Dinner was awash in thankfulness

Thanksgiving’s still in the air. So why am I thinking about a dinner in Uzbekistan?

Maybe because that’s where I encountered a profound expression of thankfulness.

It was 2003, and I was back in Tashkent, working on a project for the International Center for Journalists. It was my second go-around in Uzbekistan, and George Krimsky was again in charge.

I’d worked with George on a similar project in 2002, and we’d become great friends. He was a grizzled old foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, a guy who delighted in the role of grizzled old foreign correspondent.

We’d been revisiting places and reconnecting with journalists we’d worked with the year before. That meant a week-long seminar in Almaty, Kazakhstan, followed by a week-long seminar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, followed by a week-long seminar in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

To say things were uneven would be an understatement. The Almaty project went great; hard work, tough questions, long hours, but responsive seminar participants. The Bishkek project went smoothly as well. The staff at Internews, a partner on the project, was smart and professional. And my interpreter and I had become good friends.

Tashkent was another story. The regime in charge was routinely flexing its muscles against any show of dissent or independence from the press.

While the seminar itself had gone well and the interpreter, an older guy who seemed to embody the word “gentleman,” was outstanding, the mood was downbeat. 

Seminar participants from the year before had already run into problems with the government. And this year’s group was pessimistic at best.

It was in that context, that Dalil invited George and me to dinner.

Dalil was something of an anomaly. He wasn’t a journalist. He seemed to be kind of a perpetual student. But because he was a buddy of Omon, the local coordinator, he had been allowed to sit in on the seminar two years in a row.

Omon pitched the idea, and both George and I had tremendous respect for Omon. In his 20s, Omon had been quick to adopt and adapt Western ideas whenever he believed they could help his country. He’d started the equivalent of a service club — something like Rotary or the Lions or Kiwanis or the Optimists — in Tashkent and was injecting the idea of community service into a country that needed all the help it could get.

In other words, if Omon said something was a good idea, George and I were pretty quick to agree.

So when he seconded Dalil’s invitation to dinner, the two of us agreed.

The evening started with a shopping trip for gifts. George pointed out that it would be customary and polite for us to take something for Dalil’s wife. After all, in a Muslim family, she would be the one doing all the work to open her household to a couple of Yankee journalists.

That meant a trip to a gift shop where we bought a piece of traditional Uzbek china probably identical to something she already had. But it was the thought that counted.

Then, at the appointed hour, Dalil came by with his car and picked up the three of us. That was followed by a wild ride through the city, stopping along the way to get fresh, warm nan, essentially an Uzbek flatbread, to take home for dinner.

Dalil and his family — his wife and two sons — lived in an apartment block as ugly as any Soviet-era apartment block could be. We were greeted warmly. The gift was a hit. And Dalil’s boys were charming.

And then his wife and children essentially disappeared into the kitchen.

The four of us, George, Omon, Dalil and I, sat at a small table in the living room, where — in keeping with Islamic and Uzbek tradition — we would be served. Dalil’s wife would cook. His sons would serve as waiters. We would be treated royally.

George and I squirmed a bit over our circumstances. We both knew Dalil was devoutly Muslim. He disappeared routinely for times of prayer. No alcohol would touch his lips. Yet he was a friend of Western-looking Omon, so there was a sense of having our feet planted firmly in two cultures simultaneously.

Perhaps to break a silence at the table, George asked Dalil about a gesture he had noticed at breakfast at our tiny hotel. Men would hold their hands up parallel to their face and make kind of a wiping, downward gesture.

Dalil was delighted.

“It is a way of giving thanks,” he said.

With Omon’s help, he explained.

Imagine, they said, that you are reaching upwards to the sky to receive God’s bounty, his blessings for the day. You reach up. You feel a sense of acceptance. Then you wash those blessings and that bounty over yourself and into yourself.

The thankfulness, the gratitude, the humility, all seemed to come together in that moment.

Together, we tried it. And together we were thankful, together we were friends and together we enjoyed an unforgettable dinner.