This ends happily

Let me begin by telling you all the end – this story is going to have a happy ending.

Last Sunday I was unceremoniously kicked out of my host family house (where I’d lived for over a year) -- in the middle of the night in the dead of winter -- because someone in the house stole every cent I own (and some that wasn’t mine) and I told them I was required by PC law to look for a new family. I left exchanging insults and curses with my host sister and slept for a week in a friend’s back closet on a pad on the floor. Last Wednesday we found a new host family, really nice people, and I moved in. Three days later as I was leaving for the city I heard the keening of human beings in heart-breaking pain from the adjoining house and learned my host aunt (age 30 with 5 kids) had died the night before from a sudden brain aneurism and I may have to move out. I left for the city. I went to the bank to withdraw money and was told my debit card came up in the system as lost or stolen and they were required to take it and cut it up. I went to sleep over at my best friend’s new apartment and was told by her angry Russian land lady that no girls are welcome to guest on her property because all females are thieving liars. A good fit of begging meant I could still stay over for that one night, but my overnights in the city may be at an end. The next night was the farewell party for two of my very good PC friends who are COSing (“close of service”) on Tuesday before returning to America. At the party I got to baby-sit four friends who by mixing beer, vodka, and absinth intoxicated themselves past the ability to sit in a chair. Then I got to watch a guy I had a major crush on a few months ago go home with a girl he met five hours before. The next morning I found myself so low on cash I couldn’t even buy a sandwich and then, starving, I went back to Baharly.

Remember that bit where I promised a happy ending? I found out there is a secure way to send money through the embassy, so even if my debit card never works here I can still go on vacation in the future (late July I’ll be back in Maryland for two-three weeks, fair warning). My friend worked on her landlady and called me to say she’s hopeful I will be able to stay there in the future, so long as I don’t come in wearing a ski mask and a trench coat. When I returned to site I immediately received two pieces of wonderful news: 1) I don’t have to permanently move out of my new host family, 2) for the first week of wailing (Turkmen funeral traditions dictate the family must sit in a room and scream and cry 24/7 for the first week after death and be served food by neighbors) I don't have to stay there. I get to stay at my friend’s house in her closet (it is a very nice closet, very Harry Potter, and I love her happy lively family who like me and know me). And everyone involved was wonderfully mature and chill with everything. My friend, Altyn, is happy to have me around, her children are ecstatic. From a miserable weekend of financial worries, sad good-byes, irrational rejections, and wretched parties, coming home to happiness and friends felt like, well, coming home.

In other news, it’s Christmas. Happy holidays, everyone. There is no Christmas here, by the way. I had to go to work and no one knew why I kept looking at the calendar date and making a silly face. The large decorated evergreen trees you see everywhere around Ashgabat and Baharly and the illustrations of Santa Claus, stockings, ornaments, reindeer, gift-wrapped presents, and shiny streamers are all in honor of New Year’s. They even sing “Jingle Bells.” In English! They’ve never heard of Christmas, they just stole the decorations and paraphernalia the same as we stole it originally from the pagan Winter Solstice festivities. When they dub over American Christmas movies, (“Home Alone” is probably the most popular American movie in the world after “Titanic,” but they refer to it as the “Kevin!” movie), they substitute “New Year’s” for “Christmas” whenever it is mentioned. It’s therefore really frustrating to try and explain to them that New Year’s is a relatively minor holiday in the states with few real traditions: getting really drunk and making promises you don’t intend to keep is pretty much it. For Turkmen, on the other hand, New Year’s is a huge deal, worthy of bankrupting yourself to buy enough food to feed the hundreds of people who will come from all corners of the town to eat food at as many houses as they can visit. It’s like Halloween, Chinese New Year's, Marti Gras, and Christmas all rolled into one. Good times.

Happy holidays everyone and a very happy New Year’s. Consider this my gift to everyone – a big box of schadenfreude wrapped in old horoscopes wishing us all nothing but the best.

Stronger

The last month has been one of those times that make you stronger. The first two weeks of November were a harrowing adventure that will be made into a heartwarming buddy movie some day: “Me and My Stomach Fungus.” We began as enemies, Mr. Fungus (the nefarious microorganism we shall visualize as a purple mushroom with a big animated happy smiley face for the sake of positive thinking), and then as time slowly passed we gained a mutual respect. I manipulated it with choice tidbits of juice and food, starved it occasionally for days at a time -- I visibly dropped weight, I call that a win for my side – and it struck me down with chronic fatigue and dizziness that kept me alternating between the bed and the privy for a week and then literally stumble through my classes for another week. At that point, we reach the happy ending of our buddy movie when we finally reached a harmonious co-living understanding: I got anti-fungal pills and decisively destroyed it until no symptoms or evidence remained. Curtain closed.

As soon as I was no longer a semi-permanent resident of the outhouse, another issue came to a front: the need to immediately leave my host family. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a house yet so I’m still here hoping that my current host family doesn’t learn that I searching around: if they find out they’ll kick me out before I have a place to go. It’s a worrisome situation that I’m trying to not think about by watching the entirety of Buffy Season 1-7 in an almost continuous marathon (I’m a dork, you all know this) and reading Bill Bryson’s, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which basically says that we’re all going to unexpectedly die any second by unpredictable natural disasters. Happy stuff.

Exciting news: if any of you are bored and have a minute, then you can do your part to make the world a better place. And you don’t need to sign away two years of your life to teach in developing countries. All you have to do is go to this website: http://www.ploofle.com/petition/ and then use the “contact my representative” link to write to Congress telling them to give PC more money. And you don’t even have to write anything! The letter drive begins December 1 and ends December 15, so do your clicking now while you’re thinking about it.

DO NOT SEND MAIL TO BAHARLY

To my lovely and amazing mail correspondents, for the next month please don’t send me letters to the Baharly address. I’m in the middle of moving host families (irreconcilable differences, I’ll talk about it when I’m calmer) and I fear any letters that go to my former residence will go onto the toilet paper pile. I love hearing from you all so if you have news (or greetings or well wishes or creative curses) please email me or send it to the Ashgabat address. Thank you to all and a happy Thanksgiving.
-Annie

Joy is mine

A sorry truth of the world is that instruction manuals are not written in Turkmen, and rarely in Russian. This means that Turkmen can’t read the warning labels on their car’s dash board, the buttons on their stereo and remote controls, the setting menus on their TVs and VCRs, and the “how to” manuals for their dishwashers and irons, not to mention just about any other appliance or piece of technical equipment. In general, they tend to wing it, or find someone who’s already gone through the trial and error process and have them teach them what to do. But, as of last New Year’s, there is now an American in town, the magical American who knows how to read the enigmatic instructions with their strange diagrams and obscure vocabulary and sentences that go on for a page and half (originally in Japanese). Since arriving, I have taught a half-dozen people how to use their cell-phones, I have read the warning labels for new irons, and helped several taxi drivers know the purpose of some of the more mysterious buttons on their headboard (my usual advice, ignore them). One poor woman approached me after class with a car maintenance manual and asked me to explain to her how to install a car battery. Thankfully, most technical language is the same in Russian and English (motor, “techinika,” disk drive, DVD, etc), but there are some problems I can’t help with. One of the other unfortunately consequences of Turkmen people suddenly becoming aware of technology without any of the gradual learning curve the rest of us grew up with is that many have a somewhat unrealistic view of what is available. A professional wedding DJ came by the school and begged me to come have a look at his new stereo, which – he very excitedly explained to me -- has a USB drive port (Turkmen word: “flash”). This amazing device, he explained to me rapidly, can store hundreds of songs and can fit in a pocket without the weight of a CD wallet or boxes of cassette tapes. It was positively amazing, it could change his life. So he takes me in his car to his house and he sits me down in front of his shiny new stereo and I show him how to record music from the cassettes to the USB, from the CDs to the USB, from the radio to the USB. And he nods and nods, yes, he knows all this. But then once the music is on the USB drive, what can he do with it? How can he play it out of his TV or out of his normal stereo equipment? Well, the TV and the stereo equipment need a USB port, a way to read the information on the flashdrive and then play it. He’s crestfallen. His TV and stereo equipment only have VHS and cassette holders. And so a poor Turkmen learns the lesson that we must all learn eventually: technology only saves you time and money if you buy lots of it and on a continual basis.

To those of you in the midst of the election craziness, it may seem unbelievable to you that I forgot about it. I meant to call in on the 5th and find out from the PC office how it was going, but our phone isn’t working and I didn’t really think about it. And then I came home from work on the 6th and my host sister came running up to me with a huge smile on her face. “The black man won! The black man is going to be President of America!” My host family then mimed to me what they had seen on television: thousands of Americans screaming and waving their arms in the air in joyful celebration. And that’s how I found out that Obama is our new President. Joyful joyful hallelujah! Most of us were considering not returning to the states if the white man won.

