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— here’s a broad sketch of the trip: I had the luxury of enjoying Dushanbe for a week before setting off to the Pamirs, but one of my travel mates flew in from Bishkek the morning before and had a crash-tour of the city. We stopped to take pictures of the Nurek Reservoir about an hour outside Dushanbe, stopped again in Kulob for lunch, stopped once more in Kulai-Kum to stretch our legs and buy more snacks, and stopped for the last time at some roadside cafe (I think around Rushan? ) for salad and some tea. * get picked up straight from Dushanbe instead of Khorog, and then spend a night in Kulai-Kum to split up the drive * bring more medicine along, including Oral Rehydration Salts + ibuprofen + Нош-бпа (Russian version that works like Pepto Bismol) * split up the drive between Khorog and Langar, taking a day to stay in Ishkashim and check out the bazaar * stay another day in Murghab (partially to get used to the altitude, partially to talk to more people and seek out the museum that’s supposed to be somewhere around town) * learn a few Pamiri words (Shugni and Wakhi are the main languages of the Pamirs; many Pamiris speak Russian better than they do Tajik)

I’m not sure whether it’s more satisfying when a driver announces a departure immediately after climbing in to the backseat of a packed Stepwagon, or after having waited in a stuffy marshrutka for seventy minutes on a slow day; I think it’s probably a u-shaped relationship. Guljamal is the only person in her family who’s fasting for Ramadan (her mother is too, though when I’m visiting, she’s taking a few days off for her time of the month). Spending the weekend in Internatsional’ without internet was a breath of fresh air; I ate so much village bread, took a trip out to saray (“the animal shed,” aka the field where the family’s cows and sheep are taken to graze) to bring food to Urmat’s dad, and watched kids play in puddles. The Kazarman-Jalalabad trip was easier to arrange, but was logistically more challenging: the 3 men in the backseat, visiting from Andijan, Uzbekistan, delayed departure by 4 hours by calling every 15 minutes to say they’d be right there; a snow storm blocked the road at the top of the pass, leaving us stranded until a van of young men with shovels could arrive to dig out a path; normal stuff.

In April, Trump signed “Buy American Hire American,” an executive order that targeted the H-1B visa because it supposedly screwed over American workers by driving down wages. These are visas given to research scholars and students (like my brilliant friend Asel, who’s getting a Master’s at Columbia through the Fulbright program in order to go back and rock the world of education policy in Kyrgyzstan), au pairs, Work and Travel visitors (like many of my students in Kyrgyzstan, and those featured in this This American Life episode, who come to the US for a summer just to see it), kids on academic exchange programs, trainees participating in structured professional development programs, and — closest to my heart — camp counselors. I think about Valya, who has been working at the Villages for 9 years, who is the best babushka a summer camp could ask for and who has hosted me in her cozy St. Petersburg apartment multiple times; I think about Rahat, who showed me my first glimpse of Kyrgyz culture; I think of Vadim, a literature teacher from a small town in Siberia who is a brilliant thinker and who taught me a foundation of Russian that helped me skip several semesters of coursework; I think of Lida, Yulia, Olga, Anton, Cholponai, Sasha, so many people who have spent their summers teaching kids traditional crafts, music, dance, and language from their home countries. You can send a written message to your representatives via Alliance for International Exchange; if you’re more the phone call type, you can reach the White House Comment Line at (202) 456-1111 or the State Department Operations Center: (202) 647-1512.

Kyrgyz people are often confused when I can’t list off the national clothes, national drink, or national food of the United States (though, to be honest, I just always say that hot dish is our national meal). The idea of a national “everything” is very important here, and these symbols of Kyrgyz(stani) culture are fairly fixed: kymyz is the national beverage, kara jorgo the national dance, and besh barmak the national food (though, as a resident of southern Kyrgyzstan, I’d make a case for ash). The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years gets its name from the weaving together of several stories: some intense magical realism involving a pair of Soviet and American astronauts who make contact with an alien planet, the fallout of Stalin-era purges on a man and his family, the main character’s relationship with his feisty Bactrian camel, and two Kazakh folk tales (3, if you’re reading the original Russian). In a eulogy for Aitmatov published in Harper’s, Scott Horton writes, “One of the great charms of Aitmatov’s life was that he charted first the decline of the Central Asian life and identity, and then participated in its resurrection as the Soviet Union collapsed and as the Central Asian states regained, quite unexpectedly, their autonomy and footing on the world stage.