Figure 1.--The picture here shows Class 1 School 21 in Dushanbe. The photograph was taken during May 2003. There are 33 children and this is the morning class. The girls wear large white bows. The boys wear a variety of footwear. Shoes and sandals all he boys wear long trousers. They wear a black suit. Click on the omage to see the rest of the children. Image courtesy of William Fergusson.

Most Tajik schools do not have names, but rather numbers as was common in the Soviet Union. This is espcially true of primary schools. The picture here shows Class 1 School 21. It is a Russian Curriculum School in Dushanbe. The children are aged from 5 (kindergarten) to 16 years. The photograph here was taken during May 2003 (figure 1). There are 33 children and this is the morning class. Their school day starts at 8.30 and finishes at 12 noon. The afternoon group starts at 1pm and finishes at 4.30. There are 66 children in the year which is split up into the two classes. You will see that the girls wear large white bows. One girl is wearing long stockings cloured white. The boys wear a variety of footwear. Shoes and sandals all he boys wear long trousers. They wear a black suit. It can include jacket, vest and trousers. the girls have white socks and light summer footwear. The shoes are more colourful than the boys. The boys wear neckties and bowties. Interestingly the morning children think they have the best school time because it is cooler than in the afternoon. The afternoon class think they have the best time because they can go to sports clubs in the morning. School 21 has a tradition of being a prestigous academic school. It is well resourced. There is a concert Hall, for performances. The headmistress is very well respected by the parents and the school children are happy, highly motivated children. There is a good science department and IT suite.

HBC Note

Some HBC readers have asked why we commonly cut images in to two parts as we have done here. This has to do with the formatting of web pages. Some inmages like this one are horizontal images, much wider than tall. Thus thetvare difficult to fit on a web page, unless we shrank them. Here at HBC we like to bring you large images that you can actually see. As a result we sometimes cut omages so they fit on to one of our pages.

William Fergusson

Created: April 22, 2004
Last updated: 7:31 PM 11/14/2008