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…
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Week of Being A Real Volunteer
Friday morning was… well… it was certainly eventful. I had stayed up all night Thursday celebrating the holiday, as well as Ayjemal’s 2nd birthday, and after everyone else had finished celebrating and went to bed, I still had to stay up and pack up all of my belongings to get ready to go to Dashoguz the next morning.
The plan was for all of the volunteers to head into the city with all of their possessions on Friday, spend Friday throughTuesday in the city being sworn in as volunteers and celebrating Christmas, then to head to our respective permenant sites on Wednesday. As the van pulled up to take me to Ashgabat Friday morning at 7:30, I was still trying to cram the last of my possessions into my suitcases as my family hugged and kissed me goodbye. I was wearing my new dress that they had made for me, and after a lot of teary goodbyes, I stuffed all of my things into the van with the other volunteers, and headed into the city. It was really embarrassing, I had as much luggage in the van as all of the rest of the four of them combined. I swear I really don’t know how I manage to accumulate so much stuff…
Lex made sure everyone remembered it was my birthday (yikes, how did I manage to turn 24 already?!) and it was really nice to know that if I wasn’t able to spend my birthday with my real family, at least I was going to be spending it with my new Peace Corps family. I had a great birthday, we all went out to eat, then hung out in the hotel where there were real showers, soft beds, and lots of other Americans to play with. It was heaven.
The remainder of the week seemed to fly by in a cloud of training sessions, last minute shopping, and socializing, and before I knew it, I was standing there today saying my vows that made me an official Peace Corps Volunteer. No more being called a “trainee”, I am the real deal now, and it feels so amazing. I can’t believe I actually made it through all twelve weeks of training. It’s nice ot know that no matter how homesick I got, and no matter how strange and foreign everything here was, I still managed to stick it out and see it through. Now to get through the next two years in the same fashion…
The plan was for all of the volunteers to head into the city with all of their possessions on Friday, spend Friday throughTuesday in the city being sworn in as volunteers and celebrating Christmas, then to head to our respective permenant sites on Wednesday. As the van pulled up to take me to Ashgabat Friday morning at 7:30, I was still trying to cram the last of my possessions into my suitcases as my family hugged and kissed me goodbye. I was wearing my new dress that they had made for me, and after a lot of teary goodbyes, I stuffed all of my things into the van with the other volunteers, and headed into the city. It was really embarrassing, I had as much luggage in the van as all of the rest of the four of them combined. I swear I really don’t know how I manage to accumulate so much stuff…
Lex made sure everyone remembered it was my birthday (yikes, how did I manage to turn 24 already?!) and it was really nice to know that if I wasn’t able to spend my birthday with my real family, at least I was going to be spending it with my new Peace Corps family. I had a great birthday, we all went out to eat, then hung out in the hotel where there were real showers, soft beds, and lots of other Americans to play with. It was heaven.
The remainder of the week seemed to fly by in a cloud of training sessions, last minute shopping, and socializing, and before I knew it, I was standing there today saying my vows that made me an official Peace Corps Volunteer. No more being called a “trainee”, I am the real deal now, and it feels so amazing. I can’t believe I actually made it through all twelve weeks of training. It’s nice ot know that no matter how homesick I got, and no matter how strange and foreign everything here was, I still managed to stick it out and see it through. Now to get through the next two years in the same fashion…
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Gurban Bayram
One of the big holidays in the Muslim faith was today. Technically it’s today, tomorrow, and the next day; it’s a three-day-er and it was quite the event around here. I don’t know what it’s called worldwide, but the Turkmen call it Gurban Bayram. It literally translates to “sacrifice holiday” and just so you know, the name is pretty descriptive of what goes on for three days. Lots and lottttts of sacrificing. Mainly sheep.
This morning, we all got up extra early to get our sheep-killin freak on. Everywhere you looked in the village, it reeked of barnyard mortalities. There were deceased sheep hanging from posts, slowly draining their blood into a bucket below. There were sheep still alive that were tied to stakes while men stood next to them sharpening knives. There were even cars driving around with their trunks filled with sheep for sale who were drugged up and ready to be slaughtered at a moment’s notice. For some reason a lot of the sheep had colorful butts. Like they were literally spray-painted in jewel tones. There were purple-butted sheep, ruby red-butted sheep, turquoise-butted sheep, even a few with emerald. If they all stood together it could have strongly resembled a gay-pride parade. But I digress.
