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.