The Turkmen Chronicles

Wordle of my T-stan experience

2011-07-06T18:09:00.001+03:00

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3828619/Turkmenistan_Peace_Corps_Volunteer_blog

Interestingly, the Wordle document of most commonly repeated words in this blog, "miss" comes up the most. A better summary of the Peace Corps experience would be hard to find. Happily "good" and "like" came up often as well.

One year later

2011-01-27T19:53:00.000+03:00

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.

The End

2009-12-18T07:45:00.003+03:00

And I'm home. It's amazing how quickly the last two years in Turkmenistan become like a sort of twisted delusion, a trick of memory that never happened. If it wasn't for the bag of carpet cell-phone holders, a new ability to drink 2 liters of Coke in an afternoon, and a variety of bizarre photos on my harddrive, I could probably convince myself that it didn't happen. My Turkmen host family neighbor once asked me where on the moon Americans live; if someone told me now that the Turkmen live on the second star to the right and straight on till morning, I'd probably agree with them. I get asked often if the transition is hard, how I managed to survive the last two years, how difficult it all must have been. The truth is that normalcy is not normal. What's "normal" on any given day shifts as often as the latest gossip on the grocery store magazine racks. One day it's normal for Tiger Woods to be the glowing symbol of all that's good and moral in this world, the next day... just look at what happened to Michael Jackson? He's the biggest running joke of a pedophile loony in the world, and the second he's dead he's a pop god. You get used to an outhouse in a day, treading around cow and camel poop in the street within three days, no Internet access in a week (or two), no fellow English speakers within three months, and the lack of tasty comfort food within six months. By the end of two years the only aspects of life that remain truly bizarre (and occasionally unbearable) are: the smell of boiling goat guts for dinner and a communal form of existence that sees privacy and individual rights as a form of cruel ostracism. But even when you want to scream with frustration when your host mom walks into your room without knocking (again), that's also just life as usual.

Being home is normal too. It's been almost three weeks now and all is falling into place. I leave for London on December 28 to start classes in International Non-Government Organizations at Webster's University, part of Regent's College located in the scenic Regent's Park in the downtown center of London. Classes start on January 8, so that leaves two weeks to find housing, get a cell phone, and get hired for as big a job as my student visa will allow. Although I wish for a longer transition, it feels good to be on my feet and running onward to the next adventure.

If I have stories to tell, the blog will continue. If not, then good night, good luck, and go visit Turkmenistan -- it's like nowhere else on earth.

So long, farewell

2009-11-06T09:47:00.001+03:00

“There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall and the bells in the steeple, too. And up in the nursery an absurd little bird is popping out to say cuckoo. (cuckoo, cuckoo). Regretfully they tell us, but firmly they compel us, to say goodbye to you. So long, farewell, Auf Wiederschen, good night.”

The sad sort of clanging is from some one’s cell phone used as an MP3 Player to play Enrique Iglesias’ “Ring My Bell” on repeat. The sound from the minarets is the call to prayer playing through an outdated Soviet tape deck. And in the nursery – the dusty streets where kids play freely dodging cars – the dogs bray babaloo (babaloo babaloo). Regretfully they tell us, but firmly they compel us, to say good bye to Turkmenistan in only a few more short weeks. I leave Baharly November 29, leave Turkmenistan December 2, and I admit to mixed feelings. The large scary adult world of debt repayment, medical insurance, rent, and transportation costs awaits me. In comparison, the devil I know – the wasps nest in the outhouse, the churned sheep fat for dinner, reminding students to reshelf library books spine out (is this too hard a concept? Seriously, you’d think I was asking them to do something hideously difficult, like alphabetization) – really isn’t too bad.

When all is said and done, I will miss a lot about this place. I will miss my students. I will miss my 3-hour afternoon nap every day. I will miss my coworkers asking me again why I’m not settling down and marrying a nice Turkmen boy. I will miss reading a book a week. I will miss the random farm animals appearing in the yard only to reappear the next day in bloody pieces on the living room floor. I will miss watching several hours of TV on DVD every night. I will miss taking my city fashion cues from Russian whores. I will miss falling asleep to the sounds of Turkish soap operas turned up so loud you can hear distinct dialogue through two walls. I will miss negotiating the different street dogs’ territories and cow pies while walking to school. I will miss our constant reporting and bureaucratic paperwork to justify PC’s existence to Congress. I will miss walking past the world map mural every day down the halls I wrote the grant to get cemented and going “I did that.” I will miss wearing a short-sleeved cotton dress and sandals in mid-November. I will miss taxi drivers who ask permission to smoke after they’ve already lit their unfiltered Soviet cigarettes. I will miss the simple joy of a cold liter of Coke straight from the fridge after drinking warm flat Pepsis for a week. I will miss listening to camels braying to each other like dinosaurs from the neighbor’s yard. I will miss finding excuses to turn down soup at weddings where the goat meat is still on the leg with the hoof attached and bits of fur floating among globules of fat. I will miss dancing at Turkmen parties where only the arms wave around like cleaning windows for ten minutes and the legs trudge around to the beat. I will miss feeling like the town celebrity. I will miss people talking to me in Russian and getting insulted when I reply in Turkmen. I will miss watching the bales of cotton growing at the cotton factory storehouse into 50-foot hills of white. I will miss free all-inclusive PC medical insurance. I will miss hearing my students butcher songs (“Do Re Me” is a bull-s***, kids don’t learn to sing that fast). I will miss decorating my classroom with maps and collage murals from American magazines. I will miss owning three dresses appropriate for work, each of which is an unflattering cylindrical sack. I will miss Fridays at the Peace Corps office talking English so fast I forget syllabubs and word breaks. I will miss being part of a small regional family of PCV connected closer than biology. I will miss stuffing meat ravioli with my host mother for an hour to make lunch and hear her litany of physical complaints. I will miss the look on my students’ faces when they hear something true about the world for the first time (eating fat makes you fat, drinking water doesn’t).

But the sad clanging compels me onward. I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly. Good bye, good bye, Auf Wiederschen, good night

Walls

2009-10-16T11:38:00.000+03:00

This last weekend my friend Andrea and I had the rare and awesome privilege of watching an absent-minded man talking on a cell-phone walk straight into a glass wall. It was one of those awesome cosmic moments when all the elements aligned: the nicest supermarket in the country, automatic sliding glass doors next to large planes of unmoving glass, a new sparking cleaning, a loud cell-phone yacker. Step step step SLAM. Amazing stuff. We held it together until he was just out of ear-shot and then nearly fell over in giggles in the middle of the cracker aisle. The story looses a bit in the retelling, but whenever either of us did something silly, awkward, or clumsy for the rest of the night we would look at each other and go “well, at least I didn’t…” and there was no need to finish the statement.

The visual humor aside is a welcome distraction from the biggest news around here: the possible ending of Peace Corps Turkmenistan. I may be over-reacting, but for the first time in 18 years, the Turkmen government has denied entry to our newest shipment of volunteers. Here’s what we were told (slightly abbreviated) from Chris, our acting country director:

“Most of you are already aware that the T18’s trainee input will not happen this year. Our staff was well prepared for their arrival and only was made aware of the Governments decision on September 29th [they were supposed to arrive October 2]. In a dip note sent to the U.S Embassy, they stated that 50 volunteers would be welcome to come in September/October 2010. I will be meeting with the Deputy Chairman for both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health this week and hope to get a better understanding of their reason for this decision. I can assure you it has nothing to do with the quality of work you are doing in the field and or the mission of Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. I have spoken with Washington and they are working to place the trainees in other countries as needed. All volunteers currently in country will be able to continue with their service as planned.”

So we have a verbal promise that another group can come next year and the program can continue, but I don’t know many volunteers who believe this. The group who arrived at our mid-service – the T-17s -- can continue their last year, but then that may be it for Peace Corps Turkmenistan. The T-17s will finish up their service with no new volunteers to switch up the social scene, the volunteer population halved with only each other for company. I get lonely and bored just imagining it, I hate to think how hard it is going to be for them to live it.

The loss of the T-18s input has the further consequence that I won’t be replaced at site; I am the alpha and omega of Baharly volunteers. In class, since I heard the news, I’ve been hit with occasional pangs of sorrow looking at my brilliant motivated students and knowing that when I’m gone, their window of opportunity for a good education will be shut. If I had been replaced at site they could have had two more years of English language classes and might have learned enough to qualify for a scholarship to an American high school exchange program, but none of them are ready yet. The thought makes me a little ill, honestly, that I’m leaving them all pictures and dreams of a world far away without the skills to reach it. I had hoped to show them a door that my volunteer successors could show them the way through, but all I’ve done is showed them a lock without a key.

My only comforts are my secondary projects which will continue to teach once I’m gone: the world map mural still hangs in all its glory in the school entranceway and the books in the library have become a valuable and useful part of the school. Even if these kids won’t have opportunities to actually visit foreign lands, I’ve left them with the resources to travel there in their imaginations; I just hope they’ll use them.

Seasons of bugs and religion

2009-09-25T09:40:00.000+03:00

The rainy season (as in, the season when it rains occasionally instead of never) has begun. As winter approaches I remember the colors of the produce section of Safeway with misty-eyed reverence. Autumn in Turkmenistan means the leaves fall from the trees with no intermediary color display and the days continue to be sweat-soakingly hot except for once a week when it rains for 15 minutes. This is lovely because it means days are generally a little cooler with less dust storms. It also heralds the arrival of bugs so plentiful and alarming I’m sure a Turkmen would greet Old Testament plagues with a huff and a shrug. Mosquitoes are out in force and I’m getting eaten alive. They attack at night, leaving me with itching burning lumps as wide as a quarter. Some nights I can’t sleep due to one big itch stretching across my legs and arms, and I wake to dig around the medicine box for the few remaining anti-itch lotion packs. With so much white paste over me, I look like mid-career Michael Jackson.

There are also 36 spiders in the outhouse, several of which have red marks on the back. Surely a bad sign. Several sections of the sidewalk have turned black due to the concentrated swarming of ants. My host mother lost the use of her right arm to the elbow for three days last week after being stung by a bee the size of a baby sparrow. Regular- size bees are getting territorial of the dying grape vines next to the driveway so the trip to the outhouse resembles a harrowing bomb dodging war reenactment.

Monday was the end of Ramadan so school was cancelled (hooray 3-day weekend!). It’s possible that other families actually celebrated the end of fasting, but we didn’t. You have to fast to make eating again a bit deal, I guess. As is the pattern in these parts, we only celebrated the parts of Ramadan that are done publicly. At the beginning we gave out treats to the singing children, and last Wednesday we made pilov and distributed it to all the neighbors (and ate their distributed pilov for dinner instead of our own). I wish I got a picture of my host mom in the kitchen surrounded by the dozens of plates of neighbor’s pilov covering every surface of floor and countertops. But the other parts of Ramadan – the fasting, the praying, the private communion with Allah, eating after sundown, all of that is unenforceable by society so we didn’t do it. And so Ramadan ends with as little fanfare as when it began and we got Monday off because of it. Reminds me when we had snow-days in all Montgomery County when there was ice in Poolesville, but the rest of us had clear skies.

For better or worse, Turkmenistan ensures my last two months will not be boring. To my library contributors I say “thank you” once again, the shelves are under construction, the books are now the official property of the school and under the supervision of the Turkmen librarian (hooray sustainability), kids are borrowing them and giving them back at a responsible and encouraging rate, and we should all be pleased and proud of how well it’s turning out. Pats on the back, everyone!

December 2

2009-09-06T10:39:00.000+03:00

Received my Close of Service (COS) date.

See you then.

:)

Summer tomatoes

2009-08-28T05:25:00.000+03:00

In America someone who does their own canning is considered charmingly eccentric. A health nut, perhaps, scared of preservatives, or an ecologist mindful of individuals’ carbon mark. For Turkmen, canning is an essential part of annual winter planning. In winter there will be no vegetables in stores, no fruits in the market, no color at all in either nature or for sale. For an obscene price a few withered bananas might be available, imported from Pakistan, but most families wouldn’t consider buying them except as a centerpiece for a New Year’s spread. So, to make up for the four-five month vitamin dearth, Turkmen take the fruits available in summer and turn them into hand-made jams and turn the vegetables into sauces and pickles. Last summer my host family did these tasks without me as I was working all day at the school and doing projects after classes, and the dynamic was more like a lodger than a family member. But since I moved, and since my classes ended early so I could spend the summer on vacation, I had no such excuse this summer. I had to help.

For the record, cutting tomatoes for sauce changes from a charming novelty into a chore after ten minutes. It begins well. I was squatting on the ground in the yard with five other women, surrounded by freshly washed tomatoes glistening in the light of the single light-bulb in the night like glass ornaments or globules of blood. They gossiped and chatted and it was all fun and games. The kids washed the tomatoes in the outdoor faucet and brought them in heaping platters to us, who cut off the head and then chopped them into large chunks, and then the oldest women took our overflowing bowls of disemboweled tomatoes and put them into the three boiling cauldrons and fed the wood fires beneath them. The anthropologist in me was pleased and proud to be included in this multi-generational task of preparing for winter, a simple ritual that has barely changed in thousands of years. And then I looked down at my watch and realized that I’d been doing nothing but chopping tomatoes for ten entire minutes.

At the half-hour mark I realized with horror that we were really going to chop the entire pile of tomatoes tonight in one go. The pile was huge, enough to fill the interior of a four-door car from the floor to the window. With five of us going, we had barely made a dent in the pile since I sat down.

At the one hour mark I developed blisters on three fingers from where my knife was rubbing against my skin and layers of tomato peel and juice. My poor host sister was the victim of my increasing clumsiness as my tomato juice splash-zone more often than not got her instead of me.

At an hour and a half I began to systematically try different positions on the ground as my knees were beginning to snap and crack from squatting so long.

At the two hour mark, when I was released from duties, I sent a prayer to God to never leave the land of supermarkets again and that I would exercise twice the next day to hopefully regain the use of my legs. In the two and a half hours that we worked without break, five of us produced 25 huge glass jars of tomato sauce. And we’re going to have to do it again the day after tomorrow and next week as well. It’s a good thing I leave for a conference next week, otherwise I’d be roped in for apricot jam production. Sounds fun, huh? Imagine pitting apricots at midnight for nearly three hours and if that sounds like a grand night, you’re free to take my place in the cutting circle.

As most who know me personally are aware, the reason for the long break between blogs was that I’ve been on vacation for the last two months: first to America for three weeks and then to Thailand for two. Thank you to everyone who made my two vacations so splendid, I can’t wait to see you all again in December. Most important wisdom learned during my vacations: smoothies can make every day better, and smoothies with friends who love you are the best thing ever.

A reading

2009-07-01T08:04:00.004+03:00

Everyone (and everyone that you know) should read:

“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” by John Perkins, in order to understand the world and how it operates;

“The World According to Garp,” by John Irving, in order to understand human nature and how it works on others;

And

“High Tide in Tucson,” by Barbara Kingsolver, in order to survive it.

Pit of Hell

2009-06-24T12:34:00.003+03:00

Yes, I live in outer space

2009-06-20T08:34:00.002+03:00

I’ve been here almost two years now and most of the time I don’t notice the weirdness. You live with Teke Turkmen long enough, spend time only with other similarly-integrated PCVs, and limit contact with the outside world to letters and the occasional phone call, and the alien-ness and simple bizarreness of where I live becomes simply part of the background. Occasionally I’ll walk out of my oh-so-Soviet-looking school and see the wrinkled brown looming mountains that separate us from Iran, a Russian Jeep so old it’s started with a crank in the front grill, some cows taking a dump on the main highway, and a new bride making her rounds of a hundred guestings while weighted down by nearly 80 pounds of jewelry and fabrics in 100 degree heat, and I’ll go, “oh yeah, weirdness.” But that’s only occasionally. It takes all these elements – plus throwing in the fact that I’m wearing a Turkmen koinek and my ridiculously long hair is pinned up in a clip like a vice – to remember that I’m not in the suburbs any more. At least, not an American one.

And I’ve learned so much. Some of it is useful. Take, for example, the dogs. When I first came here, I was terrified of the dogs. Read some of the early entries if you doubt me, the dogs here are scary: half-starved mongrels higher than your waist, too-few generations removed from the Siberian wolves they’re descended from. But I can understand them now. I know which ones are terrified of a toddler with a rock, which ones are territorial only to a foot outside their gate, which ones are too dehydrated and starved to even distinguish me from a tree, which ones are mean little bastards just waiting for a quick kick to the ribs. Interestingly, the bigger the dog, the less dangerous it is; it’s the little knee-high canine rats you need to worry about.

Some of what I’ve learned is a little scary. Earlier this week I was outside sitting with my 19 year-old host sister looking up at the moon and she asked me which of the dark splotches was America. Thinking I must have not understood correctly, she further explained that, until this conversation, she had assumed that each individual country was its own individual spinning globe in the universe, which was why I needed an airplane to reach Turkmenistan and why the flight had taken so long. She thought I came from outer space.

Sometimes it feels like it.

Summer, by the way, has arrived like a skillet to the abdomen. We had an unusually long and wet spring which lulled us into a false sense of security that perhaps we would have a “tame” or “cool” or “less severe” or “bearable” summer. Alas, it was not meant to be. At my new host family’s house (I still consider them new although I’ve lived with them for six months now), there is a single air conditioning unit pumping cool air into the back of the house and slowly percolating to the rest of the rooms like a healing aura you catch a breath of once an hour or so. Due to a quirk of the clocks, high noon actually occurs at 2:30 in the afternoon and from 1-4 there really isn’t anything worth doing except sleep. You can’t go to the stores or any public building because they’re all closed and you can’t walk across the yard to the kitchen or the outhouse without braving heat so intense it triggers your gag reflex. On the upside, the absurd heat lessens your appetite so I’m only eating one meal a day (not counting the liter of juice I chug between classes).

As hideous as the weather is, I’m really can’t complain about summer as I have a pretty sweet deal. I only have 5 hours of classes a day, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Wednesday in the city, sleeping on the weekends, and a 4-hour siesta in the middle of every day. And those are my intense work-weeks. More often than not I’m on vacation (USA: July 11-27, Thailand: August 4 – August 18), or taking day trips to explore the wondrous possibilities of Turkmen tourism.

