Ak Ishan

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpected cuteness on Single’s Appreciation Day

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

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

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

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

How surviving becomes enjoying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A finer dork every day

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Baharden with love

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.