January 13th

So the Turkmen drink a lot of tea. I mean a whole lot of tea. I know you’re sitting there and nodding, but I’m talking like between a liter (a whole Nalgene bottle!) and a liter and half, per person, per sitting. We have tea at least 6 times a day, some times as many as 10 or 11. It’s insane. There’s no way I will ever be dehydrated in this country. Anyways, the point of the tea talk is that all of this tea clearly has to go somewhere (like the newly dug outhouse hole) and when our last teatime of the night is at 11pm, typically there is a middle of the night outhouse trip on the docket for me.

Lately I’ve been really depressed and down in the dumps. I think it was just part of my adjusting to being isolated here, but I was really apathetic for the first month I was here. I’d been staying in my room and watching a lot of TV on DVD and generally avoiding leaving my room unless absolutely necessary. So the other night I was up late watching Sex and the City until like 2 in the morning. I was really sleepy and so I started to doze off during one of the episodes. I woke up a half hour or so later and realized that my excess consumption of tea earlier that night had resulted in my needing to go to the bathroom very very badly all of a sudden. Sitting there in my nice warm room, very late at night, with my pajamas on, it was hard to imagine getting all of my warm clothes on and finding my flashlight so that I could trudge out to the outhouse in the backyard. Very hard to imagine.

It was really cold outside, like Alaska cold, and as I was trying to pep talk myself into getting up and going out, I saw my laundry-washing bucket out of the corner of my eye. That was all of the convincing I needed, I peed in my laundry bucket. Right there in my room. And then I went to bed. I know I should have gotten up and dumped it out somewhere, but I was tired and that still would have required me to get up and go outside. I figured I would just take it out the next morning or something…

To make a long story a little shorter, I didn’t take my pee bucket out for awhile. It seemed like every time I thought of it, there was someone hanging out in the living room or the kitchen, or the hallway. I’m sure it was just my guilty urine conscience, but I was convinced that if anyone saw me carrying my laundry bucket out of my room, full of some mystery liquid, they would totally know that I had peed in it. I couldn’t handle the idea of everyone in my house knowing I was a room-pee-er, so instead of doing anything rational to rid my bedroom of my new honey bucket, I hid it under the bed.

I tried to set my alarm a few times so that I would wake up really early in the morning and have an opportunity to take it out before everyone woke up, but that didn’t work. You know the snooze alarm and me, we are fond bedmates. After four days, the situation had become desperate. My room is really warm (I have a good heater) and the heat combined with the fact that I had a BUCKET of PEE under my bed, totally reeked it up.

About that time I decided to take a personal day from work. In truth, I wasn’t really sick, but I was still down in a depressed funk and I just needed a day to stay home and do nothing. To make it easier, I just told my family that I had diarrhea. I thought it was perfect, an entire day of hanging out reading and watching DVDs with no work and no family bugging me because I was “sick” in bed. Awesome. Until my host mom decided to bring me some soup in bed and stepped into my bedroom.

Bless her heart, she had the grace to only make a little face before she brought the soup over to my bed, but she definitely noticed the particular aroma that had enveloped my sleeping space. I made a mental note to deal with the issue ASAP and went about eating my soup and lounging some more. The next thing I know, my host mom comes back into my room and starts cleaning it! She was going all out, sweeping the carpets and wiping down the windowsills and definitely on a mission to find out what was causing the stink. I was terrified that she was going to figure out what I had done and kept trying to tell her that I could do the cleaning myself. She wouldn’t hear of it, since I was “sick” and so I sat there praying she wouldn’t decide to clean under the bed.

After twenty minutes of room cleaning, with no sign of the smelly culprit, host mom decided that it must be a bad spirit. Yes, I am being completely serious. She became convinced that a bad spirit was making my room stink, and that it was also the cause of my intestinal illness. If she only knew. So she brought in a big metal cauldron and put a bunch of traditional herbs and twigs from some sacred tree in there and lit the whole thing on fire. The room immediately filled with this thick black smoke and my Peace Corps-issued smoke detector started screaming at the top of its little mechanical lungs. What the hell? All I had wanted to do was avoid going to the bathroom in the cold. This was ridiculous.

After ten minutes of being prayed over, with the black smoke filling the room, and the smoke alarm rendering me completely deaf, host mom pronounced me “cured” from my evil-spirit infestation. She took the cauldron and left my room; I grabbed my surreptitious bucket of pee and made for the outhouse as if my life depended on it. Evidence disposed of, and lesson learned. Moral of the story: don’t pee in your room, you will go deaf.