Friday, August 22, 2008

A week with no Coke

Day 1: The resolution is set. I will give up drinking dark sodas. Those who know me well from earlier days may be surprised, as if Willie Nelson gave up pot or Jesus gave up wine. It’s not just the carcinogens, the calories building around my middle, the acids sucking the calcium from my bones, the sugars eating away at the plaque of my teeth, or the caffeine robbing my sleep, it’s the monetary cost of it. For the second month in a row I’ve had to exchange dollars at the end of the month to live my intended lifestyle of coming into the city on weekends for internet and American company. News flash, being a volunteer is not a very well-paid gig.

Day 2: So why is it that in return for English-speaking society I must give up the main non-transportation-related expense digging into my salary? A liter bottle of true Coca Cola is a little over a dollar (Turkmen Cola, which tastes like corn-syrup ass, is about fifty cents a bottle), but even drinking half a liter a day adds up quickly when your entire monthly salary is about $75 (not counting rent). Just one day without it has ignited the withdrawal symptoms: a pounding headache haunted me starting late afternoon and I was irritable and restless starting from about noon. It was about then I walked past the one store in town that sells Pepsi cans so cold there are little ice crystals inside like a soda smoothie. Trying not to think about it.

Day 3: The first big test. If I’d attended an addiction steps program I’m sure there’s some word for it, the moment when you habitually always take the substance in question, and you don’t. It was touch and go there for a bit, though. The good store that always has the cold cans is open 50% of the time when I’m going to Altyn’s and I figured if God or fate really wanted me to give up dark soda then it would be closed. It was open. I could almost taste the rich acidly sweet goodness on my tongue as I stepped through the door. But then I saw it: a 7 UP. They never have 7-Up. And 7-Up may rot your teeth, but it isn’t a carcinogen and is half the cost of Pepsi (it’s less popular). And they had a cold one. By divine providence, my abstinence from dark soda holds for another day.

Day 4: Sleeping is getting easier. As in, I seem able to nap 5-6 hours a day and then still sleep at night. Giving up dark soda apparently means not only giving up the joyful taste, but also all those jittery all-nighter evenings that only large doses of Benedril can counter-act. On the other hand, why are caffeine withdrawal and depression symptoms the same?

Day 5: This is getting ridiculous. I once tried to give up soda for Lent and made it for all of a week before I had a coke on Sunday and descended completely into a life of soda sin forever more. So much for promises to God, I serve a higher power: the God of expensively-marketed sugary poison. When I went to Turkey last month my parents brought me half a suitcase full of Diet Coke. No joke. My request from the America: movies, cute clothes (which I wore on vacation and then sent back), and Diet Coke. I drank an average 2-5 cans a day and then felt virtuous for conserving. So far the switch to Sprite and 7-Up is holding steady. The trick is the weekend.

Day 6: Should there be some caveat to the prohibition that all-nighters can include Coke? How is one supposed to stay up all night talking with people without some kind of chemical stimulant? Just pure enthusiasm? Who has that, really? On the other hand, on the Wyoming trip I learned that park rangers keep a bottle of Coke in their van to wash blood spills off the road, that it will eat the paint off of a bike, and will dissolve teeth completely when soaking in the stuff overnight. How many of these are overplayed hyperboles I don’t know, but the inch of truth is there: if I don’t want to succumb to one side of the family’s cancer or become a slave to the other side’s pattern of addiction disorders, I’ve got to give up the dark soda. Entirely.

Day 7: Wish me luck. The prohibition holds. Strange side note: my highly educated and worldly Turkmen counterpart, Altyn, who has been to Germany and watches Russian TV regularly does not know what McDonalds is. When I referenced our favorite burger chain in conversation, she asked me if it was the name of an American state. I didn’t feel like explaining that it is more a state of mind. I’m off the map, folks, and resolute.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Across the Universe

The times are changing. I was searching for a more original opening (time by its very definition and perception is always changing), but it works as a summary. I woke up Tuesday grabbing for a blanket for the first time in three months, a sign that the worst of summer is past and we’re heading back into bearable hot weather. Those two months huddled next to the fan from 11am – 3pm were less than fun.