In other news, I turned 24 last week. As an age marker, it isn’t much. Similar to 23, I am still in my early twenties and although I’m one step closer to the quarter century, I’m not there yet. What is meaningful, however, is that (like my 23rd year), I will spend it entirety in Turkmenistan and that it was my first birthday at site. And like any sane volunteer, I didn’t spend it anywhere near site. The morning I spent at the Botanical Gardens, my favorite place in Ashgabat. It is a re-creation of a N.A. Northeastern forest exactly like the forest that surrounds my house in Maryland except for no birds, there are straight pavement paths running through it and a somewhat defunct lily pond, and young Turkmen couples are making out on the benches. But the green is the same and, more important, the smell. Shut your ears and squint a bit, and you can almost be transported across the ocean. By the providence of timing, several of the major PCV characters were in the city that weekend for the GRE and other major characters (knowing that other characters would be in for the GRE) came as well. So, to honor no longer having to study for the bitch-test-from-hell-that-if-all-goes-to-plan-I-will-never-have-to-take and in honor of my birthday, 12 of the most party-hardy volunteers in Turkmenistan (in PC speak) “blew up.” In laymen terms, we partied like the world was about to explode and there was no Bruce Willis to save us. We went to the one restaurant in Turkmenistan that has Indian food, then to a bar for cheap beer until they kicked us out, and then stayed up at our favorite club dancing (and then just jumping around and flailing) until 5am. The music wasn’t the best, only ten minutes of American dance music and the rest Russian, Turkish, Arab, and Indian pop songs, but with enough beer and cheap vodka you can find the beat to anything. I have even bigger plans for my 25th, but I think I fulfilled my club craziness quota for at least the next six months (at least).

Halloween, for the interested, passed without any notice whatsoever, none of the Turkmen I asked in Baharly had even heard of it. I remember back in training my host sister asked me if “heroine” was big in America and I spent a very somber 15 minutes trying to describe America’s hard drug problems with the 20 Turkmen vocabulary words I knew at the time before we laughingly realized what the other was saying. They were referencing a scary Halloween movie they saw on the Russian sci-fi channel and wondered what the deal was with all the orange and black.

And last in the order of importance and interest, I moved. Nothing so traumatic as a move to a different host family (although we had a close call last week, details available upon request), but I moved to a new room, which entailed packing and taking stock of all the stuff I have gathered in the past year. For someone who arrived with one suitcase and a backpack, I have a ton of stuff. Where did it all come from? I have more hair scrunches than I’ve had since I was six, clean underwear that has never been worn, enough Post-It notes to wall-paper the walls in neon, and little heart candies sent to me last Valentine’s Day that still taste the same. From the original 20 kg allowed by Turkmen Air, my stuff now takes up half the floor in a room big enough to do cartwheels in. But sadly, I am no longer living in the cartwheel room (the former living room and china storage room until I took it over) and I have been relocated to where I should have been originally: the guest room (see photo). In the beginning, the family wanted to impress the American and they gave me the biggest room they had available, but now we’re nearing the year mark and they’ve given up trying to predict what will make me impressed (warm bread from the oven makes the American do a little happy dance, host mom gets new gold jewelry and she goes “eh.” Americans are weird). And they want their living room back to make more carpets. The relocation is actually a nice change – my dinky little space heater can actually change the temperature in the smaller room and I got to keep my bed. And, as anyone who has ever been to one of my college dorm rooms may recognize, it offers an entire wardrobe space to cover with my pictures and post-cards. The room unfortunately didn’t have electricity for the first week, but extension cords are amazing things and it’s all fixed now. I just get to go to sleep to the sound of new carpets under construction and weaving hammers thumping away one thin wall away until past midnight, daily. What joy is mine. You know, flip that phrase around -- “mine is joy” -- and it sounds like “minus joy.” Interesting.

Welcome to the Surreal Life

The truth is that the eeriest part of living here is how quickly really gross and bizarre elements of life simply because normal and ignorable parts of the scenery. For the entire summer and the beginning part of fall our faucets were merely decorative and when guests came to the house and tried to turn on the water I couldn’t resist a little laugh at their innocence and naiveté. Silly rabbit, there’s no water in Turkmenistan. Now that our water is no longer being diverted to irrigate the cotton fields, the one working faucet in the yard is once again a purposeful addition to the household rather than a reminder of happy days long past. And, as happens, stuff tends to accumulate around it: dishes that have yet to be washed, empty buckets that someone meant to fill, soap dishes with fragments of soap clinging to the bottom, dish rags soaked with the previous pot’s grease and crumbs. It’s the dish rags that get my special attention as these three wash-clothes are used for cleaning all of our dishes and silverware after every meal and are rarely (if ever) washed themselves. Now this is gross. I can hear the cringes coming from across the Atlantic as my nice suburban hygienic family imagines what kind of stuff is growing on those rags. They sit outside in molding wet bunches at all hours and are used equally to scour pots of boiled sheep head and home-made apricot jam. But imagine this, I was walking back from the outhouse last night and I saw one of the cats crouched by the faucet. All fine and good, it’s thirsty, there’s water. But then it stands up and pees all over the dish rags with the nonchalant relaxed air of a creature doing a familiar daily routine. And my first thoughts were, “well, at least it’s sterile, right?”

Remember how back in April I began a project to renovate the first floor of my school? My principal wanted an entire new school building and I talked him down to simply re-cementing the first floor hallway, which is so torn up and peeling that it’s a safety concern, along with replacing the ceiling light-bulbs (which haven’t been replaced since they were installed in 1991). I discussed the idea with my principal and counterpart in April, wrote the grant in May, got the money from Peace Corps in June, and we finished up the World Map mural in July. So now all we need to do is get the cement and the light bulbs and start the renovation. And August passed with no word and September began and school started, the building filled with students and teachers, and word finally came: there is no cement. The cement factories for the entire country sit on the outskirts of our town and there is no cement. The roads leading to the cement factories, which sit like metallic and smoking Emerald Cities against the silhouette of the hills, are lit at night with strings of Christmas lights blinking “Cement! Turkmen Cement! Cement!” And there is apparently no cement. One of the factories is broken and the other has increased their prices threefold to a point where we couldn’t afford to cement one of the first floor’s hallways.

The last week in September we get word that the mayor of Baharly has decided to take an interest in our project and will intervene to get us cement at the previous price. Great news, awesome news. And we sit waiting for anything to come of it. The second week of October the principal comes rushing into my classroom breathless, he tells me that we need to go RIGHT NOW to the cement factory and buy the cement. I dismiss the kids early, run home to get the money from Peace Corps, dress up in my best Turkmen dress, and the principal and my counterpart, Altyn, pick me up with not a minute to waste. We speed to the one functioning cement factory, the principal jumps out and just as I’m about to follow, Altyn grabs me and pulls me back. We’re women, we wait in the car. And we wait. The money from Peace Corps sits in my bag and we wait. Altyn and the driver are old classmates so they chat about this and that as I take in the scenery: a huge sprawling unapologetically industrial factory of pumping gears and billowing chimneys. The dust and gravel parking lot is lined with dirty Soviet-era trucks, some still with wind-up gears in the front, and the lettering for “Cement” written out in pealing Cyrillic on the sides. Feral dogs of various sizes lounge under the shade of the trucks, occasionally getting up to snap and growl at each other with a menace that gives me shivers even sitting snug in the car. The entire scene looks like something out of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome; at any moment Tina Turner in chain-mail shoulder-pads was going to come out and wail on Mel Gibson’s leather-clad ass.

A full hour later the principal returned to the car with news that struck none of us as too surprising – we didn’t have the right paperwork and we’ll have to come back again. And when are we going to have the right paperwork? Well we need to talk to a guy who needs to find it and talk to another guy who owes us a favor so it shouldn’t be too hard for him to help us out and talk to this other guy who is the only one with the right signature and then it’s only a matter of time before he gets back to us. And how long should this all take? Next week, or may be the week after, or may be next month. By New Year’s definitely. Thanks, guys, that’s awesome, great doing business with you.

The drive back from the cement factory was surprisingly jolly considering that we hadn’t actually accomplished anything and that three out of the four of us had spent the last hour pointless baking in the car in an industrial wasteland. I should also mention that I’d had food poisoning the week before and hadn’t eaten a real meal since then. I was living in constant fear that whatever small snack I’d just consumed would suddenly and unexpectedly coming out from either end while in a public place. The day before I’d had to literally run out of the class in the middle of describing the difference between present simple and present continuous tense and I made it to the outhouse with barely 5 seconds to spare before losing control of the entire contents of my digestive system. So little fuel was remaining in my stomach I barely had the strength to remain standing throughout class. So after all the excitement and let down of the cement factory, what I wanted more than anything in the world was my bed, my pillow, and a jug of hydration fluids to stop my pounding head. But the principal had other plans.

