Velvet and braids

This week I was fortunate enough to witness a “Yas” (“Youth”), a beauty pageant of sorts for soon-to-be marriageable-age girls (presently 14-16 years old). A yearly event, the most talented and intelligent girls from the seventh, eighth, and ninth grade are chosen to perform skits, recite Turkmenistan-glorifying poetry, act out music videos, and compete in academic and culinary competitions.

I could describe this event in two different ways. I could be a cynical American pseudo-feminist and talk about how the eighth and ninth grade boys stood in a corner staring at the girls like they were amusing pieces of meat and how every event emphasized the Turkmen feminine values of subservience, discipline, appearance overriding character, and conformity. I could speak at length about how each girl, 15 or 16 years old, is indoctrinated into believing that her only worthwhile skills are cooking, flirting (with class), and dressing fashionably. I could point out that there was no original material: the speeches were copied from a book and recited and the girls were judged by their ability to memorize and repeat; the skits were judged by how closely they imitated the original music videos; and the cooking competition was to see who could make the exact same dish fastest.

But I would not do the event or the girls justice. Like every event I have witnessed in Baharly, the Yas was gender segregated. Yes, may be ten boys showed up and stood in a corner looking like they knew they didn’t belong, but the 30 or so other guests were all women and younger siblings who arrived to see the dresses, hear the speeches, and see the performances. Although the undertones of “impress the future husband” were present, the event was for and about women trying to impress other women. The competition judges were not future husbands or even older men, they were older female teachers who judged the girls by the standards they would be judged as adults. Although the rules’ constraints meant there was little structural originality, the girls found ways to show off their individuality in the personally designed embroidery of their dresses, the patterns of their fabrics, their choices of costumes in the skits, and the garnishes on the food of the culinary competition. But what matters most is how the girls themselves saw the Yas. While I sat back in my chair taking pictures with a steady cynical monologue going quietly through my head (“yes, she is actually cooking in black velvet, pearls, high-heals, and a ‘Hello Kitty’ apron”), the girls were having a great time. Usually stuck in the kitchen or sweeping the yard, the girls for once were center stage, their skills and abilities as home-makers and seamstresses applauded as accomplishments rather than easy house work. At the end of the event the DJ blasted a Turkmen-translated Beyonce song and all the girls, participants and guests alike, got up and danced for the joy of movement and having a day all about them. I danced too.

Unexpected cuteness on Single’s Appreciation Day

(My classroom at right, notice how I've arranged the desks in something like a circle).

Valentine’s Day is a day I’ve always enjoyed more in theory than in fact. The idea of a day where you express the love you feel for the people around you with cards and presents, giving full voice to the emotions you have all year but never make the time to say, is a great idea. It’s thoughtful and kind and considerate and challenges people to delve into their hearts and appreciate just how important love and relationships are for a healthy and satisfying life. Before coming here I read about how a volunteer up in the far reaches of Dashaguz was assigned to a village which had never heard of Valentine’s Day. She organized a large and lavish Valentine’s Day lesson with red and pink construction paper, stickers, glue and glittering sprinkles, and heart-shaped cookies and chocolates. In the following days she saw knowledge of the holiday spread and become celebrated by young and old alike exchanging cards and expressions of love in English and Turkmen. It was a lovely story and as Single’s Appreciation Day approached, I kept thinking of it and if I had the enthusiasm to do the same.

Now I’d love to say that I threw a Valentine’s Day carnival with a parade, flowers, and a spectacular spread of joy and love. I’d love to say that I introduced a previously unknown holiday into the lives of the Turkmen people and taught it in its purest form devoid of the CVS plastic accruements and relationship anxiety now integral to celebration in the states. The reality was a little less impressive (perhaps a curse on the holiday worldwide to always not quite meet expectations). I tacked on to the end of my fourth-grade lesson on city vocabulary, “hey, kids, it’s Valentine’s Day and you should make a card for your mother.” I taught some key English phrases and relationship-vocabulary, summarized the story of St. Valentine and the legendary origins of the holiday and how it’s celebrated in the United States (give chocolate to everyone you don’t want to offend), and let them go.