And our street has asphalt! The main road that runs next to the governor’s office and the school got a new resurfacing, and then with the leftover materials my little side street was honored with a new black-top. So good-bye to the huge pot-holes, gravel pits, three-inch deep mud in spring and fall, and cars slowly maneuvering their way through the rock obstacle-course. Two days ago kids were celebrating their new road by running sprint races barefoot, whooping with joy. And as of yesterday a teacher’s daughter is in the hospital after being hit by a car on a road where before everyone was going 10 miles per hour and now they’re pushing 60 or 70. We hear for the first time a vroom sound outside our gate and every time we glance at each other with foreboding that soon there’s going to be a screech, crash, and squish. People aren’t sitting on their stoops anymore.

With two weeks left before the reopening of classes, the school building is once again filled with teachers and workers scurrying around making everything ready. It used to be that I was the only one in the building teaching my clubs Mon-Fri, but now the hallways are filled with the bickering voices of Turkmen adults grumbling to be at work. It’s a nice familiar sound. The final stages of the first floor renovation are on hold as there is no cement in Baharly (troubles between the governor and the cement factory, apparently). When I asked for an estimate of when cement would again be available, I was told “five days, ten days, may be two months.” Translation = no one knows. So it looks like we’re going to be doing the work while school is in session, which will be fun for everyone involved, if everyone considers a massive inconvenience and logistical nightmare fun.

Even without a new floor, the school is being daily transformed. All images of the past President, Turkmenbashy (people are actually beginning to open up and call him a “dictator,” it’s heartening), are being replaced by images of the new President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow (we affectionately call him “Burdy”) and Ashgabat scenery. Considering the number of images of the old President around the building (a mural, a statue, more than a dozen posters, plus 4-10 photos in each classroom), this is a very large task. In addition, by decree, all images of the Ruhnama, the former President’s literary masterpiece (there’s a two-story statue of the book in the city that spins and people dance around it during national holidays), is also being replaced by pictures of Ashgabat architecture. Last week someone took a sledgehammer to our golden statue of Turkmenbashy in the front hallway (there’s a poster of the new guy now in its place) and there is a picture of the independence monument where there used to be a poster describing the former President’s ancestry and current family tree. Folks wondered how long the new President, the former President’s dentist (and the former Minister of Health, let’s not forget), would allow images of his predecessor to hang like deities from every flat surface in the country. Apparently he lived with it for the admirable period of two years and now they’re all coming down. We’re in a new regime, a new era. So far it seems to be a whole lot better than the old one: more internet cafes, less road blocks, a more open economy, less visible KGB surveillance, etc. I’m a fan.

On the home front, a carpet is under construction in our kitchen. Considering that the loom (pieces of lead pipe, brick, and paper mache resting on the floor) stretches from one side of the room to another with about two feet of walking room around the stove, the kitchen is now effectively the carpet room. Our cozy living space with sofas, a TV, a stereo, two sewing machines, and lots of pillows is now filled with stretched wool/cotton blend string. We’ve moved our eating either outside or into the other house (where my host father used to cloister himself sitting alone in his underwear watching Russian reality TV). It’s cool to see the carpet daily develop, the huge chaos of bagged colored yarn slowing being brought into a harmonious order, but it will be nice to have our kitchen/living room back too. Even with six women working eight-hours a day, it should take three months to finish and then it will sell for several thousand dollars to a market middle-man.

With all the changes around me, I am inspired to reflect on how much I’ve changed since entering this country 10 months ago. The conclusion? Professionally, I am a good teacher. I entertain and enlighten my students as much as they will accept (I’m not a god) from Monday – Friday and in the afternoons I either teach adult classes or go to my Turkmen counterpart’s house and do the best-friend thing: complain about boys/men and how much our lives suck. She usually wins. Personally, I feel a rod of steel in my spine that wasn’t there 10 months ago, a strength that I went into the Peace Corps to find (or prove I had all along, a trick of semantics), and my salary is nearly gone from overly-partying on the weekends. I don’t know if this evens out as being more or less mature, but I like to think that I’m learning how to grow up and have fun, rather than the alternative interpretation which is that I’m becoming an incorrigible adventure-seeker. May be it’s a bit of both.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Prepare Thyself

October is approaching quickly (well, quick enough) and profiles of the incoming group of new Turkmenistan volunteers are trickling in as we stalk them on Facebook, Yahoo friend groups, and MySpace. So as a message to them (and to any perspective Peace Corps volunteers to Central Asia), I want to paint a picture of what you’re in for:

First, prepare to go insane. And not just the eccentric uber-liberal, tree-hugging crazy that people expect from Peace Corps volunteers, I mean truly gaga insane. Like the girl in Bolivia who stabbed a cow with a butter knife after it ate her last pair of underwear (the cow liked the taste of washing soap, apparently). And how when I walk through a herd of sheep every day to go to school I imagine that I’m going to me medically separated for injury-by-ramming. Those sheep may look docile and sluggish sitting there all huddled in the shade, but I know that behind those black eyes lurks a devious intelligence that’s just waiting for me to let my guard down. But I’m onto their game: I won’t let any demon wool-walker get me.