Half-way back to Baharly he instructs the driver to make a fast U and take us to Kow-Ata, a sacred site and natural wonder that I visited almost exactly a year ago during training with the rest of the T-16 volunteers. It’s a cool place; I liked it the first time round. There are ice cream and barbeque stands serving fresh kabobs outside the cave and then you enter and go down twelve to fifteen flights of stairs into the depth of the earth where there’s a deep geothermal lake you can swim and float around in with your friends. Again, great the first time round when I was wearing sneakers and pants for climbing up and down the stairs and brought a bathing suit for the lake. Back then I was also a whole lot more enamored with visiting a site of legends, songs, and Turkmen cultural history than I am now. At this point the little voice that used to giggle and bounce up and down at a chance for anthropological exploration now goes, dead-pan, “oh look, a cave. Awesome, when do we go?”

But I am a loyal employee, a decent volunteer (85% of the time at any rate), and a good friend so I got out of the car with Altyn, the driver, and the principal and we headed into Kow-Ata. Altyn (who’s 27) and I (24) walked down those stairs complaining like a pair of curmudgeons three times our age. We stopped at the landing of every flight and discussed our weak knees, our aching thighs, our poor calves, our dying hearts, and how ridiculous this entire trip was. When the principal came back, we were going to insist that we go home right now. Right now. Yep, just as soon as he came back, we were going to give him a piece of our minds, just you see. Huff huff huff. Going slower than I ever imagined possible from myself, we inched our way down as the smell of sulfuric rotting eggs and piss became increasingly nauseating. The principal, meanwhile, had run ahead of us at the entrance, flying down the stairs with a childish glee that looked positively goofy on his middle-aged, slightly overweight, and usually oh-so-stern face with the one glass eye and perpetual frown. Altyn and I reached the bottom of the stairs probably a full 10 minutes after the principal had run down. After a bout of mostly jibbing complaining, there was nothing else to do but turn around and climb back up the stairs. This time we almost ran it, stopping to rest only twice before speeding ahead toward light, water, and a chair. We complained in between pants, but at this point we wanted out. Now.

We reached the top out of breath and with a new appreciation for the glory of sunlight and non-sulfuric breezes. We sat contemplating the ice cream and food we hadn’t brought money with us to buy and waited for the principal to emerge, dripping and smiling like he was having the best day of his life. He told us to come back to the car (we joyfully complied), opened up the trunk, and presented us with his surprises: a picnic lunch prepared especially for us. And what did our dear principal pack us? Warm cheap beer and Snickers bars. I think the sound of my grumbling dissenting stomach could be heard across the Iranian border, but I ate my Snickers and drank a Dixie cup worth of the beer and sat smiling and nodding and imagining what would happen if I accidentally threw up in the principal’s hair while he was driving.

This story has a happy ending. We got back to school without my stomach doing anything more unusual than hold a loud shouting debate with itself and I taught my afternoon classes without incident. Who knows when we’ll get the damned paperwork for the cement and I’m eating off dishes washed with cat-piss, but, hell, this is Turkmenistan. Stranger things happen every day. I just don’t really notice it anymore.

The Miraculous Death and Rebirth of Gita

In a little house in a little town outside of a little city in a little country in a forgotten part of the world there lives two dogs – one good, Gita, one bad, Tuzik -- two cats – one good, Marquiza, one bad, Bagheera-- and 20 chickens – half sick, no names, they’re chickens after all. And one night at this little house there is a party and all the family comes from miles around to say “Happy Birthday” to Big Sister and bring her gifts. But the animals are not invited to the party and they sit outside the door, looking in at the family. And the chickens begin to cluck to themselves. And the cats begin to meow. And the dogs begin to bark. But the family does not pay attention and continue to eat their cake and sheep liver and don’t see the animals are unhappy. The dogs chase the cats and the cats chase the chickens and the chickens chase themselves (they’re chickens after all) and they run round and round until the air is full of cycloning fur and feathers. And the family eats on, oblivious to the building chaos until there is a knock at the gate. A stranger has arrived, a stranger with a car. The family spills out of the house, yelling at the dogs to stop (the good dog, Gita, stops, the bad dog, Tuzik, does not) and the cats to go away (the good cat, Marquiza, runs away, the bad cat, Bagheera, stays crouched by the gate) and the chickens to settle (they ran away, they’re chickens after all).

The gate is spread wide and the car drives in to the yard, bright and shiny and the family gathers to pet its shiny hood and look inside at its gleaming whistles. All new, the stranger says. And the family crouches to look beneath at its metal workings and rolls down the windows to breath in its already cigarette-saturated smell. And the gate stands open to the wide world, a gaping hole in the animals’ previously so small world. The little house is suddenly not so little, but now includes a street, two trees, and lights shimmering out of the darkness promising new worlds, possibly better worlds, bigger worlds.

Bagheera runs out into the night, with Tuzik close behind, barking like mad. Now, everyone knows a bad cat and a bad dog will act bad, it is in their natures after all, but what about the good dog? Gita is a good dog, small and white and quiet. She never barks. She never growls. She is fond of children and had her own puppies two times (all born dead, their father was also their uncle, after all). She never fights for food and would let Tuzik take all the hand-outs if the family didn’t place it directly in front of her and shoo Tuzik away. She runs on only three legs and will roll over and cover her head when she hears shouting. She was born a runt in her pack and was fed with a rag and bottle from the time she fit in Big Sister’s hand. She is a beloved and welcomed part of the family. But even a good dog is a dog after all. Bagheera runs out into the night with Tuzik fast on his heels, and Gita follows, a quiet white shadow following her chaos-loving companions. A screech of tires and a Russian curse and Big Sister and Little Sister see two still shadows in the darkness beside the road. Tuzik whines and paws at one of the still shapes on the ground and then runs back into the gate. The big world is a scary place, where friends don’t get up to play. Bagheera slowly rises and follows Tuzik back, hiding beneath the wheel of the shiny white car, bad dog and bad cat unscathed by their mad-cap adventure. But one form remains still. Gita.

Late into the night Little Sister and Big Sister sit with Gita. In the night she rises once, and then falls over. Her legs kick and she paws the ground, but swelling beneath her legs and whites around her eyes show there is more damage than meets the eye. At 1:00AM her legs stop their kicking and she stops pawing the ground. She doesn’t rise.

For two days and two nights the family stands vigil. Big Sister cries and blames Little Sister for not closing the gate. Little Sister cries and blames God for taking their beloved dog from them. Tuzik sits in corners, his face in his paws, his nose occasionally sniffing the air for a friend who is not returning. The cats can not be found, expressing their grief in the same form they express joy and friendship – grudging slinking in corners and eyeing the chickens. The chickens remain unmoved, but they’re chickens after all.

On the third day an apparition appears in the yard of the house. Gita has returned! But wait, no it isn’t. This dog is a good dog, like Gita, small and white and quiet. She never barks. She never growls. She is fond of children, but has never had puppies of her own. She never fights for food and will let Tuzik take all the hand-outs if the family doesn’t place it directly in front of her and shoo Tuzik away. She runs on all her legs, but will roll over and cover her head when she hears shouting. Her ears are slightly longer, her eyes slightly wider and blacker, her ribs slightly narrower. She is slightly less neurotic. She is a different dog. And what is her name? Gita.

It’s a miracle! An almost-Halloween miracle! And how did this miracle occur, you ask? Grandmother heard Big Sister and Little Sister were crying about their poor dog, white and small and quiet, and she looked around the neighborhood and found a new one. Where exactly did she find this dog, so miraculously similar to their old one? You know, around. But this dog is so clean and affectionate and accustomed to people, it couldn’t have come from the streets. Oh no, it definitely didn’t come from the streets, it came from a family. And did the family know it was part of this great miracle to make Big Sister and Little Sister happy? No, not really. The dog was a donation of sorts, the kind of donation that people make when they lose something they didn’t mean to lose and are not getting back. So what was the dog’s name originally, when it was well beloved by someone else? Who knows? It’s just a dog, after all, one is the same as any other. And the chickens cluck to themselves, see? It’s not just us who are disposable and replaceable around here.

