There is something bewitching about transitional periods. Before I elaborate, I’ll tell the story of what led up to this observation. Last week I attended the Peace Corps Project Design Management (PDM) Conference, the first of several in-service training sessions. In practical terms, this meant five days surrounded by other Ahal region volunteers learning about what we can do to be more than just teachers at site. Socially and professionally it was an awesome time. The social part is more entertaining so I’ll start with that and move on to the professional bit later.
Elsewhere in the city it was World Health Week as well as World Recognition Day so all our usual hotels were filled to the brim with pharmaceutical companies and oil barons. Since hotel rooms are cheap (about $5 for a double room), companies tend to buy up all the rooms in a hotel, including the empty ones, so that their employees can have total privacy and run of the premises. So we humble volunteers were left with few options: commute back and forth from site every day (a two hour trip one-way), stay up all night at the disco and then crash at the PC Office when it opens at 5AM, or find a hotel so bad that no other company wanted to stay there. And that’s how we found ourselves staying at a hotel on the edge of town that could easily be the set for a remake of The Shining. Our rooms weren’t bad (if you overlook the polyester sheets that hadn’t been cleaned in awhile). The boys were put into a suite decorated for the Rat Pack with an (unstocked) bar, black leather arm-chairs, plastic Art-Deco lights, and other black and silver garnishes from the 1950s that made you feel like you should be holding a martini. In contrast, we girls were put in the harem room. Red curtains hung over piles of red, pink, and yellow pillows and mattress pads scattered across a (factory-produced) red and yellow Turkmen carpet. Only the hookah was missing, although burns in the carpet testified that past guests had provided their own.
Due to residue drama from the weekend before (I’ll spare you), a lot of people were angry with everyone else and the first two nights were spent licking wounds and trying to get used to the sudden company of Americans. The third night, spent with four other girls watching “Sense and Sensibility,” complaining about boys, and eating three pounds of imported chocolate, was only noteworthy because none of us had done anything similar in seven months and if felt so “American” and “girly” that we couldn’t stop commenting on the novelty.
The last night, however, is the one that’s actually worth elaboration. We began at the English Pub (see photo), the most expensive restaurant in Ashgabat, patronized only by American embassy workers and foreign oil brokers. One Heineken costs a quarter of our monthly salary. The highlight of the evening was a live band who’s lead singer, Eric (white shirt, center), is a former Peace Corps volunteer who about five years ago married a Turkmen woman and settled down to live in Turkmenistan and work for a NGO forever more. Cool guy. We hung out sharing apple pie and vodka until the upstairs disco opened at 11. Until now, if we went to a city night-club, we went to the one in our favorite
hotel’s basement. It’s a relatively small room with mirrors over the walls, low lights, and a few half-hearted green lasers and strobes that flash through the semi-haze of cigarette smoke. The music is pretty good, though, and we enjoy it; it’s the kind of night-club where they know your order at the bar and the hookers wear the same outfit every night. The disco on the second floor of the English pub, however, is another story entirely. It’s like something out of a Russian music video where the wealthy mob gangsters are served by scantily-clothed women in luxurious (yet tasteful) leather and chrome surroundings where all the lines are smooth and someone high on something expensive could spend the whole evening just staring at the walls. Everything is less than a year old, there are smoke machines, enough lasers and strobe lights to discombobulate even the sober, and the whores were indistinguishable from the embassy workers and professional women out for a night of anonymous fun. The music was all Russian pop and we went slowly crazy in the hours under its influence. Dancing that began as slowly controlled undulating devolved into spastic jumping and arm flailing as we realized that for one night we didn’t have to worry about whether our students remembered to use the verb to be with the present continuous or if we were acting as proper representatives of America and the Western world. We were just young 20-somethings out on the town in a place where no one knew us, and in the flashing lights we could barely even recognize ourselves.
Professionally, the conference was for us (and especially our Turkmen counterparts) to start brainstorming and planning our secondary projects. We are English teachers, but as Peace Corps volunteers, we are expected to be more than that. Past volunteers have written grammar books and visual dictionaries, built English language resource centers, renovated gymnasiums and computer labs, held sport clubs run by trained local youths, and completed countless other non-English related activities that have helped to develop and energize their communities. As new volunteers to site (we’re still rank rookies in the large scheme of things) we weren’t allowed to write grants or start large development projects until month four: April, 2008. In other words, we begin now.
