The Week of New Stuff

Lots of stuff started this week; some of it was good stuff. One not-so-new concept was my teaching (or lack thereof) in the schools. There was heat this week, and students, but for some reason I didn’t get to teach. I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps I’m simply not meant to teach in the schools. No one showed for my pregnancy class either. Hopefully once Bagila gets back from her vacation she can help to initiate some of this stuff again. Anyways, I digress. New stuff.

I got a new coat. This is somewhat funny, because I really didn’t need one at all. My parents had bought me a new down jacket right before I left for Turkmenistan. It was holding up against the cold really well, but my vanity led me to seek out an auxiliary wintry weather cover. All of the women in Dashoguz have these long wool coats with fur around the cuffs and collar. They’re beautiful. Everyone wears them, and they all look so polished and put together walking around in their pretty coats. I couldn’t help it; I had to have one. Besides, they tell us we’re supposed to “blend in” don’t they? I’m sure this includes purchasing a 4-million manat jacket. (it’s about $200, I know, kind of pricey for my salary, but I had to do it) The jacket is “oran owadan” (very beautiful) and it makes me happy every time I put it on, so I feel like it was a worthwhile purchase. I’ll show you pictures…

We’re also planning a new variety of meeting, a Dashoguz-wide health volunteer collaboration. I’m really excited about it. Alice, Noah, Gahmya, and myself are planning on getting together in late February to talk about successes and failures thus far in our community health education efforts. I think it will be a good chance to get some new ideas and do some problem solving. They always say that four heads are better than one, and I KNOW that four people’s Turkmen is better than mine alone. I’m also really excited to meet Gahmya. She’s the only remaining health volunteer in Dashoguz from the T-15 group, and I’m hoping she can serve as the voice of experience for us newbies.

Oh, I also got my first salary from the bank. This was a particularly exciting experience, because it involved me going into the city on a workday. Lots of fun. I met up with Alice and Noah, and the three of us went to the post office (where I got my first mail from America!!), the bank, and the internet café (which worked a little bit). The highlight of the day (by far) was getting to talk to my family. I had them call me at one of the city volunteer’s houses, and we talked to each other for a half hour. I gave them a little bit of an update on my status quo, and they told me about Alaska life. Aaah. It’s good to hear from civilization.

I got a new melon too. Melons are really big here. Turkmenistan has amazingly tasty melons, and they have a ton of different kinds in the summer, but I didn’t realize that they also have winter melons. This was an awesome discovery since I had it in the form of a first-person encounter with one such melon. I was sitting in my office at the clinic, doing my thing, when this man from the village randomly appears in my office door holding what I assumed was a rotten melon that looked like it had been dropped down a flight of stairs. It was funny colored and wrinkled and misshapen. At first I thought he was trying to sell it to me, but after a few minutes of “guess that Uzbek word” I realized he was giving it to me as a gift. Oh… how nice…? I set it on my windowsill, with no intention of seeing how rotten it must be on the inside (if its exterior was any indication, it was bad news). It stayed there until one of my nurses came in and got all excited upon seeing it. She immediately ran and got the other nurses, along with a big knife, and all of them came trooping in to eat (?!?!) the rotten melon. I figured Turkmen must get desperate for fruit when its wintertime.

Ten minutes later, the melon had been sliced and diced, and to my surprise it was white on the inside, kind of the same color as a banana. It didn’t look rotten at all. I was still a little apprehensive about taking my first bite, but once I did, I couldn’t get enough; it was phenomenal. It was sweet, almost like cotton candy, and super juicy. It was like this crazy flavor explosion in my mouth, a welcome reprieve after all of the fat and salt I’d been eating so far this winter. So now you know, Turkmenistan has winter melons and they are faaabulous.

Hmmm, other new things… oh yes, there are new residents in our house. Of the parasitical variety. My boyfriend has tapeworms.

Now in case you’re just joining us, a quick update is in order. No I am not actually dating anyone in Turkmenistan, but I have managed to meet the love of my life in cat-form. He is a little brown and white tabby cat and I have named him Puffy (P-Diddy for short). Tuesday night, Puffy and I were relaxing in bed and reading a Nicholas Sparks novel when I looked down and realized Puffy had some sort of stray fuzzy particle attached to his fur. As I reached down to grab it off of him and flick it away, his stray fuzzy started to wiggle. It was about a centimeter long, white, flat, and definitely a portion of a tapeworm. I thought I was going to throw up.

After taking several calming breaths and throwing Puffy out of my bedroom, I conducted a thorough search of my bed and surrounding areas for any worms that may have escaped from Puffy. Didn’t see any, but slept fitfully dreaming of a worm-infestation in my intestines. Yyyegggch. The next morning at work, I looked up tapeworms and learned that they can grow up to 2 meters long (this is more than six feet), and that they will typically live in a person or animal’s intestines, for years sometimes, and that little segments will occasionally crawl out of the anus, independently of the main worm. If the host-person or host-animal that the worm is living in should die, the whole worm will crawl out. Doesn’t that make your skin crawl, thinking about a six-foot worm crawling out of a dead person’s butt? Oh man, I really hope that I don’t have worms from Puffy. Gross, gross, gross.