One year later

Turkmenistan is never far from my thoughts these days, although I’ve been home for more than a year. A month ago, on the one year anniversary of returning to the states, I realized that there was one more blog entry needed to complete this story. I never ended up going to London -- as “The End” states – the visa fell through, a situation I would have expected to happen traveling in Turkmenistan, but wasn’t expecting for getting a simple student visa to the UK. So I stayed home, unemployed and volunteering and applying to as many jobs as I could, before ending up at Peace Corps Headquarters in DC working in their department of overseas programming and training.

So many times in this blog I wrote about how strange Turkmenistan was, how odd it was that something I knew in my head was “weird” had become so “normal” in the practice of daily life. Every now and then I look around at DC, at its unstated codes and expectations (stand right, walk left; the Red Line is delayed; donkeys mean liberal), and think that a Turkmen would have legitimate cause to think we were the strangest of all.

But this strangeness has the comfort of the devil I know, and I’ll be around for awhile.