My cute Valentine moment came, however, not from a lavish lesson plan but rather an hour later when two of my fourth-grade boys hesitantly tapped on my classroom door. They entered giggling and blushing, thrust their notebook-paper cards into my hand, and scampered off. As I read their messages I could hear them giggling and pushing each other in the hallway. On identically misspelled cards they’d written on the outside, “I love you Annine.” Inside, both wrote: “Hellow Annine. I love you. You are excellent. Friend, boy friend? I like you. You are my best friend.” A moment later they peeked their heads through the door, chorused “Goodbye, Annie!” and sprinted down the hallway. I doubt they stopped running until they were off school grounds. When I passed one on the street earlier this evening he blushed so red I thought he might faint. When I think about the kids here I wonder how anyone can have the heart to leave early.

How surviving becomes enjoying

I write blog entries in segments. Moments such as watching a kid sneeze in his hands, pat down the family bread, and then me still eating it two minutes later (more on hygiene later), inspire me to quietly scribble prose in the corners of notebooks and the back of lesson plans when the people around me think I’m diligently studying Turkmen prepositions. A few days ago I wrote a lovely paragraph about how the bitter frozen winter had transformed into spring as suddenly and beautifully as a cliché. I slept without socks for the first time in weeks and it was glorious. The weather was so perfect I had my club kids practicing the present continuous of “to run” and “to walk” by actually running, walking, skipping, and stopping around the court yard like a scene out of “Dead Poets Society.” But that’s the only bit of that paragraph you’re going to get because the view out of the window is an inch of snow that’s only getting higher. The perverseness of the weather means that in the morning I leave the house with five-six layers of clothes obscuring every scrap of skin and then by the afternoon I’m sweating in 60-75 degree warmth and stripping down to one or two layers to teach and walk home. As the sun sets, I re-layer and the cycle begins again. Fun fact discovered recently – the reason it’s so damned cold and no one warned us to pack for it is that this is the coldest winter Turkmenistan has had in 70 years. Apparently I’ve got it easy here in Ahal. Rumor says some of the other regions, Mary and Lebop specifically, have two to three feet of snow, the schools are closed, and the volunteers there – a month at site – still haven’t started teaching yet.

The photo is of my bedroom - yes, I live in a wedding cake. The television was moved to the kitchen.

The biggest news in Baharly town is that the President has officially declared it a city. He said it on the news last Sunday so it must be so. And thus from the time I went to bed on Sunday evening and woke up Monday morning, I became a resident of (and sole American in) Baharly City. When this will have any practical application (high-rise buildings, more jobs, road repairs, functioning gas and electric to the surrounding villages, larger schools that can accommodate all the regional children, a faster post office system, traffic lights, yada yada yada) is anyone’s guess. No one’s optimistic enough to guess. The President says “soon.”

So as of January 26 I finished my first month as a Peace Corps volunteer. This is significant not only because I doubled Thomas’s survival time (my good-old Godkepe site-mate left T-stan after two weeks), but I have completed what all PCVs say is the hardest month in the two years. During January my survival strategy was simple: survive. I went to school, taught, went home, and hung out with my host family for a few hours before disappearing into my wedding cake room to plan glorious lesson plans, watch comedic action and literature adaptation films, and plow through the latest bestseller I never had the chance to read at home (In the past two weeks - “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortensen was really intimidating, although it did give me a glimpse into what men on the other side of the wall are talking about as I spend all my days with gender-segregated Muslim women. “Middlesex” by Jeffry Eugenides is an amazing piece of writing and a great story, every chapter earns its Pulitzer Prize. I’m now in the middle of “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow). I established myself as a worthy teacher: attendance at my four clubs (one for 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th-9th graders) has risen rather than decreased, kids in the hallways beg me to come teach in their English classes, and the assistant director held a meeting for all language teachers (German, Russian, Turkmen, English) instructing them to all come watch me during their free time so they can duplicate what I do. At home I established myself as a shy, monosyllabic speaker who went “to sleep” at 9:00pm (I actually sleep around 11 or midnight most nights; doing nothing is really time-consuming), and was constantly asked if I missed my mother. I survived.