Seasons of Turkmenistan

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, how do you measure a year in the life of Turkmenistan? In cups of tea, in camel sightings, in harrowing Lada taxi rides, in fluctuating dollar exchange rates, in ants. In deteriorating Soviet monuments, in golden Presidential statues, in 10 foot-tall rotating Ruhnama book statues, in ripe melons. Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, how do you measure such a year in life? How about in summers so hot it’s like a heated skillet to the head, how about falls and springs where the rain turns the dust roads into three-inch deep mud, how about winters so cold the stray dogs crawl beneath other dog carcasses to stay warm? How indeed do you measure a year in Turkmenistan? Is it in the rhythm of the girls’ pounding away at their carpets rather than going to school, in the sound of bubbling green tea, in the sound of boys playing soccer with a half-pumped ball? You measure in the moments of insanity, the moments of overwhelming joy, the moments when you think you’re in love, the moments when you laugh so hard you think you’ll burst your intestines, the moments when you cry so hard it’s like a puddle inside, the moments when you think your world is going on end, the moment when it does, the moment when it begins again, better than before.

A year ago my parents dropped me off at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown and I met my fellow T-16 Turkmenistan volunteers. Two days later we boarded our personal versions of the roller coaster which is Peace Corps Turkmenistan, a ride with no safety belts and wheels that often don’t connect with the rails. The highlights are all about the people, the stories are usually about the food, the adventures are when things went wrong, and the parts I like best are the bits that don’t make good stories. It’s time to celebrate still being here after a year in the blessed and beautiful Turkmenistan, a land which during orientation we were warned might not be at the entrance to Hell, but is definitely just a short bus ride from there.

What still gets to me about T-stan a year in:
1) The Star Wars theme song opening the daily news broadcast on the national government-run radio station. The Imperial March opens the second half of the broadcast.
2) Taxi rides in old Soviet Ladas where you need to manually hold the door closed as you’re going down the highway and the gear shift is decorative.
3) Needing to explain to every man, woman, and child the reasoning behind my marital status within the first three minutes of acquaintance.
4) Older women greet you saying, “hello, how are you? You’ve gained weight.” Or, if they’re being complementary, “Hello, how are you? I remember you being fatter, have you lost weight?”
5) Turkmen explanations for how the world works: if you’re overweight, you drank too much water and you need to eat more sheep fat; if you have a sore throat, you ate ice cream in cold weather; if you have diarrhea, you sat under the fan in cool weather; if your stomach is sore, you ate too much watermelon and fruit; if you’re inexplicably in a bad mood, a bird walked across one of your shed hairs; if you’re hit by a car, someone gave you the evil eye; the internationally weak dollar exchange is the sole fault of the new Turkmen President in conjunction with God; if a girl acts like a bitch it’s because her skin is dark-complexioned; if a child has trouble paying attention is school, their family is poor and stupid; children’s personality and behavior patterns are innate and determined by God and not influenced by parenting.
6) Herds of goats still make me paranoid.

What makes me still happy to be here:
1) My Turkmen teaching partner, Altyn, whose eyes light up when she hears a new idea.
2) The other PC volunteers, who every day inspire and astound me with their ability to joke about the taboo, ridicule the unspeakable, hate the easy, and embrace the hilarious. 3) My students who look like they’re going to cry when I tell them class is canceled.
4) My comfy couch bed, a pile of imported movies, and tons of free time to enjoy them.
5) Melons and pomegranates that make American produce seem like pale shadowy imitations of the real thing.
6) I still have no idea what’s going to happen from one day to the next.

Just one circle, please

Do you remember your first multiple choice test? I remember my first official standardized exam, the California Achievement Test (CAT) administered when I was in fourth (third?) grade to see if I was eligible for honors elementary school (I should have a bumper sticker that says “tracking worked for me”). I thought the point was to finish first rather than answer the questions correctly and the result was I did so badly I was categorized as mentally retarded. But at what point quizzes, exercise sheets, exams, and all other qualitative and quantitative evaluations began to take the form of A,B,C,D, and become an integral part of our educational experience, I have no idea. It was probably about the time we learned how to read. How do you spell the word for man’s best friend? A. DAWG; B. DOG; C. DOGG; D. WALLET. Teacher feeds the sheet through the scanning machine and job done. Welcome to the American educational system as we know it.

Turkmen children don’t know how to take multiple choice tests. I found this out last week. School started last Monday and I’m starting up a whole new round of after-school English clubs. Unlike last year when I broke down clubs by grade (one for the fourth graders, another for the fifth graders, etc), this year I’m breaking them down by language level, with the 4-6 graders split into three levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced (“advanced” in this case used rather loosely) and the 7-10 graders split along the same lines. To be fair, I made three different versions of a placement exam (no cheating) and then administered it to anyone interested in getting into the intermediate or advanced levels. It took me three days of giving this exam to finally get my directions spiel down so they understood how to take it. There are 20 questions, each question has four options (not just A or B, but C and D are also viable options), and each question has only one answer (you can’t circle all four and expect me to give you credit for finding the right one). If you circle the wrong answer, cross it out so I know it’s wrong and circle the correct one (if you circle two, don’t expect me to recognize which one you know is right). I’m not going to tell you which is the correct answer and I’m not going to translate the answers into Turkmen. And no matter how much I like you, I’m not going to give you a hint of which one is right.

Because there is the difference between exams as I give them and exams as these students have experienced them – they’re about demonstrating skills rather than making marks in a teacher’s journal to give to the regional educational department. According to all official figures you will read in world atlases or country fact and figures sheets, Turkmenistan has a 98% literacy rate. Why? Let’s look at your average English mid-term exam. The main graded section is from something called “dictation.” Students are told ahead of time which paragraph will be read to them from their textbook and then the day of the exam the teacher reads the paragraph aloud slowly and the students write what they hear. If they’re unsure of what the teacher said or about the spelling, they are welcome to ask the teacher for the translation and the spelling (which are given without reservation). If they still don’t understand, they are welcome to copy directly from the book. So, what’s actually being tested here? Oh, right, the ability to copy. Illiterate students still receive low scores, but teachers are forbidden to write the scores of failing students in their grade books. Why? It makes the school look bad, and what’s bad for the community is obviously bad for the individual student and teacher, so what’s the problem? And while we’re talking about official figures, Turkmenistan also has a low infancy death toll, no homeless people, no AIDS, no homosexuals, and no non-Muslims. Thank you, Mr. President, for giving us such a blessed and perfect country; you don’t need to change a thing.

PS – I was given a new classroom which, unlike the last one, came unfurnished. So this last week my job (besides getting these clubs started) has been to fill up the blank walls with order, design, tension, composition, balance, light, and harmony. For fellow PCV these collages could work as a “name that Newsweek issue” game. I started out intending to make them illustrations of American life, values, and personalities (notice Marilyn Monroe and Obama). But at some point in the middle of the second I realized that they’re at the back of the room where I’m the only one looking at them while teaching, so they’re ultimately about what I like to look at (can you find the Oxford University skyline? The wooden bowls were made my dad). They serve the educational function of inspiring questions and aesthetics that these students otherwise don’t have access to (other than from their satellite TVs), but mostly they serve the personal function of helping me find serenity. Oh, pictures of James McAvoy and Clive Owen, grant me the composure to teach those who wish to be taught, the strength to slap around those who wish to fart around, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A week with no Coke

Day 1: The resolution is set. I will give up drinking dark sodas. Those who know me well from earlier days may be surprised, as if Willie Nelson gave up pot or Jesus gave up wine. It’s not just the carcinogens, the calories building around my middle, the acids sucking the calcium from my bones, the sugars eating away at the plaque of my teeth, or the caffeine robbing my sleep, it’s the monetary cost of it. For the second month in a row I’ve had to exchange dollars at the end of the month to live my intended lifestyle of coming into the city on weekends for internet and American company. News flash, being a volunteer is not a very well-paid gig.

Day 2: So why is it that in return for English-speaking society I must give up the main non-transportation-related expense digging into my salary? A liter bottle of true Coca Cola is a little over a dollar (Turkmen Cola, which tastes like corn-syrup ass, is about fifty cents a bottle), but even drinking half a liter a day adds up quickly when your entire monthly salary is about $75 (not counting rent). Just one day without it has ignited the withdrawal symptoms: a pounding headache haunted me starting late afternoon and I was irritable and restless starting from about noon. It was about then I walked past the one store in town that sells Pepsi cans so cold there are little ice crystals inside like a soda smoothie. Trying not to think about it.

Day 3: The first big test. If I’d attended an addiction steps program I’m sure there’s some word for it, the moment when you habitually always take the substance in question, and you don’t. It was touch and go there for a bit, though. The good store that always has the cold cans is open 50% of the time when I’m going to Altyn’s and I figured if God or fate really wanted me to give up dark soda then it would be closed. It was open. I could almost taste the rich acidly sweet goodness on my tongue as I stepped through the door. But then I saw it: a 7 UP. They never have 7-Up. And 7-Up may rot your teeth, but it isn’t a carcinogen and is half the cost of Pepsi (it’s less popular). And they had a cold one. By divine providence, my abstinence from dark soda holds for another day.

