From Baharden with love

After a little over a week at my new permanent site of Baharly/ Baharden (I’m beginning to say it like a local), I have come to the conclusion that as a stranger in a strange land I must either become strange or become like the PCV in Paraguay who was medically separated for being mentally unbalanced. She stabbed a cow with a kitchen knife. It ate her last pair of underwear. I can sympathize. For me, the strangeness is not from cows with a hankering for the taste of laundry soap and cloth, but rather from the people who are at once incredibly accessible and friendly, but also skilled with magical abilities and thought processes I can’t begin to fathom. How they can eat foot consisting entirely of fat and carbohydrates and not all be 250 pounds, I don’t know. How they can sit just talking and drinking tea for hours, I don’t know. How my host sister can sit and watch me do a Tai Bo exercise video with an entirely expressionless face for an entire hour, I don’t know. How they can at once admire work and yet avoid it whenever possible (and sometimes when it should be impossible), I don’t know. How they can obsess and moralize about cleanliness and tidiness and yet use the same unwashed cloth to clean up raw chicken and goat carcasses, dry the plates, and then wipe their mouths, I don’t know. These mysteries (with the exception of the last one) I hope to learn through duplication, adaptation, and application to my own life here. It should be interesting to return to America, the land of constant work and sound bite conversations, after two years of a “short wait” translating as one to two hours of non-activity.

So I gave my first teacher conference for three days this week. I didn’t know I was going to do my first teacher conference, but on the first day of the all-teachers winter holiday conference, in the time it took for all the English teachers in Baharden town and the surrounding villages to push me to the front of the room I prepared a nice little presentation on the American educational philosophy (go to school till you’re 18 or your parents go to jail), the Peace Corps philosophy (we teach and help you for free, gasps all around), and American universities and liberal arts colleges (you can learn a profession or just learn a lot of fun facts, I chose the latter). I spoke in a mixture of Turkmen and English for over an hour answering questions about the American banking loan system (can you pay for a house or a car with just your salary? answer = no), why I’m single (in America women work first and then sometimes get a guy as a nice accessory to match her purse – just kidding, of course), and why I’m only one of three children rather than ten (not unusual in Turkmenistan). With a night to prepare, the second day I did a tidy presentation on 4MAT lesson plans, the Teaching English as a Foreign Language basic currency for communicative teaching methods. The third day I gave them all books about communicative and interactive teaching and picture dictionaries to jazz up the memorize-and-repeat-or-get-hit-by-a-stick current classroom atmosphere. Whether they listened to me because I was the only one talking (with the exception of the guys in the back, boys never really grow up), because my novelty as the American hasn’t worn off, or because they were actually interested in the information I was presenting and will incorporate it into their teaching, remains to be seen. They had a really hard time processing the first step, to engage the students, as the idea that students may choose to not pay attention is about as alien as the concept of a free will other than God’s. I pick my battles. I chose to focus my ire and attention on them accepting the importance of the fourth step: students’ independent creation of dialogues and texts using English. My standing up there discussing these ideas in Turkmen after only three months of study I hope was a poignant example of communicative methods working better than listen-and-repeat methods which have students four years into English study still unable to answer “how are you?” I’m just happy that I’m doing more than just sitting around and drinking tea during the two week winter break – it may be okay for Turkmen, but I’m still too much an American to enjoy doing nothing. Damned Protestant work ethic, it follows me even across the world.

So it’s really bloody cold here, especially considering I was anticipating (and packed for) the desert. The past few days it’s been way below freezing, there’s an inch of snow/impacted ice on the ground which makes the already treacherous roads spikes of frozen mud. I tell people when they ask that weather in DC is similar in winter, and that’s true, but below freezing weather in the states is a relatively hypothetical state. As a sheltered suburbanite, I experienced winter for about five minutes walking from over-heated home to over-heated car, over-heated car to over-heated building, over-heated building to over-heated car, over-heated car to over-heated home. My winter coat was more for the comfort of snuggling up in something fuzzy than actual necessity. My current unbelievably extraordinarily ugly winter coat was a gift from my amazing teacher counterpart and a hand-me-down from her 60+ year-old mother-in-law who thought it was too unfashionable and ugly to wear around town or even around the house. But despite the fact that I would blend in perfectly at an old Russian bag ladies’ convention, my coat almost never leaves my body these days as I trudge through the blistery elements to reach the kitchen, the outhouse, the living room (all separate buildings), and then through the streets for 10-30 minutes to reach the school, the corner store, colleagues, and my growing circle of acquaintances. I packed for fall figuring I’d buy winter clothes when I arrived, but as the entrance to the grand bazaar should have a sign reading “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” I have since decided that layering up four or five clothes at a time is preferable. So I look like a sphere and slowly freeze, but it’s an adventure. So far I don’t have any projectile vomiting onto kittens, over-dosing on anti-diarrhea medications and foaming pink at the mouth, falling down the shitter hole, or spectacular disease stories (all the ones listed happened in the last three months to other volunteers here). I’m tempted to chug the water just to walk away from Peace Corps with a story to rival the ones that come out of Africa or other warmer, wetter, malaria-infested parts of the world. May be the last month.

As anxious minds have asked, I have a new address in Baharden (available upon request from myself or my mother), but the old address continues to work as well. I can only pick up mail sent to the old address when I go into Ashgabat (may be once or twice a month) or when the PC staff comes out to my site to check up on my progress. Packages (music, books, movies, and food such as Poptarts, Double-stuffed Oreos, gum, and other packaged edibles able to withstand nuclear blasts) should continue to be sent to Ashgabat, but letters and well-wishes feel free to send direct to Baharden. A guy really excited to see stamps and handwriting all the way from America brings it straight to my door and my host family passes around the envelope with muted amazement.