Now it’s February and I’ve started a new survival strategy: enjoying myself. It’s a profound yet remarkably simple concept, really, although it does require a change in my routine. It requires making friends and leaving my room. So I put the new strategy into practice by making a calendar with three blank slots on each day: one for the morning, afternoon, and evening. Parts of the day when I teach are filled in and all the free times are blank. In the blank spots my club students can sign up for me to come to their house, meet their mother and family, explain what I’m doing here, and allow me to get around more in the community without randomly knocking on doors and hoping a “narcoman” doesn’t live there. When I first devised this plan I imagined I would be just doing what a good PCV should: spreading good will, answering questions, facilitating cultural comparison, moving on. The results, even in the first week, surpassed my wildest dreams. Not only were the students overjoyed that I was showing an interest in their lives, I discovered that a good chunk of my brilliant, motivated young students have brilliant, motivated older sisters in their early to mid-twenties who are eager to hang out and be friends with the new American. And thus in a week my circle of friends has increased from three (my host sisters) to 7,8,9 and getting larger daily. From only finding solace at night alone with my liter of Coke (the local store restocked and so I’m refueled as well) and Firefly episodes, I suddenly have folks to hang out with watching Turkmen and Russian music videos and compare Turkmen and American dating rituals. Our marriages aren’t arranged, for a start (Turkmen dating and marriage deserve an entire entry – or a thesis, just kidding – in their own right). As a good Turkmen-girl-in-training, I have not exchanged more than a “hello” (and never eye contact) with a non-American man between the age of 14 and 30 in the last four weeks. For the motivated and intelligent Turkmen female dreaming of a life away from carpet weaving and tailoring dresses, life in Baharly can get really darn boring and sometimes they’re entertained by just watching me read. Seriously. They love seeing photos of American people doing American things, so if you have photos of you, your family, your friends, or strangers doing normal activities in the midst of American opulence (normal life), print me out a copy and send it on to Baharly. You’ll make a lot of people very happy. Put in a couple Pop-tarts for me and I’ll consider you worthy of sainthood.

An aside. . .
If you’re one of those amazing, dear souls who actually writes me letters, you may be getting in reply soon some information about my (blank)ing Education Department who can (blank)ing (blank) the (blank)ing (blank) and isn’t getting dinner after. My school administration, students, and fellow teachers are amazing and I love them all.

Continuing. . .
My second project to better my life and change “surviving” to “enjoying life” is the “learn five words a day” program. As the name doesn’t need further explanation, I will list some of the words I found when I returned to my Turkmen language textbooks: chal (yogurty milk, usually from camel’s milk), suzme (reconstituted yogurt, looks as lovely as it sounds), dograma (Turkish dish consisting of bread bits in goat organ broth), grechka (buckwheat), mash (thick lentil porridge, it’s actually pretty good once you get past the texture), and kompot (fruit drink made by boiling fruit with sugar, a staple in winter). There are a lot of really good Turkmen dishes: manty (steamed filled dumplings), pishme (fried dough), borek (boiled dumplings), among others, but none of them produce the same kind of gut horror as “reconstituted yogurt” which sat out on a window sill all night, froze, then thawed on the furnace as hour before the meal (eaten with a spoon from a communal dish).

I would like to put on the record that I have now eaten all edible parts of a chicken (and that’s a lot more than what you normally eat in America), goat meat and several organs I couldn’t recognize, cow lung, and rabbit. Lungs should not be considered edible. I discovered three weeks after the fact that I ate reheated camel brain. Tasted pretty good.