Day 4: Sleeping is getting easier. As in, I seem able to nap 5-6 hours a day and then still sleep at night. Giving up dark soda apparently means not only giving up the joyful taste, but also all those jittery all-nighter evenings that only large doses of Benedril can counter-act. On the other hand, why are caffeine withdrawal and depression symptoms the same?

Day 5: This is getting ridiculous. I once tried to give up soda for Lent and made it for all of a week before I had a coke on Sunday and descended completely into a life of soda sin forever more. So much for promises to God, I serve a higher power: the God of expensively-marketed sugary poison. When I went to Turkey last month my parents brought me half a suitcase full of Diet Coke. No joke. My request from the America: movies, cute clothes (which I wore on vacation and then sent back), and Diet Coke. I drank an average 2-5 cans a day and then felt virtuous for conserving. So far the switch to Sprite and 7-Up is holding steady. The trick is the weekend.

Day 6: Should there be some caveat to the prohibition that all-nighters can include Coke? How is one supposed to stay up all night talking with people without some kind of chemical stimulant? Just pure enthusiasm? Who has that, really? On the other hand, on the Wyoming trip I learned that park rangers keep a bottle of Coke in their van to wash blood spills off the road, that it will eat the paint off of a bike, and will dissolve teeth completely when soaking in the stuff overnight. How many of these are overplayed hyperboles I don’t know, but the inch of truth is there: if I don’t want to succumb to one side of the family’s cancer or become a slave to the other side’s pattern of addiction disorders, I’ve got to give up the dark soda. Entirely.

Day 7: Wish me luck. The prohibition holds. Strange side note: my highly educated and worldly Turkmen counterpart, Altyn, who has been to Germany and watches Russian TV regularly does not know what McDonalds is. When I referenced our favorite burger chain in conversation, she asked me if it was the name of an American state. I didn’t feel like explaining that it is more a state of mind. I’m off the map, folks, and resolute.

Across the Universe

The times are changing. I was searching for a more original opening (time by its very definition and perception is always changing), but it works as a summary. I woke up Tuesday grabbing for a blanket for the first time in three months, a sign that the worst of summer is past and we’re heading back into bearable hot weather. Those two months huddled next to the fan from 11am – 3pm were less than fun.

And our street has asphalt! The main road that runs next to the governor’s office and the school got a new resurfacing, and then with the leftover materials my little side street was honored with a new black-top. So good-bye to the huge pot-holes, gravel pits, three-inch deep mud in spring and fall, and cars slowly maneuvering their way through the rock obstacle-course. Two days ago kids were celebrating their new road by running sprint races barefoot, whooping with joy. And as of yesterday a teacher’s daughter is in the hospital after being hit by a car on a road where before everyone was going 10 miles per hour and now they’re pushing 60 or 70. We hear for the first time a vroom sound outside our gate and every time we glance at each other with foreboding that soon there’s going to be a screech, crash, and squish. People aren’t sitting on their stoops anymore.

With two weeks left before the reopening of classes, the school building is once again filled with teachers and workers scurrying around making everything ready. It used to be that I was the only one in the building teaching my clubs Mon-Fri, but now the hallways are filled with the bickering voices of Turkmen adults grumbling to be at work. It’s a nice familiar sound. The final stages of the first floor renovation are on hold as there is no cement in Baharly (troubles between the governor and the cement factory, apparently). When I asked for an estimate of when cement would again be available, I was told “five days, ten days, may be two months.” Translation = no one knows. So it looks like we’re going to be doing the work while school is in session, which will be fun for everyone involved, if everyone considers a massive inconvenience and logistical nightmare fun.

Even without a new floor, the school is being daily transformed. All images of the past President, Turkmenbashy (people are actually beginning to open up and call him a “dictator,” it’s heartening), are being replaced by images of the new President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow (we affectionately call him “Burdy”) and Ashgabat scenery. Considering the number of images of the old President around the building (a mural, a statue, more than a dozen posters, plus 4-10 photos in each classroom), this is a very large task. In addition, by decree, all images of the Ruhnama, the former President’s literary masterpiece (there’s a two-story statue of the book in the city that spins and people dance around it during national holidays), is also being replaced by pictures of Ashgabat architecture. Last week someone took a sledgehammer to our golden statue of Turkmenbashy in the front hallway (there’s a poster of the new guy now in its place) and there is a picture of the independence monument where there used to be a poster describing the former President’s ancestry and current family tree. Folks wondered how long the new President, the former President’s dentist (and the former Minister of Health, let’s not forget), would allow images of his predecessor to hang like deities from every flat surface in the country. Apparently he lived with it for the admirable period of two years and now they’re all coming down. We’re in a new regime, a new era. So far it seems to be a whole lot better than the old one: more internet cafes, less road blocks, a more open economy, less visible KGB surveillance, etc. I’m a fan.

On the home front, a carpet is under construction in our kitchen. Considering that the loom (pieces of lead pipe, brick, and paper mache resting on the floor) stretches from one side of the room to another with about two feet of walking room around the stove, the kitchen is now effectively the carpet room. Our cozy living space with sofas, a TV, a stereo, two sewing machines, and lots of pillows is now filled with stretched wool/cotton blend string. We’ve moved our eating either outside or into the other house (where my host father used to cloister himself sitting alone in his underwear watching Russian reality TV). It’s cool to see the carpet daily develop, the huge chaos of bagged colored yarn slowing being brought into a harmonious order, but it will be nice to have our kitchen/living room back too. Even with six women working eight-hours a day, it should take three months to finish and then it will sell for several thousand dollars to a market middle-man.

With all the changes around me, I am inspired to reflect on how much I’ve changed since entering this country 10 months ago. The conclusion? Professionally, I am a good teacher. I entertain and enlighten my students as much as they will accept (I’m not a god) from Monday – Friday and in the afternoons I either teach adult classes or go to my Turkmen counterpart’s house and do the best-friend thing: complain about boys/men and how much our lives suck. She usually wins. Personally, I feel a rod of steel in my spine that wasn’t there 10 months ago, a strength that I went into the Peace Corps to find (or prove I had all along, a trick of semantics), and my salary is nearly gone from overly-partying on the weekends. I don’t know if this evens out as being more or less mature, but I like to think that I’m learning how to grow up and have fun, rather than the alternative interpretation which is that I’m becoming an incorrigible adventure-seeker. May be it’s a bit of both.

Prepare Thyself

October is approaching quickly (well, quick enough) and profiles of the incoming group of new Turkmenistan volunteers are trickling in as we stalk them on Facebook, Yahoo friend groups, and MySpace. So as a message to them (and to any perspective Peace Corps volunteers to Central Asia), I want to paint a picture of what you’re in for:

First, prepare to go insane. And not just the eccentric uber-liberal, tree-hugging crazy that people expect from Peace Corps volunteers, I mean truly gaga insane. Like the girl in Bolivia who stabbed a cow with a butter knife after it ate her last pair of underwear (the cow liked the taste of washing soap, apparently). And how when I walk through a herd of sheep every day to go to school I imagine that I’m going to me medically separated for injury-by-ramming. Those sheep may look docile and sluggish sitting there all huddled in the shade, but I know that behind those black eyes lurks a devious intelligence that’s just waiting for me to let my guard down. But I’m onto their game: I won’t let any demon wool-walker get me.

Second, prepare to go ugly. Worldwide, the pattern for Peace Corps volunteers is for men to lose weight (think Holocaust-victim thin, poor fellas) and women to gain (like filling up a water balloon). I’m not going to describe what my feet look like right now. When I asked the Peace Corps doctor if I should be concerned with the discolorization and the morphed shape, she said I shouldn’t be concerned, it’s just the logical conclusion to walking around for ten months over dust and grime in sandals that tend to rub huge calluses in strange places. She assured me that ballerinas’ feet look much worse. I refrained from reminding her that ballerinas wear shoes to hide their feet while we PCV display our deformities to the world like a strange badge of martyred honor. And, of course, we have a wardrobe of approximately four (five if you’re lucky) outfits, so even if a shirt starts out cute, it loses its effect through repetition (and cursory washing) pretty quickly.

Thirdly, prepare to obsess. This may seem like part of the “go insane” prediction, but it is significant enough that it deserves its own category. Like the Victorian matron who sits in a darkened room cooking up new hypochondriac diseases for herself, PCV stew at site thinking over and over again about whatever pop culture has appeared in our lives recently. A TV show or movie that in the US might be “good” or even “really good,” is here the pinnacle of cultural achievement worthy of deep analysis, speculation, and life-changing decisions. Consider how in a recent email to my parents I spent a good page and a half comparing the relative merits of BBC Doctor Who vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the former has better guest stars, but the latter has a better all-around ensemble cast and more emotionally-provocative mythic parallels). See?