So as the first three months (the learning and settling-in period) draws to a close and the next era of projects begins, I find myself in an uncomfortable transitional period. Many cultures acknowledge the power of transitional spaces: doorways, shadows, adolescence, graduation, birth, death (to name only a few) with special rituals or symbols that mediate or control them. These mystifying periods and states, the uncomfortable state of limbo, is one which we can all recognize even in the most mundane moments of life. The “where are we going to eat,” or “what are we going to do next” party discussion, the apathetic argument of what movie to watch that lasts longer than the movie itself, even the act of the daily commute illustrates how uncomfortable (and yet full of exciting possibility) transitions are to experience.
As much as I would like to move on to the more productive era of my service, I am unfortunately still lingering in the transitional limbo, held back because I haven’t had a chance to talk to the principal and the school administration about what they need. I could go in there and give them a list of what I want to do: renovate the hallway floors (there are holes that put DC potholes to shame and kids are always tripping and hurting themselves when the electricity goes off), install an AC unit in the new computer lab (the new computers are all going to fry in this summer’s 120 degree heat), put a water fountain inside the building (no more running a block for water in between classes), fix the heater (no more teaching in five layers during winter), draw a world map mural (no more arguments about whether Germany and America are neighbors and if Britain is one of the 50 American states), bring in new desks and chairs that don’t give kids splinters, and put up actual soccer goal posts in the yard so the boys don’t get into fist fights about whether the ball flew between the two book-bags or not. I could walk in there with my list of ideas, but it wouldn’t be true development work. The ideas have to come from them otherwise it’s just the American swooping in, dropping off stuff, and then leaving again. Although it would be easy to play bank cashier and just drop a lot of new stuff on my school, the philosophy of Peace Corps is that we are humble facilitators helping the community reach their own goals. We’re here for two years, they’re here forever, and they need to have complete ownership of their projects from beginning to end. So I work at their pace, on their time, with what they want. As a classic overachiever, this makes me want to grind my teeth and it forces me to loiter around in limbo waiting for them to come up with some ideas, but it will all be better off in the long run. I look forward to seeing what will become of me and my time, my work is in their hands.
Elsewhere in the city it was World Health Week as well as World Recognition Day so all our usual hotels were filled to the brim with pharmaceutical companies and oil barons. Since hotel rooms are cheap (about $5 for a double room), companies tend to buy up all the rooms in a hotel, including the empty ones, so that their employees can have total privacy and run of the premises. So we humble volunteers were left with few options: commute back and forth from site every day (a two hour trip one-way), stay up all night at the disco and then crash at the PC Office when it opens at 5AM, or find a hotel so bad that no other company wanted to stay there. And that’s how we found ourselves staying at a hotel on the edge of town that could easily be the set for a remake of The Shining. Our rooms weren’t bad (if you overlook the polyester sheets that hadn’t been cleaned in awhile). The boys were put into a suite decorated for the Rat Pack with an (unstocked) bar, black leather arm-chairs, plastic Art-Deco lights, and other black and silver garnishes from the 1950s that made you feel like you should be holding a martini. In contrast, we girls were put in the harem room. Red curtains hung over piles of red, pink, and yellow pillows and mattress pads scattered across a (factory-produced) red and yellow Turkmen carpet. Only the hookah was missing, although burns in the carpet testified that past guests had provided their own.
Due to residue drama from the weekend before (I’ll spare you), a lot of people were angry with everyone else and the first two nights were spent licking wounds and trying to get used to the sudden company of Americans. The third night, spent with four other girls watching “Sense and Sensibility,” complaining about boys, and eating three pounds of imported chocolate, was only noteworthy because none of us had done anything similar in seven months and if felt so “American” and “girly” that we couldn’t stop commenting on the novelty.