So there’s death everywhere I look, and then my host father and brother arrive home and remove from their car trunk a purple butt and an emerald butt. As well as the sheep attached to them. I guess I never really thought about it, but sacrificing an animal is really kind of an intense task. Sheep aren’t little, at least these ones weren’t. Each of them was about the size of a Saint Bernard, and they were fully conscious and baa-ing, and making a general ruckus. My dad went first. He dug a little hole in the ground for the sheep’s blood to drain into, then he drug the sheep (who had all four of its feet tied together) over to the hole and placed its neck over the top of it.
He took a regular kitchen knife (it wasn’t even that big) and cut the sheep just a little bit, directly on its jugular vein. All of this blood came whooshing out, and it was incredibly noisy. It sounded like when you can hear water running through the pipes in your house, and the blood just kept coming. As the sheep lost blood and stopped fussing so much, my dad cut further into the neck, slicing through muscle and cartilage. It was particularly fascinating when he cut the trachea. The sheep was still alive, albeit unconscious, and as a result it was still breathing. When he cut the trachea it kept breathing, and it made the most horrendous noise. Kind of like slurping soup, or maybe trying to breathe through a really really stuffy nose.
Do you know what happens if you take the lid off of a 2-liter bottle of soda, and turn it directly upside-down? Soda begins to pour out, and the sides of the bottle are suctioned in as the liquid drains out. At some point, the flow of the soda slows because the volume is depleted so much, and the bottle sides can’t suction in any further. To equalize, air rushes in and refills the space vacated by the drained soda so that the rest of the remaining soda can drain out. Are you following how this would apply to sheep-sacrificing physics? I suddenly hear an awful gurgling noise and the blood coming out of the sheep’s jugular suddenly stops flowing. There’s a lot of noise and a split second where nothing seems to be happening, then just as suddenly the blood starts flowing even faster. Absolutely fascinating. I figured they just died right away and that was it. Guess not.
Especially icky (besides the sheep emptying its bowels upon death) was the cutting of the spine. We’re talking big vertebrae. Like really thick, and the only thing the man had to work with was a standard kitchen knife. Every time he touched the knife to the spine, the whole sheep would jerk and wiggle as if it were not only alive, but also still conscious. This kept freaking my host-father out, so he would take the knife tip away from the spine, and the spasming would stop. You’d figure the sheep’s nervous system would be done for, seeing as it had almost no blood in its body, but I guess some physical processes take longer than others to cease functioning. Anyways, he finally had to just hack through one of the discs in between vertebrae with this shitty dull knife, and the whole time he did it, the entire sheep was jerking and flailing around like it was trying to get away from him. It was creepy, and if I hadn’t seen him cut the sheep’s jugular more than 15 minutes before, I would have been certain the sheep was still awake.
This was the point where the rain started to come down in significant quantities. That, coupled with the rising stench from the sheep body, made it no longer worth it to me to stay outside, so I headed back in and went about cleaning my room and packing to leave for Ashgabat the following day. A few hours later, I walked into our living room, and was accosted by a huge cloth laid on the floor, filled with sheep parts. Like legs and stuff. All of the organs were in a big bowl (a really big bowl, more like a cauldron) and normally I would have been grossed out enough to turn around and retreat to my room, but I was feeling pretty feisty, so I recruited one of my sisters, and we played name-that-organ for the better part of an hour. I got to look inside of the sheep’s stomach (did you know it has ridges, like an accordion file, so that it can expand?) and I got to play with lungs and kidney and liver and heart, and something that looked like a turd, but I think it was a gallbladder. It was great.
So then my sister tells me she needs me to help her out with a sheep-related job and I’m like “Sure, bring it on!” Famous last words. At this point it was still pouring rain outside, and it was a really cold rain. Not to sound like a wimp, but it wasn’t really weather I wanted to be outside in. So we had to go outside and clean sheep intestines. I’m not sure how familiar you are with what intestines look like when they come out of the sheep, but they’re basically a big wad of intestiney-ness, encased in fat. There’s all of this connective tissue that keeps the intestines and fat in a compact unit, and in order to clean it, you have to follow the intestine along, like a tangled piece of thread, and keep ripping it free of all of the fascia and fat that it’s attached to. It makes this really distinct tearing sound. Kind of what you would imagine Velcro would sound like under-water. After we had detangled two sheep’s worth of intestinal tracts, it was time to de-crap-ifiy them. We had to rip them into foot-long sections (another great noise and sensation, intestines are much more elastic than you would imagine), then take a stick and shove it through each section of intestine to move all of the fecal material out of it. The intestines have some sort of fatty tissue lining their insides, and the knobs on the stick kept getting stuck on it as you tried to remove the stick from the intestine. As a result, most of the intestines wound up getting turned inside out as we tried to detangle the stick from the fat.