Fourthly, prepare to be given responsibility beyond what you feel capable of. This is a mixed blessing and is perhaps the reason why many of us join the Peace Corps to begin with. As 20-somethings coming straight out of liberal arts college with no skills except how to sound good on paper and subsist on Instant Mac-and-Cheese, our first jobs consist usually of grinding 9-5s where the most significant thing we achieve is getting the fax machine to work. But here you’re “the American,” the magical alien come from space with nifty toys and obscure skills (wow, how fast you type! But you can’t tailor a dress?), and they trust you to be the boss, not the intern. The first floor renovation is coming along (we have the money, as soon as the principal comes back from vacation we can buy the cement and start construction, then there’s just the paperwork) and the next project is all lined up: fixing/installing a new heater for the school. Installing and maintaining furnaces are services the local school system is usually expected to provide for schools (along with water, which we also don’t have at the moment), but it’s a bit like being on the organ donor list – there’s always someone else who the system decides is more “deserving” of the money that year. Our school is the newest in Baharly, but was built during a period of national turmoil in the mid 1990s and so is also the most shoddy. So although we need the most repairs, we’re the last on the list for funds and support because we’re still technically “new.” Nowhere but in the Peace Corps would they trust a book-worm academic anthropology/history major to over-see the assembly and funding of major construction projects. I’m learning fast.

Lastly, prepare to realize you had an adventure about a week after it happened. When answering questions from non-PCV Americans I realize that I live a rather bizarre life. There’s a new baby camel living in the neighbor’s yard, there are two dogs and three frogs that stare at me unblinkingly while I bathe over my bucket, I have a student who is an international chess contestant, cars drive over roads while they’re in the process of being paved (I was inches from getting hit by a steam-roller while in a taxi earlier today), and chickens poop on my window sill every morning. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head and doesn’t include all the Turkmen human cultural eccentricities, of which there are hundreds. But it’s just life now and most of my anecdotal “adventures” were, at the time, just another problem to solve with as little fuss as possible. It means that any individual day just feels like another day and only when thinking about it later (or when I talk about it and someone makes a face) do I realize that, wow, I’m living in a really strange world and am having the time of my life.

Because that’s what it all comes down to: you think constantly about how you’re going insane, turning ugly, obsessing to a point where you feel like a stranger to yourself; you feel overwhelmed by the expectations of others and fulfilling a role you don’t feel qualified for, but ultimately the insanity is what makes it marvelous and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. :)

Turkey!

Turkey and Turkmenistan are not the same country. I realize that they start with the same first syllable, but they are as different as Canada and Cancun. And yet small hints remain. In Istanbul there were chickens living in the highway median. In Ankara girls wore headscarves with jeans too small across the ass (a contradiction that isn’t seen in Turkmenistan yet, but would not be out of place). Our oh-so-Western and educated guide in Ankara said Mom got food poisoning because of the weather (I almost fell over laughing in the van). Our tour-guides were also generally more often of the Central Asian model than the Western: their purpose was not to give an insider insight and show us the places outside the tourist track, but rather to make sure that we stayed on the tourist track and only received the party line. It’s like we paid for our own KGB agent to show us around and tell us that the man being arrested in front of us was a perfectly safe individual who hadn’t done anything wrong, and yet the government was right to arrest him (true story). One of our fellow tourists (whose family is Turkish) told me that Turkmenistan is exactly like Turkey 30 years ago and I believe it. As Turkey is an immensely cool country which I wouldn’t mind living in when I grow up, I see this as a very optimistic prediction for Turkmenistan which I’m doing my part to bring to fruition.

I will spare you all a detailed blow-by-blow of our itinerary. My parents and I spent three days in Istanbul getting on and off a bus seeing the major attractions of the city and the Bosphorus. Then after a quick flight to Izmir we spent a day wandering through the immense Ephesus ruins. It was a rather impressively-preserved site, but our attention was distracted by trying to keep ahead of the Italian cruise-ship crowd advancing behind us like a solid horde of bronze-tan wildebeests in big sunglasses. The next day was Pamukkale (“Cotton Castle” because of the calcium deposits that make it look like a tiered sugar cake) and the ruins of Hierapolis, a Roman town built to take advantage of the Pamukkale thermal springs. I resisted the temptation to get covered in expensive mud. Then we saw Cappadocia for three days (see below). After Cappadocia we jumped back in a plane to see Ankara for two days, viewing the makings of Western civilization at the Hittite ruins of Hattusas and Phrygia Gordion, as well as the massive monuments where the modern Turks worship their republic’s founder, Ataturk; very cool guy apparently. As might be apparent, the word “vacation,” when traveling with my parents, is not synonymous with “resting.” It is in fact more synonymous with “journeying,” or -- do I dare? -- “working.” My parents got on their plane back to America 10 hours before I was scheduled to return to Turkmenistan so I used that time to “vacation”: sitting in various scenic locations reading “The Book of Air and Shadows” by Michael Gruber (really amazing book, far better than “The Da Vinci Code,” of the same genre), playing on the internet (everyone should see “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” at drhorrible.com), and watching movies in an honest-to-God movie theater (“Wanted” is okay, the Batman movie wasn’t out yet in Turkey).

I hesitate to gush about Cappadocia because I don’t want to give away the surprise. Call me an ignorant cretin, but I hadn’t heard of Cappadocia before this trip. While we were in Istanbul we’d run into other tourists and the first thing they’d ask us was “have you gotten to Cappadocia yet?” and we’d say, “no, but it’s on our list,” and they’d turn away with looks of secretive envy. Neil Gaiman in “American Gods” describes places of power, places in the world where sacred energy has gathered and human beings traditionally respond by building temples, monuments, and (in America) road-side attractions. I felt it in Delphi in Greece, in the slave pens in Zanzibar (for different reasons), and now in Cappadocia, that intangible something that leaves a mark on your soul. It isn’t just the physical wonder of the place, an ancient lava bed where erosion has eaten away at the rock and turned the landscape into walls of curling, sloping cliffs like the sides of a macaroon pastry and towers euphemistically called “fairy chimneys.” And it isn’t just the history, where ancient Hittites began carving out homes in the soft rock towers to hide from invaders and then early Christians built monasteries and chapels as well as entire under-ground cities linked by miles-long tunnels that go over 40 meters into the ground and served as places of storage and refuge. Functioning underground cities. Seriously. But there is a sense of wonder that goes beyond all that, a sense of sacredness that goes deep into the soil and is tangible even when flying hundreds of feet over it in a hot air balloon at dawn. Thank you, again, Dad for that trip.

And thank you, parents, for paying my way out of Turkmenistan, for being delightful and sensitive companions, and for giving me a wondrous vacation to remember as the days tick away at site. Now all I have to do is wait for next summer. Dublin, anyone?

All-Vol

It’s a bit surreal to realize that “All-Vol,” the once-in-a-year all volunteer conference bringing in all 60-some Turkmenistan Peace Corps volunteers from across the country for education and debauchery, has finally come and gone. We looked forward to it for months, we came early (if we could) to start the festivities as soon as possible, and then stayed until the Peace Corps staff started to give us the angry eye. The first night I stayed over at Brit’s, a T-15 (a girl from the year before me, I’m a T-16), with the five acknowledged biggest partiers in T-stan PC. For someone who never went to a Greek party, never stayed longer than 30 minutes at a suites party, never got more than tipsy in 4 years of college, and never went clubbing within the United States borders, I’m doing a lot of catching up. Beer tastes a lot better these days, although vodka remains only bearable when it’s so smothered in juice and soda that it’s undetectable. Even watching other people take shots makes me feel ill. Anyway, after the first night partying at Brit’s, there were three days of conference learning about methodologies and how to get along with Turkmen culture interspersed with healthy doses of peer support sessions making “don’t quit” cards for each other.

We got all dolled up on the 4th to attend a fancy embassy party at the house of the American ambassador to Turkmenistan. In one of the oddest evenings of the last year, we walked through a large metal gate, two sets of metal detectors, and past a security booth built more securely than the Turkmen airport, and then across a lawn -- an honest-to-God-lawn with manicured grass and everything -- through a large house that looked like a Monopoly hotel piece, and then out into a grassy reception area with free wine (wine!!) and beer and a demonstration of imported Native Americans doing a sun-dance in a corner and an imported cowboy doing rope tricks in the other. In between them was a huge buffet of Mexican food which was delicious enough to inspire us to wait in line for 45 minutes for seconds and thirds even when we were way past full. The food was so delectable and novel it made almost every single one of us extremely sick the next morning. And desert was apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Once people stopped ignoring the “tribal demonstrations,” the US Airforce band started up with a series of classic rock covers that had the drunkest of us up on the dance-floor going strong within minutes. The less-drunk followed soon after and soon a good half of the volunteers were screaming “Go Minnesota!” or “Go California!” at the top of their lungs as the band called out tributes to the states and then flailing about the dance floor in a way that had the Turkmen guests equally appalled and envious. We did a lot of laughing about being on “American soil,” but considering the small patch of American twilight zone the embassy achieved on that evening totally isolating us from the rest of the Turkmen world, they could very well have imported the ground beneath our feet along with everything else.

