Sunday, November 30, 2008

DO NOT SEND MAIL TO BAHARLY

To my lovely and amazing mail correspondents, for the next month please don’t send me letters to the Baharly address. I’m in the middle of moving host families (irreconcilable differences, I’ll talk about it when I’m calmer) and I fear any letters that go to my former residence will go onto the toilet paper pile. I love hearing from you all so if you have news (or greetings or well wishes or creative curses) please email me or send it to the Ashgabat address. Thank you to all and a happy Thanksgiving.
-Annie

Friday, November 7, 2008

Joy is mine

A sorry truth of the world is that instruction manuals are not written in Turkmen, and rarely in Russian. This means that Turkmen can’t read the warning labels on their car’s dash board, the buttons on their stereo and remote controls, the setting menus on their TVs and VCRs, and the “how to” manuals for their dishwashers and irons, not to mention just about any other appliance or piece of technical equipment. In general, they tend to wing it, or find someone who’s already gone through the trial and error process and have them teach them what to do. But, as of last New Year’s, there is now an American in town, the magical American who knows how to read the enigmatic instructions with their strange diagrams and obscure vocabulary and sentences that go on for a page and half (originally in Japanese). Since arriving, I have taught a half-dozen people how to use their cell-phones, I have read the warning labels for new irons, and helped several taxi drivers know the purpose of some of the more mysterious buttons on their headboard (my usual advice, ignore them). One poor woman approached me after class with a car maintenance manual and asked me to explain to her how to install a car battery. Thankfully, most technical language is the same in Russian and English (motor, “techinika,” disk drive, DVD, etc), but there are some problems I can’t help with. One of the other unfortunately consequences of Turkmen people suddenly becoming aware of technology without any of the gradual learning curve the rest of us grew up with is that many have a somewhat unrealistic view of what is available. A professional wedding DJ came by the school and begged me to come have a look at his new stereo, which – he very excitedly explained to me -- has a USB drive port (Turkmen word: “flash”). This amazing device, he explained to me rapidly, can store hundreds of songs and can fit in a pocket without the weight of a CD wallet or boxes of cassette tapes. It was positively amazing, it could change his life. So he takes me in his car to his house and he sits me down in front of his shiny new stereo and I show him how to record music from the cassettes to the USB, from the CDs to the USB, from the radio to the USB. And he nods and nods, yes, he knows all this. But then once the music is on the USB drive, what can he do with it? How can he play it out of his TV or out of his normal stereo equipment? Well, the TV and the stereo equipment need a USB port, a way to read the information on the flashdrive and then play it. He’s crestfallen. His TV and stereo equipment only have VHS and cassette holders. And so a poor Turkmen learns the lesson that we must all learn eventually: technology only saves you time and money if you buy lots of it and on a continual basis.

To those of you in the midst of the election craziness, it may seem unbelievable to you that I forgot about it. I meant to call in on the 5th and find out from the PC office how it was going, but our phone isn’t working and I didn’t really think about it. And then I came home from work on the 6th and my host sister came running up to me with a huge smile on her face. “The black man won! The black man is going to be President of America!” My host family then mimed to me what they had seen on television: thousands of Americans screaming and waving their arms in the air in joyful celebration. And that’s how I found out that Obama is our new President. Joyful joyful hallelujah! Most of us were considering not returning to the states if the white man won.

In other news, I turned 24 last week. As an age marker, it isn’t much. Similar to 23, I am still in my early twenties and although I’m one step closer to the quarter century, I’m not there yet. What is meaningful, however, is that (like my 23rd year), I will spend it entirety in Turkmenistan and that it was my first birthday at site. And like any sane volunteer, I didn’t spend it anywhere near site. The morning I spent at the Botanical Gardens, my favorite place in Ashgabat. It is a re-creation of a N.A. Northeastern forest exactly like the forest that surrounds my house in Maryland except for no birds, there are straight pavement paths running through it and a somewhat defunct lily pond, and young Turkmen couples are making out on the benches. But the green is the same and, more important, the smell. Shut your ears and squint a bit, and you can almost be transported across the ocean. By the providence of timing, several of the major PCV characters were in the city that weekend for the GRE and other major characters (knowing that other characters would be in for the GRE) came as well. So, to honor no longer having to study for the bitch-test-from-hell-that-if-all-goes-to-plan-I-will-never-have-to-take and in honor of my birthday, 12 of the most party-hardy volunteers in Turkmenistan (in PC speak) “blew up.” In laymen terms, we partied like the world was about to explode and there was no Bruce Willis to save us. We went to the one restaurant in Turkmenistan that has Indian food, then to a bar for cheap beer until they kicked us out, and then stayed up at our favorite club dancing (and then just jumping around and flailing) until 5am. The music wasn’t the best, only ten minutes of American dance music and the rest Russian, Turkish, Arab, and Indian pop songs, but with enough beer and cheap vodka you can find the beat to anything. I have even bigger plans for my 25th, but I think I fulfilled my club craziness quota for at least the next six months (at least).

Halloween, for the interested, passed without any notice whatsoever, none of the Turkmen I asked in Baharly had even heard of it. I remember back in training my host sister asked me if “heroine” was big in America and I spent a very somber 15 minutes trying to describe America’s hard drug problems with the 20 Turkmen vocabulary words I knew at the time before we laughingly realized what the other was saying. They were referencing a scary Halloween movie they saw on the Russian sci-fi channel and wondered what the deal was with all the orange and black.

And last in the order of importance and interest, I moved. Nothing so traumatic as a move to a different host family (although we had a close call last week, details available upon request), but I moved to a new room, which entailed packing and taking stock of all the stuff I have gathered in the past year. For someone who arrived with one suitcase and a backpack, I have a ton of stuff. Where did it all come from? I have more hair scrunches than I’ve had since I was six, clean underwear that has never been worn, enough Post-It notes to wall-paper the walls in neon, and little heart candies sent to me last Valentine’s Day that still taste the same. From the original 20 kg allowed by Turkmen Air, my stuff now takes up half the floor in a room big enough to do cartwheels in. But sadly, I am no longer living in the cartwheel room (the former living room and china storage room until I took it over) and I have been relocated to where I should have been originally: the guest room (see photo). In the beginning, the family wanted to impress the American and they gave me the biggest room they had available, but now we’re nearing the year mark and they’ve given up trying to predict what will make me impressed (warm bread from the oven makes the American do a little happy dance, host mom gets new gold jewelry and she goes “eh.” Americans are weird). And they want their living room back to make more carpets. The relocation is actually a nice change – my dinky little space heater can actually change the temperature in the smaller room and I got to keep my bed. And, as anyone who has ever been to one of my college dorm rooms may recognize, it offers an entire wardrobe space to cover with my pictures and post-cards. The room unfortunately didn’t have electricity for the first week, but extension cords are amazing things and it’s all fixed now. I just get to go to sleep to the sound of new carpets under construction and weaving hammers thumping away one thin wall away until past midnight, daily. What joy is mine. You know, flip that phrase around -- “mine is joy” -- and it sounds like “minus joy.” Interesting.