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In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber. When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory. John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to
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Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
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Tajikistan's national library, the biggest in Central Asia. It opened in 2012 and covers an area of forty-five thousand square meters over nine floors. It has room for ten million books and, in order to fill all the shelves, each household was asked to donate books for the opening. Journalists who have been inside said there are only books in one of the halls; in the rest the shelves stand empty.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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Nearly half the Turkmens in central Asia live outside of Turkmenistan, many of them in Afghanistan and Iran. there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. In Samarkand and Bukhara, both in Uzbekistan, the main language is Tajik. The Uzbeks for their part, account for a sixth of the population of Kyrgyzstan and at least a fifth of the population of Tajikistan.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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The Soviet cartographers did not have an easy task of creating order out of the Central Asian patchwork of different peoples, languages and clans. Until 1924, the Russians treated Central Asia as one big region which they called Turkestan - the land of the Turks - as most people who lived there spoke Turkic languages.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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People did often not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always answer if they were Uzbek, Kyrgyz or Tajik.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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He shook his head and waved me on to his colleague, who was responsible for moral checks.
"Do you have any porn with you miss?" The customs officer looked at me with interest.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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There are very few lazy people in Uzbekistan now" he said. "I describe as lazy those who go to Moscow and sweep its streets and squares." - President of Uzbekistan
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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In 1941, a group of Soviet archeologists opened the grave to inspect Timur Lenk's remains. His coffin bore the following inscription: "When I rise from the dead the world shall tremble". It is said that they found another inscription inside the coffin: Whosoever opens my tomb shall unleash an army more terrible than I". Two days after the archeologists opened the tomb, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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They flew over the village in helicopters with banners warning that there would be an explosion at eleven o'clock .
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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As it is sufficient in Sunni Islam for a man to repeat Talaq, the word for divorce, three times for a couple to be divorced, many Tajik women have received the following text message from their husbands in Russia: 'Talaq, Talaq, Talaq'. In 2011, the Council of Ulema in Tajikistan banned divorce by mobile telephone.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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Ala kachuu, 'snatch and run', is what the tradition of bride kidnapping is called in Kyrgyz… around one third of all marriages in Kyrgyzstan occur in this way… thirty per day. More than ninety percent of these wives stay with their kidnapper.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)