Our All-American week concluded with a true American past-time: baseball. Well, technically we played softball and then for only five innings (seriously, though, five innings is a really nice length, professional teams should learn from our example), but I can proudly state that the T-16s whooped the T-15s’ asses! With a score of 15-10 we had a solid victory. I should say in all fairness, though, that the spirit award should really go to Scott, the T-15 captain, who continued to play and make home-runs with an over 100-degree temperature and vomiting between plays. To help out my team I did them the incredible favor of not playing and instead dispensed water and cheered really loud. I may have played soccer and danced throughout my childhood, but my coordination is only in my feet: my arms might as well be attached to my knees for all the use they are during hand-eye coordination games.

Turkmenistan is a truly amazing place filled with wonders that are not available elsewhere. It is so bizarre sometimes that I wonder if the entire country isn’t a huge hoax and someone with a hidden camera is going to jump out from behind the outhouse one day and say “gotcha!” And then other days it feels so familiar that only the camel in the neighbor’s yard reminds me that I’m far from home. And yet, for all its endless fascinating features and new experiences, it’s time for a vacation. This week I’m off to Turkey to see my parents for the first time in nine months and to take a posh tour of the historic and cultural sites along the Turkish coast. Two weeks of running water, pedestal toilets, and not being alone in a strange land. It’s time to get out of town.

Watching paint dry was never so interesting

There are two ways to draw a world map. The first is with an overhead projector: you make a copy of the world map and then just project it at the wall. Simple, easy, concise. It requires an over-head projector and electricity in the art space to work. We have neither. So we’re doing the second method – the grid method. Using meter sticks to measure out 7cm squares across the 2mX4m space and then using the world map drawing provided by PC, copy each individual block onto its corresponding grid box on the map. After drawing the initial blue rectangle (mirroring creation, we begin the world with water before shaping land masses), we drew the first vertical line (not grid, the first LINE) along the side and the first horizontal line along the bottom in three hours. We didn’t have a leveler so each line had to be measured every inch or so to make sure it was still straight and then compared with hanging weighted strings to make sure that the vertical line was still straight. To repeat, two lines took 3 hours. Three hours. There are approximately 100 lines on the grid. The assistant principal stopped by to see our progress and politely and quietly explained that if we wanted to finish the grid, not to mention the entire map, by the end of this year, we should try something new. Taking the string we were using to check vertical straightness, we covered it with classroom chalk, stretched it across the wall from our starting to our ended points, then snapped it against he wall. The chalk on the string bounced onto the wall and made a perfectly straight line between the two points. Then all we had to do was trace along the chalk lines with pencil. Three of us working non-stop finished the entire grid in another three hours and on day 3 we could actually begin drawing the map.

The World Map Project began in 1988 when a Peace Corps Volunteer, Barbara Jo White, while waiting for a bus in the Dominican Republic was inspired to get kids interested in geography by drawing a world map on their school wall. The idea spread across the Dominican Republic and then across the PCV community until it became an iconic part of the PC organization. Until this year, each PC training group in Turkmenistan was required to draw a world map at their training site school. The program stopped when schools who had hosted multiple training groups mentioned they were running out of wall space. I am the first volunteer in Baharly, however, so this is a new task for us all.

Thankfully, I’m not taking it on alone. Although PC provided all of the materials and I’m the only one who can read the instruction manual, the project is being led by my English teaching counterpart and local Wonder Woman, Altyn, and carried out by her three student recruits: Batyr, Shamahammet, and Yurin, two 10th graders and one 8th grader singled out for their artistic ability. Working an intensive five days, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, we drew in the continents and countries with pencil, went over the lines in Sharpie (our efforts hampered by having only one marker for the five of us), and then painted in the nations. As I write this, we’re nearing completion of the final stage: writing in the names of the countries in Turkmen. We had hoped to finish up last week, but my first bout of major stomach illness (the doctor thinks it was salmonella) sent me to Ashgabat for two days of recuperation and map efforts stalled in my absence.

Throughout the process I’ve been reminded of how important this map will be for the kids and for any visitors to the school. During the pencil outlining stage, one of my artists got off the grid by two squares, twisting China into an unrecognizable shape and making all of SE Asia appear on the wrong side of India. And here’s the clincher: no one noticed anything wrong until a good two hours of work was completed and I finished class to come check on it. Anyone with any familiarity with the shape of the world would have noticed that something was up immediately and double-checked the grid numbers. Our biggest blunder, ironically, occurred with the placement of Turkmenistan: one of the artists was so excited to draw his home nation that he forgot about Afghanistan and all of Central Asia was pushed out of kilter. We didn’t notice the problem until after we’d gone over it in Sharpie so Turkmenistan and its neighbors are a bit messier than the other parts of the world. After seeing what happened to SE Asia, I drew all of Africa myself to make sure that it got the appropriate care and attention. My drawing skills aren’t spectacular, but, like so much of this project, it’s the thought that counts.

My hope is that this map will inspire children to learn more about the world around them, ask more educated questions than “is Germany a neighbor of America?” and begin to see their lives as part of a greater landscape than their immediate surroundings. It’s possible that I won’t see the effects of the map within my brief time here, but hopefully future volunteers here will reap the benefits of students and parents with a greater world perspective and wider ambitions.

Fly with me

So my clubs have increased exponentially in size. Kids come, have a good time, then show up the next class with their friends, their neighbors, and their cousin visiting on vacation. Folks in the adult club get a sample of what I’m doing in class and then send their kids the next day, older siblings drag along their younger siblings, and so I no longer have classes with only four kids: now I have 20, 25, 15, and promises of more in the weeks to come. It makes planning tricky as I have to teach the kids who showed up to every session and have mastered “Hello, how are you? My name is Aygul” as well as find a way of intensively reviewing the basics for the new kids. Some days it feels like I’m just going in circles repeating old material, reviewing old material, and then running out of time before we can get to the new stuff. I’ve made a kind of peace with myself knowing that these summer clubs are more a symbol of my involvement with the community (they’re open to whoever shows up, while the school-year clubs are only by invitation from the principal and the other English teachers) than actual instruction.

The best part of the summer, however, is the five-day work week. For six months I have lived a six-day work schedule with a single day off (Sunday) to rest, recuperate, and seek out non-Turkmen companionship. When there’s only one day off, it becomes a source of minor anxiety to decide whether to spend that precious time connecting with people at site, going on field-trips with my students, or coming into the city for internet and American people time. But only working Monday through Friday means that on Saturday I can go on field trips and spend time people at site (see below), and then still have AN ENTIRE OTHER DAY to go to Ashgabat and pretend to be American for 5-8 hours on Sunday.

Last week I used my newly discovered Saturday to head with the eighth graders to Serdar Yoly (again) where the picnic was a bit lame until we found the swings. We arrived early, around 7am, before the swarms of kids (and my bio-rhythms) were awake so we had the playground all to ourselves. At first they just sat on the swings swaying slightly, using them basically as mobile chairs. At first I was annoyed – what a waste of a good playground swing! -- but soon it became evident that they didn’t know how to swing. When a boy pushed a girl’s swing, she went may be a foot and started squealing that it was too high. You must understand, I have this thing about swings. Swings are the closest thing we have to self-propelled flight; they simultaneously launch the imagination and create a breeze as the wind whips past your face and through your clothing. So when one of the kids got up to whisper something in a friend’s ear, I stole her swing and was soon getting a good 15 feet of air and terrifying my students that I was about to die. But they’re 16 and not about to be out-done by their stodgy old teacher so before long they were competing for who could get the highest. I even got Altyn, my fellow English teacher, on and up and going strong. The pictures don’t do the morning justice; they doesn’t capture the happy sighs and squeals, the laugher, the flashes of fear, joy, exhilaration, and discovery across their faces as they soared higher and higher. They can’t capture a kid’s first flight.

The Song of (Brown) Summer

The weather heats up, we pop Benedril pills to be able to sleep and ignore the pools of sweat and flies, and dream of vacations (Turkey with the parents in July) and upcoming conferences (i.e. clubbing, drinking, English language socializing, and, to quote one of my most infamous fellow volunteers, “blowing up”). The stores are overflowing with juicy tomatoes the size of softballs and apricots that look like they came from a Tropicana commercial. The Coca Cola is flowing like a river through my over-caffeinated system and I spend my time playing on the computer, writing letters, watching the same imported movies and TV shows repeatedly, hanging with the host family occasionally, and planning my lessons that continue despite the end of the school year.