Take, for instance, the Pit of Hell. In the materials I read before coming to Turkmenistan there was a frequently repeated joke that Turkmenistan might not actually be Hell, but it’s a short bus ride from there. A bus would actually have had some trouble getting over the dunes so we took 4-wheel drive Jeeps instead.

There are several explanations for how the 50 meter (give or take) gashing gas crater in the middle of the desert came to be. My favorite story, which I read before coming here, was that some Russian soldiers randomly rolled a flaming tire into a big hole (as people do) and it caught the natural gas and continued to flame forever more. The more likely explanation -- which I heard from the German geological student who took us out there -- is that the Russians routinely bombed the shit out of the desert looking for any natural gas pockets (the parts of the desert which would blow up on impact) and this hole was one that they determined wasn’t profitable enough to tap. In twenty years or so the natural gas reserve under the crater will be all used up and the huge hole of flame we witnessed will be no more.

There honestly isn’t much to do at the Pit of Hell besides joke about the satanic nature of this country (these jokes are actually sustainable for much longer than you’d think), take pictures at night where everyone is bathed in a ghostly orange glow [pictures available soon], and camp out under stars you can’t see so close to the crater’s bright light. And, of course, ask “can you believe this?!” at least seven times an hour.

The answer is always the same: “No, I really can’t.”

Uno Changed My Life

2009-06-10T12:40:00.001+03:00

Okay, I’m the first to admit that it’s been awhile since I blogged last. But I’ve been distracted. I’ve been playing Uno. Now Uno, as just about every American child knows, is a card game involving four colors and a few mixed wild and specialty cards distributed by Mattel. The instruction manual comes in five languages so I’m assuming that it is an international phenomenon and not just an American one. The game is played by 2-10 players at a time, going around in a circle with players discarding a blue, green, red, or yellow card matching the color or number of the previously-discarded card. The player to discard all their cards first is the winner. The concept is complicated by the inclusion of Skip, Reverse, Pick 2, Pick 4, and wild cards which will, in various ways, doom your neighbor to your advantage.

Something about this simple game touches the Turkmen psyche and it has caught on in ways I never imagined. I have seen children get off their chair, kneel on the floor, and beg their classmate to declare a wild card a yellow rather than green. My host brother bangs on my door at eleven at night begging to show the cards off to his friends. My 28-year old widowed host-sister mentions the time I made her Pick 4 three times in a row while we make dinner. My students complete grammar worksheets in record time with the promise of a half-hour of Uno hanging above their heads. Knowing I’ll be more likely to play if in a good mood, my host mother cooks me non-sheep-fat variations of the main meal.

My single deck of Uno cards, found abandoned in the Peace Corps office Free Box, is probably the single most valuable and coveted object within 50 miles. So, if you want to know what I’ve been up to for the past two months, it’s a simple answer.

Playing cards.

In other news – I received a 1 million pound full-tuition scholarship to attend Webster’s University in London, a part of Regent’s College, starting January 8, 2010. I’m going to check it out on my London plane layover in July and if the place isn’t a swindle, then I’m UK-bound three weeks after I come home from Turkmenistan. This time you all can come visit me.

I have a cold

2009-04-24T15:06:00.000+03:00

Mucus! So very much mucus!

the future

2009-04-03T10:40:00.000+03:00

April already, huh. It’s true what they say: each week may seem like an eternity, but the moment you look at a calendar you realize that the second year of Peace Corps really does fly by. I’ve been in Turkmenistan for a year and a half and I can still remember the first three months of training more clearly than the nightmare I had last night. I know my post-Peace Corps plans are of great interest to the world (and if they’re not, then you haven’t been paying attention), so I figure I’ll give a brief run-down. I am applying to two grad schools: Webster’s Graduate School (part of Regents College in downtown London), and The New School: Milano (downtown Manhattan). No more village life for me. Regardless of which school accepts me, I plan on getting my masters in Non-Profit Management with an international focus in women’s rights. Both have programs starting January, 2010; Webster’s finishing in one year while The New School finishes in two. If, however, I don’t get accepted for the January semester in either New York or London I will:

1) Join my cousin Jon on one of his organic farm cooperatives (hopefully some place foreign)
2) Get a job as a recruiter for Peace Corps at DC headquarters
3) Be an English teacher in Korea for a year (where you can easily save $1000 a month, according to some RPCV pals currently living there, even while living like a rock star)
4) Rejoin Peace Corps and hope they assign me a job as something other than an English teacher or youth coordinator
5) Take macro and micro economics (and creative writing) courses at Prince George’s Community College or Montgomery Community College as preparation for a more impressive application to Yale Graduate School for non-profit management

Here is what I will NOT do (remind me of this when these all become viable options):
1) Work at Ann Taylor or some other mall retail outlet
2) Sit around my parents’ house as a moody lump doing nothing to propel myself forward in my life except watch movies and write crap vampire novels
3) Be a high school substitute teacher
4) Get a job somewhere that includes cubicles, felt walls, and smiley face pins – unless I’m there undercover as a spy and have a license to kill

As a reminder, I am still accepting boxes of children’s illustrated books and fashion magazines to build my blooming English language library. Thank you so much to everyone who has already sent me something, even two or three magazines from CVS can really be an eye-opener and source of joy to a Turkmen child. Address available upon request.

Hard core, Peace Corps

2009-03-13T10:44:00.001+03:00

English textbooks really don’t have Turkmenistan in mind when writing example dialogues and exercises. Don’t get me started on an entire text about how to ski. Take, for instance, this dialogue practicing adverbs of frequency, the present simple vs. present continuous tense, and expressing incongruity.

A: What are you doing?
B: I’m washing the dishes in the bathtub.
A: That’s strange! Do you usually wash dishes in the bathtub?
B: No, I never wash dishes in the bathtub, but I’m washing dishes in the bathtub today.
A: Why are you doing that?
B: Because my sink is broken.
A: I’m sorry to hear that.

Students are then supposed to substitute the action and broken object with new words, such as sleeping on the floor because the bed is broken, walking to work because the car isn’t working, using a typewriter because the computer is broken, and sweeping the carpet because the vacuum is busted. But here’s the problem: not only do most of my students no have sinks – or running water in their house – they probably haven’t seen a bathtub outside of TV. They wash with basins of water headed over a gas furnace and water stored in an underground tank. They also sleep on the floor on 1-inch thick hard mats on a nightly basis because they say beds make their back hurt (I pile my mats 3 high). Unless you’re a taxi driver, no one drives to work and I can count the number of household computers in the whole town on one hand. I’ve seen a few vacuums around, mostly used as novelties to show off to guests, but daily sweeping all the carpets in the house is a Turkmen compulsion as necessary for well-being as eating and sleeping.

So we PCV have written a “For Turkmen” companion to our English textbooks. In this version, the unusual action is driving, not walking, and they’re driving because it’s raining (getting wet invites such hazards as fevers, flu, and frozen wombs). Other examples include shouting at the neighbors because the telephone isn’t working; cooking over a fire because the gas was cut off; studying English by candlelight because the electricity isn’t working; and sleeping outside because the fan is busted and it’s too hot inside. These are the “strange,” – and yet not al that rare – occurrences that are just part of daily life here.

Did you hear? It’s official, Turkmenistan PCV live the most hard-core lives on the planet in the most isolated place on earth. Antarctica, the former reigning champ of all things isolated and challenging, now has high speed Internet access and regular meals made from fresh gourmet food imported daily.

According to Discovery Channel News, the new Belgian “Princess Elizabeth” scientific research center opened February 17, 2009 looking like a “flying saucer on stilts” and powered by a state-of-the art, wind and sun-powered, zero emissions system. Unlike Antarctica researchers of old who talked to the outside world via Morse Code and 8-day long boat rides, current residents have access to the outside world in ways we T-stan PCV can only fantasize: Internet in their very own rooms.

Antarctica was largely neglected after its discovery in the 1890s because of its “hostile environment, lack of resources, and isolation,” attributes which in Turkmenistan have been considered bragging points and reasons to stick it out as volunteers. Of course, the only natural inhabitants of Antarctica are cold-adapted plants and animals such as penguins, seals, mosses, and lichen. The natural inhabitants of Turkmenistan are heat-adapted creatures surviving on the fuel of gossip and sheer daiza-driven will (the evergreen trees are exceptions and refuse to survive despite the late President’s wishes, the insufferable wretches). I suppose it’s a matter of debate about which is a more hard core smell to have lingering in your hair at the end of the day: boiled sheep liver or penguin poop.

books, magazines, journals, oh my!

2009-03-01T10:43:00.000+03:00

I’ve set up a small (very small) library in my classroom. It’s one shelf long of mostly picture books and a few illustrated classics like Huck Finn and Alice in Wonderland. The Darien Book Aid people finally came through, and I got around to setting it up. Kids are already showing curiosity and I’m trying to figure out how best to use it in class – winner of a game gets a book for the weekend? Take out a book and come back next class with 10 new words? It could work. So far my sophisticated library system is to have the kids swarm the shelf at the end of class, find something they like, I sign it out, they bring it back in a week. I’m not giving reading assignments yet, I’m not making them *do* anything at all, but I want them to think of books as a privilege and a wonder, not a chore. I just want the kids to *want* to read, something definitely lacking so far in their educational experience. If the only books I’d ever seen or read in my life were textbooks, I would also want to read like a cat wants to be thrown against the wall. But, so far, they seem to like them. We’ll see how long it takes for the novelty to wear off, but I’m excited that they have books in their hands and they leave class excited and exchanging looks at each others’ covers. Brings me a little glimmer of what I can only describe as joy: I did that. I brought those kids something they’d never experienced before: excitement about books. Am I awesome or what? Sometimes I really like my job.

So far my library has exactly 27 items, that’s including each National Geographic and People magazine counted individually. There’s not enough for every kid to take out a book at the same time, but I’m working on that. Unfortunately, the recession being what it is, Darien Book Aid can’t send a second shipment, so I’m improvising.

And YOU can help!!

If you want to be part of building a library in the developing world, send me kids’ picture books and fashion magazines. Illustrations and photos are key. If you’re worried about the weight, our dear US Postal Service offers the “flat rate” box, where shipping costs the same regardless of whether the box is filled with feathers, bricks, or, yes, books for learning Turkmen boys and girls. The address of where to send them is available upon request, just remember that my remaining time here is ticking away so mail your contribution today. And I sound like PBS, when did that happen?

Pain in the ...

2009-02-15T10:01:00.000+03:00

Why is it that some days feel absolutely epic and others fly? Last week flew, this week trudges. This morning’s classes felt like 5 hours rather than 3. I then helped prepare lunch for another 2 hours (even with three people Turkmen meals take awhile to prep), napped the nap of the exhausted, and then returned to school for another 4 hours. On a slow day, every lesson feels like it has the high gravity mass to warp time around itself and make it move slower than its normal path. I finally got around again to the class where I dislocated my shoulder and they look at me with a kind of frightened awe, as it I might spontaneously combust at any moment. It takes the pressure off making an interesting lesson plan when my sling is such an object of morbid fascination. I’ve started wearing my sling only when I teach (when I’m most tempted to fling that arm about) and then leaving it off while I walk around and sit with the family, as I draw enough attention without looking like an amputee under my coat.

use small gestures

2009-02-06T08:32:00.000+03:00

"And the house was *this* big!"

And that's the part where I fling my arms out so wide I throw my right arm out of the socket, cry out like a wounded wildebeest, sink to the floor in front of 20 terrified Turkmen children, pop it back in with a sickly squishing sound, and cancel class. I've never see them move so fast out the door. Then came in the flurry of teachers, a mix of genuinely concerned, genuinely curious, and genuinely gossip-hungry. We called PC for advice, preferably for instructions on how long to hold on the heat pad/ice pack, and got strict instructions to come to the office RIGHT NOW! So, still dressed in my bright floral Turkmen koinek school uniform, I packed up my stuff one-handed (my usually useless left arm appendage got more work than it has in the last year), and came to the city. As soon as I arrived at the office I was hurried to the hospital for a series of tests and prods that seemed more appropriate for a fracture rather than a dislocated shoulder (especially a dislocated shoulder that's back in it's proper joint already): shots, X-rays, and emergency room tendon specialist called in from home. All for poor little old me. The result is that I have to wear a really annoying sling for two weeks, I'm not allowed to raise my arm about my head, and after two weeks I'm going to have to do intensive exercises to build up the muscle so that it will properly hold my bone in the socket. Apparently I have a naturally really flexible bone structure, but that comes at the price of joints more prone to disconnect. Well, I may have to wear a sling, but it's worth the story of reattaching my own arm in class.

Family dearest

2009-01-29T12:16:00.000+03:00

An anthropological moment…

I don’t know many people who *enjoy* their families. I know many who can tolerate, survive, get through the day, and even like and love their families. But ask someone, “so, do you love your family?” they’ll usually say the automatic “yes,” then pause, and begin a long list of clarifications beginning with “but…” Sure, I’ve got some addendums myself, but it’s a short list. Most of the time being around my family tends to brighten rather than darken my mood and I’m flying back from T-stan this July to not miss out on the fun at the family reunion. Even living in the states I recognized that I’d won the family lottery, at least in terms of ending up with amazingly supportive and accepting people, even if only branch of the extended family has any money. Living here, however, reminds me that not only did I won the lottery, but most of the people I know who complain constantly about their families ended up pretty well off as well.

If the Greeks are right and you get to choose your next life before taking a drink to forget all about your last one, don’t choose to be a Turkmen. Or -- let me clarify for those familiar with Turkmen regional cultural differences -- don’t choose to be born into a mega-conservative traditional Ahal Teke Turkmen family. I have now lived in three and can tell you with a certain authority that as much as you might dislike, feel harassed by, be embarrassed by, and try to avoid your own family, you could have it SO much worse. You could have grown up in Baharly.

As Americans, we take pride in saying – with various amounts of sincerity – that we don’t care what other people think. This is an utter lie in almost every instance even when (perhaps especially when) we act in opposition to expectations. But here, where police are more hypothetical threats than real powers, gossip is the actual force keeping anarchy (and individual expression) at bay. What other people think of you is the single most important thing in your life. I mention this now because the following family rules and guidelines may sound ridiculous and you may start thinking to yourself “well, I wouldn’t do that.” Well, yes, you would. You would do it and never step a toe out of line because if you break a rule, and someone sees you, then you can ruin your family’s honor (which in term means they’ll never be able to get a financial loan or be hired for local jobs) or your family will be forced to disown you (which, if you’re a woman, means you’ve got one option left: prostitution). Keeping in mind that these are the consequences of misbehavior or trying to be different than everyone else…

Girls, when you get married, you won’t be able to leave your husband’s house until you read middle age – you might or might not be allowed to use the phone to call your mother. You must wear a head scarf (so does everyone else), and cover your mouth when in the presence of your mother-in-law or her adult female relatives. You may only speak to your father-in-law in an absolute emergency, but under no circumstances may you talk to, or look at, your brother-in-law (if he comes into the room, you stare at the floor). You will be expected to cook, clean, make tea, and do all labor-intensive chores in the house – other unmarried women in the house should also help. If you never marry, your fate will be exactly the same as a newly-married woman, except that with no children, you will never have the chance to rule over them and their spouses and will be a live-in servant. If your husband becomes a drug addict or an abusive alcoholic, your in-laws will blame you solely for their son’s behavior. If you work outside of the house, half of your salary will go to your in-laws, who are free to give the money elsewhere as your portion of the salary is the one expected to pay for food, clothing for yourself and your children, and any house renovations or improvements.

Young adults, if you have problems, under no circumstances do you go to your parents. Any boyfriends or girlfriends (who you can only talk to over the phone or by complicated webs of lies orchestrated through your peers) must be kept utterly secret, or you’ll be severely beaten and never married. School may not be challenging (staying awake is probably the hardest part), but it’s 5 hours when your behavior is being carefully evaluated and judged by all around you and your future prospects entirely pivot on their opinions of you. Being popular might literally be a life or death, eat or starve, proposition.

Boys, once you reach puberty the only girl you will ever see are close family members (who will be too busy to talk to you) and prostitutes. You will have no work at home so you will be shut away in a back room with a TV and other smoking, half-drunk men, away from the working women who you can see if you scream out into the hallway for more food, tea, or vodka. Or you can squat in groups of 2 or 2 in the street chewing seeds and staring at the traffic in utter silence. Pedestrians will walk around you as if you’re just another shrub or cow cake on the sidewalk. For those with jobs, this vegetative state is limited to the evenings and the lunch break, but for the many unemployed with nothing else to do during the day, the brain and body slowly wither until your large-bosomed wife with 7-14 children to coordinate is serving meals to a patriarch skeleton who everyone forgets to mention.

Unfortunately, this is a realistic worst-case scenario rather than an exaggeration. My former host mom, my new host mom, as well as my new host dad are all from families of 10 siblings. Actually, there are worse-fates: I’ve known of two girls since arriving here last December who lost hope, poured gasoline over their naked bodies, and set themselves on fire in their bathrooms.

But there are also good stories. In my new host families, my host mom and dad seem to be friends. Not equal partners, each has their own domain and my host dad has the unquestioned authority over her movements outside the house (they’ve been married 20+ years and he still occasionally forbids her to visit her mother, as a matter of whim). But they talk together in the evening, share tea and discuss the family. They even express their thoughts and feelings on rare special occasions. The only shouting I hear is her at him. He said “hello” to his wife while walking through the room and my host sister-in-law smiled broadly at me and said “look! See how much he loves her?”

I’m asked on an almost daily basis why I don’t marry a Turkmen boy and settle in Baharly forever. After trying to explain concepts like free will and gender equality and getting blank stares, I’ve finally settled for saying that I don’t like Turkmen weather.

