November 14th

We’ve started to accumulate a posse here. It’s quite entertaining. The kids love to walk with us as soon as they notice there are Americans on the street. They don’t talk to us a lot, for the most part they all talk to eachother and point and giggle at us, but they absolutely insist on walking as close to us as possible. Every now and then, a really brave one will say hello (in English!) and then ask us a few questions in Turkmen about why we’re there and what we’re doing. You can tell the kids are starting to think we’re pretty entertaining. Last week was our first official club day and we had planned a lesson on healthy nutrition. We weren’t really sure how many kids were going to come since we hadn’t told that many about it, but we figured maybe 15 or 20 would be a pretty good turnout. You can imagine our surprise when we had more than fifty kids show up Saturday morning, all of them ready to learn about healthy food. It was so great, and it made me feel really good about our village kids.

I’ve found a new dress maker, I’m excited to see what she makes for me. I really love this whole custom tailoring. I’ve never been in a situation where I could decide exactly what I wanted my clothes to look like and how I wanted them to fit me. Admittedly, all of the clothes I’m getting are floor length dresses with high necklines, but at least I get to pick which colors and shapes they are, right? It’s amazing how much I’m already starting to acclimate to the Turkmen idea of “proper dress”. I saw someone wearing a skirt that showed a portion of their knees the other day, and before I could stop myself I actually heard myself tsk-tsking them and shaking my head in disapproval. Are you kidding me? What happened to me?

Lex and Maya and I went to a big birthday for the father of one of the doctors at our clinic. It was really neat, he’s a big figure in the arts community in Ashgabat, so for his birthday party, they rented out a concert hall in the city and prestigious artists, singers, musicians, and actors all came and performed for him. It was my first real exposure to the Turkmen aarts, and I enjoyed it tremendously. There were a few opera singers who were absolutely phenomenal.