Second, prepare to go ugly. Worldwide, the pattern for Peace Corps volunteers is for men to lose weight (think Holocaust-victim thin, poor fellas) and women to gain (like filling up a water balloon). I’m not going to describe what my feet look like right now. When I asked the Peace Corps doctor if I should be concerned with the discolorization and the morphed shape, she said I shouldn’t be concerned, it’s just the logical conclusion to walking around for ten months over dust and grime in sandals that tend to rub huge calluses in strange places. She assured me that ballerinas’ feet look much worse. I refrained from reminding her that ballerinas wear shoes to hide their feet while we PCV display our deformities to the world like a strange badge of martyred honor. And, of course, we have a wardrobe of approximately four (five if you’re lucky) outfits, so even if a shirt starts out cute, it loses its effect through repetition (and cursory washing) pretty quickly.

Thirdly, prepare to obsess. This may seem like part of the “go insane” prediction, but it is significant enough that it deserves its own category. Like the Victorian matron who sits in a darkened room cooking up new hypochondriac diseases for herself, PCV stew at site thinking over and over again about whatever pop culture has appeared in our lives recently. A TV show or movie that in the US might be “good” or even “really good,” is here the pinnacle of cultural achievement worthy of deep analysis, speculation, and life-changing decisions. Consider how in a recent email to my parents I spent a good page and a half comparing the relative merits of BBC Doctor Who vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the former has better guest stars, but the latter has a better all-around ensemble cast and more emotionally-provocative mythic parallels). See?

Fourthly, prepare to be given responsibility beyond what you feel capable of. This is a mixed blessing and is perhaps the reason why many of us join the Peace Corps to begin with. As 20-somethings coming straight out of liberal arts college with no skills except how to sound good on paper and subsist on Instant Mac-and-Cheese, our first jobs consist usually of grinding 9-5s where the most significant thing we achieve is getting the fax machine to work. But here you’re “the American,” the magical alien come from space with nifty toys and obscure skills (wow, how fast you type! But you can’t tailor a dress?), and they trust you to be the boss, not the intern. The first floor renovation is coming along (we have the money, as soon as the principal comes back from vacation we can buy the cement and start construction, then there’s just the paperwork) and the next project is all lined up: fixing/installing a new heater for the school. Installing and maintaining furnaces are services the local school system is usually expected to provide for schools (along with water, which we also don’t have at the moment), but it’s a bit like being on the organ donor list – there’s always someone else who the system decides is more “deserving” of the money that year. Our school is the newest in Baharly, but was built during a period of national turmoil in the mid 1990s and so is also the most shoddy. So although we need the most repairs, we’re the last on the list for funds and support because we’re still technically “new.” Nowhere but in the Peace Corps would they trust a book-worm academic anthropology/history major to over-see the assembly and funding of major construction projects. I’m learning fast.

Lastly, prepare to realize you had an adventure about a week after it happened. When answering questions from non-PCV Americans I realize that I live a rather bizarre life. There’s a new baby camel living in the neighbor’s yard, there are two dogs and three frogs that stare at me unblinkingly while I bathe over my bucket, I have a student who is an international chess contestant, cars drive over roads while they’re in the process of being paved (I was inches from getting hit by a steam-roller while in a taxi earlier today), and chickens poop on my window sill every morning. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head and doesn’t include all the Turkmen human cultural eccentricities, of which there are hundreds. But it’s just life now and most of my anecdotal “adventures” were, at the time, just another problem to solve with as little fuss as possible. It means that any individual day just feels like another day and only when thinking about it later (or when I talk about it and someone makes a face) do I realize that, wow, I’m living in a really strange world and am having the time of my life.

Because that’s what it all comes down to: you think constantly about how you’re going insane, turning ugly, obsessing to a point where you feel like a stranger to yourself; you feel overwhelmed by the expectations of others and fulfilling a role you don’t feel qualified for, but ultimately the insanity is what makes it marvelous and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. :)