea and snacks and then serve a great meal of “plov”, their national rice dish. Plov is made of rice with carrots and chickpeas and sometimes raisins cooked with bits of lamb and served in a great mound on a plate that everyone shares from. I don’t think I ever ate as much as the two weeks here visiting families. At one point I had to remind my fixer that even though I didn’t wish to be rude I did need to stop eating and make some pictures.

One of the obvious reasons that the labor migrants leave Tajikistan for Russia to work is that they are unable to find good work at home. The economic situation in Tajikistan is not a particularly sunny one. When the Soviet Union collapsed the Tajiks as well as much of Central Asia was left with not very much. Turkmenistan found oil and gas and Uzbekistan has had some similar success.

Tajikistan has been the unlucky cousin. The oil reserves that are locked in their mountains are small and very expensive to get at. The Soviets had brought very little industry here and so when they left there was not very much for this new country to base an economy on. They are slowly starting to try and build an industrial base. The Soviets did leave them with a fairly well built infrastructure. There are good roads to most of the country and a train line that leads to Russia as well as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

From what I have been able to witness Tajikistan’s future is in tourism. They have a mountain wilderness that is on par with the Colorado Rockies or the California Sierra Nevada. There are mountain peaks that have not been climbed yet and forests yet to have trails put in. And this country’s best natural resource is its people. If they were to build up a mountain tourist industry they might be able to keep some of their young men from leaving for Russia.

I wrote this post while sitting in the apartment of my interpreter Davlyat. Now I am back in Ireland and it is time to figure out my next move. I have run out of money so it is very important that I sell this story and try to recover some of the expense of last two months. Unfortunately my prospects at making a living here in Ireland are not great so it looks like I will be headed state-side sooner than I would have liked when I left back in July.