There are days I wonder why I’m not violently ill. The other day while at another house, I saw a sick toddler vomit into his mother’s hands. His disgusted mother wiped off her hands with a towel and rinsed them off with water. In the half hour between the event and dinner I saw no further hand cleaning and I continued to watch with a numb acceptance as she fished through the communal bowl of meat for a good piece, touching so many other pieces I know I now have toddler vomit in my digestive system. That’s the essence of communal eating: sharing is caring. Before I become too judgmental of others’ questionable hygiene, I should mention that I haven’t bathed in three days and I can smell my own reek. I scratch my head and a beige crust comes away beneath my fingernails. I wash my clothes because they’ve touched my body rather than because of any exterior source. I try to avoid close inspection of my hands.

This is not my choice. My house doesn’t have water and to “shower” my host sister (sometimes with assistance) must make over ten trips to a neighbor’s house carting large buckets of water in each hand. After the tub is filled with cold water, then a second large cauldron of water must warm up on the furnace (read: wait two-three hours). To bathe, you take the rusted metal mug and fill a large metal basin ¾ with cold water from the tub which has now been sitting stagnant for the last day or so. The last ¼ water you carefully extract from the boiling cauldron to bring the basin water to a reasonable temperature. Taking the metal mug, you then dump water over yourself until your hair is wet and your body sufficiently damp in the smelliest regions. Shampoo, rinse (dump water on your head, roll it around, dump water on your head, roll it around, dump water on your head, roll it around, dump water on your head, roll it around), repeat. By this time your body is wet, soap down, then rinse (dump water on your left arm, dump water on your right arm, dump water on your chest, dump water on your back, dump water on your left thigh, dump water on your right thigh, dump water on your left shin, dump water on your right shin). Somewhere during this process the basin has run out of water so you must refill the ¾ with cold water and not scald yourself adding the last boiling fourth. While rinsing off your body your hair has half dried so you dump water on your head again, roll it around, dump water on your back and chest (dry now as well), and try not to think about the two family dogs who live in the bathroom and are watching this entire process.

In America my showers take an average of 3-5 minutes. In Turkmenistan my “showers” take about 30. As annoying as they are, as much trouble as they are, I look forward to my showers like a kid looks forward to Christmas. After three days, four or five sometimes, of living and sleeping within my own filth, the feeling of water falling on my skin (even if only from a hand-held rusting metal mug) is a near-holy experience. It’s small wonder Muslims make the act of washing an essential part of worship and that the Turkmen motion for prayer is a pantomime of washing their faces. The sheer effort it takes to bathe (coupled with its infrequency) makes it one of the most significant personal acts I perform during the week. During training I longed for the Peace Corps office in Ashgabat so I could use the internet and look up on IMDB some nagging fact that had been bugging me for days. After three weeks of no internet, I no longer care. The PC office has a shower, an honest-to-God shower, and for that I will sing a gospel “Hallelujah!”

A finer dork every day

Written January 20 (didn't post then because I forgot the flash drive):

So it’s the end of week three at site and the end of my first week as a full-time English teacher. My first act when entering class was to move the desks from their straight static rows into a big (rather lopsided) circle and then had the kids get up and throw balls at each other reciting the alphabet and numbers. I won many a heart and mind by Monday afternoon and the number of kids showing up for each club increased as the week progressed. My schedule is still in the experimentation phase so who I’m teaching, how, when, and with whom tends to change daily (I’m getting used to winging it), but it looks like I’m teaching mostly English clubs to kids aged 10-17 with a few actual school lessons on the side. Basically I’m working a 6 day week beginning at 8:30am and ending in the early afternoon and, for the most part, only teaching the best, brightest, and most motivated students the school can offer. It’s pretty cushy for me, but I hope to switch away from the clubs in the future as child labor is an essential part of most family incomes here and only kids not needed at home (males) have the free time to come to an English club outside of normal school hours.

