garmchashma

(Written offline on the evening of 6/26 as I wait for a 3G modem to get me online. It's now just before 10 AM on 6/27 and I"m sitting the office of the General Director of Pamir Energy, where internet is good. Mash'allah.)

Sorry for the multi-day absence. We left for Khorog on Tuesday morning via the helicopter (no prohibition on pics so I have lots more) and on arriving in Khorog unexpectedly found myself without internet. We were not in the office at all and the hotel didn’t even have TV reception. Being without internet when you expect to be is nice, but when it’s in the middle of a work trip it’s kind of anxiety-inducing. I’m late on a couple of kind of important emails that no one else can write, or, if they could write them they don’t know to because I can’t communicate with them. 

That aside, Khorog has been very cool. I spent all day yesterday driving around with a couple of PE engineers, Malohat and Mansoor. Malohat speaks English pretty well so she was my interpreter and guide. We visited a bunch of different substations, saw where the lines cross the river into Afghanistan at Tem, and checked out the two power stations: Khorog HPP and Pamir I HPP. I’d never been inside a hydropower plant before. Khorog HPP was especially cool because they are repairing two of the turbines, so they were turned off and we could see into the pipes and get up close. I imagine that in the States the safety precautions would be a lot higher but we had hard hats. Pamir I is bigger, 28 MW versus 10, so the turbines are vertical and a couple of stories tall rather than just lying on their sides. We also visited PE’s customer service and billing center and the main office, which is right above Khorog HPP. 

In the midst of all that we stopped for lunch in Khorog City Park, which was rehabilitated by AK Trust for Culture a couple of years ago. It was really nice, and the outdoor cafe where we ate was tasty. Lots of people around, kids swimming in a big pond, big poplar trees, groups of teenage girls looking exactly like groups of teenage girls look in the States, swing sets. The works. 

We had dinner at the Serena, which was excruciatingly slow if also very pretty. After a day of being driven around by Mansoor, who seemed to know every third car we passed, I knew at least 3/4 of the people who came to the Serena while we were there. There’s a big crew here for this built environment conference that I didn’t know about and ended up at today by pure coincidence. Focus people, AK Planning and Building people, AKF Pakistan people, and so on. I’ve met a bunch of people on this trip who I’ve corresponded with for years in some cases but never seen face-to-face. That’s been awesome, of course. I ate last night with my PE guides and then they left and I joined the Focus table (plus Hadi of AK Planning and Building) for some socializing. Lots of jokes, it was nice. A few of them were staying at the same hotel as me on the very opposite end of Khorog, so I caught a ride with them. 

This morning after breakfast Karim and Yousef and I walked around the somewhat overgrown but beautiful botanical gardens outside the hotel. Then they headed off to see some Focus stuff and I went down the hill to this conference. It was pretty dry so I won’t expand on it here.

And now I find myself in Garmchashma, which literally means “hot springs,” about an hour and twenty minutes south of Khorog, or upriver. Where I’m from rivers flow east or they flow south, so a river that flows basically due north gets me turned around. I’m here at the invitation of Daler, the General Director of PE, who’s been on a tour of some remote areas with the Norwegian ambassador to Central Asia. There has been some confusion with the logistics -- a common theme since I arrived in Tajikistan -- so I’ve been relegated to a kind of shitty room after being led to a quite nice room in a different building. I don’t mind taking a back seat to His Excellency, but I’m not going to say I wasn’t disappointed at the switch.

Frankly I guess I’d just rather be back in Khorog, where I know people and can communicate. It should be fun to be out here, and I’m glad I accepted Daler’s very last-minute invitation because if I was in Khorog I’d be thinking, Darn, I should have gone to the hot springs. By reputation they’re really nice, although I haven’t been in yet. Maybe later tonight? Maybe tomorrow? I’m at someone else’s mercy (Daler’s) and I don’t know where he is. I’m ashamed and angry with myself for feeling anything but gratitude and adventure for the opportunity to be in a place like this but I think I can just chalk it up to having this work hanging over my head and being unable to do it. I’ve even written out the emails, so it’ll just be a copy-past job: Once Daler arrives with his 3G modem and I can tick a couple of boxes off the list I will relax. Also once I eat. 

We’ll get up early and go back to Khorog in the morning, and then it’s meetings meetings, fly back to Dushanbe at 4 PM, and check back into Serena for one more day of meetings. Unless, of course, everything changes again. Anyway, two more days and then I’m on my way home. 

***12:20 AM***

I’m leaving the above the way it was because it’s the way I felt at the time and I’ve got no reason other than self-embarrassment to whitewash. Daler came a few minutes after I finished writing the post. He was so apologetic, and he’s such an incredibly nice person. And of course I said, No problem, don’t worry about it because (A) it really is fine, a few hours of mild inconvenience is really nothing to complain about and (B) I’m not a douche bag. So we had dinner together, with the Norwegian ambassador and a couple of other Norwegian guys, one from the Almaty office and one from Kabul. And also my co-passengers in the ride from Khorog, one of whom turned out to be former Deputy Minister for Energy in Tajikistan, and a major friend of PE as they were getting off the ground 5-10 years ago. The two Excellencies both speak fluent Russian so they went off into a corner and Daler and I had a chance to catch up.

After dinner was the springs. The Norwegians wanted to wait for the outdoor pool because I guess they’d been in the indoor one earlier in the day. Problem: At night it’s first-come, first-served, and there were some ladies there. No gender mixing, as you might imagine. I didn’t want to wait so I joined Daler and the Deputy Minister in one of the covered pools. It was great, hot but not overwhelming and minerally and peaceful. We did two dips, the first one maybe 15-20 minutes and the second one 8-10, with 30 minutes in between. Very relaxing. 

And now it’s late and I have the 3G modem but it’s really slow, so I’m not sure I’m going to get this up tonight anyway.