The Week of Transition

Christmas Eve was great. All of the volunteers were in awesome spirits after being sworn in the day before, and after we spent the day in a training session, we all got together in small groups in the evening to celbrate the holiday together. I ordered pizza with a bunch of the girls, then actually went to Catholic Mass (for real!) in the city. I found out that the Vatican has an embassy in Ashgabat and so me and four others went over there for midnight mass. The actual service was conducted in Russian, but we still sang traditional Christmas songs, and there was something incredibly comforting about being in church for Christmas. It was a really good night.

Christmas day was really good too. We all went to our country director’s house for a Christmas brunch, and we did a gift exchange and celebrated our last day together before we headed our separate ways for service. After brunch, I spent the rest of the day saying my goodbyes and packing my excess of possessions for the big trip to Dashoguz.

Everyone flew in airplanes when we initially visited our sites in November, and the travel was totally painless and quick. Unfortunately, because we had soo much stuff with us when we went there permenantly, all of the volunteers had to travel via marshrutka. Marshrutkas are Turkmen minivans, and while travel from Ashgabat to Dashoguz city takes only fifty-five minutes in an airplane, it takes upwards of twelve hours in a marshrutka. Ugh. We had to be in the hotel lobby, ready to go with all of our baggage by 4:30 am. No one actually went to sleep the night before.

The ride to Dashoguz was hellish. Overnight the temperature had dropped significantly, and the marshrutkas had very poor heating on them, so everyone was freezing as we (ironically) drove across the desert. In case you couldn’t imagine, the desert roads weren’t exactly the most well-maintained things either. The van kept bouncing all over the road, with luggage flying everywhere and all of us suffering from sever whiplash. By the end of the twelve hours, I never thought I would be so happy to see my new home.

I had managed to develop a pretty substantial headcold after a week of staying up all night with volunteers and generally taking poor care of myself, and by the time I got to my host family’s house, I could barely get all thirteen of my bags inside the front door before I collapsed on my new bed in a comatose condition. Bagila and Shukerjan (my counterpart and my host mom) came home from work and woke me up to go to a family birthday party in the village. I was tired and sick, but figured it wouldn’t look good if I started bailing on parties when it was only my first day in the village. I got to the birthday party, and you can imagine my shock and amazement when I realized that all of the women at the party were passing around a bottle of vodka to take shots from. Whoa whoa whoa, I think the marshrutka may have gotten lost and dropped me off in a different country. Women drink here? My throat hurt too much to drink anything stronger than the apple juice I wound up with, but as we went home after the party, I began to wonder how much less conservative Dashoguz really was. I fell asleep as soon as we got home from the party, but woke up in the middle of the night and almost wet my pants. No more over-indulgence in apple juice without a pre-bedtime potty trip. It was really close to a bad situation.

My first day of work actually turned out to be a non work day as I spent all day in the city with Noah (one of the other health volunteers) getting ourselves appropriately registered with the ministry of health. I came home from the ministry and to my surprise and delight, my family had doubled the amount of furniture that had been in my room when I left that morning. Initially I had a coat rack, a bed, and a trunk when I had gotten here on Wednesday. While those were great compared to nothing (I actually had a bed for goodness sakes!), I still was pretty sure they weren’t quite going to accommodate all of the stuff had had brought with me. My family had managed to round up a desk and a huge wardrobe with a full length mirror by the time I came home and I was totally thrilled. I spent the rest of the night unpacking and settling into my new digs with the assistance of Shukerjan and Rayhan.

The unpacking festivities carried into the next day as well (yeah, there was that much stuff) and all Shukerjan kept saying was “what were you thinking? Why did you bring this much stuff?!” (except in Turkmen). I didn’t really have any legitimate excuse, so instead it was a constant stream of I know, I know, you’re right, I know…

The rest of the week really flew past in a haze of me adjusting to life with my family. At work I worked on my language, chatted randomly with the doctors and nurses there, and generally tried to start introducing myself to people as they came into the clinic. At home, I began to learn a little more about my family and how they like to function. First thing I had to understand is that I live in an Uzbek village. They are all Turkmen (technically speaking) because they live in Turkmenistan and were born in Turkmenistan, but everyone in my village considers themselves to be of Uzbek descent. This means that all of them speak Uzbek, in addition to Turkmen and Russian. It also means that they are a lot less traditional and conservative in comparison to my first village in training. Women and men hang out together, women don’t have to cover their faces at all, and everyone drinks alcohol, not just the men. This may not sound like that big of a deal to an American, but trust me, being in Turkmenistan, its completely revolutionary.

I think I was getting a little too comfortable with this unheard of level of forward thinking, because I started wearing my favorite sweatpants around the house this weekend. I hadn’t really taken into account that I had lost about twenty pounds during training, and as a result, the waistband of my now looser sweats kept sagging down and revealing my unsightly butt crack. My gelineje Rayhan gracefully rectified the situation by giving me a spare house dress to wear over my pants, but it was a good reminder that no matter how liberal this village may seem in comparison to training, I still need ot remember that I am in Turkmenistan. I think it might be time to get some more clothes made…