Sunday, May 25, 2008

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.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

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 cafĂ© 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