November 8th

I woke up and my eyes still were really sore, so I had to wear my glasses again, and I had forgotten it was Thursday, so even though I needed a shower in the worst way, my family wasn’t going to let me within a ten foot radius of the bayna. Needless to say, I walked out of the house looking like I had been run over by a Turkmen cement truck. I was so busy focusing on how gross I was, that I didn’t even notice my host brother trying to talk to me at first. Really, my older host brother was talking to me! On purpose! He asked me if I wanted a ride to school, which is huge since he hasn’t even said hi to me since I have lived here! I had to go meet Kelly, so I had to thank him profusely and refuse his offer, but I was beyond stoked that he and I had experienced a major communication breakthrough. I was on cloud nine all the way to Kelly’s house.

My morning stayed interesting as Kelly and I headed towards school. Ahead of us, we saw this lone old man who was pushing his clearly broken-down car up the street while he attempted to steer it around the random smattering of animals and children walking to school. We felt really bad for him, so we both came up and started pushing his car from behind. He took this as a good sign and started pushing faster. I kid you not, we seriously RAN with his car all the way past where we usually turn to go to school. I have never been so thankful that I live in a completely flat village. I realize that we were only pushing this fairly light car for maybe 10 minutes, but I was totally exhausted by the time we got it to the garage. I think it’s time to lay off the massive quantities of choreck and surprise ice creams.

The morning stayed in a super high-speed sort of mode because as soon as we got to school, some people from the Peace Corps showed up to teach us how to take blood pressures. We are going to be doing a big hypertension project and part of it will be doing blood pressure counseling. I am really excited, but I feel a little bad for my family now because I am absolutely obsessed with trying to practice on them. I’m like that annoying little dog that is constantly trying to hump your leg, except I’m really into arms, and I come with a stethoscope attached. Oh, and I’m really slow, so they have to sit there with their arms going numb for a good three or four minutes while I try to figure out whether they have really high blood pressure or whether I’m just listening to the wrong side of the stethoscope. My poor host family.

We totally get excited about the dorkiest things in language class. We seem to have our favorite game of the week. I use the term game loosely, because in any other circumstance I don’t know how “fun” any of our games would be. Presently, I think they are pretty good stuff.

Our current favorite is sort of like Boggle, but not really. Maya will sit all of us in a place where we can’t cheat by looking at anything on the walls, then will randomly pick a letter of the Turkmen alphabet. We will each write down every single Turkmen word we can think of that starts with that letter (I am happy if I can think of 10), then after 2 minutes of writing, we will go around and see who could think of the most words that no one else had. On a good day, it’s five. Usually the winner has three. We still have a long way to go with language.

One of our other favorites is the “guess what I am” game. We will all think of something and write it on a sticky note on one person’s back. We all give them clues in Turkmen and they try to guess what they are. As silly as it sounds, we could probably play this game for hours on end. You never get tired of it when people are things like “an airport”, “a napkin”, and my personal favorite, “cheap”. Just to hear someone say “am I cheap?” in Turkmen sets me into a fit of giggles. Wow… I think I am officially loosing little bits of my IQ the longer I am here… oh well, at least I am having fun while doing it.

We had the really really good dinner again tonight, the one with mashed potatoes and barley and tomatoes. It was delicious as usual. This makes three times since I have been in the country so far, I think my family officially rocks.