Loitering in limbo (but with discos)

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

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

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

A frog slowly boils

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

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

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.