December 9th

Now that I’m back from site visits, and life is starting to get back to normal, I’m experiencing a mild sense of melancholoy. I was so excited about site visits for so long, and now that I’m back, I’ve realized its just a short time until I’ll be saying goodbye to my training village and all of my village mates. It’s also been really cold here and I think that’s just contributing to the overall feel of gloominess.

Apparently Kelly’s family found my blog and I’m supposed to say hi to them, so HI MR AND MRS GAST!!!!! My host family is really excited that its finally December because we have a lot of family birthdays in December. The really big one is going to be Ayjemal’s birthday on the 20th. It’s only the first week in December and we’ve already begun to make preparations for it. Apparently it also happens to coincide with a big religious holiday for the Muslim people here, so I’m not quite sure what to expect, but it will apparently be significant. It’s also the last day I will be spending with my host family, since all of the volunteers head into Ashgabat first thing on the 21st to be sworn in as official volunteers, then head to site. Wow, even though most of December is still left, I feel like it’s already over with…

I got some really obnoxious food poisoning on Thursday night. Lex and I had been in Ashgabat and were very very hungry, so we’d bought some potato somsas (like hot pockets) form a street vendor. When we bit into them, we noticed that the dough wasn’t cooked at all in the middle, but the two of us were so hungry that we convinced outselves it wasn’t really necessary to have fully cooked dough. After all, its not like we were eating raw meat or something, right? Wrong. I was up all night throwing up and could barely drag myself into language lessons the next day. Lex showed up in a similar condition, and the two of us swore we would never again let our appetites get the better of our judgement. We’ll see how well that holds up…

My family has been getting on my case this week, asking why volunteers don’t ever come over to visit our house. I told them that I hadn’t realized it, and they made me promise all of the Americans would come over and hang out some time soon. The next day, they gave me new fabric as a gift. It’s a tradition for everyone to have a new dress made for the Gurban Bayram (the big holiday on the 20th) and my family wanted to make sure I was included on it. They were really worried that I might not like the fabric they had picked out, but I assured them that I absolutely loved it. I was really touched.