Holidays

Happy International Women’s Day! March 8 honoring women, their work, and their contributions to society is celebrated throughout the world (not in America because Americans are above such nonsense, we celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day with more enthusiasm). In Turkmenistan (or at least in Baharly), Women’s Day is celebrated as Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Black History Month all rolled into one. To begin with, it’s a national holiday with all schools and government facilities closed and the Friday before is a half-day with the afternoon spent in parties honoring women. All female teachers and students from kindergarten through 10th grade also receive 200,000 manat (roughly $10, I lived during training very comfortably on $30 a month so it’s a big deal) from the President as a gift honoring women’s role as caretakers and emotional sanctuaries. Women’s Day is a gift-giving holiday where everyone is expected to give token (or large) gifts to the females in their lives: mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and female friends and classmates. I mentioned Valentine’s Day because the most common gifts are flowers, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, stuffed animals with “I Love You” logos, and jewelry. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how many gifts I’ve received in the past three days, but I’ve re-gifted most of them. A grown woman (Lord, am I that already?) doesn’t need a veritable plethora of mass-manufactured teddy bears and glass bowls.

In other news, last Sunday was the first Ahal Volunteer official hang-out day since the T-16s (that’s my group) arrived at site three months ago. The Ahal region volunteers are traditionally the lamest socially as we’re so scattered that coming together requires coordination and advance planning. All of us are too close to college age to be very good at coordination and advance planning. But with a bit of enthusiasm we pulled it off and found each other in Godkepe (my training site) to go to a restaurant and then hike around the mountains together for an afternoon. It’s one of those days that positively shines in memory, but doesn’t make a good story as everything went right instead of wrong. If even one detail had been a disaster then there might have been a story, but the weather was gorgeous, we didn’t get lost, the landscape was beautiful (in a stark Turkmen kind of way, see photos at right and above), and we pleasantly enjoyed each other’s company discussing the three favorite conversation topics of all PC volunteers: American food we’re not eating, sex we’re not having, and stomach problems we wish we weren’t having. It’s one of those days we will look back on and go, “Remember that time in March when we all went to the Godkepe mountains and walked around?” “Yeah?” “Those were good times.” “Yeah.” “We hadn’t had a chance to hang out before that, we finally got a chance to know each other that day,” “Yep, good times.” And we’ll all smile and then talk about American food we’re not eating, sex we’re not having, and stomach problems we wish we weren’t having, but are privately proud to share.

The plan (we’ll see how long it lasts) is for us all to come together the first Sunday of every month and do something fun, beyond sitting on our asses and surfing the internet in the Peace Corps office. After next month the T-16s will also be free to sleep over night at other locations, which opens up new possibilities of clubbing, bar hopping, and other exciting late-night activities. Fun times ahead.

A nice "I made a difference" moment from yesterday: I blew some 18 year-old girls' minds telling them that American boys' families don't pay their perspective brides' families several thousand dollars to marry them. If boy meets girl and girl meets boy and girl and boy spend a good year or so hanging out and decide they want to do it for the rest of their lives, then they go in front of a person of authority and say so, end of story. No mothers have to give permission, no sons have to raise money to buy the girl from her family, chaparones don't have to be present for the dating process (there actually is a dating process, arranged marriages are out of style in America), and, most importantly, American girls do not spend their childhoods in terror that they will do something to lower their quantifyable self-worth.

The latest additions to Annie’s Peace Corps Recommended Reading Book Club are "Timbuktu" by Paul Auster, “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer, and “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. "Timbuktu" is a great well-written story I finished in about a day and a half, although having been to the city of Timbuktu I know it's not going to meet the character's expectations. As for the other two books, although written with very different styles, both essentially say the same thing: discover the world by listening to your heart and following through on your dreams even if it means going to farther extremes than what society would deem “normal” or even “healthy.” Coelho’s book is about a boy’s search for treasure, written as a fairy tale and philosophical meditation about the powers at work in the world helping people attain their dreams and what we must do to help those powers along. Krakauer’s book, a nonfiction journalistic account of a boy’s search for adventure (recently made into a movie I didn’t see, from the previews I can safely say the book is better than the movie), adds a qualification to Coelho’s idealistic message: bring a map and food with you when you go in search of your dreams.