Malika, the Terror

This is a photo of Malika, my four year old "host niece." I tried the standard Salowich joke on her, grabbing her head and saying: this is a brain eater, do you know what it's doing? It's starving. I think it was lost in translation to Uzbek.

According to Bakhtior, she is "stubborn", like her mom. Most mornings she starts off crying for her mom, but by the afternoons she is eager to sing songs from her Tajik kindergarten and to remind me the names of all the plants in the garden: grapes, pears, apples, hot peppers, basil, apricots, and mint. Most of the time, however, I can't understand what she's saying.

She is a patient teacher, though. We had a little impromptu pop quiz at dinner the other night, which was basically an excuse for me to formulate easy questions in Uzbek. I asked Muhammad Amin what the capital of Tajikistan was, who the president was, and where I was from. He got two out of three cuz he thought I was from Turkey (!! - zoiks). We then asked Malika where I was from, or why I spoke such bad Uzbek, she said: you don't speak bad Uzbek. What a charmer.

Yesterday at dinner she was deemed a "champion" for finishing the cabbage in her soup. (it was a basic broth with stufed cabbages (yum), carrots, onions, and potatoes - and lots of dill. A basic form of the national dish "shorvo." Muhammad Amin cried because he refused to eat his cabbage.

But everyone got melon in the end -- yay! Except it wasn't khandalak, but another kind which, by any normal standards would be amazing. But it's not my favorite.

take care,
Charles