The Village Visit in Review

So I spent the past week visiting the village that is going to be my permenant Turkmen home for the next 2 years. I love it. The village name is Gok Chage (it means blue sands, pretty huh?) and it is in Dashoguz weleyat (like a province sort of), which is way up in the northern part of the country. Out of all the provinces, this one is typically the coldest and has the most snow. Gok Chage is about a twenty-five minute cab ride from the capital city of our weleyat (aptly named Dashoguz City), so I will still be able to go into the city once a week to check my e-mail and get mail from the post office.

I was seriously stoked to find out I was going there, I really wanted something that reminded me of Alaska a little bit. My village is everything that I asked for. It’s a little village (only 4,500 people) and I am their first American, so I don’t have to feel like I’m being compared to anyone else, and I am able to come up with all of my own project ideas and plans. I am really excited. Also, I should be able to really get to know the people in the village on a personal level since there aren’t a whole lot of them.

In Turkmenistan they have what they call houses of health (clinics), and usually there will be one per village. The size of the house of health depends on the size of the village, and in my house of health, there are four doctors, a dentist, and five nurses to serve the needs of Gok Chage. The doctor who has been assigned to be my counterpart is named Bagila, and she is amazing. She is relatively young, only 27, and she is so much fun! She really wants me to learn Russian since that tends to be the language of choice in most medical settings, but she is also really interested in learning Englsih, so the two of us are going to help eachother. Even in the week I was there, her English had noticeable improvement. She already knew a little from school, and I think she just needed someone to practice it with to really gain confidence in speaking it. Seeing as how my Russian is currently struggling, I was more than happy to help her out.

In case anyone was curious as to what I actually do on a daily basis (besides drinking copious quantities of tea), here’s what it looks like my time in Gok Chage will consist of. I am officially a “community health educator” and that can be a pretty nebulous thing around here, so each of us work with our clinic to decide what the needs of our specific community are.

One of the biggest challenges for health volunteers is making friends in their villages. People won’t listen to you as a stranger, they have to feel like you’re a part of the community, that’s when you really start becoming effective and making a difference. The Turkmen have a fabulous custom of what they call “guesting”. You literally show up at someone’s house uannounced and they welcome you in, feed you, give you lots of chay (tea), and they visit with you. It is perfectly acceptable to do this with people you don’t even know very well, and in Gok Chage it is not uncommon to “guest” before dinner, and wind up staying all the way through breakfast the next day. Turkmen are pretty hospitable.

So basically, it’s going to be my “job” for the next couple of months to get to know my community thorough guesting (oh, my life is so rough!). The more I get to know the people of Gok Chage, the better I will be able to figure out how I can try to help them out. Besides guesting, I will also be spending time at my clinic with Bagila.

In Gok Chage, people don’t typically come into the doctor’s office voluntarily, so the doctors really have to go to them. Bagila spends half of each of her work days walking around the village knocking on doors and asking how people are doing. She has a section of the village that she’s responsible for (about a thousand people) and a lot of times she will have a list of people who need a little more attention than others. A few days a week I will do house calls with Bagila and will be educating villagers about everything from hypertension to anemia. Bagila has a pretty good idea of who needs what, so she and I are going to pick certain days to talk about certain topics with people.

In addition to house calls, I am going to be teaching health at the two schools in Gok Chage. I teach first graders and fourth graders for a total of three hours a week, and I will be doing it in the class that they normally have English lessons in, so if I am having some trouble explaining something, the English teacher will hopefully be able to help me out. The great thing about teaching kids health is that you can really go any direction. They want to know about everything from brushing your teeth to infectious diseases to self-esteem, and they are usually pretty good about receiving new ideas. I am excited for the semester to start.

I have an office in the house of health, and once I get a little more settled into Gok Chage, I am going to start having clubs there. Clubs can be targeted at any group of people, but the two most popular demographics are kids and pregnant women. Volunteers usually have clubs meet once a week and they will usually do some kind of lesson, then plan an activity to reinforce what people learned. I have heard of volunteers doing everything from cooking classes, to art clubs, to yoga lessons. The sky is really the limit as long as you have interested villagers. I am going to feel out what people’s interests are and go from there. Most volunteers don’t start doing clubs for the first few months they are in their new site, since the villagers really have to get to know you before they will be willing to come. Once you get a base group of people who think you are entertaining, you can actually do two or three clubs a week. I am really excited to see what happens. Hopefully all of my chay drinking and guesting will pay off. Don’t worry, I will keep you updated.

As for the time that I’m not at the clinic, I will be living with a host family in Gok Chage. My host mom is named Shukurjan, and she is Bagila’s nurse at my clinic. I live with Shukurjan and her husband Akmet, they’re both in their mid forties, and their son Batyr and his wife Raihan live with us, with their 1 year old son Arslan. It’s surprising how small this family feels compared to the 11-person family I live with right now. The Abdullayevs (my Dashoguz fam) are Uzbek and it’s really neat to see some of the cultural differences between them and my current family, who are very traditional Turkmen. Uzbeks tend to be a little less conservative, so I can wear pants more often, and they also tend to have a lesser degree of gender separation in their daily dealings. This also means that I am going to have to learn to speak some Uzbek, so by the time I get home I will know some Russian, Uzbek, and Turkmen. Very cool.

I could go on for pages about how great my new family is, and I probably will in a future post, but just so you know, I like them a lot, they’re super friendly, and I think it is going to be a very educational next two years with them. Now on to how great the other Dashoguz volunteers are.

Peace Corps had us spend the first part of the week in our village, then on Sunday they arranged for the current volunteers in our individual weleyats to meet up with the new volunteers and spend the day with them. There are 8 people in my training group, including myself, who are going to dashoguz. One of them is Kelly, who is currently my neighbor in herrikgala, and I absolutely think she is fantastic. The rest of them are just as awesome as she is, so I was super excited to be spending Sunday with all of them. Imagine my surprise and delight when it turned out that the current volunteers in dashoguz are also super awesome. They took the eight of us on a “café crawl” where we went to all of the best Dashoguz City cafés and ate a course of our meal at each of them. They also took us to this old amusement park where we rode bumper cars, and they even gave us new socks as a gift. Everyone was so friendly, so smart, so outgoing, and so passionate about what they’re doing here. I am really amazed at the caliber of people who are in Dashoguz right now, it is inspiring to know I am going to be spending the next two years surrounded by them.

So yeah, just in case it wasn’t completely obvious, I love it here. I really think this is where I am supposed to be right now in life, and I can’t emphasize enough how great I think my new village is. Life is lookin pretty good. Yay Peace Corps.