Rocking Out

2009-01-16T10:08:00.001+03:00

I find it a curious fact that I only get drunk, go clubbing, and “party” in the conventional sense when in foreign countries. I’ve been to clubs in Kenya, Mali, and Turkmenistan, but none in America, despite living my life outside Washington DC and attending school outside New York City. And here in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan I attended my first “death metal” concert. According to my fellow American concert-goers, this doesn’t count. They’ve been to massive Slipknot and Mattalica concerts (just to name the bands I recognized, collectively they’ve been to dozens) and have survival stories of mosh-pits full of thousands of people and the scars along their arms to prove it. One girl told with pride the story of how she was really trashed in a mosh-pit and got a cut so bad it needed stitches, and yet she didn’t notice until the concert was over. They complained that if the concert isn’t loud enough to make you slightly dizzy, it’s not loud enough.

I think I liked our little death metal concert better: loud enough to be heard over the screaming of Russian teenagers, soft enough we could have a conversation by yelling. It was in the basement of an apartment building, a white room about the size of a garage with red plastic wrapped around a few bare light bulbs to add ambiance and a raised stage on one side about 4 feet deep and an empty space on the other for the audience to stand, scream, and try to not slip on the gray linoleum. It was originally the storeroom for the café and bar you need to walk through to get to the concert and the acoustics reflected its original purpose rather than its newest incarnation: from ten feet away the band was completely garbled, but that might have been intentional. As I said, I don’t know much about how death metal is supposed to sound.

I’d like to say that we showed up and were great cultural examples for how death metal concerts are in America and the world (some of my cohorts have been to death metal concerts in Europe as well), but I’m afraid to say we looked and acted like tools. We were dressed completely wrong: in whatever clothes we’d shown up to the Peace Corps office in that day. The rest of the audience (Russian high schoolers, for the most part) were decked out in black, leather, chains, eye-shadow, piercings, gelled colored hair, and whatever American rock punk paraphernalia they could find. I caught a few with “Nightmare Before Christmas” backpacks, although I can’t imagine where they found them. We looked like a trio of old squares in comparison in sweater vests, dress shirts, Chaco pants, running shoes, and surfing T-shirts.

We hung to the back and I listened to the others’ running commentary on how cute everything was: their “little mosh pit,” their American-imitation outfits, their Red Hot Chili Peppers punk covers (it helped that they just screamed the tunes instead of trying to make the lyrics sound hard core), and how everything was not quite as good as the concerts they’d gone to in America. After awhile they realized just how patronizing and condescending they were sounding, and then decided to out-compete each other for who could sound the MOST patronizing and condescending. I drank my beer and tried to enjoy the music (the second band wasn’t bad, they had a decent lead guitarist and drummer). But standing and staring is not the way to experience a death metal concert, you need to get in there and risk personal injury banging into as many people as possible, scream so loud you can’t hear the music over your own voice, and paint yourself up so spectacularly you’re unrecognizable.

I don’t have the experience to make an educated comparison, but I think I liked the Russian “imitation” better than my American cohorts’ infamous metal concerts where the audience outnumbers most Turkmen towns. Although they couldn’t get over how little and poser everything was, my impression is that huge rock concerts are the posers, they’re trying to create (on a large, lucrative scale) what used to be an expression of raw teenage angst. Kids used to rock out in their garage, invite their friends, and just scream their heads off in apartment lofts and back yards because no one could understand their pain except for themselves and the music. These Russian kids live in Turkmenistan, they watch Russian and American music videos and movies and these are their guides for how to live a Western lifestyle different than their Turkmen neighbors, neighbors who mostly judge them as shameless animals. These kids responded to that Turkmen stereotype, accepted it, and made it their own. With only the barebones necessary – a band, an audience, and a bar with cheap drinks (the only concert I’ve ever attended where they didn’t scalp you on the drinks), they stood in the basement and screamed F-you to the establishment and the world. It’s easy for my American compatriots to be condescending about how “little” everything is, but it has to be because it is noncommercial and pure, the way death metal began (in my nostalgic idealistic world history). I doubt I will ever have the opportunity again to say I went to a death metal concert that was innocent in its purity.

I don’t think I’ll go again.

This ends happily

2008-12-26T11:33:00.002+03:00

Let me begin by telling you all the end – this story is going to have a happy ending.

Last Sunday I was unceremoniously kicked out of my host family house (where I’d lived for over a year) -- in the middle of the night in the dead of winter -- because someone in the house stole every cent I own (and some that wasn’t mine) and I told them I was required by PC law to look for a new family. I left exchanging insults and curses with my host sister and slept for a week in a friend’s back closet on a pad on the floor. Last Wednesday we found a new host family, really nice people, and I moved in. Three days later as I was leaving for the city I heard the keening of human beings in heart-breaking pain from the adjoining house and learned my host aunt (age 30 with 5 kids) had died the night before from a sudden brain aneurism and I may have to move out. I left for the city. I went to the bank to withdraw money and was told my debit card came up in the system as lost or stolen and they were required to take it and cut it up. I went to sleep over at my best friend’s new apartment and was told by her angry Russian land lady that no girls are welcome to guest on her property because all females are thieving liars. A good fit of begging meant I could still stay over for that one night, but my overnights in the city may be at an end. The next night was the farewell party for two of my very good PC friends who are COSing (“close of service”) on Tuesday before returning to America. At the party I got to baby-sit four friends who by mixing beer, vodka, and absinth intoxicated themselves past the ability to sit in a chair. Then I got to watch a guy I had a major crush on a few months ago go home with a girl he met five hours before. The next morning I found myself so low on cash I couldn’t even buy a sandwich and then, starving, I went back to Baharly.

Remember that bit where I promised a happy ending? I found out there is a secure way to send money through the embassy, so even if my debit card never works here I can still go on vacation in the future (late July I’ll be back in Maryland for two-three weeks, fair warning). My friend worked on her landlady and called me to say she’s hopeful I will be able to stay there in the future, so long as I don’t come in wearing a ski mask and a trench coat. When I returned to site I immediately received two pieces of wonderful news: 1) I don’t have to permanently move out of my new host family, 2) for the first week of wailing (Turkmen funeral traditions dictate the family must sit in a room and scream and cry 24/7 for the first week after death and be served food by neighbors) I don't have to stay there. I get to stay at my friend’s house in her closet (it is a very nice closet, very Harry Potter, and I love her happy lively family who like me and know me). And everyone involved was wonderfully mature and chill with everything. My friend, Altyn, is happy to have me around, her children are ecstatic. From a miserable weekend of financial worries, sad good-byes, irrational rejections, and wretched parties, coming home to happiness and friends felt like, well, coming home.

In other news, it’s Christmas. Happy holidays, everyone. There is no Christmas here, by the way. I had to go to work and no one knew why I kept looking at the calendar date and making a silly face. The large decorated evergreen trees you see everywhere around Ashgabat and Baharly and the illustrations of Santa Claus, stockings, ornaments, reindeer, gift-wrapped presents, and shiny streamers are all in honor of New Year’s. They even sing “Jingle Bells.” In English! They’ve never heard of Christmas, they just stole the decorations and paraphernalia the same as we stole it originally from the pagan Winter Solstice festivities. When they dub over American Christmas movies, (“Home Alone” is probably the most popular American movie in the world after “Titanic,” but they refer to it as the “Kevin!” movie), they substitute “New Year’s” for “Christmas” whenever it is mentioned. It’s therefore really frustrating to try and explain to them that New Year’s is a relatively minor holiday in the states with few real traditions: getting really drunk and making promises you don’t intend to keep is pretty much it. For Turkmen, on the other hand, New Year’s is a huge deal, worthy of bankrupting yourself to buy enough food to feed the hundreds of people who will come from all corners of the town to eat food at as many houses as they can visit. It’s like Halloween, Chinese New Year's, Marti Gras, and Christmas all rolled into one. Good times.

Happy holidays everyone and a very happy New Year’s. Consider this my gift to everyone – a big box of schadenfreude wrapped in old horoscopes wishing us all nothing but the best.

Stronger

2008-12-04T17:08:00.000+03:00

The last month has been one of those times that make you stronger. The first two weeks of November were a harrowing adventure that will be made into a heartwarming buddy movie some day: “Me and My Stomach Fungus.” We began as enemies, Mr. Fungus (the nefarious microorganism we shall visualize as a purple mushroom with a big animated happy smiley face for the sake of positive thinking), and then as time slowly passed we gained a mutual respect. I manipulated it with choice tidbits of juice and food, starved it occasionally for days at a time -- I visibly dropped weight, I call that a win for my side – and it struck me down with chronic fatigue and dizziness that kept me alternating between the bed and the privy for a week and then literally stumble through my classes for another week. At that point, we reach the happy ending of our buddy movie when we finally reached a harmonious co-living understanding: I got anti-fungal pills and decisively destroyed it until no symptoms or evidence remained. Curtain closed.

As soon as I was no longer a semi-permanent resident of the outhouse, another issue came to a front: the need to immediately leave my host family. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a house yet so I’m still here hoping that my current host family doesn’t learn that I searching around: if they find out they’ll kick me out before I have a place to go. It’s a worrisome situation that I’m trying to not think about by watching the entirety of Buffy Season 1-7 in an almost continuous marathon (I’m a dork, you all know this) and reading Bill Bryson’s, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which basically says that we’re all going to unexpectedly die any second by unpredictable natural disasters. Happy stuff.

Exciting news: if any of you are bored and have a minute, then you can do your part to make the world a better place. And you don’t need to sign away two years of your life to teach in developing countries. All you have to do is go to this website: http://www.ploofle.com/petition/ and then use the “contact my representative” link to write to Congress telling them to give PC more money. And you don’t even have to write anything! The letter drive begins December 1 and ends December 15, so do your clicking now while you’re thinking about it.

DO NOT SEND MAIL TO BAHARLY

2008-11-30T10:09:00.001+03:00

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

Joy is mine

2008-11-07T11:51:00.005+03:00

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.

Welcome to the Surreal Life

2008-10-18T11:25:00.001+03:00

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.

The Miraculous Death and Rebirth of Gita

2008-10-10T11:03:00.000+03:00

In a little house in a little town outside of a little city in a little country in a forgotten part of the world there lives two dogs – one good, Gita, one bad, Tuzik -- two cats – one good, Marquiza, one bad, Bagheera-- and 20 chickens – half sick, no names, they’re chickens after all. And one night at this little house there is a party and all the family comes from miles around to say “Happy Birthday” to Big Sister and bring her gifts. But the animals are not invited to the party and they sit outside the door, looking in at the family. And the chickens begin to cluck to themselves. And the cats begin to meow. And the dogs begin to bark. But the family does not pay attention and continue to eat their cake and sheep liver and don’t see the animals are unhappy. The dogs chase the cats and the cats chase the chickens and the chickens chase themselves (they’re chickens after all) and they run round and round until the air is full of cycloning fur and feathers. And the family eats on, oblivious to the building chaos until there is a knock at the gate. A stranger has arrived, a stranger with a car. The family spills out of the house, yelling at the dogs to stop (the good dog, Gita, stops, the bad dog, Tuzik, does not) and the cats to go away (the good cat, Marquiza, runs away, the bad cat, Bagheera, stays crouched by the gate) and the chickens to settle (they ran away, they’re chickens after all).

The gate is spread wide and the car drives in to the yard, bright and shiny and the family gathers to pet its shiny hood and look inside at its gleaming whistles. All new, the stranger says. And the family crouches to look beneath at its metal workings and rolls down the windows to breath in its already cigarette-saturated smell. And the gate stands open to the wide world, a gaping hole in the animals’ previously so small world. The little house is suddenly not so little, but now includes a street, two trees, and lights shimmering out of the darkness promising new worlds, possibly better worlds, bigger worlds.

Bagheera runs out into the night, with Tuzik close behind, barking like mad. Now, everyone knows a bad cat and a bad dog will act bad, it is in their natures after all, but what about the good dog? Gita is a good dog, small and white and quiet. She never barks. She never growls. She is fond of children and had her own puppies two times (all born dead, their father was also their uncle, after all). She never fights for food and would let Tuzik take all the hand-outs if the family didn’t place it directly in front of her and shoo Tuzik away. She runs on only three legs and will roll over and cover her head when she hears shouting. She was born a runt in her pack and was fed with a rag and bottle from the time she fit in Big Sister’s hand. She is a beloved and welcomed part of the family. But even a good dog is a dog after all. Bagheera runs out into the night with Tuzik fast on his heels, and Gita follows, a quiet white shadow following her chaos-loving companions. A screech of tires and a Russian curse and Big Sister and Little Sister see two still shadows in the darkness beside the road. Tuzik whines and paws at one of the still shapes on the ground and then runs back into the gate. The big world is a scary place, where friends don’t get up to play. Bagheera slowly rises and follows Tuzik back, hiding beneath the wheel of the shiny white car, bad dog and bad cat unscathed by their mad-cap adventure. But one form remains still. Gita.

Late into the night Little Sister and Big Sister sit with Gita. In the night she rises once, and then falls over. Her legs kick and she paws the ground, but swelling beneath her legs and whites around her eyes show there is more damage than meets the eye. At 1:00AM her legs stop their kicking and she stops pawing the ground. She doesn’t rise.

For two days and two nights the family stands vigil. Big Sister cries and blames Little Sister for not closing the gate. Little Sister cries and blames God for taking their beloved dog from them. Tuzik sits in corners, his face in his paws, his nose occasionally sniffing the air for a friend who is not returning. The cats can not be found, expressing their grief in the same form they express joy and friendship – grudging slinking in corners and eyeing the chickens. The chickens remain unmoved, but they’re chickens after all.

On the third day an apparition appears in the yard of the house. Gita has returned! But wait, no it isn’t. This dog is a good dog, like Gita, small and white and quiet. She never barks. She never growls. She is fond of children, but has never had puppies of her own. She never fights for food and will let Tuzik take all the hand-outs if the family doesn’t place it directly in front of her and shoo Tuzik away. She runs on all her legs, but will roll over and cover her head when she hears shouting. Her ears are slightly longer, her eyes slightly wider and blacker, her ribs slightly narrower. She is slightly less neurotic. She is a different dog. And what is her name? Gita.

It’s a miracle! An almost-Halloween miracle! And how did this miracle occur, you ask? Grandmother heard Big Sister and Little Sister were crying about their poor dog, white and small and quiet, and she looked around the neighborhood and found a new one. Where exactly did she find this dog, so miraculously similar to their old one? You know, around. But this dog is so clean and affectionate and accustomed to people, it couldn’t have come from the streets. Oh no, it definitely didn’t come from the streets, it came from a family. And did the family know it was part of this great miracle to make Big Sister and Little Sister happy? No, not really. The dog was a donation of sorts, the kind of donation that people make when they lose something they didn’t mean to lose and are not getting back. So what was the dog’s name originally, when it was well beloved by someone else? Who knows? It’s just a dog, after all, one is the same as any other. And the chickens cluck to themselves, see? It’s not just us who are disposable and replaceable around here.

Seasons of Turkmenistan

2008-10-01T10:12:00.000+03:00

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, how do you measure a year in the life of Turkmenistan? In cups of tea, in camel sightings, in harrowing Lada taxi rides, in fluctuating dollar exchange rates, in ants. In deteriorating Soviet monuments, in golden Presidential statues, in 10 foot-tall rotating Ruhnama book statues, in ripe melons. Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, how do you measure such a year in life? How about in summers so hot it’s like a heated skillet to the head, how about falls and springs where the rain turns the dust roads into three-inch deep mud, how about winters so cold the stray dogs crawl beneath other dog carcasses to stay warm? How indeed do you measure a year in Turkmenistan? Is it in the rhythm of the girls’ pounding away at their carpets rather than going to school, in the sound of bubbling green tea, in the sound of boys playing soccer with a half-pumped ball? You measure in the moments of insanity, the moments of overwhelming joy, the moments when you think you’re in love, the moments when you laugh so hard you think you’ll burst your intestines, the moments when you cry so hard it’s like a puddle inside, the moments when you think your world is going on end, the moment when it does, the moment when it begins again, better than before.

A year ago my parents dropped me off at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown and I met my fellow T-16 Turkmenistan volunteers. Two days later we boarded our personal versions of the roller coaster which is Peace Corps Turkmenistan, a ride with no safety belts and wheels that often don’t connect with the rails. The highlights are all about the people, the stories are usually about the food, the adventures are when things went wrong, and the parts I like best are the bits that don’t make good stories. It’s time to celebrate still being here after a year in the blessed and beautiful Turkmenistan, a land which during orientation we were warned might not be at the entrance to Hell, but is definitely just a short bus ride from there.

What still gets to me about T-stan a year in:
1) The Star Wars theme song opening the daily news broadcast on the national government-run radio station. The Imperial March opens the second half of the broadcast.
2) Taxi rides in old Soviet Ladas where you need to manually hold the door closed as you’re going down the highway and the gear shift is decorative.
3) Needing to explain to every man, woman, and child the reasoning behind my marital status within the first three minutes of acquaintance.
4) Older women greet you saying, “hello, how are you? You’ve gained weight.” Or, if they’re being complementary, “Hello, how are you? I remember you being fatter, have you lost weight?”
5) Turkmen explanations for how the world works: if you’re overweight, you drank too much water and you need to eat more sheep fat; if you have a sore throat, you ate ice cream in cold weather; if you have diarrhea, you sat under the fan in cool weather; if your stomach is sore, you ate too much watermelon and fruit; if you’re inexplicably in a bad mood, a bird walked across one of your shed hairs; if you’re hit by a car, someone gave you the evil eye; the internationally weak dollar exchange is the sole fault of the new Turkmen President in conjunction with God; if a girl acts like a bitch it’s because her skin is dark-complexioned; if a child has trouble paying attention is school, their family is poor and stupid; children’s personality and behavior patterns are innate and determined by God and not influenced by parenting.
6) Herds of goats still make me paranoid.

What makes me still happy to be here:
1) My Turkmen teaching partner, Altyn, whose eyes light up when she hears a new idea.
2) The other PC volunteers, who every day inspire and astound me with their ability to joke about the taboo, ridicule the unspeakable, hate the easy, and embrace the hilarious. 3) My students who look like they’re going to cry when I tell them class is canceled.
4) My comfy couch bed, a pile of imported movies, and tons of free time to enjoy them.
5) Melons and pomegranates that make American produce seem like pale shadowy imitations of the real thing.
6) I still have no idea what’s going to happen from one day to the next.