Please don’t forget that not only is it raining heavily and my fingers are completely numb from the cold, but to make matters even more special there is this thick mud sucking at our feet as we squat there squeegee-ing sheep crap onto the ground. Definitely one of my finer moments in Turkmenistan.
So after an hour of being in the rain with the sheep guts, they are finally cleaned out and ready to do something. Whatever it is that you do with sheep guts. I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. Until we took them into our kitchen and started cutting them into sections. That’s right. For dinner I had sheep-guts soup. And it was awesome. And that’s how I spent today, just in case you were wondering.
This morning, we all got up extra early to get our sheep-killin freak on. Everywhere you looked in the village, it reeked of barnyard mortalities. There were deceased sheep hanging from posts, slowly draining their blood into a bucket below. There were sheep still alive that were tied to stakes while men stood next to them sharpening knives. There were even cars driving around with their trunks filled with sheep for sale who were drugged up and ready to be slaughtered at a moment’s notice. For some reason a lot of the sheep had colorful butts. Like they were literally spray-painted in jewel tones. There were purple-butted sheep, ruby red-butted sheep, turquoise-butted sheep, even a few with emerald. If they all stood together it could have strongly resembled a gay-pride parade. But I digress.
So there’s death everywhere I look, and then my host father and brother arrive home and remove from their car trunk a purple butt and an emerald butt. As well as the sheep attached to them. I guess I never really thought about it, but sacrificing an animal is really kind of an intense task. Sheep aren’t little, at least these ones weren’t. Each of them was about the size of a Saint Bernard, and they were fully conscious and baa-ing, and making a general ruckus. My dad went first. He dug a little hole in the ground for the sheep’s blood to drain into, then he drug the sheep (who had all four of its feet tied together) over to the hole and placed its neck over the top of it.
He took a regular kitchen knife (it wasn’t even that big) and cut the sheep just a little bit, directly on its jugular vein. All of this blood came whooshing out, and it was incredibly noisy. It sounded like when you can hear water running through the pipes in your house, and the blood just kept coming. As the sheep lost blood and stopped fussing so much, my dad cut further into the neck, slicing through muscle and cartilage. It was particularly fascinating when he cut the trachea. The sheep was still alive, albeit unconscious, and as a result it was still breathing. When he cut the trachea it kept breathing, and it made the most horrendous noise. Kind of like slurping soup, or maybe trying to breathe through a really really stuffy nose.
Do you know what happens if you take the lid off of a 2-liter bottle of soda, and turn it directly upside-down? Soda begins to pour out, and the sides of the bottle are suctioned in as the liquid drains out. At some point, the flow of the soda slows because the volume is depleted so much, and the bottle sides can’t suction in any further. To equalize, air rushes in and refills the space vacated by the drained soda so that the rest of the remaining soda can drain out. Are you following how this would apply to sheep-sacrificing physics? I suddenly hear an awful gurgling noise and the blood coming out of the sheep’s jugular suddenly stops flowing. There’s a lot of noise and a split second where nothing seems to be happening, then just as suddenly the blood starts flowing even faster. Absolutely fascinating. I figured they just died right away and that was it. Guess not.
Especially icky (besides the sheep emptying its bowels upon death) was the cutting of the spine. We’re talking big vertebrae. Like really thick, and the only thing the man had to work with was a standard kitchen knife. Every time he touched the knife to the spine, the whole sheep would jerk and wiggle as if it were not only alive, but also still conscious. This kept freaking my host-father out, so he would take the knife tip away from the spine, and the spasming would stop. You’d figure the sheep’s nervous system would be done for, seeing as it had almost no blood in its body, but I guess some physical processes take longer than others to cease functioning. Anyways, he finally had to just hack through one of the discs in between vertebrae with this shitty dull knife, and the whole time he did it, the entire sheep was jerking and flailing around like it was trying to get away from him. It was creepy, and if I hadn’t seen him cut the sheep’s jugular more than 15 minutes before, I would have been certain the sheep was still awake.
This was the point where the rain started to come down in significant quantities. That, coupled with the rising stench from the sheep body, made it no longer worth it to me to stay outside, so I headed back in and went about cleaning my room and packing to leave for Ashgabat the following day. A few hours later, I walked into our living room, and was accosted by a huge cloth laid on the floor, filled with sheep parts. Like legs and stuff. All of the organs were in a big bowl (a really big bowl, more like a cauldron) and normally I would have been grossed out enough to turn around and retreat to my room, but I was feeling pretty feisty, so I recruited one of my sisters, and we played name-that-organ for the better part of an hour. I got to look inside of the sheep’s stomach (did you know it has ridges, like an accordion file, so that it can expand?) and I got to play with lungs and kidney and liver and heart, and something that looked like a turd, but I think it was a gallbladder. It was great.
