November 4th

So an average day for me… I wake up around 8:20 and eat a quick breakfast with my family before walking a block down the street to meet up with Kelly at her family’s house. This occasionally involves a quick second breakfast. Kelly and I walk the fifteen minutes to Carrie’s house, where all five of us are currently taking Turkmen lessons from Maya. We spend 4 hours working on our Turkmen, eat lunch (which Carrie’s host mom cooks, super tasty), then go off to technical training for a few hours. For Lex and I, technical training is sort of a nebulous concept right now. Theoretically, we are supposed to be learning about Turkmen medical culture by observing it firsthand and asking lots of questions. There are a few problems with this particular course of action. First of all, Lex and I don’t really speak Turkmen just yet. Don’t get me wrong, we are learning, and eventually I’m sure we’ll be really good at it, but for the time being we’re not quite there yet. This makes it rather interesting when we try to have any sort of meaningful interaction with the nurses and doctors at our clinic, and tragically limits our time at the clinic to simply sitting down and staring, while wondering what exactly is going on. I’m hoping this will improve as time goes on. After our time at technical training is finished, we will either head home to hang out with our host families or go to each other’s houses for tea and commiseration regarding Turkmen life.

After getting home for the day (which typically happens somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven o’clock), I usually wind up just hanging out with my host family while they listen to music, cook dinner, and play with the babies. I feel sometimes like I’m watching a live action version of the television show Pants Off, Dance Off when we’re hanging out with the babies. Ayjemal loooves to dance to anything, and for a two year old, she has a substantial repertoire of dance moves. There has been everything from samba shoulders to dropping it like its hot. It’s pretty entertaining to watch. While Ayjemal is busy shaking her groove thing, it seems like my younger baby, Hatija, never has any clothes on.

Turkmen have a very different view on how one should go about training their children to use the toilet, and part of their plan includes not using diapers. I’m serious, from the time they’re born Turkmen babies don’t wear diapers, they just keep soiling their pants over and over again. This results in an incredible amount of dirty clothing for their mothers to launder, but in theory, it speeds up the process of baby learning how to use to toilet. Either way you cut it, it means that Hatija is constantly in a “transitional” pants stage while they try to locate a clean pair to replace to freshly dirtied ones she is wearing. You’d think the kid was a nudist.

After dinner and the floor show, I usually wind up falling into bed like an old lady by no later than 8:30. I realize it seems odd that I would find myself absolutely exhausted at a time when most Americans are just settling down for a night of prime time television watching, but this place exhausts me. I think it’s the fact that with the new language, nothing is easy here. At home, I wouldn’t have to think twice about most things, whether it was saying good morning to my family, driving myself to the grocery store, or calling my friends to see how their day was. Here, everything is hard. I have to practice what I’m going to say in my head in multiple increments before I’ll ever say a word to my family or village neighbors, and even when I finally do say it, the effort behind deciphering what they say in response is incredible. It is literally exhausting just to listen to people talk here. I feel like such a wimp. Everyone is telling me that this will get better; its just a matter of time and patience. I’m hoping it will happen sooner rather than later. Right now I think its possible that I am sleeping more than either of the babies at my house.

In other news, this week was our first big American holiday while away from home. Halloween was on Wednesday, and at first I thought I would be really lonely for home and friends, especially when I thought about how everyone is America was celebrating while I was here. In reality, it turned out to be fine. The five of us from my village, plus Maya, all went into Ashgabat and ate pizza at a restaurant and had a few beers to mark the passing of our first month of volunteerism. I had a really good time, and have finally started to realize that as much as I desperately miss my friends and family from home, the people here are really doing a lot to help me fill that void.

I was walking to school on Friday and wasn’t really paying attention to my immediate surroundings. Out of nowhere, this giant dog comes charging at me from the neighbor’s yard, snarling and snapping his teeth. Normally in America I would be thinking rabies, and fearing for my life, but things here are a little bit different. For one thing, the dogs here are jerks. They’re horrible. I have yet to meet a decent dog in Turkmenistan. They all live outside, don’t get enough to eat, and are abused and neglected from the time they’re just small puppies. The resulting product is something of a Cujo-Satan mixture. They all chase you, growl at you, try to bite you, and generally make life tedious and unpleasant. I hate Turkmen dogs. Hate them. The particular neighbor dog in question was run over by a cement truck a few days later. In America the particular event would have saddened me tremendously. Here… let’s just say I wasn’t shedding any tears. Stupid dogs.