Just one circle, please

2008-09-12T11:34:00.004+03:00

Do you remember your first multiple choice test? I remember my first official standardized exam, the California Achievement Test (CAT) administered when I was in fourth (third?) grade to see if I was eligible for honors elementary school (I should have a bumper sticker that says “tracking worked for me”). I thought the point was to finish first rather than answer the questions correctly and the result was I did so badly I was categorized as mentally retarded. But at what point quizzes, exercise sheets, exams, and all other qualitative and quantitative evaluations began to take the form of A,B,C,D, and become an integral part of our educational experience, I have no idea. It was probably about the time we learned how to read. How do you spell the word for man’s best friend? A. DAWG; B. DOG; C. DOGG; D. WALLET. Teacher feeds the sheet through the scanning machine and job done. Welcome to the American educational system as we know it.

Turkmen children don’t know how to take multiple choice tests. I found this out last week. School started last Monday and I’m starting up a whole new round of after-school English clubs. Unlike last year when I broke down clubs by grade (one for the fourth graders, another for the fifth graders, etc), this year I’m breaking them down by language level, with the 4-6 graders split into three levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced (“advanced” in this case used rather loosely) and the 7-10 graders split along the same lines. To be fair, I made three different versions of a placement exam (no cheating) and then administered it to anyone interested in getting into the intermediate or advanced levels. It took me three days of giving this exam to finally get my directions spiel down so they understood how to take it. There are 20 questions, each question has four options (not just A or B, but C and D are also viable options), and each question has only one answer (you can’t circle all four and expect me to give you credit for finding the right one). If you circle the wrong answer, cross it out so I know it’s wrong and circle the correct one (if you circle two, don’t expect me to recognize which one you know is right). I’m not going to tell you which is the correct answer and I’m not going to translate the answers into Turkmen. And no matter how much I like you, I’m not going to give you a hint of which one is right.

Because there is the difference between exams as I give them and exams as these students have experienced them – they’re about demonstrating skills rather than making marks in a teacher’s journal to give to the regional educational department. According to all official figures you will read in world atlases or country fact and figures sheets, Turkmenistan has a 98% literacy rate. Why? Let’s look at your average English mid-term exam. The main graded section is from something called “dictation.” Students are told ahead of time which paragraph will be read to them from their textbook and then the day of the exam the teacher reads the paragraph aloud slowly and the students write what they hear. If they’re unsure of what the teacher said or about the spelling, they are welcome to ask the teacher for the translation and the spelling (which are given without reservation). If they still don’t understand, they are welcome to copy directly from the book. So, what’s actually being tested here? Oh, right, the ability to copy. Illiterate students still receive low scores, but teachers are forbidden to write the scores of failing students in their grade books. Why? It makes the school look bad, and what’s bad for the community is obviously bad for the individual student and teacher, so what’s the problem? And while we’re talking about official figures, Turkmenistan also has a low infancy death toll, no homeless people, no AIDS, no homosexuals, and no non-Muslims. Thank you, Mr. President, for giving us such a blessed and perfect country; you don’t need to change a thing.

PS – I was given a new classroom which, unlike the last one, came unfurnished. So this last week my job (besides getting these clubs started) has been to fill up the blank walls with order, design, tension, composition, balance, light, and harmony. For fellow PCV these collages could work as a “name that Newsweek issue” game. I started out intending to make them illustrations of American life, values, and personalities (notice Marilyn Monroe and Obama). But at some point in the middle of the second I realized that they’re at the back of the room where I’m the only one looking at them while teaching, so they’re ultimately about what I like to look at (can you find the Oxford University skyline? The wooden bowls were made my dad). They serve the educational function of inspiring questions and aesthetics that these students otherwise don’t have access to (other than from their satellite TVs), but mostly they serve the personal function of helping me find serenity. Oh, pictures of James McAvoy and Clive Owen, grant me the composure to teach those who wish to be taught, the strength to slap around those who wish to fart around, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A week with no Coke

2008-08-22T12:45:00.001+03:00

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.

Across the Universe

2008-08-15T11:13:00.006+03:00

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.

Prepare Thyself

2008-08-02T09:03:00.001+03:00

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. :)

Turkey!

2008-07-25T12:00:00.006+03:00

Turkey and Turkmenistan are not the same country. I realize that they start with the same first syllable, but they are as different as Canada and Cancun. And yet small hints remain. In Istanbul there were chickens living in the highway median. In Ankara girls wore headscarves with jeans too small across the ass (a contradiction that isn’t seen in Turkmenistan yet, but would not be out of place). Our oh-so-Western and educated guide in Ankara said Mom got food poisoning because of the weather (I almost fell over laughing in the van). Our tour-guides were also generally more often of the Central Asian model than the Western: their purpose was not to give an insider insight and show us the places outside the tourist track, but rather to make sure that we stayed on the tourist track and only received the party line. It’s like we paid for our own KGB agent to show us around and tell us that the man being arrested in front of us was a perfectly safe individual who hadn’t done anything wrong, and yet the government was right to arrest him (true story). One of our fellow tourists (whose family is Turkish) told me that Turkmenistan is exactly like Turkey 30 years ago and I believe it. As Turkey is an immensely cool country which I wouldn’t mind living in when I grow up, I see this as a very optimistic prediction for Turkmenistan which I’m doing my part to bring to fruition.

I will spare you all a detailed blow-by-blow of our itinerary. My parents and I spent three days in Istanbul getting on and off a bus seeing the major attractions of the city and the Bosphorus. Then after a quick flight to Izmir we spent a day wandering through the immense Ephesus ruins. It was a rather impressively-preserved site, but our attention was distracted by trying to keep ahead of the Italian cruise-ship crowd advancing behind us like a solid horde of bronze-tan wildebeests in big sunglasses. The next day was Pamukkale (“Cotton Castle” because of the calcium deposits that make it look like a tiered sugar cake) and the ruins of Hierapolis, a Roman town built to take advantage of the Pamukkale thermal springs. I resisted the temptation to get covered in expensive mud. Then we saw Cappadocia for three days (see below). After Cappadocia we jumped back in a plane to see Ankara for two days, viewing the makings of Western civilization at the Hittite ruins of Hattusas and Phrygia Gordion, as well as the massive monuments where the modern Turks worship their republic’s founder, Ataturk; very cool guy apparently. As might be apparent, the word “vacation,” when traveling with my parents, is not synonymous with “resting.” It is in fact more synonymous with “journeying,” or -- do I dare? -- “working.” My parents got on their plane back to America 10 hours before I was scheduled to return to Turkmenistan so I used that time to “vacation”: sitting in various scenic locations reading “The Book of Air and Shadows” by Michael Gruber (really amazing book, far better than “The Da Vinci Code,” of the same genre), playing on the internet (everyone should see “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” at drhorrible.com), and watching movies in an honest-to-God movie theater (“Wanted” is okay, the Batman movie wasn’t out yet in Turkey).

I hesitate to gush about Cappadocia because I don’t want to give away the surprise. Call me an ignorant cretin, but I hadn’t heard of Cappadocia before this trip. While we were in Istanbul we’d run into other tourists and the first thing they’d ask us was “have you gotten to Cappadocia yet?” and we’d say, “no, but it’s on our list,” and they’d turn away with looks of secretive envy. Neil Gaiman in “American Gods” describes places of power, places in the world where sacred energy has gathered and human beings traditionally respond by building temples, monuments, and (in America) road-side attractions. I felt it in Delphi in Greece, in the slave pens in Zanzibar (for different reasons), and now in Cappadocia, that intangible something that leaves a mark on your soul. It isn’t just the physical wonder of the place, an ancient lava bed where erosion has eaten away at the rock and turned the landscape into walls of curling, sloping cliffs like the sides of a macaroon pastry and towers euphemistically called “fairy chimneys.” And it isn’t just the history, where ancient Hittites began carving out homes in the soft rock towers to hide from invaders and then early Christians built monasteries and chapels as well as entire under-ground cities linked by miles-long tunnels that go over 40 meters into the ground and served as places of storage and refuge. Functioning underground cities. Seriously. But there is a sense of wonder that goes beyond all that, a sense of sacredness that goes deep into the soil and is tangible even when flying hundreds of feet over it in a hot air balloon at dawn. Thank you, again, Dad for that trip.

And thank you, parents, for paying my way out of Turkmenistan, for being delightful and sensitive companions, and for giving me a wondrous vacation to remember as the days tick away at site. Now all I have to do is wait for next summer. Dublin, anyone?

All-Vol

2008-07-08T09:18:00.002+03:00

It’s a bit surreal to realize that “All-Vol,” the once-in-a-year all volunteer conference bringing in all 60-some Turkmenistan Peace Corps volunteers from across the country for education and debauchery, has finally come and gone. We looked forward to it for months, we came early (if we could) to start the festivities as soon as possible, and then stayed until the Peace Corps staff started to give us the angry eye. The first night I stayed over at Brit’s, a T-15 (a girl from the year before me, I’m a T-16), with the five acknowledged biggest partiers in T-stan PC. For someone who never went to a Greek party, never stayed longer than 30 minutes at a suites party, never got more than tipsy in 4 years of college, and never went clubbing within the United States borders, I’m doing a lot of catching up. Beer tastes a lot better these days, although vodka remains only bearable when it’s so smothered in juice and soda that it’s undetectable. Even watching other people take shots makes me feel ill. Anyway, after the first night partying at Brit’s, there were three days of conference learning about methodologies and how to get along with Turkmen culture interspersed with healthy doses of peer support sessions making “don’t quit” cards for each other.

We got all dolled up on the 4th to attend a fancy embassy party at the house of the American ambassador to Turkmenistan. In one of the oddest evenings of the last year, we walked through a large metal gate, two sets of metal detectors, and past a security booth built more securely than the Turkmen airport, and then across a lawn -- an honest-to-God-lawn with manicured grass and everything -- through a large house that looked like a Monopoly hotel piece, and then out into a grassy reception area with free wine (wine!!) and beer and a demonstration of imported Native Americans doing a sun-dance in a corner and an imported cowboy doing rope tricks in the other. In between them was a huge buffet of Mexican food which was delicious enough to inspire us to wait in line for 45 minutes for seconds and thirds even when we were way past full. The food was so delectable and novel it made almost every single one of us extremely sick the next morning. And desert was apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Once people stopped ignoring the “tribal demonstrations,” the US Airforce band started up with a series of classic rock covers that had the drunkest of us up on the dance-floor going strong within minutes. The less-drunk followed soon after and soon a good half of the volunteers were screaming “Go Minnesota!” or “Go California!” at the top of their lungs as the band called out tributes to the states and then flailing about the dance floor in a way that had the Turkmen guests equally appalled and envious. We did a lot of laughing about being on “American soil,” but considering the small patch of American twilight zone the embassy achieved on that evening totally isolating us from the rest of the Turkmen world, they could very well have imported the ground beneath our feet along with everything else.

Our All-American week concluded with a true American past-time: baseball. Well, technically we played softball and then for only five innings (seriously, though, five innings is a really nice length, professional teams should learn from our example), but I can proudly state that the T-16s whooped the T-15s’ asses! With a score of 15-10 we had a solid victory. I should say in all fairness, though, that the spirit award should really go to Scott, the T-15 captain, who continued to play and make home-runs with an over 100-degree temperature and vomiting between plays. To help out my team I did them the incredible favor of not playing and instead dispensed water and cheered really loud. I may have played soccer and danced throughout my childhood, but my coordination is only in my feet: my arms might as well be attached to my knees for all the use they are during hand-eye coordination games.

Turkmenistan is a truly amazing place filled with wonders that are not available elsewhere. It is so bizarre sometimes that I wonder if the entire country isn’t a huge hoax and someone with a hidden camera is going to jump out from behind the outhouse one day and say “gotcha!” And then other days it feels so familiar that only the camel in the neighbor’s yard reminds me that I’m far from home. And yet, for all its endless fascinating features and new experiences, it’s time for a vacation. This week I’m off to Turkey to see my parents for the first time in nine months and to take a posh tour of the historic and cultural sites along the Turkish coast. Two weeks of running water, pedestal toilets, and not being alone in a strange land. It’s time to get out of town.

Watching paint dry was never so interesting

2008-07-01T10:47:00.001+03:00

There are two ways to draw a world map. The first is with an overhead projector: you make a copy of the world map and then just project it at the wall. Simple, easy, concise. It requires an over-head projector and electricity in the art space to work. We have neither. So we’re doing the second method – the grid method. Using meter sticks to measure out 7cm squares across the 2mX4m space and then using the world map drawing provided by PC, copy each individual block onto its corresponding grid box on the map. After drawing the initial blue rectangle (mirroring creation, we begin the world with water before shaping land masses), we drew the first vertical line (not grid, the first LINE) along the side and the first horizontal line along the bottom in three hours. We didn’t have a leveler so each line had to be measured every inch or so to make sure it was still straight and then compared with hanging weighted strings to make sure that the vertical line was still straight. To repeat, two lines took 3 hours. Three hours. There are approximately 100 lines on the grid. The assistant principal stopped by to see our progress and politely and quietly explained that if we wanted to finish the grid, not to mention the entire map, by the end of this year, we should try something new. Taking the string we were using to check vertical straightness, we covered it with classroom chalk, stretched it across the wall from our starting to our ended points, then snapped it against he wall. The chalk on the string bounced onto the wall and made a perfectly straight line between the two points. Then all we had to do was trace along the chalk lines with pencil. Three of us working non-stop finished the entire grid in another three hours and on day 3 we could actually begin drawing the map.

The World Map Project began in 1988 when a Peace Corps Volunteer, Barbara Jo White, while waiting for a bus in the Dominican Republic was inspired to get kids interested in geography by drawing a world map on their school wall. The idea spread across the Dominican Republic and then across the PCV community until it became an iconic part of the PC organization. Until this year, each PC training group in Turkmenistan was required to draw a world map at their training site school. The program stopped when schools who had hosted multiple training groups mentioned they were running out of wall space. I am the first volunteer in Baharly, however, so this is a new task for us all.

Thankfully, I’m not taking it on alone. Although PC provided all of the materials and I’m the only one who can read the instruction manual, the project is being led by my English teaching counterpart and local Wonder Woman, Altyn, and carried out by her three student recruits: Batyr, Shamahammet, and Yurin, two 10th graders and one 8th grader singled out for their artistic ability. Working an intensive five days, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, we drew in the continents and countries with pencil, went over the lines in Sharpie (our efforts hampered by having only one marker for the five of us), and then painted in the nations. As I write this, we’re nearing completion of the final stage: writing in the names of the countries in Turkmen. We had hoped to finish up last week, but my first bout of major stomach illness (the doctor thinks it was salmonella) sent me to Ashgabat for two days of recuperation and map efforts stalled in my absence.

Throughout the process I’ve been reminded of how important this map will be for the kids and for any visitors to the school. During the pencil outlining stage, one of my artists got off the grid by two squares, twisting China into an unrecognizable shape and making all of SE Asia appear on the wrong side of India. And here’s the clincher: no one noticed anything wrong until a good two hours of work was completed and I finished class to come check on it. Anyone with any familiarity with the shape of the world would have noticed that something was up immediately and double-checked the grid numbers. Our biggest blunder, ironically, occurred with the placement of Turkmenistan: one of the artists was so excited to draw his home nation that he forgot about Afghanistan and all of Central Asia was pushed out of kilter. We didn’t notice the problem until after we’d gone over it in Sharpie so Turkmenistan and its neighbors are a bit messier than the other parts of the world. After seeing what happened to SE Asia, I drew all of Africa myself to make sure that it got the appropriate care and attention. My drawing skills aren’t spectacular, but, like so much of this project, it’s the thought that counts.

My hope is that this map will inspire children to learn more about the world around them, ask more educated questions than “is Germany a neighbor of America?” and begin to see their lives as part of a greater landscape than their immediate surroundings. It’s possible that I won’t see the effects of the map within my brief time here, but hopefully future volunteers here will reap the benefits of students and parents with a greater world perspective and wider ambitions.

Fly with me

2008-06-15T09:30:00.003+03:00

So my clubs have increased exponentially in size. Kids come, have a good time, then show up the next class with their friends, their neighbors, and their cousin visiting on vacation. Folks in the adult club get a sample of what I’m doing in class and then send their kids the next day, older siblings drag along their younger siblings, and so I no longer have classes with only four kids: now I have 20, 25, 15, and promises of more in the weeks to come. It makes planning tricky as I have to teach the kids who showed up to every session and have mastered “Hello, how are you? My name is Aygul” as well as find a way of intensively reviewing the basics for the new kids. Some days it feels like I’m just going in circles repeating old material, reviewing old material, and then running out of time before we can get to the new stuff. I’ve made a kind of peace with myself knowing that these summer clubs are more a symbol of my involvement with the community (they’re open to whoever shows up, while the school-year clubs are only by invitation from the principal and the other English teachers) than actual instruction.

The best part of the summer, however, is the five-day work week. For six months I have lived a six-day work schedule with a single day off (Sunday) to rest, recuperate, and seek out non-Turkmen companionship. When there’s only one day off, it becomes a source of minor anxiety to decide whether to spend that precious time connecting with people at site, going on field-trips with my students, or coming into the city for internet and American people time. But only working Monday through Friday means that on Saturday I can go on field trips and spend time people at site (see below), and then still have AN ENTIRE OTHER DAY to go to Ashgabat and pretend to be American for 5-8 hours on Sunday.

