Jan 7, 2013
“I was always at risk of being arrested by secret service agents. They hated independent journalists,” says Aida Eizeman, a former journalist from Uzbekistan. “There are eight journalists currently languishing in their dungeons. When they told me that they can easily imprison me, I left my homeland. I have lived as a refugee in Idaho. Now...
Dec 3, 2012
The Orthodox Church of Georgia is attracting a post-communist generation in need of a point of reference. Nine years after the Rose Revolution, the young generation reflects the hopes and contradictions of this ancient Christian nation, torn between desire for freedom and preservation of tradition. About thirty kilometers from Tbilisi, nestled in a valley, the...
Nov 26, 2012
Below are my SUUUPER LONG travelogues from this summer. Read them at your leisure, or not at all! Take care, ladies and gentlemen! Adventurously, Jaimee Dusty Desert I look out my window at the dusty mesquite tree. There is no puff of wind in this desert to shake it. I hear the sound of voices....
Nov 19, 2012
One of the most striking visuals that greets a visitor passing through the Dardanelles Strait (known in Turkish as the Çanakkle Boğazı) is this fragment of Turkish verse carved into the hillside: Dur yolcu! Bilmeden gelip bastığın, Bu toprak, bir devrin battığı yerdir. The words are a fragment from a poem by Necmettin Halil Onan. Those are...
Nov 12, 2012
HATAY PROVINCE, TURKEY — One of the main Muslim holidays, Eid al-Adha, came at the end of October. During the massive fireworks and celebrations all around Turkey, fighting continued in Syria despite hopes for a cease fire. Even though the Turkish military is playing a more visible role by the border, the trust in the...
Nov 5, 2012
Zurich – Dubai On a recent flight from Zurich to Dubai, I had a couple from Switzerland sitting next to me going on their honeymoon to Réunion. They asked me where they could find the movies in German. They wouldn’t understand English, not to mention have any interest in the selection of Arab, Hindi, Telugu,...
Oct 29, 2012
“Yes, they do, they do!” says 11 year old Nagihan. She is reacting to her mother, Aynur Kusca, who says elective Kurdish class isn’t offered at her daughter’s school. They discuss the topic but keep disagreeing. But anyway, Aynur explains, even if her daughter is right she wouldn’t enroll her in Kurdish class. “It is...
Oct 22, 2012
In the jumpy YouTube video, tiny eleven year-old Medya Ormek, dressed in baggy green pants and a black-checked scarf stands at a podium with her microphone in hand. In front of her are nearly a million people gathered for Newroz festival, an ancient Kurdish celebration of spring refashioned into a celebration of ethnicity and rebellion....
Oct 15, 2012
picture credit: Molapse - http://molapse.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/molapse-is-back-in-analogue-form/ When farangi find out that I’m a professional blogger working on Central Asia, they usually pause and ask, with all sincerity, “they have the Internet out there?” I’m not trying to make a dig at my fellow Occidentals. It’s true that, for one reason or another, Central Asia tends to...
Oct 1, 2012
Most elections are boring. It’s true, not some sort of Imposition of Western Norms or anything; people vote for the fella they like the most, and the obvious candidate usually wins. The binary nature of democracy — the “him, not her” aspect of it — really puts a damper on the theater of the political...
Sep 24, 2012
It was late April 2011. The air in Belbulak, the Almaty satellite city we temporarily called home, was coarse with burning garbage. Dust hung along the unpaved roads. The refuse of the winter’s toss-in-the-snow disposal system was emerging rotted and unclaimed. The smell through town was enough enough to turn our eyes watery and to...
Sep 17, 2012
“Poetry is the queen of language, the sovereign of the word. […] Language has free will in it and it warms the heart with the roundness and perfection of its form.” So says Abai Qunanbaiuli, perhaps the most well-known of the nineteenth century Central Asian men of letters. This epigram is taken from his...
