Tajikistan Year Two So Far

The city of Panjakent, Tajikistan, where Anna is living and working this year.  Beyond the city are the Zerafshan River and the Turkestan Range.

Hello, readers!  It's been a minute.  It's about time for me to get back here and share some stuff.  This is my first post since July last year.  As I mentioned there and also here, Anna and I signed on for another year of Tajikistan, but with a significant twist on our first year--this time we aren't there together.  We’re living apart this year.

Anna is working another year with the English Language Fellows Program.  She's in Panjakent, a small city in the country's west, near the border with Uzbekistan. Similar to last year in Khujand, Anna's primary duty is teaching teachers-in-training at an institute. Additionally, she teaches some classes and clubs at American Space Panjakent.  Anna also visits local classrooms and gives trainings to working English language teachers.

I'm living in Hebron, New Hampshire, a small, rural town where Anna and I own a house. It's a family place and we feel very, very, very lucky to have inherited it.  I have two jobs.  I tutor at a local private school, Holderness, and I'm an assistant at the devastatingly quaint Hebron Library.  If you like my writing here, consider signing up for our monthly newsletter because I write that too!  After years of living in Ohio, I'm enjoying living close to my family, nearly all of whom also live in New Hampshire. 

Living apart like this isn't our ideal life but we had our reasons. Anna was offered a second year of the Fellow program and very much wanted to do it. I enjoyed my experiences and work last year in Tajikistan but was eager to earn US dollars again. Beyond this, three other factors contributed to my decision to stay in the US. They were, in no particular order, taking care of our cats, seeing more of my family, and doing some renovation work on our house.

Over five months into this chapter of life, I can say that we're doing well. Anna and I are healthy and happy far more often than not. Living apart and all has been a strange experience for us though and not one we're particularly eager to continue beyond this year. Anna's work is going well and she's even getting additional opportunities beyond what she did last year, which is obviously really wonderful. In January she traveled to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as part of a week-long education conference--definitely material for a future blog post! Right after that she went to Tashkent--the capital of Uzbekistan, if you needed a reminder--and helped to lead her program’s midyear conference.  I'm very proud of her!

Anna after a presentation in Turkmenistan.

Meanwhile I'm doing things I hoped to do here in New Hampshire. As I mentioned earlier, I see a lot more of my family than I did when we lived in Ohio. In particular, I see a lot of my brother, Will, who lives less than a mile from me! I also enjoy my work. Right now we're also in the depths of New England winter.  I definitely support the adage "if it's cold, it may as well snow."  And snow we have. I've somewhat kept up with my running, but I also enjoy snowshoeing and nordic skiing, both of which are excellent workouts.

Nordic skiing selfie!

Speaking of running, a recent highlight for me was running my first marathon in October, the Marine Corps in DC.  My sister, Meg, ran it too--she lives there--and talked me into it, not that I needed much convincing.  Those sibling rivalry instincts kicked in pretty hard.  No way was I not going to run a marathon if Meg was doing one--her first as well!

Meg and I moments before the start of our marathon.

While Anna and I are in the midst of ten months of living apart, we are getting in some visits. She was just back here in the US for a couple of weeks and then I'll visit her there in the spring. The program wraps up in June and we're scheming about some additional travel then.

Anyways, that's it for this post--just a short update.  I promise to you (and me) that I'll come back to this blog before another six months have passed.  My lack of writing hasn't been accidental though.  The thread of this blog is definitely harder to pin down this year.  Last year fit a tidy narrative.  We're going abroad! We're living in a country most Americans have never heard of!  Everything in Tajikistan was new to us and I wrote about it.  People write blogs when they go live abroad for a year or whatever.  It all added up to an easy but also, hopefully, engaging narrative.

This year is so... different.  Among other things, the name of this blog doesn't work anymore!  I'm no longer trailing and I'm not in Tajikistan.  Seriously though, it's harder to write this year.  I've always seen the focus of this blog as Tajikistan much more than us as a couple or me as an individual, so to not be in Tajikistan is an obvious difficulty!  While living apart like this is another way of living abroad, and one that plenty of people do, it's not exactly the kind of journey I'm itching to share.  If you want a blog about the challenges of staying connected to your partner across ten time zones in the deceptive intimacy of our digital age you'll have to look elsewhere, sorry.

If you've made it this far, thanks so very much for reading. I appreciate the loyal reading and many compliments I've received since starting this blog in August 2022. A good bit of this love comes from family, so that's a bit compulsory, but more than a fair amount of support has come from people not so obliged to read my blog, let alone say anything to me about it.  I've written this in various ways in various posts last year, but gratitude is always worth repeating, especially after so long away from here.  Thank you so very much for reading!  I'll be back on here again before too long.