I arrived in Dushanbe for the first time at 4AM. The city was dark and silent. My taxi sped softly through empty streets. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a group of twenty people in neon orange vests, with long-handled brooms made of stiff branches sweeping the streets. Who were these people? Dushanbe's legendary street sweepers, tasked with the never-ending task of keeping this desert city's streets clean of dust.
In New York City, street cleaners are giant trucks with rotating brushes and jets of water and soap. In Tajikistan, people take street cleaning just as seriously, but here, the street cleaners are several hundred people with brooms. They are out all the time, keeping the city streets free of dust and garbage.
Cleanliness is very important in Tajik culture. Houses are usually pristine: The floors are washed every day, the carpets are beat and scrubbed once a month and the kitchen is spotless. This cultural obsession with cleanliness extends to city streets: People usually wash the sidewalks in front of their houses at least every other day in the summer. This also helps keep the dust down. Dushanbe is basically located in a desert -- there is very little rainfall -- and fine grains of dust and sand get everywhere.
