Wordle of my T-stan experience

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

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

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

“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

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

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

Received my Close of Service (COS) date.

See you then.

:)