6. Losing Your Country (and Finding the Other), with Dildora Damisch

Read full interview transcript on www.janyljusupjan.com

6th episode: Losing Your Country (and Finding the Other), with Dildora Damisch,

June 2020, Chaï Latte & Salt Podcast

Hello, welcome to the 6th episode of Central Asia’s Culture podcast Chai Latte & Salt.

Today we discuss the issue of losing your country, and, perhaps finding a new one, with Dildora Damisch.

Dildora is from Uzbekistan, lived many years in Germany before moving to the US. Her recounting on how she was able to marry a foreigner during the Soviet System is hilarious.

But there is another angle to our conversation. First I tell you a story.

The Story: There once was a nomad army nation. They could have easily been the Mongols or the Kyrgyz, where everyone traveled with their family and where men, women, young and old, were all warriors. One day the Khan, like Genghis Khan, the leader of the army-nations, told his people to get rid of all the elderly because it became difficult to procure food and water.

Everybody obeyed, but one young man. He hid his father in a chest and carried him around on the back of his horse, without people knowing it. Once the army came across a desert and people started dying for lack of water. The Khan announced that whoever finds water will get a piece of gold. , called jamby(jambyis a piece of precious metal hung on a tree, if you shoot it down with your arrow, it is yours).

Nobody was able to find a solution, and people were dying en mass. The young man went to his father asking for advise. Father said: “drive a cow around the desert until it is exhausted. In the end, the cow will come and stop in one place. Start digging there”. The young soldier told this to the Khan, they acted accordingly and there was indeed water where the cow stopped, exhausted and thirsty.

This kind of difficult situation repeated itself again, and yet another time, and in each case, the young man came up with a solution. The Khan became suspicious and demanded of the young soldier to tell the truth. The guy had to admit that he disobeyed the Khan’s order and did not kill his father, and that it was him who was giving those bits of advice.

The Khan accepted himself guilty of mass killing of the elderly or, as we would say now, of senicideand proclaimed a law according to which the elderly were to be given all the respect and reverence they deserve as the carriers of the Wisdom of the Nation.

Note: Originally I thought killing off of the olders was called OLDICIDE, you know that I am not a native English speaker, and that it should be pronounced as OLDICID, as I have done in the interview with Dildora. But in fact it is “senicide” as my friends pointed out on a Facebook discussion.

This is a long introduction to one of the topics of the episode: How do we care for the elderly today, during the Coronavirus. I think not very well.

Dildora Damisch runs a tour company Multilingual Detroit Downtown Tour company in the US, she is also the owner of a business of caring for the elderly (the Milena Home care company). That is why I think she is a perfect person to talk with about the issue of our attitude to the elderly.

You can reach Dildora at damisch@googlemail.com, she is also on Facebook.

The interview with Dildora helped me to raise the issues that are important for me, but also to understand her better. I found out more about her, and her personality. That is about how much or how little we may know about people very close to us.

One chapter of my book project Breakfast Talks with Christian Lelong, is devoted to similar issues. I sent out a fragment to the email subscribers from my website janyljusupjan.com. So, if you are interested in similar exclusive content, please subscribe to my email updates on the site, or just write to me at janyl_j@hotmail.com, requesting the fragment titled “Christian on Surviving Coranovirus as a Couple”.

If you think this discussion may be interesting to someone else, please share it with them.

Please write a review to Chai Latte and Salt at your favorite podcast platform, that will help me to stay strong and move forward with this project. More of similar shows are coming soon.

Thank you to Dildora, to you, my listeners and readers. Thanks also to my volunteer editors Damon Kutzin and Phoebi Anris. After their revision, I keep improvising, so any mistakes are solely mine!

Happy Summer Season!

Your Janyl Jusupjan