So then my sister tells me she needs me to help her out with a sheep-related job and I’m like “Sure, bring it on!” Famous last words. At this point it was still pouring rain outside, and it was a really cold rain. Not to sound like a wimp, but it wasn’t really weather I wanted to be outside in. So we had to go outside and clean sheep intestines. I’m not sure how familiar you are with what intestines look like when they come out of the sheep, but they’re basically a big wad of intestiney-ness, encased in fat. There’s all of this connective tissue that keeps the intestines and fat in a compact unit, and in order to clean it, you have to follow the intestine along, like a tangled piece of thread, and keep ripping it free of all of the fascia and fat that it’s attached to. It makes this really distinct tearing sound. Kind of what you would imagine Velcro would sound like under-water. After we had detangled two sheep’s worth of intestinal tracts, it was time to de-crap-ifiy them. We had to rip them into foot-long sections (another great noise and sensation, intestines are much more elastic than you would imagine), then take a stick and shove it through each section of intestine to move all of the fecal material out of it. The intestines have some sort of fatty tissue lining their insides, and the knobs on the stick kept getting stuck on it as you tried to remove the stick from the intestine. As a result, most of the intestines wound up getting turned inside out as we tried to detangle the stick from the fat.
Please don’t forget that not only is it raining heavily and my fingers are completely numb from the cold, but to make matters even more special there is this thick mud sucking at our feet as we squat there squeegee-ing sheep crap onto the ground. Definitely one of my finer moments in Turkmenistan.
So after an hour of being in the rain with the sheep guts, they are finally cleaned out and ready to do something. Whatever it is that you do with sheep guts. I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. Until we took them into our kitchen and started cutting them into sections. That’s right. For dinner I had sheep-guts soup. And it was awesome. And that’s how I spent today, just in case you were wondering.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
The Week of The LPI
You know how you’ll have one of those classes in college where you have a great time going to it because you sit next to your best friend, and the two of you always go out for lattes afterwards? The actual subject matter of the class doesn’t really seem significant because of all the fun you have in the auxillary portions of it. It’s just that at some point, there’s going to be a test on the stuff you were supposed ot be learning, and suddenly you begin wishing you could rewind and pay attention instead of gossip for the past semester. This week was that test for our training class and I was petrified after having spent the past eleven weeks having a lot of fun, but doing a really bad job of learning Turkmen.
The name of the test is the Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), and there was actually a minimum score we had to get, to be considered successfully finished with our Pre service Training. I was so afraid of not making the cut. I spent all week trying to cram every little bit of Turkmen into my head that I possibly could, all the while berating myself for being such a slacker of a language student.
The test was scheduled for Friday morning, and the time between Monday and Friday seemed to pass in a flash. Mahrie’s birthday was on Tuesday, The baby pooped on the carpet on Wednesday (very funny incident), I went shopping for the last time at the Talkuchga bazaar on Thursday, and suddenly it was Friday. Eek!
Don’t worry, I won’t keep you in suspense, the test went fine. I was classified as an intermediate low speaker. Which in normal language means that I know how to speak in complete sentences, but not in paragraphs yet. Good enough for me, and good enough for Peace Corps. I was relieved.
All of the other volunteers came over for dinner at my family’s house on Saturday. My family was quite pleased that they’d finally gotten an opportunity to host “The Americans” in the village, and we all had a really good time haging out with each other. I can’t believe that we’re going to be saying goodbye to one another in only a week. Oh sad…
The name of the test is the Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), and there was actually a minimum score we had to get, to be considered successfully finished with our Pre service Training. I was so afraid of not making the cut. I spent all week trying to cram every little bit of Turkmen into my head that I possibly could, all the while berating myself for being such a slacker of a language student.
The test was scheduled for Friday morning, and the time between Monday and Friday seemed to pass in a flash. Mahrie’s birthday was on Tuesday, The baby pooped on the carpet on Wednesday (very funny incident), I went shopping for the last time at the Talkuchga bazaar on Thursday, and suddenly it was Friday. Eek!
Don’t worry, I won’t keep you in suspense, the test went fine. I was classified as an intermediate low speaker. Which in normal language means that I know how to speak in complete sentences, but not in paragraphs yet. Good enough for me, and good enough for Peace Corps. I was relieved.
All of the other volunteers came over for dinner at my family’s house on Saturday. My family was quite pleased that they’d finally gotten an opportunity to host “The Americans” in the village, and we all had a really good time haging out with each other. I can’t believe that we’re going to be saying goodbye to one another in only a week. Oh sad…
Sunday, December 9, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
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.
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.
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