Around a pot of sumalak, a different kind of neighborliness emerges

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — Sumalak, the sweet wheat pudding that greets the spring across Central Asia, is not a dish anyone can make alone. It simmers for the better part of a day and a night, and someone must always be at the cauldron, stirring. In one Tashkent apartment building, it has become a reason for residents to gather in their shared courtyard, take turns at the pot, and talk about what kind of neighbors they want to be to one another.

The building is part of a makhalla—one of the traditional neighborhood communities at the heart of Uzbek social life, each with its own local committee.

“I had a great desire not to go to the makhalla to ask for something, but to come and say: how can I help you? What can we do together?” said Zamira Kadirova, a resident of the building and Secretary of the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Tashkent, who helped open a recent forum on the life of the makhalla. Today, she explained, her neighbors also come together for hashar—communal work for the common good—and are consulting with one another on renovating the building’s façade.

Convened by the Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs of Uzbekistan, the forum came during a year that has been nationally dedicated to the development of the makhallas. Much attention has rightly gone to renewing roads, courtyards, and public services. The forum turned to a less visible dimension of a neighborhood’s well-being: the relationships of trust, care, and mutual support that, as participants observed, no amount of infrastructure can create.

The gathering, the fourth in a series the Office has convened since January 2025, drew representatives of government, the makhalla system, civil society, religious communities, academia, and the media alongside active residents. Earlier forums had considered spiritual and moral values in society and the family. This one moved outward to the neighborhood, where, in Ms. Kadirova’s words, “what is born within the family finds its continuation.”

“When we say ‘makhalla,’ what still comes to mind is the makhalla committee,” observed Dilmurod Yusupov, a researcher and advocate for the rights of persons with disabilities. “But for people to become active, they must first of all see themselves in the makhalla—see people, not a committee.”

Farrukh Rasulov of the Office of Public Affairs offered a way of holding both meanings together. The makhalla, he suggested, can be seen as a living whole in which three protagonists are interwoven—the individual, the community of neighbors, and the makhalla committee that serves them—each with its own role and responsibilities. The committee’s task, he said, is “not to pull everything onto itself, but to coordinate,” drawing on the potential of the whole neighborhood.

In several neighborhoods, Mr. Rasulov explained, cooperation with the makhalla committee has grown once residents came forward with something to offer—moral education classes for youth and children—and the committee could see the difference these efforts were making in young people’s lives.

At the forum, others described similar beginnings. “We came to the makhalla not to ask, but to offer help,” said Alyana Rasulova, a primary-school teacher. “At first they couldn’t understand us—and then they were very glad.” Nilufar Khodjayeva, one of the forum’s moderators, put the possibility in numbers: “If even one thousand residents in a makhalla of five thousand take small constructive actions, the neighborhood’s culture changes entirely.”

Shukriya Grafova, who together with other youth and mothers helps with classes for the moral and spiritual education of children in her neighborhood, described a boy with impaired hearing and speech who joined one of these classes during a lesson on friendship and human dignity. None of the fifteen children present singled him out, she said. “This is very important—how much we instill respect for every human being.”

Participants returned again and again to consultation as the way forward. “If residents only make demands of the makhalla, and the makhalla of the residents, we will get nowhere,” said Ms. Kadirova. “We should not separate into ‘you and us.’ We are one whole.”

Underlying the discussions was the question of trust. When residents and the makhalla committee meet only over problems to be solved, Mr. Rasulov later reflected, each can come to see the other as a function rather than a person. Trust, he suggested, grows as people come to know one another as human beings. “Only through relationship will there be trust,” he said. The Office of Public Affairs plans to explore the theme of trust further through future initiatives.

Ms. Kadirova has already seen in her courtyard what a neighborhood can become. When the residents of her building came together to prepare and share sumalak, someone new to the neighborhood watched in amazement as neighbors shared a meal and organized activities for the young. For many in new high-rise complexes, she observed, such a sense of community is unfamiliar: people leave early in the morning and come home late without interacting with one another. She spoke of the type of neighbor she hopes to have and to be: “so that when my daughter returns home in the dark, a neighbor is there to help her.”