The last night, however, is the one that’s actually worth elaboration. We began at the English Pub (see photo), the most expensive restaurant in Ashgabat, patronized only by American embassy workers and foreign oil brokers. One Heineken costs a quarter of our monthly salary. The highlight of the evening was a live band who’s lead singer, Eric (white shirt, center), is a former Peace Corps volunteer who about five years ago married a Turkmen woman and settled down to live in Turkmenistan and work for a NGO forever more. Cool guy. We hung out sharing apple pie and vodka until the upstairs disco opened at 11. Until now, if we went to a city night-club, we went to the one in our favorite
hotel’s basement. It’s a relatively small room with mirrors over the walls, low lights, and a few half-hearted green lasers and strobes that flash through the semi-haze of cigarette smoke. The music is pretty good, though, and we enjoy it; it’s the kind of night-club where they know your order at the bar and the hookers wear the same outfit every night. The disco on the second floor of the English pub, however, is another story entirely. It’s like something out of a Russian music video where the wealthy mob gangsters are served by scantily-clothed women in luxurious (yet tasteful) leather and chrome surroundings where all the lines are smooth and someone high on something expensive could spend the whole evening just staring at the walls. Everything is less than a year old, there are smoke machines, enough lasers and strobe lights to discombobulate even the sober, and the whores were indistinguishable from the embassy workers and professional women out for a night of anonymous fun. The music was all Russian pop and we went slowly crazy in the hours under its influence. Dancing that began as slowly controlled undulating devolved into spastic jumping and arm flailing as we realized that for one night we didn’t have to worry about whether our students remembered to use the verb to be with the present continuous or if we were acting as proper representatives of America and the Western world. We were just young 20-somethings out on the town in a place where no one knew us, and in the flashing lights we could barely even recognize ourselves.Professionally, the conference was for us (and especially our Turkmen counterparts) to start brainstorming and planning our secondary projects. We are English teachers, but as Peace Corps volunteers, we are expected to be more than that. Past volunteers have written grammar books and visual dictionaries, built English language resource centers, renovated gymnasiums and computer labs, held sport clubs run by trained local youths, and completed countless other non-English related activities that have helped to develop and energize their communities. As new volunteers to site (we’re still rank rookies in the large scheme of things) we weren’t allowed to write grants or start large development projects until month four: April, 2008. In other words, we begin now.
So as the first three months (the learning and settling-in period) draws to a close and the next era of projects begins, I find myself in an uncomfortable transitional period. Many cultures acknowledge the power of transitional spaces: doorways, shadows, adolescence, graduation, birth, death (to name only a few) with special rituals or symbols that mediate or control them. These mystifying periods and states, the uncomfortable state of limbo, is one which we can all recognize even in the most mundane moments of life. The “where are we going to eat,” or “what are we going to do next” party discussion, the apathetic argument of what movie to watch that lasts longer than the movie itself, even the act of the daily commute illustrates how uncomfortable (and yet full of exciting possibility) transitions are to experience.
As much as I would like to move on to the more productive era of my service, I am unfortunately still lingering in the transitional limbo, held back because I haven’t had a chance to talk to the principal and the school administration about what they need. I could go in there and give them a list of what I want to do: renovate the hallway floors (there are holes that put DC potholes to shame and kids are always tripping and hurting themselves when the electricity goes off), install an AC unit in the new computer lab (the new computers are all going to fry in this summer’s 120 degree heat), put a water fountain inside the building (no more running a block for water in between classes), fix the heater (no more teaching in five layers during winter), draw a world map mural (no more arguments about whether Germany and America are neighbors and if Britain is one of the 50 American states), bring in new desks and chairs that don’t give kids splinters, and put up actual soccer goal posts in the yard so the boys don’t get into fist fights about whether the ball flew between the two book-bags or not. I could walk in there with my list of ideas, but it wouldn’t be true development work. The ideas have to come from them otherwise it’s just the American swooping in, dropping off stuff, and then leaving again. Although it would be easy to play bank cashier and just drop a lot of new stuff on my school, the philosophy of Peace Corps is that we are humble facilitators helping the community reach their own goals. We’re here for two years, they’re here forever, and they need to have complete ownership of their projects from beginning to end. So I work at their pace, on their time, with what they want. As a classic overachiever, this makes me want to grind my teeth and it forces me to loiter around in limbo waiting for them to come up with some ideas, but it will all be better off in the long run. I look forward to seeing what will become of me and my time, my work is in their hands.
1 comment:
Hello! I am a reader from the Philippines. I found your site very interesting. It is worth the visit.
Post a Comment