Last week I used my newly discovered Saturday to head with the eighth graders to Serdar Yoly (again) where the picnic was a bit lame until we found the swings. We arrived early, around 7am, before the swarms of kids (and my bio-rhythms) were awake so we had the playground all to ourselves. At first they just sat on the swings swaying slightly, using them basically as mobile chairs. At first I was annoyed – what a waste of a good playground swing! -- but soon it became evident that they didn’t know how to swing. When a boy pushed a girl’s swing, she went may be a foot and started squealing that it was too high. You must understand, I have this thing about swings. Swings are the closest thing we have to self-propelled flight; they simultaneously launch the imagination and create a breeze as the wind whips past your face and through your clothing. So when one of the kids got up to whisper something in a friend’s ear, I stole her swing and was soon getting a good 15 feet of air and terrifying my students that I was about to die. But they’re 16 and not about to be out-done by their stodgy old teacher so before long they were competing for who could get the highest. I even got Altyn, my fellow English teacher, on and up and going strong. The pictures don’t do the morning justice; they doesn’t capture the happy sighs and squeals, the laugher, the flashes of fear, joy, exhilaration, and discovery across their faces as they soared higher and higher. They can’t capture a kid’s first flight.

The Song of (Brown) Summer

2008-06-07T10:54:00.000+03:00

The weather heats up, we pop Benedril pills to be able to sleep and ignore the pools of sweat and flies, and dream of vacations (Turkey with the parents in July) and upcoming conferences (i.e. clubbing, drinking, English language socializing, and, to quote one of my most infamous fellow volunteers, “blowing up”). The stores are overflowing with juicy tomatoes the size of softballs and apricots that look like they came from a Tropicana commercial. The Coca Cola is flowing like a river through my over-caffeinated system and I spend my time playing on the computer, writing letters, watching the same imported movies and TV shows repeatedly, hanging with the host family occasionally, and planning my lessons that continue despite the end of the school year.

My summer clubs began last Monday and I’m working out the kinks of each group’s needs and eccentricities. Out of my 8 English clubs, some have as many as 10 or 11 kids; others have as few as 3 or 4. My adult club has 4: two guys who are at a mildly conversational level and just need help with advanced grammar like the difference between past simple and past perfect continuous (I have to study before class as much as they do) and two guys who don’t know “what is your name?” Each club requires a little creative problem solving. With the younger kids I’m still working out the details (the advanced kids are bored and getting apathetic, the really ignorant are struggling and getting depressed), but I’m a bit proud of what I’m doing with the adult class. I plan two lesson plans at once, each filled with intense worksheets and dialogue constructions. I teach one side of the room and give them an assignment to do on their own. As they work, I run to the other side of the classroom and check up on what the first group has been working on. I advise them, reward them with a sticker for good effort, teach them a little, and then give them another assignment to work on as I run back to work with the other pair. I’m exhausted at the end of the two hours, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that comes after running a race you know you won.

Other than that, my only offerings to the internet void are recommended reading: “Will in the World” by Stephen Greenblatt, which isn’t so much a biography of Shakespeare as an adventure/theology/philosophy/romance/horror book with a strong narrative story and alive, memorable characters. And I hesitate to wildly recommend “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” by Jeff Lindsay and its accompanying Showtime television show as I don’t know what it says about me that I really enjoy a story about a charming, entertaining serial killer. And of course I’m in the middle of a slight “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series obsession, but that should come as a surprise to few.

Saying "hello"

2008-05-25T08:47:00.000+03:00

After 8 months I have finally mastered the Turkmen greeting. There is a simple “hello,” (“Salam”), but in the situation where an American might acknowledge a passing friend with a “hey” and maybe a salute, the Turkmen have a long complex dialogue asking about your health, doings, your parents’ health, your job satisfaction, and your general well-being. In the same way that “How’s it going” in English usually doesn’t expect a response and the answer is almost always untrue (ex. Your dad just died, “how are you?” “I’m good.”), the Turkmen greeting interrogation is a matter of politeness rather than information gathering. They begin the questions once you’re within earshot and recite both the questions and the answers before you’ve had a chance to respond. So you both say each part of the conversation on top of each other and if timed correctly it will be completed at the moment you draw even in the road, at which point you either nod and smile, or make an observation about the weather. The nod means you continue on, the weather observation means you have to stop, get through a detailed discussion of the current weather, how it compares to American weather, and then ask again about their family. Once these pleasantries are complete you’re free to move on to whatever business they want to discuss. That I have finally mastered the timing of these exchanges where I can get through the whole thing without breaking stride is, I feel, a sign that I’m becoming accustomed to life here. Feeling settled in is getting easier now that summer is approaching and I can assume a little more control over my life. No longer wed to the school’s schedule’s limitations, I’m increasing my number of English clubs and accepting students from other local schools, but decreasing my work week from 6 days to 5 days: I have my weekend back!! If there was running water at home as well I’d feel positively spoiled. And the projects are underway: we’re renovating the first floor hallway (ten tons of cement and 135 new light bulbs courtesy of Peace Corps’s small project funds) and drawing a large world map mural. The amount of paperwork necessary to do this and justify the need for funds is a bit overwhelming and explains why people usually hire professional grant writers to do this kind of thing. I’m just glad I had over a decade of excellent education in making something that isn’t particularly spectacular (painting a wall, laying cement), sound a lot more interesting. An excerpt from my grant proposal: “The World Map Project will transform the existing hallway walls from passive surfaces into learning environments, and the floors will be turned from hazards into learning facilitators.” And, yes, this is what I’m thinking about these days: floors as learning facilitators. Peace Corps transforms you, all the brochures tell you, but exactly how is a little more unsuspected.

Merv

2008-05-18T09:32:00.001+03:00

The truth is that we didn’t so much see Merv, the ancient once-bustling trade city of the Silk Road, as happen to camp among the brambles that have grown up in the barren arid wasteland it has become. Twenty-some volunteers from all corners of the country arrived by bus, train, and taxi converging on Mary city last Sunday for a non-official volunteer field trip. From Mary we traveled together to Merv to set up camp next to what looked like an old battlement wall (at right), now hollowed out by snake holes (we didn’t see the inhabitants, thankfully). With twenty of us milling around, we were able to take informal rotations cooking the barbeque, eating apricots (both dried imports from America and fresh local), hacking down dead trees with blunt axes for the fire (so much fun), climbing up and down the battlements while balancing vodka-spiked bottles of Fanta, and tossing back and forth Frisbees that our muscle memories had forgotten how to throw. When it grew dark we improvised candles out of carved out plastic bottles and shaped wax, and stayed up late arguing about the various merits of Lord of the Rings (the movies) verses the original Star Wars trilogy, and taking turns ranting about how the new Star Wars movie are travesties in every conceivable way (except for Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor who almost made the tickets worthwhile). At some early hour we cleared the food off the picnic blanket and the twenty of us platonically piled on one another with sleeping bags and slept a semi-drunken passed-out sleep until the sun rose at 5am, forcing us awake for the buses’ arrival. We could force ourselves to leave only by promising that we’d do it all again in October. I’ll be there.

So that’s what happened when Andrea and I got to Merv. How we got there is a bit more of a story.

So the train from Ashgabat to Mary left at 7:00PM on Friday night. Trains to Mary average about 9 hours so we thought we’d sleep on the train and arrive at the Mary city train station at 4:00AM with two hours to sit around before sunrise. We had made arrangements to meet up with other Mary volunteers at 8:30AM, find breakfast, and then fill the hours together before meeting the entire group in the later afternoon. In Ashgabat Andrea and I found ourselves on a new train decked out with beds, clean sheets and blankets, piped-in Turkmen pop music with controllable volume, clean bathrooms, and room service. It was a surprisingly pleasant trip and our compartment companions surprised us by going to bed as soon as it was dark (around 7:30). We snuck into my top bunk and sipped our smuggled beer and quietly talked about boys and sex. Whenever one of the Turkmen got up to use the bathroom we would quickly hide our beer and food and then giggle into our pillows imagining what they would think if they could understand what we were saying. The giggling would subside and then we would look each other and we’d double over laughing again. We almost fell off the bed twice. We were like teenagers sneaking around behind our parents’ back, subterfuge the most fun part of the adventure. At 11:00 we settled into our beds thinking we’d get a good five hours of sleep before we rolled into the station. At 11:30 the lights came on, our Turkmen companions starting getting their bags ready, and a conductor came by to proclaim we were arriving in Mary city in fifteen minutes. We frantically got on the cell phone, but all the Mary volunteers whose number we knew were stuck in their villages with no way of getting to the city until morning. We were on our own with 8 hours until sunrise in a city we didn’t know and nothing to do except share an Ipod with a dying battery and a historical fiction book set during Sherman’s March. The prospect was grim. On the platform we befriended an elderly policeman who escorted us first to a near-by hotel we couldn’t afford and then back to the train station where he settled us in a corner where he promised we wouldn’t be bothered. So we made a small corner of the bright fluorescently-lighted Mary train station our home, hugging our backpacks as we tried to sleep sitting this way and that way in the uncomfortable small metal chairs. I think Andrea got a 15 minute nap at some point in the night, I know I didn’t. Our conversation became increasingly vague, circling around the philosophical, scientific, and social implications of what would happen if one group of rich people found a way of live forever and how our concept of eternal life is mostly drawn from Anne Rice and Joss Wheaton visions of vampire culture. We basically agreed that mortality is better for everyone; the alternative would get boring eventually. So we waited and the sun gradually rose with a slowness that seemed to be deliberately taunting. At 8:30 Kate found us staring into dead space like crank-up toys without batteries. The hotel that had seemed too expensive at midnight last night now seemed absolutely worth the investment, if only to nap for three hours. We stumbled to a taxi and asked for directions to the cheapest hotel in town. He pointed to a two-story building right next to the tracks where the first floor was dominated by a café and the second floor was a sort of converted hostel with four rooms outfitted with cots. For a dollar we had a room to ourselves, a lock on the door, and clean sheets. We collapsed onto the beds and were blessedly dead to the world for a good two and a half hours until Kate came to wake us up to meet the rest of the folks. With that short nap we were new human beings and with awake eyes realized that our miracle hotel find was in fact the quintessential cheap brothel next to the train tracks. We had arrived early enough in the morning to find it empty, but now the other rooms were filled with soldiers on leave and their scantly-clad girls and (more scandalously) soldier companions. We left quietly and met up with the rest of the volunteers at the market, discovering then that if we had brought more telephone numbers with us there were at least four different homes open to us in the city where we could have slept. That said, however, after a night sitting awake in that train station, our cheap brothel seemed just as welcoming and friendly as any clean family home.

For additional photos from Merv, check out Kate's blog at: katesveritas.blogspot.com

I have a cold

2008-04-30T10:16:00.000+03:00

Mucus! So much mucus!

Serdar Yoly and other treats

2008-04-23T11:36:00.000+03:00

The great and honorable Turkmenbashy, Father of Turkmenistan and first and life-long President of said country, before his unfortunate death in 2006 gifted his people with Serdar Yoly, a “health walk” outside of the capital city. Serdar Yoly consists of an 8-mile set of stairs up and across the mountains bordering Turkmenistan and Iran (below) and a manicured park at the walk’s base (left). As one of the only free entertainment/ hang-out places in the city, the park is filled on the weekends with teenagers, young families, and college students. And last Sunday, to this group was added myself and the Intermediate-Low English class from the Balkent: Turkish Language Center in Ashgabat. My principal’s 19-year daughter (and my friend/tutoree) takes classes there and so I was invited along as the guest of honor and the opportunity-to-practice-English guinea pig. The girls were all Russian or Turkish (all were born here, but they know even less Turkmen than me) and so we spoke halting English in order to communicate our opinions of Justin Timberlake, the dance moves of Usher and Shakira, the beauty of Mariah Carey vs. Rihanna, and the various merits of using English to be a translator, an oil baron interpreter, or an English teacher. I learned that my badminton skills have not improved since middle school gym (the birdie nearly fell in the “river” filled with dead fish twice) and I have forgotten how to jump rope (I blame the grass and the skirt). It was another of those great field-trip days where there isn’t really a story because everything went right. We ended the day singing along to Savage Garden and Rihanna on someone’s cell phone and laughing as we stuffed our faces with chocolate and Coca Cola.

I’d explain the picture at right, but I think I’d just ruin it. Just enjoy and ponder.

An aside -
As I write this, the kitchen smells like raw sheep’s bowels. Most of you probably have no sensory memory to identify that smell and you should thank your lucky stars individually and by name for the privilege of not knowing what the intestinal tract and bladder of a sheep smells like. It’s like the sheep meat aftertaste times ten and then mixed with sewage, blood, and wet dog hair. Bon appetite!

As a final special final treat, take my Mid-Term Exam for the 7th-9th graders’ class:
Part 1: Which word doesn’t belong?
1. a) orange b) purple c) jeans d) gray
2. a) glasses b) earrings c) shoes d) hat
3. a) skirt b) dress c) blouse d) umbrella
4. a) watch b) tie c) mittens d) glove
5. a) mittens b) pocketbook c) purse d) briefcase

6. a) singer b) nurse c) doctor d) hospital worker
7. a) cook b) carpet-maker c) dress-maker d) shepherd
8. a) teacher b) driver c) director/ principal d) student

Part 2: Fill in the correct word in the sentence and/or answer the questions
9. What do you want to be?
a) I don’t want teacher.

b) thief, street fighter, and drug addict

c) I want to wear a white shirt and jeans.

d) I want to be a rich businessman.

10. Do you know English?
a) I “kinda” know English.

b) English difficult think I am.
c) Do you guess I know.

d) I guess I made a mistake, that is my English.

11. I think that ____ _____ my pants.
a) this is

b) that are
c) these is

d) those are

Extra Credit: Fill in the blanks
A. May I help you?
B. Yes, please. I’m looking for a _____.
A. Here’s a nice _____.
B. But this is a ____ _____!
A. That’s okay. _____ _____s are very popular this year. American girls wear them.

Loitering in limbo (but with discos)

2008-04-17T10:44:00.000+03:00

There is something bewitching about transitional periods. Before I elaborate, I’ll tell the story of what led up to this observation. Last week I attended the Peace Corps Project Design Management (PDM) Conference, the first of several in-service training sessions. In practical terms, this meant five days surrounded by other Ahal region volunteers learning about what we can do to be more than just teachers at site. Socially and professionally it was an awesome time. The social part is more entertaining so I’ll start with that and move on to the professional bit later.

Elsewhere in the city it was World Health Week as well as World Recognition Day so all our usual hotels were filled to the brim with pharmaceutical companies and oil barons. Since hotel rooms are cheap (about $5 for a double room), companies tend to buy up all the rooms in a hotel, including the empty ones, so that their employees can have total privacy and run of the premises. So we humble volunteers were left with few options: commute back and forth from site every day (a two hour trip one-way), stay up all night at the disco and then crash at the PC Office when it opens at 5AM, or find a hotel so bad that no other company wanted to stay there. And that’s how we found ourselves staying at a hotel on the edge of town that could easily be the set for a remake of The Shining. Our rooms weren’t bad (if you overlook the polyester sheets that hadn’t been cleaned in awhile). The boys were put into a suite decorated for the Rat Pack with an (unstocked) bar, black leather arm-chairs, plastic Art-Deco lights, and other black and silver garnishes from the 1950s that made you feel like you should be holding a martini. In contrast, we girls were put in the harem room. Red curtains hung over piles of red, pink, and yellow pillows and mattress pads scattered across a (factory-produced) red and yellow Turkmen carpet. Only the hookah was missing, although burns in the carpet testified that past guests had provided their own.

Due to residue drama from the weekend before (I’ll spare you), a lot of people were angry with everyone else and the first two nights were spent licking wounds and trying to get used to the sudden company of Americans. The third night, spent with four other girls watching “Sense and Sensibility,” complaining about boys, and eating three pounds of imported chocolate, was only noteworthy because none of us had done anything similar in seven months and if felt so “American” and “girly” that we couldn’t stop commenting on the novelty.

The last night, however, is the one that’s actually worth elaboration. We began at the English Pub (see photo), the most expensive restaurant in Ashgabat, patronized only by American embassy workers and foreign oil brokers. One Heineken costs a quarter of our monthly salary. The highlight of the evening was a live band who’s lead singer, Eric (white shirt, center), is a former Peace Corps volunteer who about five years ago married a Turkmen woman and settled down to live in Turkmenistan and work for a NGO forever more. Cool guy. We hung out sharing apple pie and vodka until the upstairs disco opened at 11. Until now, if we went to a city night-club, we went to the one in our favorite hotel’s basement. It’s a relatively small room with mirrors over the walls, low lights, and a few half-hearted green lasers and strobes that flash through the semi-haze of cigarette smoke. The music is pretty good, though, and we enjoy it; it’s the kind of night-club where they know your order at the bar and the hookers wear the same outfit every night. The disco on the second floor of the English pub, however, is another story entirely. It’s like something out of a Russian music video where the wealthy mob gangsters are served by scantily-clothed women in luxurious (yet tasteful) leather and chrome surroundings where all the lines are smooth and someone high on something expensive could spend the whole evening just staring at the walls. Everything is less than a year old, there are smoke machines, enough lasers and strobe lights to discombobulate even the sober, and the whores were indistinguishable from the embassy workers and professional women out for a night of anonymous fun. The music was all Russian pop and we went slowly crazy in the hours under its influence. Dancing that began as slowly controlled undulating devolved into spastic jumping and arm flailing as we realized that for one night we didn’t have to worry about whether our students remembered to use the verb to be with the present continuous or if we were acting as proper representatives of America and the Western world. We were just young 20-somethings out on the town in a place where no one knew us, and in the flashing lights we could barely even recognize ourselves.

Professionally, the conference was for us (and especially our Turkmen counterparts) to start brainstorming and planning our secondary projects. We are English teachers, but as Peace Corps volunteers, we are expected to be more than that. Past volunteers have written grammar books and visual dictionaries, built English language resource centers, renovated gymnasiums and computer labs, held sport clubs run by trained local youths, and completed countless other non-English related activities that have helped to develop and energize their communities. As new volunteers to site (we’re still rank rookies in the large scheme of things) we weren’t allowed to write grants or start large development projects until month four: April, 2008. In other words, we begin now.