My summer clubs began last Monday and I’m working out the kinks of each group’s needs and eccentricities. Out of my 8 English clubs, some have as many as 10 or 11 kids; others have as few as 3 or 4. My adult club has 4: two guys who are at a mildly conversational level and just need help with advanced grammar like the difference between past simple and past perfect continuous (I have to study before class as much as they do) and two guys who don’t know “what is your name?” Each club requires a little creative problem solving. With the younger kids I’m still working out the details (the advanced kids are bored and getting apathetic, the really ignorant are struggling and getting depressed), but I’m a bit proud of what I’m doing with the adult class. I plan two lesson plans at once, each filled with intense worksheets and dialogue constructions. I teach one side of the room and give them an assignment to do on their own. As they work, I run to the other side of the classroom and check up on what the first group has been working on. I advise them, reward them with a sticker for good effort, teach them a little, and then give them another assignment to work on as I run back to work with the other pair. I’m exhausted at the end of the two hours, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that comes after running a race you know you won.

Other than that, my only offerings to the internet void are recommended reading: “Will in the World” by Stephen Greenblatt, which isn’t so much a biography of Shakespeare as an adventure/theology/philosophy/romance/horror book with a strong narrative story and alive, memorable characters. And I hesitate to wildly recommend “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” by Jeff Lindsay and its accompanying Showtime television show as I don’t know what it says about me that I really enjoy a story about a charming, entertaining serial killer. And of course I’m in the middle of a slight “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series obsession, but that should come as a surprise to few.

Saying "hello"

After 8 months I have finally mastered the Turkmen greeting. There is a simple “hello,” (“Salam”), but in the situation where an American might acknowledge a passing friend with a “hey” and maybe a salute, the Turkmen have a long complex dialogue asking about your health, doings, your parents’ health, your job satisfaction, and your general well-being. In the same way that “How’s it going” in English usually doesn’t expect a response and the answer is almost always untrue (ex. Your dad just died, “how are you?” “I’m good.”), the Turkmen greeting interrogation is a matter of politeness rather than information gathering. They begin the questions once you’re within earshot and recite both the questions and the answers before you’ve had a chance to respond. So you both say each part of the conversation on top of each other and if timed correctly it will be completed at the moment you draw even in the road, at which point you either nod and smile, or make an observation about the weather. The nod means you continue on, the weather observation means you have to stop, get through a detailed discussion of the current weather, how it compares to American weather, and then ask again about their family. Once these pleasantries are complete you’re free to move on to whatever business they want to discuss. That I have finally mastered the timing of these exchanges where I can get through the whole thing without breaking stride is, I feel, a sign that I’m becoming accustomed to life here. Feeling settled in is getting easier now that summer is approaching and I can assume a little more control over my life. No longer wed to the school’s schedule’s limitations, I’m increasing my number of English clubs and accepting students from other local schools, but decreasing my work week from 6 days to 5 days: I have my weekend back!! If there was running water at home as well I’d feel positively spoiled. And the projects are underway: we’re renovating the first floor hallway (ten tons of cement and 135 new light bulbs courtesy of Peace Corps’s small project funds) and drawing a large world map mural. The amount of paperwork necessary to do this and justify the need for funds is a bit overwhelming and explains why people usually hire professional grant writers to do this kind of thing. I’m just glad I had over a decade of excellent education in making something that isn’t particularly spectacular (painting a wall, laying cement), sound a lot more interesting. An excerpt from my grant proposal: “The World Map Project will transform the existing hallway walls from passive surfaces into learning environments, and the floors will be turned from hazards into learning facilitators.” And, yes, this is what I’m thinking about these days: floors as learning facilitators. Peace Corps transforms you, all the brochures tell you, but exactly how is a little more unsuspected.

Merv

The truth is that we didn’t so much see Merv, the ancient once-bustling trade city of the Silk Road, as happen to camp among the brambles that have grown up in the barren arid wasteland it has become. Twenty-some volunteers from all corners of the country arrived by bus, train, and taxi converging on Mary city last Sunday for a non-official volunteer field trip. From Mary we traveled together to Merv to set up camp next to what looked like an old battlement wall (at right), now hollowed out by snake holes (we didn’t see the inhabitants, thankfully). With twenty of us milling around, we were able to take informal rotations cooking the barbeque, eating apricots (both dried imports from America and fresh local), hacking down dead trees with blunt axes for the fire (so much fun), climbing up and down the battlements while balancing vodka-spiked bottles of Fanta, and tossing back and forth Frisbees that our muscle memories had forgotten how to throw. When it grew dark we improvised candles out of carved out plastic bottles and shaped wax, and stayed up late arguing about the various merits of Lord of the Rings (the movies) verses the original Star Wars trilogy, and taking turns ranting about how the new Star Wars movie are travesties in every conceivable way (except for Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor who almost made the tickets worthwhile). At some early hour we cleared the food off the picnic blanket and the twenty of us platonically piled on one another with sleeping bags and slept a semi-drunken passed-out sleep until the sun rose at 5am, forcing us awake for the buses’ arrival. We could force ourselves to leave only by promising that we’d do it all again in October. I’ll be there.

So that’s what happened when Andrea and I got to Merv. How we got there is a bit more of a story.

So the train from Ashgabat to Mary left at 7:00PM on Friday night. Trains to Mary average about 9 hours so we thought we’d sleep on the train and arrive at the Mary city train station at 4:00AM with two hours to sit around before sunrise. We had made arrangements to meet up with other Mary volunteers at 8:30AM, find breakfast, and then fill the hours together before meeting the entire group in the later afternoon. In Ashgabat Andrea and I found ourselves on a new train decked out with beds, clean sheets and blankets, piped-in Turkmen pop music with controllable volume, clean bathrooms, and room service. It was a surprisingly pleasant trip and our compartment companions surprised us by going to bed as soon as it was dark (around 7:30). We snuck into my top bunk and sipped our smuggled beer and quietly talked about boys and sex. Whenever one of the Turkmen got up to use the bathroom we would quickly hide our beer and food and then giggle into our pillows imagining what they would think if they could understand what we were saying. The giggling would subside and then we would look each other and we’d double over laughing again. We almost fell off the bed twice. We were like teenagers sneaking around behind our parents’ back, subterfuge the most fun part of the adventure. At 11:00 we settled into our beds thinking we’d get a good five hours of sleep before we rolled into the station. At 11:30 the lights came on, our Turkmen companions starting getting their bags ready, and a conductor came by to proclaim we were arriving in Mary city in fifteen minutes. We frantically got on the cell phone, but all the Mary volunteers whose number we knew were stuck in their villages with no way of getting to the city until morning. We were on our own with 8 hours until sunrise in a city we didn’t know and nothing to do except share an Ipod with a dying battery and a historical fiction book set during Sherman’s March. The prospect was grim. On the platform we befriended an elderly policeman who escorted us first to a near-by hotel we couldn’t afford and then back to the train station where he settled us in a corner where he promised we wouldn’t be bothered. So we made a small corner of the bright fluorescently-lighted Mary train station our home, hugging our backpacks as we tried to sleep sitting this way and that way in the uncomfortable small metal chairs. I think Andrea got a 15 minute nap at some point in the night, I know I didn’t. Our conversation became increasingly vague, circling around the philosophical, scientific, and social implications of what would happen if one group of rich people found a way of live forever and how our concept of eternal life is mostly drawn from Anne Rice and Joss Wheaton visions of vampire culture. We basically agreed that mortality is better for everyone; the alternative would get boring eventually. So we waited and the sun gradually rose with a slowness that seemed to be deliberately taunting. At 8:30 Kate found us staring into dead space like crank-up toys without batteries. The hotel that had seemed too expensive at midnight last night now seemed absolutely worth the investment, if only to nap for three hours. We stumbled to a taxi and asked for directions to the cheapest hotel in town. He pointed to a two-story building right next to the tracks where the first floor was dominated by a café and the second floor was a sort of converted hostel with four rooms outfitted with cots. For a dollar we had a room to ourselves, a lock on the door, and clean sheets. We collapsed onto the beds and were blessedly dead to the world for a good two and a half hours until Kate came to wake us up to meet the rest of the folks. With that short nap we were new human beings and with awake eyes realized that our miracle hotel find was in fact the quintessential cheap brothel next to the train tracks. We had arrived early enough in the morning to find it empty, but now the other rooms were filled with soldiers on leave and their scantly-clad girls and (more scandalously) soldier companions. We left quietly and met up with the rest of the volunteers at the market, discovering then that if we had brought more telephone numbers with us there were at least four different homes open to us in the city where we could have slept. That said, however, after a night sitting awake in that train station, our cheap brothel seemed just as welcoming and friendly as any clean family home.




For additional photos from Merv, check out Kate's blog at: katesveritas.blogspot.com