Yes, I live in outer space

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.”