So as the first three months (the learning and settling-in period) draws to a close and the next era of projects begins, I find myself in an uncomfortable transitional period. Many cultures acknowledge the power of transitional spaces: doorways, shadows, adolescence, graduation, birth, death (to name only a few) with special rituals or symbols that mediate or control them. These mystifying periods and states, the uncomfortable state of limbo, is one which we can all recognize even in the most mundane moments of life. The “where are we going to eat,” or “what are we going to do next” party discussion, the apathetic argument of what movie to watch that lasts longer than the movie itself, even the act of the daily commute illustrates how uncomfortable (and yet full of exciting possibility) transitions are to experience.

As much as I would like to move on to the more productive era of my service, I am unfortunately still lingering in the transitional limbo, held back because I haven’t had a chance to talk to the principal and the school administration about what they need. I could go in there and give them a list of what I want to do: renovate the hallway floors (there are holes that put DC potholes to shame and kids are always tripping and hurting themselves when the electricity goes off), install an AC unit in the new computer lab (the new computers are all going to fry in this summer’s 120 degree heat), put a water fountain inside the building (no more running a block for water in between classes), fix the heater (no more teaching in five layers during winter), draw a world map mural (no more arguments about whether Germany and America are neighbors and if Britain is one of the 50 American states), bring in new desks and chairs that don’t give kids splinters, and put up actual soccer goal posts in the yard so the boys don’t get into fist fights about whether the ball flew between the two book-bags or not. I could walk in there with my list of ideas, but it wouldn’t be true development work. The ideas have to come from them otherwise it’s just the American swooping in, dropping off stuff, and then leaving again. Although it would be easy to play bank cashier and just drop a lot of new stuff on my school, the philosophy of Peace Corps is that we are humble facilitators helping the community reach their own goals. We’re here for two years, they’re here forever, and they need to have complete ownership of their projects from beginning to end. So I work at their pace, on their time, with what they want. As a classic overachiever, this makes me want to grind my teeth and it forces me to loiter around in limbo waiting for them to come up with some ideas, but it will all be better off in the long run. I look forward to seeing what will become of me and my time, my work is in their hands.

postal notice

2008-04-10T17:23:00.000+03:00

A note on packages: some are getting stolen. For the record, I ALWAYS write thank you notes for received packages and letters, so if you sent me something and then never received word, I didn't receive it. I know how much trouble it is to go to the post office and I truly, deeply appreciate everything I receive. I'm sorry that your noble efforts are being taken and distributed by the Turkmenistan postal staff. As of yet, I believe all the letters and packages sent directly to Baharly are making it through - it's just the Ashgabat address which sprung a slight leak. If there is important news, email me. I check email about once a week, write responses at home, and then send them the next time I'm online. Please continue to try and send packages and letters, but please be forgiving if I fail to reply to something I never receive. I love you all, thanks.

changed title

2008-04-06T15:38:00.000+03:00

It's like Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," except in Turkmenistan.

A frog slowly boils

2008-04-06T10:24:00.000+03:00

School has begun once more after a week of idle relaxing and sleeping until mid-afternoon. So I feel somewhat jet-lagged, having to once more fit my bio-rhythms into a lifestyle that includes being awake with the sun. It’s amazing how quickly the body and brain adjust to having no demands on them and then how slowly they readjust to moving, thinking, and planning. A week of stress-free easiness has at least stalled my excessive eating and my race toward obesity has slowed a little (at least for this month).

The great thing about living so close to the capital is that while other volunteers in more distant regions had to negotiate train tickets and air-fares to reach the Peace Corps office during spring break, all I had to do was catch a taxi and then wait around the computer as friends came to me. Although I didn’t plan ahead enough to really take advantage of their presence and stay the week in the city, it was good times for the brief period I could see some new faces. They came bringing new perspectives (Baharly is a really good site, apparently, with great people and decent facilities) and new stories of piss, shit, and sex from the lives of other volunteers. I’ll be a good friend and not broadcast these stories over the internet, but write me a letter/email and I’ll share (sans names) full details. If I have learned any small token of worldly wisdom here it’s that Americans (may be all people) do very strange things when in foreign countries and that these stories are always more funny than the same event occurring on their home turf.

I ate sheep intestines today at lunch and discovered that my “yuk” reflex is broken, or at least blessedly temporarily turned off so that I can enjoy my meals in peace. I also realized that I have forgotten what most fruits and vegetables, along with all Mexican and Chinese food, tastes like. I remember how the food made me feel, but not the actual flavor and texture. There was a time during training when I thought longing for my mother’s vegetarian chili and a good rare burger with all the trimmings would make me go insane, but except for an occasional dream where I’m eating a pizza I can’t taste, I’m getting over it. Hooray for cultural adjustment. Signs that I became cultural adjusted without noticing it (like a frog slowly boiling) have been abundant in the past week. I walked from my co-teacher’s house to my own busy with my own thoughts and realized when I reached my front gate that I couldn’t remember a single moment of the journey – the kind of “following my feet” phenomenon I used to only get when driving around my MD hometown. Last night I knew I had at least four distinct ants crawling on my legs and stomach, but I fell asleep anyway. I also no longer leap in my skin when I see in the corner of my eye the abnormally large frog that lives in our bathroom.

The last sign of my cultural adaptation is in details of my transformed personal appearance. It’s not just the weight gain (which is considerable), but my hair has grown out enough that it can be formed into a perfect bun every morning, pulled to the base of my skull so tight that the edges of my hair-line are sore. With two new Turkmen summer dresses (in garishly bright-colored material that I didn’t choose – one has flowers -- but matches my host-sisters’ tastes), I now have a full Turkmen wardrobe to respectfully teach in all seasons. I also bought my first pair of Turkmen shoes. In winter there are 15-20 styles of black shoes available in the market, styles which everyone recognizes, knows the price, and the expected wear (my nondescript and boring American shoes caused a stir simply due to their novelty). In summer, however, there is only one style of shoe (in different colors) which every female from age 5 to 75 wears: three dollar “Chico’s Italian-Made” plastic sandals with one strap across the top and a buckle. The largest size available is a European size 40 (I’m a 42, 44), so my toes drag the ground in the front, my heel pokes out the back, and I hobble along the street on thin red plastic platforms which are made to fit more conventional feet. If I was a character in a novel then this detail would probably have profound symbolic significance, but as it is, I just have dusty toes, a sore in-step, and a growing sense of irony that I joined the Peace Corps to become more materialistic.

For the record, my host uncle brought over his bicycle and it is absolutely possible to forget how to ride a bike, but falling off stays fixed in muscle memory forever.

And the latest installment in the thrilling adventure of “what is Annie reading this week” is that “Billy Bathgate” by E.L. Doctorow is a great book that has amazing cinematic potential (1930s gangsters and hustlers), and “The God of Small Things” deserves its Booker Prize (amazing story). “Possession” by A.S. Byatt is a poetically-written reminder of why I didn’t become an English major and what is at stake if you go straight to grad school and lose touch with real life: you can get utterly overwhelmed by fiction, literary criticism, philosophy not grounded in real life experiences, and whiners. I can add “Possession” to the short list of books which make a better movie (along with the original “Zorro,” all three “Lord of the Rings,” The 5th Harry Potter book, “The Scarlett Pimpernel,” and “Emma”), because you only have to endure its melodramatic plot and obnoxious characters for two hours rather than fifteen.

A moment for a Turkmen language lesson, brought to you by my helpful “Colloquial Turkmen” textbook which gives me all the phrases I could ever need for life:

Balagynyzy utuklemalimi? Shall we iron your pants?
Men bagyrm agyrar. My liver hurts.

Spring break begins, Turkmen style

2008-03-24T12:27:00.000+03:00

Happy (slightly belated) Easter everyone. Spring break has arrived in Baharly, celebrated in conjunction with the “Nowruz” traditional Turkmen new years holiday. For three days all families do extensive cleaning, dragging all the carpets, blankets, and any moveable objects (in short, everything but large furniture) out into the yard to sit in the sun and bake. They/We clean every surface inside and out, sit outside, and in the evenings all the marriageable age girls and boys put on their finest and go out for a stroll along the main roads. You can almost hear Fred Astaire and Judy Garland singing about “bonnets with frills about it.” The girls stand in groups giggling at the boys and the boys drive by the girls in their cars, pick up their special friends, and the rest watch and giggle at who gets picked up by who. Although I helped with the cleaning (my carpet’s still outside and my room hasn’t looked so clean since I moved in), the hormone parade I saved for my students to enjoy. I may have spent the past 48 hours watching all the new the Masterpiece Theater Jane Austen movies in a marathon (along with other fun, romantic movies sent to me by amazingly wonderful people), but I’m not on the prowl for a Turkmen husband yet (of course, it’s still only month 6 of 27).

It’s all good fun and I’m enjoying a complete week of sleeping in, watching movies, reading bestsellers, and taking a nice long breather. Last Thursday I even went with some Turkmen friends to the one and only Turkmen amusement park, the Erteki Park, commonly called by its nickname, “Disneyland.” It’s certainly smaller than its namesake or even Six Flags, but there’s a rollercoaster, Farris wheel, bumper cars, and dozens of smaller rides for all ages, a gift to the Turkmen people from the former President. Even two short rides on the bumper cars reminded me how much I miss driving a car, but it was a great day.

Ak Ishan

2008-03-19T12:19:00.000+03:00

So here’s a moment for the anthropologists (and the culturally-interested at heart).

Last Sunday my host family and the eighth grade class took me to Ak Ishan, arguably the most popular shrine pilgrimage site in Turkmenistan. One of the most spiritual places I have ever encountered, it is (within in a nominally Islamic country) distinctly non-Islamic. There is a mosque and a stumpy minaret expensively and carefully decorated with Arabic Quran verses, but the most important part of the site is the path that leads away from the mosque, a path which takes pilgrims on a sort of religious obstacle course that is part of a much older tradition than Islam. Directly behind the mosque, and the first stop on the path, is the grave of Ak Ishan, a 19th century holy man whose strength and power to grant wishes continues after death. He is buried in a twenty-foot wide circular enclosure of unmarked golden sand surrounded by a four-foot tall tiled wall. Pilgrims begin by walking around the enclosure, touching the wall with both hands and then the top of their head, asking Ak Istan for help with their troubles. Pilgrims then stop at a long covered booth where a religious leader sits reading the Quran and praying. After waiting for the prayer to end and saying their own thanks to God (in Turkmen, not Arabic), it’s time to walk along the path – two columns of one-foot square tiles that lay on top of a much older walkway. The path is only about 75 yards long through the desert dunes and passes some 20 or so rock alters: some unadorned carved flat stones, others ancient fossils imbedded with Prehistoric oceanic life forms, and a few rocks which would be unnoticeable boulders except for the offerings of money, toys, and handkerchiefs all around them held down with smaller rocks. I was separated from Altyn (my cultural translator of the day) at about this point so I have no idea what all the different alters symbolize, but the only one with any distinctive carvings (an unmistakable phallus) was the specific stop of my single female companions so I think I can accurately guess the meaning of that one. Smaller paths led away from the main path toward a second walled grave enclosure (Ak Ishan’s wife), several sacrificial sites where older women gathered grieving and keening (no idea why), and small hollows where pilgrims could perform different tasks to earn their wish’s fulfillment (crawl three times through or under specific rocks and brambles, give additional offerings at different bushes and rocks). The path circled back to the main buildings where holy men and fortune tellers sat in the shade granting wishes for a small price and selling bags of sweets and fried dough to take to family members unable to make the trip (one bag meant one wish or favor from God). Unlike American historical and spiritual sites where brass plaques, hand-outs, introduction booklets, and photo books (not to mention t-shirts, posters, paper weights, and key-chains) are available at the inevitable gift-shop, Turkmen children learn what to do by going on a yearly field trip and learning by mimicry and oral tradition what they should do to experience the magic.

The order of the day followed a sort of deeply Turkmen ritual. Altyn told me to show up at school at 6:00am so the bus would leave at 6:30. She told the students to show up at 6:30 so the bus would leave at 7:00. She told the bus driver to show up at 7:00 so we could leave by 7:30. She showed up at 7:15 with all the food and we left around 8:00 when the last stragglers had been fetched and brought from their homes. The shrine is about 45 minutes away toward the Balkan Sea and when we arrived the 8th grade girls quickly went to work cooking our lunch of boiled sheep fat soup (that’s the ingredients: sheep fat and a little meat boiled in water with a side of white bread, it’s a very popular dish). The teachers, other guests, and myself sat in one of the long guest houses (rule of Turkmen culture – don’t do anything if you can find a younger unmarried girl to do it for you), a large warehouse-like room with piles of rugs on the floor where other pilgrim groups sat sitting or preparing the food they brought with them. The soup took about four hours to prepare (read, we sat in that room for four hours), ate the soup (or just the bread after pushing around the soup for awhile), cleaned up the dishes (read, we sat in that room for another hour and a half), and then walked the path (see above). I walked through this most holy of holy places basically deaf and blind to the meaning and history of what I was seeing (and with my head uncovered because I forgot my head scarf – a blunder no one reminded me of before we left because needing to remind someone to bring a head scarf on a pilgrimage is like needing to remind someone not to show up to church topless). Even so, I’m grateful for being included and having an opportunity to see an example of ancient pre-communist, pre-Islamic Turkmen worship at a holy place few (if any) of the other volunteers or American tourists will have a chance to see.

But here’s when the day got fun (the path and holy stuff was interesting, but when you’re inappropriately dressed and don’t know what’s going on, it’s interesting without being particularly “fun”). With the religious part of the day complete, the 8th grade class with me and Mahri (my older host sister, age 21) went running out into the dunes to play tug of war, a Turkmen version of Red Rover, Capture the Flag (fewer rules, more wrestling in the sand, no jail, and no one ever admits being tagged), and simply racing up and down the dunes.

Seeing those kids playing in the sand was the true wonder of the day for me. Turkmen children are forced to grow up much faster than American children - as soon as they can walk they are trusted to get around the house by themselves and starting with coherent speech they are allowed to play in the street with other older children and no adult supervision. Almost every Turkmen child I’ve met has minor or major scarring on their arms and faces, legacies of lessons about knives and fire learned the hard way in their youth. They graduate in 10th grade (rather than 12th) and they have to be ready by then to become mothers, breadwinners, and homeowners. Children start working full-time in the family business at age 6 or 7. By 8th grade both girls and boys have learned their life trade (usually driving, selling in the bazaar, weaving, or sewing) and have responsibility for their younger siblings. Girls in particular must be very careful of their behavior and reputation because what they do now will affect how much boys will pay for their hand in marriage two or three years down the line. As a general rule, Turkmen children look about 2 or 3 years older than they actually are (a gap of appearance and actual age that lengthens as they get older: when they’re 20, they’ll look 30, at 30 they’ll look 50). In English class both boys and girls are stoic and unimaginative, terrified to say the wrong thing or appear foolish or young in any way. They hate games and would rather be lectured on grammatical constructs than be asked to create new sentences or dialogues that could potentially have embarrassing mistakes. After three months of teaching them, I thought I had their personalities pretty much pegged. But seeing them whooping and screaming and laughing and pushing each other in the sand, slamming their bodies into each other and rolling around with sand in their hair and in their clothes, I remember they’re only 15 and 16 years old. For one brief afternoon on one sunny, windy cool spring day, they got to be teenagers.

Holidays

2008-03-09T10:02:00.000+03:00

Happy International Women’s Day! March 8 honoring women, their work, and their contributions to society is celebrated throughout the world (not in America because Americans are above such nonsense, we celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day with more enthusiasm). In Turkmenistan (or at least in Baharly), Women’s Day is celebrated as Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Black History Month all rolled into one. To begin with, it’s a national holiday with all schools and government facilities closed and the Friday before is a half-day with the afternoon spent in parties honoring women. All female teachers and students from kindergarten through 10th grade also receive 200,000 manat (roughly $10, I lived during training very comfortably on $30 a month so it’s a big deal) from the President as a gift honoring women’s role as caretakers and emotional sanctuaries. Women’s Day is a gift-giving holiday where everyone is expected to give token (or large) gifts to the females in their lives: mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and female friends and classmates. I mentioned Valentine’s Day because the most common gifts are flowers, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, stuffed animals with “I Love You” logos, and jewelry. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how many gifts I’ve received in the past three days, but I’ve re-gifted most of them. A grown woman (Lord, am I that already?) doesn’t need a veritable plethora of mass-manufactured teddy bears and glass bowls.

In other news, last Sunday was the first Ahal Volunteer official hang-out day since the T-16s (that’s my group) arrived at site three months ago. The Ahal region volunteers are traditionally the lamest socially as we’re so scattered that coming together requires coordination and advance planning. All of us are too close to college age to be very good at coordination and advance planning. But with a bit of enthusiasm we pulled it off and found each other in Godkepe (my training site) to go to a restaurant and then hike around the mountains together for an afternoon. It’s one of those days that positively shines in memory, but doesn’t make a good story as everything went right instead of wrong. If even one detail had been a disaster then there might have been a story, but the weather was gorgeous, we didn’t get lost, the landscape was beautiful (in a stark Turkmen kind of way, see photos at right and above), and we pleasantly enjoyed each other’s company discussing the three favorite conversation topics of all PC volunteers: American food we’re not eating, sex we’re not having, and stomach problems we wish we weren’t having. It’s one of those days we will look back on and go, “Remember that time in March when we all went to the Godkepe mountains and walked around?” “Yeah?” “Those were good times.” “Yeah.” “We hadn’t had a chance to hang out before that, we finally got a chance to know each other that day,” “Yep, good times.” And we’ll all smile and then talk about American food we’re not eating, sex we’re not having, and stomach problems we wish we weren’t having, but are privately proud to share.

The plan (we’ll see how long it lasts) is for us all to come together the first Sunday of every month and do something fun, beyond sitting on our asses and surfing the internet in the Peace Corps office. After next month the T-16s will also be free to sleep over night at other locations, which opens up new possibilities of clubbing, bar hopping, and other exciting late-night activities. Fun times ahead.