Even four months in I’m still getting used to the fact that I’m not in Africa. It’s easy to remember I’m not in America (no McDonalds for a start), but pre-service training was, to all extents and purposes, one big glorified semester abroad so sometimes I forget I’m in Central Asia and not back in Africa. And, unlike Kenya, it gets cold here. Actually it’s sub-freezing 24-7. I’m getting used to the cold, though, now that I’m learned to never count on the presence of a heater. The nature of my suburban upbringing led me to assume at first that because gas and electricity are free and radiators inexpensive that all interiors would be heated. This assumption led me to nearly loose toes when I attended a wedding party wearing only tights and underwear under my dress. I made small talk, ate sheep soup and rice, and then danced (waved my arms while standing in a circle of women), all the while contemplating frostbite and whether not feeling my toes was an improvement over feeling the sharp sting of cold. The school is also unheated so classes have been shortened from 45 minutes to 35 so the kids (and the teachers) don’t get sick. I’m also becoming accustomed to sleeping wearing three layers of shirts, two pairs of socks, two layers of pants, and a scarf around my waist all under two blankets and my sleeping bag. Every night I feel like I’m hunkering down for hibernation, swathed in layers of material more snugly than peanuts in a Snickers bar. I long for summer with its release from pounds of clothing and yet also dread the loss of my comfortable cocoon. My host family has fun telling me stories about what I’ll expect from the desert summers here: large bugs crawling on me at night and into the food during the day, a sun so hot even folks with tans get burned in an hour, and the only possible activities while the sun is up being sleep and eating watermelons.

I’m continually surprised when I hear familiar American music and tunes appearing in unexpected places. I can’t tell decide which was the most disorientating: the day when the evening news was introduced with a Turkmen instrumental version of “Memory” from Cats followed immediately by the Star Wars “Imperial March” or the Turkmen Independence Day fireworks orchestrated to the main theme of Pirates of the Caribbean. The daily news begin daily with either the score of “Gladiator” or “Fellowship of the Ring.” I can only imagine the record company reading the copyright request, asking themselves where the hell is Turkmenistan and why do they want to use battle music or evil-villain themes to introduce the weather forecast? It took me a minute or two to recognize the tunes (a day to recognize LOTR) and realize why I felt the montage of picturesque Turkmen floral, mountainous, and holy historical sites were so at odds with the sword-swinging soundtrack. “Jingle Bells” is also everywhere as the generic song for childhood and child-like situations in Turkmen television, film, and music videos. Although superficially associated with the New Years holiday, “Jingle Bells” is also sung divorced from any seasonal context so pops up everywhere. Kids sing it to me in the streets as it’s usually the only English song they know. I’m carefully considering what songs to teach in class as I know whichever I choose will literally haunt my wanderings whenever I encounter students in town.

Another sign that I’m slowly becoming redefined here is that I haven’t had a soda in 10 days. Shocking, isn’t it? The last time I went so many consecutive days without a Coke was a long ago Lent when I tried to give it up and succeeded for little over a week before going to a party and drinking a liter almost single handedly. It’s possible the next time I’m in Ashgabat I’ll do similarly [a note from three weeks later -- I drank a liter and a half when I was last in Ashgabat, vibrated on the taxi ride home, and didn’t sleep all night] but Baharly is rather bare of Coca Cola products so I fight the caffeine and sugar cravings with gallons of tea (good for the body) and lots of chocolate (good for the soul). When I consider how much oil and fat I consume in every meal I can hear my arteries screaming.

I’m going through a “literature made into movies” phase. In the past three weeks I’ve sped through “Fight Club,” “Atonement,” and “Cold Mountain.” The first is a great book, although a bit depressing: its central message is that destruction and pain are the only trustworthy forces in the world and all attempts at beauty and contentment are bullshit. The last two, despite differences of time and place, are so similar in their theme of love and hope enduring despite war, distance, and despair that they shamed me to suck up my own transition anxieties. It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that every movie I watch and book I read here I tend to perceive only in terms of how its message applies to my life and how I can either incorporate it into my experience or reject it as irrelevant or counterproductive. It’s hard to just read a book for itself. Clichéd stories of young people making their way through new worlds and making friends despite obstacles are suddenly deeply poignant while stories of characters whining about their fates and the shallowness of life are so annoying I want to feed their books to the furnace. The exception is Hamlet, whose “to be or not to be” speech has become something like a prayer. I came to the Peace Corps to learn to be cool (and help people, yada yada yada), but I think I’m just becoming a bigger dork. Eh, there are worse fates.