Permanent Placement Annoucement

The big news: I am living in Baharly Town for the next two years. It is about 45 minutes from where I am living now in the Ahal Region, about 2 hours (by public bus) from the capitol, Ashgabat. With 15000 people, Baharly consists of a small downtown center (where I’m living), surrounding villages, and is located at the foot of the Kopetdag mountains. The proximity to Ashgabat means I will have weekly access to the free internet at the Peace Corps office as well as regular mail. As the internet is unreliable (note how last weekend it was down), please continue to write letters. Staying in the Ahal region means I will continue to live in the most conservative and fundamentalist of the regions with the closest proximity to the PC Office (=close for medications, also close for staff’s supervision and control). No unauthorized travel for me.

More details: I will visit my permanent site to meet my host family and fellow Turkmen English teachers for five days next week so right now I only know what the PC packet says. According to the pamphlet about my placement, I have been assigned to a medium-sized school in Baharly town with 3 English teachers and around 1000 students. My school principal is an English teacher by profession. As far as ethnicity is concerned, Baharly is overwhelmingly Turkmen so I will not be learning Russian or Uzbeck. It is a new site which has never had a PC volunteer before and my nearest fellow America is Linda (one of my current training site-mates), assigned to stay here in Godkepe (45 minutes away). Some of my dearest friends among the other volunteers are assigned to Ashgabat, however, so company is an easy and cheap bus ride away. That's not including the new Turkmen friends I will be making at sites and my current Language and Cultural Trainer (LCF) who I love and is an hour away between Baharly and Ashgabat.

My host family information: To repeat, all of this is from the PC description sheets which have proven unreliable in the past, so take all this with a certain skepticism. I am living in a compound 10 minutes walk from my school and 15 minutes from the market and public transportation. My family has four members: a father who works at the Ashgabat airport (getting tickets may be really easy), a 50+ year old housewife mother, a 25 year-old sister who lives at home (yeah!), and an 8th grader sister who “speaks a little English” (= “hello”). I’m going to get really good at Turkmen. No one smokes and they have a puppy, hens, and a camel. I will have my own house on the compound with two rooms including a bed & mattress (!), a worktable, one or two chairs, a wardrobe (!), and curtains. The compound has a bucket shower, but with a gas heating system and they have a well in addition to a water pipe (which “usually works in winter,” whatever that means). They’ve gone on the record to state that I’m allowed to have guests of any gender visit and spend the night. When I talked to Ata (one of the PC staff who chose our host families), he said my family is ready to bend over backwards to be really friendly and welcoming for me – thus my own house on the compound. However challenging the professional situation may be adjusting to the conservative Ahal culture and helping them get used to the strange American in their midst, it sounds like my home situation could not be more ideal. I look forward to an exciting, challenging, interesting, and hopefully very rewarding two years.