A nice "I made a difference" moment from yesterday: I blew some 18 year-old girls' minds telling them that American boys' families don't pay their perspective brides' families several thousand dollars to marry them. If boy meets girl and girl meets boy and girl and boy spend a good year or so hanging out and decide they want to do it for the rest of their lives, then they go in front of a person of authority and say so, end of story. No mothers have to give permission, no sons have to raise money to buy the girl from her family, chaparones don't have to be present for the dating process (there actually is a dating process, arranged marriages are out of style in America), and, most importantly, American girls do not spend their childhoods in terror that they will do something to lower their quantifyable self-worth.

The latest additions to Annie’s Peace Corps Recommended Reading Book Club are "Timbuktu" by Paul Auster, “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer, and “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. "Timbuktu" is a great well-written story I finished in about a day and a half, although having been to the city of Timbuktu I know it's not going to meet the character's expectations. As for the other two books, although written with very different styles, both essentially say the same thing: discover the world by listening to your heart and following through on your dreams even if it means going to farther extremes than what society would deem “normal” or even “healthy.” Coelho’s book is about a boy’s search for treasure, written as a fairy tale and philosophical meditation about the powers at work in the world helping people attain their dreams and what we must do to help those powers along. Krakauer’s book, a nonfiction journalistic account of a boy’s search for adventure (recently made into a movie I didn’t see, from the previews I can safely say the book is better than the movie), adds a qualification to Coelho’s idealistic message: bring a map and food with you when you go in search of your dreams.

Velvet and braids

2008-02-27T10:46:00.000+03:00

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

2008-02-17T09:09:00.000+03:00

(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

2008-02-10T10:42:00.000+03:00

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

2008-02-10T10:39:00.000+03:00

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.

From Baharden with love

2008-01-06T10:10:00.000+03:00

After a little over a week at my new permanent site of Baharly/ Baharden (I’m beginning to say it like a local), I have come to the conclusion that as a stranger in a strange land I must either become strange or become like the PCV in Paraguay who was medically separated for being mentally unbalanced. She stabbed a cow with a kitchen knife. It ate her last pair of underwear. I can sympathize. For me, the strangeness is not from cows with a hankering for the taste of laundry soap and cloth, but rather from the people who are at once incredibly accessible and friendly, but also skilled with magical abilities and thought processes I can’t begin to fathom. How they can eat foot consisting entirely of fat and carbohydrates and not all be 250 pounds, I don’t know. How they can sit just talking and drinking tea for hours, I don’t know. How my host sister can sit and watch me do a Tai Bo exercise video with an entirely expressionless face for an entire hour, I don’t know. How they can at once admire work and yet avoid it whenever possible (and sometimes when it should be impossible), I don’t know. How they can obsess and moralize about cleanliness and tidiness and yet use the same unwashed cloth to clean up raw chicken and goat carcasses, dry the plates, and then wipe their mouths, I don’t know. These mysteries (with the exception of the last one) I hope to learn through duplication, adaptation, and application to my own life here. It should be interesting to return to America, the land of constant work and sound bite conversations, after two years of a “short wait” translating as one to two hours of non-activity.

So I gave my first teacher conference for three days this week. I didn’t know I was going to do my first teacher conference, but on the first day of the all-teachers winter holiday conference, in the time it took for all the English teachers in Baharden town and the surrounding villages to push me to the front of the room I prepared a nice little presentation on the American educational philosophy (go to school till you’re 18 or your parents go to jail), the Peace Corps philosophy (we teach and help you for free, gasps all around), and American universities and liberal arts colleges (you can learn a profession or just learn a lot of fun facts, I chose the latter). I spoke in a mixture of Turkmen and English for over an hour answering questions about the American banking loan system (can you pay for a house or a car with just your salary? answer = no), why I’m single (in America women work first and then sometimes get a guy as a nice accessory to match her purse – just kidding, of course), and why I’m only one of three children rather than ten (not unusual in Turkmenistan). With a night to prepare, the second day I did a tidy presentation on 4MAT lesson plans, the Teaching English as a Foreign Language basic currency for communicative teaching methods. The third day I gave them all books about communicative and interactive teaching and picture dictionaries to jazz up the memorize-and-repeat-or-get-hit-by-a-stick current classroom atmosphere. Whether they listened to me because I was the only one talking (with the exception of the guys in the back, boys never really grow up), because my novelty as the American hasn’t worn off, or because they were actually interested in the information I was presenting and will incorporate it into their teaching, remains to be seen. They had a really hard time processing the first step, to engage the students, as the idea that students may choose to not pay attention is about as alien as the concept of a free will other than God’s. I pick my battles. I chose to focus my ire and attention on them accepting the importance of the fourth step: students’ independent creation of dialogues and texts using English. My standing up there discussing these ideas in Turkmen after only three months of study I hope was a poignant example of communicative methods working better than listen-and-repeat methods which have students four years into English study still unable to answer “how are you?” I’m just happy that I’m doing more than just sitting around and drinking tea during the two week winter break – it may be okay for Turkmen, but I’m still too much an American to enjoy doing nothing. Damned Protestant work ethic, it follows me even across the world.

So it’s really bloody cold here, especially considering I was anticipating (and packed for) the desert. The past few days it’s been way below freezing, there’s an inch of snow/impacted ice on the ground which makes the already treacherous roads spikes of frozen mud. I tell people when they ask that weather in DC is similar in winter, and that’s true, but below freezing weather in the states is a relatively hypothetical state. As a sheltered suburbanite, I experienced winter for about five minutes walking from over-heated home to over-heated car, over-heated car to over-heated building, over-heated building to over-heated car, over-heated car to over-heated home. My winter coat was more for the comfort of snuggling up in something fuzzy than actual necessity. My current unbelievably extraordinarily ugly winter coat was a gift from my amazing teacher counterpart and a hand-me-down from her 60+ year-old mother-in-law who thought it was too unfashionable and ugly to wear around town or even around the house. But despite the fact that I would blend in perfectly at an old Russian bag ladies’ convention, my coat almost never leaves my body these days as I trudge through the blistery elements to reach the kitchen, the outhouse, the living room (all separate buildings), and then through the streets for 10-30 minutes to reach the school, the corner store, colleagues, and my growing circle of acquaintances. I packed for fall figuring I’d buy winter clothes when I arrived, but as the entrance to the grand bazaar should have a sign reading “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” I have since decided that layering up four or five clothes at a time is preferable. So I look like a sphere and slowly freeze, but it’s an adventure. So far I don’t have any projectile vomiting onto kittens, over-dosing on anti-diarrhea medications and foaming pink at the mouth, falling down the shitter hole, or spectacular disease stories (all the ones listed happened in the last three months to other volunteers here). I’m tempted to chug the water just to walk away from Peace Corps with a story to rival the ones that come out of Africa or other warmer, wetter, malaria-infested parts of the world. May be the last month.

As anxious minds have asked, I have a new address in Baharden (available upon request from myself or my mother), but the old address continues to work as well. I can only pick up mail sent to the old address when I go into Ashgabat (may be once or twice a month) or when the PC staff comes out to my site to check up on my progress. Packages (music, books, movies, and food such as Poptarts, Double-stuffed Oreos, gum, and other packaged edibles able to withstand nuclear blasts) should continue to be sent to Ashgabat, but letters and well-wishes feel free to send direct to Baharden. A guy really excited to see stamps and handwriting all the way from America brings it straight to my door and my host family passes around the envelope with muted amazement.

Christmas in T-Stan

2007-12-25T14:06:00.000+03:00

Old habits die hard so although I haven’t been to church in over 3 months, I’m writing this while sitting in a church, or sorts. Actually, it’s the Vatican Embassy in Ashgabat, a house-like building behind a normal-looking gate with a plastic Christmas wreath on the door. Inside looks like a loved but under-funded home with walls painted the same yellowish beige that seems so universally chosen for religious interiors that it may be truly God’s will for the walls to make worshippers slightly queasy. The walls are covered with prints of Mother Theresa, a random Spanish saint, several Virgin Marys (including one that looks vaguely Turkmen and another vaguely Hispanic), a large glowing Jesus, and two carefully decorated but slightly bare Christmas trees. As is usually the case when I’m sitting in churches of any denomination, I feel slightly conflicted. On one hand, in my hand is a hymnal filled with “Amazing Grace,” “Lord of the Dance” (tune of “Simple Gifts”), “Joy to the World,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” as well as many other old and beloved favorites, but on the other hand, I’m sitting in a Catholic Midnight Mass that’s entirely in Russian (do you cross left to right or right to left? And why do they keep ringing the bell?). The only English was at the part when they served communion and the really hot priest (seriously, all of us are going to Hell) reminded us that it was “only for Catholics.” Eh. In general it was a lovely service. We sang “Silent Night” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” about eight times at different points before, during, and after - just the first verse of each, sung first in English, then Russian, then Polish, the German. By the end of the service the entire congregation (parish?) basically said “screw it” and we all sang it in our own language at the same time. The highlight of the experience -- the part that made leaving the debauchery in the hotel all worth it -- was the walk and cab ride there and back when the five of us belted out Christmas carols and hollared "Jingle Bells" to our driver's infinite amusement.

Across the world in about 10 hours when the 24th passes to the 25th, my parents, and whatever family decides to stay awake, will be at the midnight service lighting candles one to the other until the hall is lit only by several hundred small flames. The entire sanctuary will glow while the Stevensons’ operatic voices sing “Silent Light” and all the kids (and a few adults) play with the dripping wax of their candle and see how much they can tip it without wax getting on their bright red clothes. Still bursting with enthusiasm, we will clean up communion (raspberry juice so it will look bright red and Christmas-y – Mom’s theatrical touch to Christmas communion preparation) then run home to get lots of sleep for the long day of intense merriment ahead.

Written Christmas morning -
Last night ended watching "Secret Garden" with two good girlfriends (none of us brought X-Mas movies, but it has the same feeling) and getting the first full night of sleep after three days of clubbing and general debauchery (nothing serious, I'm still more crazy sober than drunk).

Christmas began at the PC Director's house where we were wined and dined on bread and juice and gave out our Secret Santa gifts. I received several blank notebooks and two really nice pens as my writing fetish has gotten around. After doing some shopping around with Andrea (who I will not see until April after we ship out tomorrow), I hung (am hanging) around the Peace Corps office playing Taboo with 15 other PCV, drinking two liters of Coke, and generally trying to enjoy the day and forget that tomorrow at 9am I'm leaving the world of pampered Americans. Baharly Here I Come.

Other important news, as of two days ago I am an official Peace Corps Volunteer, sworn in by the American ambassador while wearing a really nice dress (forgot to put the photos on the flash drive to post, oops) and wearing enough make-up to cause two friends to squint at my face and go "Annie?" Fun times. Hopefully I can put up a photo later the next time I have access to the internet - in a month. Write letters.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (Taze Yyl)!!!!!!!

A darker side

2007-12-16T09:13:00.001+03:00

Hearing the threat of “if you don’t eat your dinner you can’t have dessert,” even in Turkmen, is a very familiar sound. Children around the world from suburban Maryland to Lamu, Kenya, to Godkepe, Turkmenistan know that phrase so well they don’t really have to pay attention to catch the meaning. When staring at a heaping plate of unexciting dinner food, children hear that warning tone and they know they need to eat it or that pile of chocolate candy next to the teapot will remain only a frustrating mirage. In the past few weeks I’ve picked up a few new threats that I never learned in my sheltered home in Silver Spring, MD: “stop crying or I’ll hit you again with the rolling pin,” “wake up now or I’ll get the stick,” and the blindingly hypocritical, “stop hitting your sister, hitting is bad, if you do it again I’ll hit you harder.” Corporeal punishment extends to the classroom as well where I saw a teacher berate and beat seven boys (one got a knee to the crotch in front of the entire class) for a half hour when their offense was showing up five minutes late to class. Among other volunteers we joke about starting a program called “the pointer is only for the map.”

I’m sitting in the living room watching my host sister make the cat increasingly annoyed and I feel inspired to return to the topic of dogs and animal care in Turkmenistan. If you remember from one of the first entries, there was one truly affectionate loyal and friendly dog in Godkepe formerly living at my Turkmen language teacher’s house. I say formerly because a little over a month ago my teacher’s host mother gave the dog away to the near-by military base – presumably to be eaten – leaving three adorable golden puppies who were the highlight of our days until they similarly disappeared last week. The dog-apathetic host mother apparently gave them away to the electrician who expressed a passing interest in them when he came by to fix the TV. We hope Wily, Basca, and Goofy (the puppies) are dead, as the alternative fates for dogs here are all excessively depressing.

Another exciting cultural lesson of the past week was a Turkmen funeral ceremony. It seems strange to say that I’m looking forward to finally attending a funeral for an old person who lived a full and eventful age and died in their bed surrounded by loved ones. So far during my life I’ve attended the funerals of a suicidal 15 year-old (USA), a cholera-victim 12 year-old (Kenya), and now in Turkmenistan I attended the funeral of a tortured and murdered 22 year-old. The exact circumstances aren’t meant for mass distribution, but four days ago I went with my site-mates to sit quietly and chew bread with a mother so exhausted from weeping that all she could do was shake and whisper that she was glad we’d come. It’s the sort of day when you feel gloom is puddling in your bones.

I have a cold (partly the reason for the dark turn in this blog), and I wonder how much of it is a psychological reflection of the weather. For the past two weeks the sun has been only a hypothetical presence hidden behind a thick iron-gray curtain of cloud. With the gray mud combined with the dirty white-washed buildings (read: gray) and the gray-filtered light, the entire town looks like a faded coloring book no one has filled in yet. I wish I could take a bucket of red and green paint and literally paint the town to liven up the generally dismal winter scenery. I never thought I’d miss the over-decorated streets of suburbia in the Christmas season.

And on those cheerful notes, training draws a close with only one week to go. To review, Peace Corps service is two years and three months long, with that extra three months spent in intensive four-hour a day language training, three-hour a day technical training, and “Hub Days” where all the trainees spread around the capitol at their training come together to receive safety, health, and teaching methodology training (plus find out all the funny stories of what’s going on at the other sites). It’s strange to think that my entire study abroad semester in Kenya was roughly the length of training and I will stay here 24 additional months (or more, if I choose to extend). It seems like several life-times although intellectually I know two years is half of high school or college and a small fraction of a life-time. And in terms of the people I meet here, I will appear and disappear as suddenly as a change in the weather.

Although prospects of my permanent site fill me will equal parts of excitement, dread, and anticipation (like all new endeavors), my thoughts this week really aren’t as depressed as my choice of meditations would seem to illustrate. I’m truly looking forward to going to Baharly and beginning a 2 year adventure that will supposedly shape my future professionally and personally. I am especially looking forward to learning how to make carpets and becoming inducted into an artistic tradition some books describe as the key to the Turkmen soul. Carpets cover every floor and often the walls as well and they tell pictorial symbolic histories of tribal ancestors, inspiring heroes, and cultural values. (In the photo I’m learning my first carpet lesson at a Godkepe carpet factory) During my three months here I have found myself increasingly drawn to thread and its myriad of uses and forms in T-stan. I just finished crocheting an elaborate shawl using a flower-like pattern I learned from my Godkepe host sister. It even has fringe. Compared to the yards to simple easy lines I used to do at home, I feel like I’ve graduated into a new world of thread manipulation. It’s amazing how many uses they have for yarn here: knitting beautiful socks called “cheshkas,” crocheting their own sweaters and shawls, weaving carpets and rugs, and even braiding bracelets and necklaces with yarn and camel hair to ward off the evil eye. It saturates every aspect of life. When I’m busily occupied in the living room combining single threads together to create a beautiful shawl, hat, or scarf, I feel like I’m not only creating an intricate piece of craft, I’m also weaving myself into a part of an ancient art form and profession. I don’t wonder why so many of the heroines of Greek mythology were weavers (Arachne, Penelope, Helen, etc) and why multiple cultures have envisioned the Fates as weavers. It may sound overly poetic or cliché, but there is something truly magical about how a long strand of rolled cotton knotted together can become something beautiful and functional. And thus creation, occupation, and art help distract and lighten thoughts about the darker side of life here.

Permanent Placement Annoucement

2007-11-25T09:41:00.000+03:00

The big news: I am living in Baharly Town for the next two years. It is about 45 minutes from where I am living now in the Ahal Region, about 2 hours (by public bus) from the capitol, Ashgabat. With 15000 people, Baharly consists of a small downtown center (where I’m living), surrounding villages, and is located at the foot of the Kopetdag mountains. The proximity to Ashgabat means I will have weekly access to the free internet at the Peace Corps office as well as regular mail. As the internet is unreliable (note how last weekend it was down), please continue to write letters. Staying in the Ahal region means I will continue to live in the most conservative and fundamentalist of the regions with the closest proximity to the PC Office (=close for medications, also close for staff’s supervision and control). No unauthorized travel for me.

More details: I will visit my permanent site to meet my host family and fellow Turkmen English teachers for five days next week so right now I only know what the PC packet says. According to the pamphlet about my placement, I have been assigned to a medium-sized school in Baharly town with 3 English teachers and around 1000 students. My school principal is an English teacher by profession. As far as ethnicity is concerned, Baharly is overwhelmingly Turkmen so I will not be learning Russian or Uzbeck. It is a new site which has never had a PC volunteer before and my nearest fellow America is Linda (one of my current training site-mates), assigned to stay here in Godkepe (45 minutes away). Some of my dearest friends among the other volunteers are assigned to Ashgabat, however, so company is an easy and cheap bus ride away. That's not including the new Turkmen friends I will be making at sites and my current Language and Cultural Trainer (LCF) who I love and is an hour away between Baharly and Ashgabat.

My host family information: To repeat, all of this is from the PC description sheets which have proven unreliable in the past, so take all this with a certain skepticism. I am living in a compound 10 minutes walk from my school and 15 minutes from the market and public transportation. My family has four members: a father who works at the Ashgabat airport (getting tickets may be really easy), a 50+ year old housewife mother, a 25 year-old sister who lives at home (yeah!), and an 8th grader sister who “speaks a little English” (= “hello”). I’m going to get really good at Turkmen. No one smokes and they have a puppy, hens, and a camel. I will have my own house on the compound with two rooms including a bed & mattress (!), a worktable, one or two chairs, a wardrobe (!), and curtains. The compound has a bucket shower, but with a gas heating system and they have a well in addition to a water pipe (which “usually works in winter,” whatever that means). They’ve gone on the record to state that I’m allowed to have guests of any gender visit and spend the night. When I talked to Ata (one of the PC staff who chose our host families), he said my family is ready to bend over backwards to be really friendly and welcoming for me – thus my own house on the compound. However challenging the professional situation may be adjusting to the conservative Ahal culture and helping them get used to the strange American in their midst, it sounds like my home situation could not be more ideal. I look forward to an exciting, challenging, interesting, and hopefully very rewarding two years.

