The internet was down at the Peace Corps office last weekend, so here is last week's post.
The photo at right is my 23rd Birthday party with my host sisters and site-mates.
Stories of the Peace Corps usually involve insects bigger than bats, monsoon seasons in thatched huts, and diseases involving swelling and pus. For me, the Peace Corps cultural adaptation process has been about watching “Scrubs” while eating breakfast.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Firstly, “Scrubs” is dubbed in Russian by a single monotone male voice doing all the dialogue on top of the still-hearable English. JD and Turk are particularly easy to hear underneath the Russian as they use short slang which requires much longer Russian phrases to translate (“What’s up, bro” takes about a minute, not to mention explaining the significance of “black whale”). Unfortunately, with the exception of his sound effects, Dr. Cox’s original voice is lost beneath the Russian growl. The only time the television is not on during the day is when there is no electricity in a house, a situation which (despite its frequency) leaves the family as helpless as any American suburbanite. Their lives are designed around the presence of electricity, natural gas, and running water (I probably took our loss of both electricity and water for two days best out of all the family as I came emotionally prepped for it before I arrived).
My breakfast scene is further complicated by the fact that the table is three inches tall with the eight members of my host family plus myself all sitting cross-legged or laying sideways around it on the colorful hand-woven carpet. When it’s just us, my brothers and sisters sit and lay down haphazardly so that everyone has enough room and can still watch the perpetually-on television. When guests arrive, however, the traditional separation of the genders kicks in and the males get the guest room and the women either sit in the living room or busily prepare tea and sweets for the male guests. When a strange/guesting male is in the house, even when he’s separated by a wall, none of my sisters lie down, but rather sit with perfect posture with their legs tucked modestly beneath them. I'm still getting used to the geographical gender posture rules.
I’m also eating the Turkmen equivalent of oatmeal for breakfast every morning: pieces of crumbled bread (“churok”) in boiled milk straight from the cow an hour previously. The “churok,” a loaf about a foot-long and an inch high, a Turkmen specialty, tastes like hearty whole wheat and has the texture of wall insulation. The bread’s baking instructions and specially- designed earthen mound stove is so ancient it goes back to Turkmen nomadic days and the bread itself has a sacred significance – it is kept in a camel-hair woven blanket, should never be turned upside down, people take pieces with them for good luck when traveling long distances, and any uneaten scraps are saved for later consumption as it is blasphemous to throw it away. The bread is so dense that even when soaking in warm thick milk for five minutes it holds it’s shape so (with a lot of sugar) breakfast becomes a sweet bog of starch, protein, calcium, and cream. Not so bad, really, considering that poor Thomas and Dan were served fried camel organs for an entire week. Breakfast is actually one of my favorite meals here as the Turkmen food pyramid is visualized a little differently than what American nutritionists usually suggest. The Turkmen word for “sweet” is the same as “delicious” so nothing can be too sweet, and the word “food” – if it doesn’t have an extra modifier of “vegetable-like” – implies extremely oily, starchy, or meat-based (usually all three). Fruits and vegetables aren’t considered foods, but rather ignorable appetizers.
When contemplating my usual breakfast scene, we must also consider what I’m wearing: my first Turkmen “koinek” (traditional floor-length dress). Although I bought the red and black-patterned material at the bazaar, my youngest sister cut the material to fit my measurements, my middle sister wove the complex embroidery around the neck, and my eldest sister tailored it to be both flattering and comfortable. The next time I get paid from the Peace Corps I’m getting another one.
But that’s my life in Turkmenistan in a nutshell. Every day I drink about a liter of Coca Cola, I read books borrowed from the PC office, exercise with my youngest sister in the privacy of my room, and (despite the difference in language) my conversations with my host sisters follow predictable girly patterns: clothes, boys, weight, movies (they know as many as I do), cosmetics, knitting patterns, and how to deal with problem students (we’re all teachers of different subjects). In all, it is a complicated mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar which at once proves how interconnected the world’s pop culture has become as well as how it is mediated and conformed into the existing traditional life styles and values. And that’s just a complicated way of saying I’m getting used to it here, and really it’s not so very different than my life in America. The differences are in the details.