Zack Braff and Sacred Bread

2007-11-25T09:35:00.000+03:00

The internet was down at the Peace Corps office last weekend, so here is last week's post.

The photo at right is my 23rd Birthday party with my host sisters and site-mates.

Stories of the Peace Corps usually involve insects bigger than bats, monsoon seasons in thatched huts, and diseases involving swelling and pus. For me, the Peace Corps cultural adaptation process has been about watching “Scrubs” while eating breakfast.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.

Firstly, “Scrubs” is dubbed in Russian by a single monotone male voice doing all the dialogue on top of the still-hearable English. JD and Turk are particularly easy to hear underneath the Russian as they use short slang which requires much longer Russian phrases to translate (“What’s up, bro” takes about a minute, not to mention explaining the significance of “black whale”). Unfortunately, with the exception of his sound effects, Dr. Cox’s original voice is lost beneath the Russian growl. The only time the television is not on during the day is when there is no electricity in a house, a situation which (despite its frequency) leaves the family as helpless as any American suburbanite. Their lives are designed around the presence of electricity, natural gas, and running water (I probably took our loss of both electricity and water for two days best out of all the family as I came emotionally prepped for it before I arrived).

My breakfast scene is further complicated by the fact that the table is three inches tall with the eight members of my host family plus myself all sitting cross-legged or laying sideways around it on the colorful hand-woven carpet. When it’s just us, my brothers and sisters sit and lay down haphazardly so that everyone has enough room and can still watch the perpetually-on television. When guests arrive, however, the traditional separation of the genders kicks in and the males get the guest room and the women either sit in the living room or busily prepare tea and sweets for the male guests. When a strange/guesting male is in the house, even when he’s separated by a wall, none of my sisters lie down, but rather sit with perfect posture with their legs tucked modestly beneath them. I'm still getting used to the geographical gender posture rules.

I’m also eating the Turkmen equivalent of oatmeal for breakfast every morning: pieces of crumbled bread (“churok”) in boiled milk straight from the cow an hour previously. The “churok,” a loaf about a foot-long and an inch high, a Turkmen specialty, tastes like hearty whole wheat and has the texture of wall insulation. The bread’s baking instructions and specially- designed earthen mound stove is so ancient it goes back to Turkmen nomadic days and the bread itself has a sacred significance – it is kept in a camel-hair woven blanket, should never be turned upside down, people take pieces with them for good luck when traveling long distances, and any uneaten scraps are saved for later consumption as it is blasphemous to throw it away. The bread is so dense that even when soaking in warm thick milk for five minutes it holds it’s shape so (with a lot of sugar) breakfast becomes a sweet bog of starch, protein, calcium, and cream. Not so bad, really, considering that poor Thomas and Dan were served fried camel organs for an entire week. Breakfast is actually one of my favorite meals here as the Turkmen food pyramid is visualized a little differently than what American nutritionists usually suggest. The Turkmen word for “sweet” is the same as “delicious” so nothing can be too sweet, and the word “food” – if it doesn’t have an extra modifier of “vegetable-like” – implies extremely oily, starchy, or meat-based (usually all three). Fruits and vegetables aren’t considered foods, but rather ignorable appetizers.

When contemplating my usual breakfast scene, we must also consider what I’m wearing: my first Turkmen “koinek” (traditional floor-length dress). Although I bought the red and black-patterned material at the bazaar, my youngest sister cut the material to fit my measurements, my middle sister wove the complex embroidery around the neck, and my eldest sister tailored it to be both flattering and comfortable. The next time I get paid from the Peace Corps I’m getting another one.

But that’s my life in Turkmenistan in a nutshell. Every day I drink about a liter of Coca Cola, I read books borrowed from the PC office, exercise with my youngest sister in the privacy of my room, and (despite the difference in language) my conversations with my host sisters follow predictable girly patterns: clothes, boys, weight, movies (they know as many as I do), cosmetics, knitting patterns, and how to deal with problem students (we’re all teachers of different subjects). In all, it is a complicated mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar which at once proves how interconnected the world’s pop culture has become as well as how it is mediated and conformed into the existing traditional life styles and values. And that’s just a complicated way of saying I’m getting used to it here, and really it’s not so very different than my life in America. The differences are in the details.

"Now I know..."

2007-11-11T09:11:00.001+03:00

After sorting through the last few weeks’ disastrous and humorous anecdotes, I found one that is both. Last week after waking with a sense of comfortable contentment, I started my day by making eggs. The Turkmen philosophy of cooking is that if it tastes good with oil, then drowning a food in oil should be fabulous. After three weeks of scrambled eggs that were more grease than eggs, I volunteered to start making my own, to everyone’s satisfaction. Of course, I can’t actually cook. That I’d made it until last week without burning down the kitchen is a sort of miracle, really. I’d been experimenting with the different kinds of oils, grease, and fats that sit in recycled unmarked bottles and cans throughout the kitchen and discovered that the oil from the Coca Cola bottle next to the coffee ground can (now filled with camel fat) was the best for lubricating my favorite iron skillet. My favorite skillet was still caked with last night’s dinner, but some scrubbing (with water, there’s no dishwashing soap here) had it looking somewhat clean. So I got out the oil and started making scrambled eggs, every step bringing a sense of accomplishment and pride as the eggs sizzled and began to solidify into a familiar omelet shape. I pushed around the raw egg a small tea spoon (the only clean spoon in the bin) and although the fire was a little hotter than usual, it worked to my advantage as the eggs cooked faster and every part of the pan was heating more or less equally. Then came the moment of truth. I found a plate and grabbed a wash-cloth and took the skillet from the fire and moved it toward the table. The skillet, which under a smaller flame was never incredibly hot, was now far too hot to hold with just one wash-cloth. I cried out in pain as the iron handle became uncomfortable in my palms and I set the skillet down on the kitchen table, which promptly began to hiss. Damn. I grabbed a second washcloth, got hold of the skillet handle, and looked down to see a perfect skillet-shaped burned hole in the plastic covering of the table and a scorch mark on the stacked papers beneath the plastic. The table itself seemed undamaged, but as I surveyed my handy-work the pan wobbled in my hands and my perfect eggs began to slip and I brought up my left hand to steady it and brushed against the bottom of the pan, making another sizzle sound accompanied with a burning flesh smell. As I cursed again, the pan wobbled the other direction and the wash-cloths slipped and my right forefinger connected with the still-hot handle. I finally got the skillet to the cool side of the stove-top, dumped the still-perfect eggs onto the plate, ran cold water over my burned fingers, and entered the living room with pain and guilt plastered across my face. I presented my hands to my eje (host mother) and explained through gestures and large facial expressions what had occurred. I got lots of sympathy and Edugul (my host sister) put toothpaste on it (not a bad idea, really). I ate half my eggs before Edugul headed for the kitchen and I followed her, pointing to the hole I’d made in the table and apologizing profusely in English and Turkmen. She laughed and I made the “I’m really really sorry” face, which she shrugged off. When I came back to the living room my eje proceeded to explain to me that I needed more than one wash-cloth to hold burning skillets, that fire made iron hot, and that I should be careful. I chuckled a little, replied “Now I know,” and they all laughed. A week later, my fingers are still healing (mostly because I won’t stop picking at the scabs), but when you see me next I’ll still have all ten.

In other news, as I walking home from the bus station today a huge party at my neighbor’s house was playing the Macarena loud enough to be heard a block away. On the curb an elderly man looking like a slightly taller Yoda crouched chewing something and nodding with solemn contemplation to the song’s bouncing beat. I thought nothing would beat last night’s Turkmen professional ice skater (this is a desert country) performing on TV a choreographed ice ballet to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Cotton-Eye Joe” in full cowboy paraphernalia.

Why Turkmen kids walk the streets singing “Hit the Road, Jack”. . .

2007-11-02T08:47:00.000+03:00

Lessons learned from my first weeks as a camp music teacher, 3rd form (7-8 year-old) assistant English teacher, and English language club teacher: 1) Ray Charles, “C is for Cookie,” and gospel songs work for all ages and are enjoyed even if the students don’t know any English beyond “hello,” while “Why Do You Build Me Up?” and “The Ants Go Marching” require either stereo accompaniment or English fluency, and preferably both. 2) Children have the supernatural ability to not only sense a ball’s presence at the bottom of a bag, but also to pass this knowledge to one another faster than sound. They can then beg to play with it in repeated harmonized whines specially tuned to grate the ears, mind, and soul. 3) If a visual aid doesn’t move or include more than one color, then kids won’t look at it. 4) Come to class/club/camp with at least four back-up games in case every carefully planned activity spontaneously combusts due to the combined catalysts of classrooms lacking a blackboard, too many/few students, and boys/girls beating up the other boys/girls. 5) When possible, bring a translator. Without one you run the risk of facing an entire classroom of uncomprehending but expectant stares as you try to explain the directions of a game for the fourth time using toddler Turkmen and charades that only induce giggles and no new understanding.

Despite some hitches, the first two weeks of intensive teaching technical training (translation: sink or swim classroom instruction with bi-weekly “hub days” where we learn how we could have taught better four days before) have gone very well. My kids have their colors, numbers (even out of sequence!), and introductions down pat and they come running to give me hugs from three streets away. A lifetime terror of children as a race has only lessened slightly after getting to know them better, but their beaming faces after getting positive reinforcement on an answer (Turkmen teachers generally don’t say “good job”) remind me why I’m here.

In other news, last weekend was my first visit to the large Gokdepe bazaar, a world unto itself, acres wide, with twisting labyrinthine stalls and alleyways that overflow its cement walls and cover much of the surrounding valley, only giving way to the rows of buses and large vans which retrieve and depart with the bazaar’s occupants. Every dusty square foot is filled with velvet, satin, cotton, and synthetic fabrics and prints; embroidery (patterns, raw materials, and completed pieces done by hand and machine); coats, jeans, sweaters, and shirts from Turkey and China; soaps, lotions, yarn, music (cassette tapes), socks, hair pins, sponges, pots, tea sets, cleaning fluid, gasoline, car doors and headlights, cookies, backing soda, Snickers bars, cotton cooking oil in Coca Cola liter bottles, and every other conceivable knick-knack and life accessory. Carts full of sacks of flour, fresh pomegranates, and Bollywood DVDs pushed their way through the streets barely wide enough to fit them as women carrying bags half the size of themselves darted out of the way and pressed themselves up against three-foot high piles of empty shampoo bottles. It was a fascinating adventure of sights, scents, smells, and buzzing human activity (women in pants! A sight to sooth the soul and, surprisingly, make me slightly shamed and scandalized on their behalf), which I hope I can avoid doing again for at least two months. The sensory overload was worth it in the end as I now have cloth for my first Turkmen koinek (floor-length dress) which I’m designing with my host sisters’ help/dictation. I’m choosing the neckline, my middle sister is designing the embroidery pattern and sewing it with her sewing machine, my oldest sister is cutting the fabric, and my littlest sister is tailoring it to fit me perfectly. With our powers combined, and assuming I survive their enthusiasm, I should have a lovely red and black dress fit for school, weddings, and guesting by the end of next week. After living with only four outfits during the past two months, the idea of a new possibility in the morning fills with me a sublime glee. Unexpected lesson of this week: PC makes you more materialistic, interesting how that works out.

Scary running feet

2007-10-19T11:58:00.000+03:00

This week I met our family dogs, one a hulking beast with gray and white fur the size of a small couch and a second smaller red mutt that looks like a cross between a fox and a hyena. My initial hesitation (I won’t say terror) of the local dogs was partially influenced by the fact that until two days ago even the family pet guard dogs pulled at their chains barking and growling whenever I came near. Then during a recent bout of gastric insurrection (Colonial Pepto Bismol is on the case and the separatists should shortly be under control) I went out at night to our cement hole outhouse and the dogs were off their chains. I had a momentary surge of sympathy for deer in front of semi-trucks as I stood at the door regarding Garagol (the cough-sized one) with the moonlight reflecting off his impressive canines. He came forward slowly and my hand tightened on the door knob. The story about the guy who was medically separated due to dog mauling came into my mind (PC has lots of stories) and then Garagol began nuzzling my leg and we came to a quick understanding: so long as he acts like a big sweaty then I’ll perform my duties as the only human in miles who knows how to properly pat his head. We’re good friends now and when a strange dog came into the courtyard yesterday while I was in the outhouse, Garagol nearly killed it in his enthusiasm to protect me.

Yesterday was the first rain and it took us all by surprise. After nearly two weeks of high 80s and mid 90s, suddenly we awoke to 50s and a semi-downpour. Of course none of us dressed for it so we complained of cold and numb extremities the day after we complained of melting. Our poor Turkmen teacher threw up her hands at us never being satisfied, but, eh, if rain is the worst thing happening to us. . .

Next week is a challenging break from routine as we hold our own Extra Curricular Activity (not a “camp” due to Russian connotations, although it will last three days from 9:00am-1:00pm with the usual “camp”-like activities). I’m in charge of music – imagine a lot of “I’m A Little Teapot” and explaining the “hokey pokey” without the use of a shared language – and Linda’s doing English games and the fellas, Thomas and Dan, are handling sports and arts. With an hour of planning and almost no materials except for some balls and the school space, I expect barely controlled chaos held at bay with our toddler-quality Turkmen vocabulary. I don’t think the horror film genre has fully utilized yet the scariness of large groups of bored children you can’t talk to. Fun ahead.

End of Week #1

2007-10-12T08:58:00.000+03:00

For my first impressions of Turkmenistan, I would like to begin with the dogs. Both owned and feral roam the streets, some as large as bikes and others as small as cats with teeth so big you think their heads should fall over. The way to avoid being ravished by these dogs is to, if approached, bend down and pretend to grab a rock. The dog will then growl a bit, but soon move away and let you pass whole. The reason for this is that all infant puppies have rocks thrown at their heads by children (and adults) and so have a just and understandable terror of rocks. Logical explanations for extreme situations seem to be around every corner in Turkmenistan. The extreme grandeur of the capital, Ashgabat, with its towering spires of marble and gold off the cover of a Ray Bradbury “Martian Chronicles” novel compared with my training site town of G— all have reasonable explanations. Free gas, electricity, and water in homes compared to a roll of toilet paper costing more than several liters of Coke.

Honestly, I really enjoy this place and the people. I have been blessed with an incredible host family who spends hours helping me with my Turkmen language skills (in a week I’m up the level I was with Swahili in 4 months and Spanish in 9 years) and friends who make the days pass so quick I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Every time I walk home along my tree-lined dusty street I feel blessed that I can happily anticipate returning to my family and seeing what adventure in cooking, vocabulary, grammar, cleaning, or conversation they have waiting for me. With a diet of melons (really really good melons), fried dough stuffed with meat, salads drenched in oil, pomegranates (bigger than fists), and average seven cups of tea a day, I think I will gain about 50 pounds during the next three months, but I’ll be happy with every bite.

As I was walking back from the bucket-shower room (also the furnace room and the tooth brushing room although I haven't quite figured out how the combination of buckets work and where the drain is), I saw my host Dad watching the ABC "Arabian Nights" mini-series on TV (the TV is on constantly, I've seen more TV in the last 78 hours than in the past five years combined) and it blew my mind a little that I am living an Arabian Nights story. Merv, an archeological site near the city of Mary, is mentioned in one of the tales and the characters have Central Asian names and looked like my host family, my teacher counterparts, and my students. The town looks significantly different, think small town Midwest combined with southern Californian mountains with lines of private courtyard compounds, but I'm actually here.

Staging

2007-10-01T08:03:00.000+03:00

After two days of generic Peace Corps preparation (travel in pairs, boil the water, be ready to face your fears, recognize your own cultural perceptions, etc) and an even longer summer before that (I love you all, but a four month summer is excessive), I am so ready to jump on that plane tomorrow at noon for Frankfurt, and then Turkmenistan. Our DC country desk administrator, Ben, is rather amazing and I'm glad to have him in our corner on the US side of things. If our admin in Turkmenistan is half as good, the next two years should run like a happily purring machine. From what we hear, Turkmenistan is one of the more challenging PC posts in the world, but also one of the most rewarding with the clearest signs of growth. We are the only international aid organization there so our individual impacts are noticeable, memorable, and noteworthy after only two years, unlike some other posts where you're tripping over other Western aid workers and the impact of individual projects are lost in the shuffle. My fellow PC volunteers (about 40 total, a mix of English teachers and public health volunteers) are amazing people, outgoing and enthusiastic, and after two days of intense socializing, I haven't found anyone yet who I haven't enjoyed their company. Good times ahead.

And thus it begins

2007-09-18T05:12:00.000+03:00

Launch is less than two weeks away and preparations are beginning slowly to commence. Between two weekends ago in Philly and this last weekend in New Jersey, I have said my good-byes to all my dear friends ("good bye" if I didn't run into you to say it in person). I'm also beginning to accumulate enough portable technology to get cast as the dork side-kick in an action movie. Watch for me in the desert scenes of the fifth Indiana Jones movie ("Indiana Jones and the Enchanted Retirement Home") with laptops and DVD cases strapped to various limbs.

I begin this adventure with the usual mixture of excitement and my usual "what have I gotten myself into now?" feeling. The second is now so familiar after four years of globetrotter adventures that it's like an old friend. Of course, the welcoming of this old familiar dread/anticipation means waving good bye to the longest summer in Christendom and its lazy haze. Good bye, Comfort Zone, good bye, see you again in two years when it will be time to concoct a new one from sugared conformity and moistened apathy. Time to go out and see some of the world.