Stories of the Peace Corps usually involve insects bigger than bats, monsoon seasons in thatched huts, and diseases involving swelling and pus. For me, the Peace Corps cultural adaptation process has been about watching “Scrubs” while eating breakfast.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Firstly, “Scrubs” is dubbed in Russian by a single monotone male voice doing all the dialogue on top of the still-hearable English. JD and Turk are particularly easy to hear underneath the Russian as they use short slang which requires much longer Russian phrases to translate (“What’s up, bro” takes about a minute, not to mention explaining the significance of “black whale”). Unfortunately, with the exception of his sound effects, Dr. Cox’s original voice is lost beneath the Russian growl. The only time the television is not on during the day is when there is no electricity in a house, a situation which (despite its frequency) leaves the family as helpless as any American suburbanite. Their lives are designed around the presence of electricity, natural gas, and running water (I probably took our loss of both electricity and water for two days best out of all the family as I came emotionally prepped for it before I arrived).
My breakfast scene is further complicated by the fact that the table is three inches tall with the eight members of my host family plus myself all sitting cross-legged or laying sideways around it on the colorful hand-woven carpet. When it’s just us, my brothers and sisters sit and lay down haphazardly so that everyone has enough room and can still watch the perpetually-on television. When guests arrive, however, the traditional separation of the genders kicks in and the males get the guest room and the women either sit in the living room or busily prepare tea and sweets for the male guests. When a strange/guesting male is in the house, even when he’s separated by a wall, none of my sisters lie down, but rather sit with perfect posture with their legs tucked modestly beneath them. I'm still getting used to the geographical gender posture rules.
I’m also eating the Turkmen equivalent of oatmeal for breakfast every morning: pieces of crumbled bread (“churok”) in boiled milk straight from the cow an hour previously. The “churok,” a loaf about a foot-long and an inch high, a Turkmen specialty, tastes like hearty whole wheat and has the texture of wall insulation. The bread’s baking instructions and specially- designed earthen mound stove is so ancient it goes back to Turkmen nomadic days and the bread itself has a sacred significance – it is kept in a camel-hair woven blanket, should never be turned upside down, people take pieces with them for good luck when traveling long distances, and any uneaten scraps are saved for later consumption as it is blasphemous to throw it away. The bread is so dense that even when soaking in warm thick milk for five minutes it holds it’s shape so (with a lot of sugar) breakfast becomes a sweet bog of starch, protein, calcium, and cream. Not so bad, really, considering that poor Thomas and Dan were served fried camel organs for an entire week. Breakfast is actually one of my favorite meals here as the Turkmen food pyramid is visualized a little differently than what American nutritionists usually suggest. The Turkmen word for “sweet” is the same as “delicious” so nothing can be too sweet, and the word “food” – if it doesn’t have an extra modifier of “vegetable-like” – implies extremely oily, starchy, or meat-based (usually all three). Fruits and vegetables aren’t considered foods, but rather ignorable appetizers.
When contemplating my usual breakfast scene, we must also consider what I’m wearing: my first Turkmen “koinek” (traditional floor-length dress). Although I bought the red and black-patterned material at the bazaar, my youngest sister cut the material to fit my measurements, my middle sister wove the complex embroidery around the neck, and my eldest sister tailored it to be both flattering and comfortable. The next time I get paid from the Peace Corps I’m getting another one.
But that’s my life in Turkmenistan in a nutshell. Every day I drink about a liter of Coca Cola, I read books borrowed from the PC office, exercise with my youngest sister in the privacy of my room, and (despite the difference in language) my conversations with my host sisters follow predictable girly patterns: clothes, boys, weight, movies (they know as many as I do), cosmetics, knitting patterns, and how to deal with problem students (we’re all teachers of different subjects). In all, it is a complicated mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar which at once proves how interconnected the world’s pop culture has become as well as how it is mediated and conformed into the existing traditional life styles and values. And that’s just a complicated way of saying I’m getting used to it here, and really it’s not so very different than my life in America. The differences are in the details.
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