Shan: In T-Stan

Please Write Shannon!

2009-12-31T05:46:00.000-09:00

Hey, so I have no internet for the most part up here and I really want to know how everyone is doing. I haven't talked to a lot of you for months! Please write me a letter and let me know what's going on in your corner of the world. I promise to write you in return.

XXOO Shan

Here's the addy:

Turkmenistan
Dashoguz Weleyat
Merkezi Pochta
Abonent #9 (Korpus Mira) Shannon Orley
Dashoguz Shaheri 746300
TURKMENISTAN

In the event of a care package...

2008-04-14T05:51:00.001-08:00

Not to be presumptuous, but if you felt incredibly compelled to send me a package, here are some things that would make me smile a lot...

Good flavors of tea
The powder packets from macaroni and cheese (don't need the noodles)
Dice
Blank DVDs
DVD movies/ TV series on DVD
Box Cake mix
Chocolate Chips (only from October thru March, otherwise it will melt)
Magazines
Beef Jerky
Mr. Sketch Markers
Crayons/ Colored Pencils
Lined Notebook paper
Construction paper
Stickers
Hair eleastics and clips
Baby Wipes (looove these!)
Blue BIC Pens
Gum & Chapstick
AAA Batteies
Mixed music CDs
PICTURES AND LETTERS OF AND FROM YOU!!!

Love you all! Thank you so much for all of the wonderful care packages I have already gotten. I am totally blessed with the greatest friends and family!!

The Week of the Keek

2008-03-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

So this school teaching thing is finally starting to come together. I actually taught health twice this week again. It was great. I did my love lesson, and I did my dental lesson. The kids seemed to dig it, there was just one slight problem: the keek.

I was teaching a class of first graders about love. We were in the middle of talking about who we loved and each of the kids was telling me one thing or person that they loved while I handed out paper for them to make valentines with. Here’s how it went: (except in Turkmen, not English)

Me: (while holding a big stack of drawing paper) Oh, that’s great, you love your cow, and how about you? Who do you love? Your car? That’s nice, I love my car too, are you going to make a valentine for it?

Them: I love flowers, I love my mom, I love Britney Spears, I love bananas, I lo… KEEK!

Me: Keek?! What’s a keek?

Them: (pointing frantically behind me, in an upward direction) KEEK, KEEK! That’s a KEEEEEEK!

Me: (looking behind me and seeing a little brown bird that was flying around the classroom trying to get out) Oh, you mean a bird. That’s not scary. Stop yelling.

Them: That is NOT a bird, it’s a keek!

Me: (looking closer and realizing it’s a BAT, not a bird) (in English now) Oh my god oh my god oh my god, IT’S A BAT!!! AAAAaaaaahhhh!

I spent the next ten minutes hiding under my pile of papers, crouched in a corner screaming while another teacher tried to chase the vampire, er, I mean bat, out of the classroom with a broom. I’d never seen a bat before in real life, and I was convinced I was going to get rabies just by being in the same room as him. Every time he tried to escape the broom and dove closer to me, I let out an especially high pitched wail. I was terrified. An excellent role model…

The bat was finally.. um, dealt with… (you don’t want details, trust me) and I tried to continue our lesson, but it wasn’t going to happen. Every few minutes, one of the kids would point behind me and scream KEEK!! really loud, and I would look appropriately petrified as they all dissolved into giggles at my cowardice. Shut up, it wasn’t funny… I really was in fear for my life!

Our family finally got the cell phone on Tuesday. That was a happy happy day. You can all call me on it now (if you feel like trying to call Turkmenistan). I would love to hear from you! I will give the number for it to my (American) parents, so if you want to try getting ahold of me via phone, feel free to hit them up for my contact information.

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. Bagila got a cell phone too, so we can call each other now (yay!) and Bagila wants me to make some posters for our clinic’s hallway about anemia. I’m just excited to be doing stuff. I also met with the other health volunteers again, and the four of us are going to do a health day camp in Gahmya’s village later this month.

There was a big bayram this week (do you remember what bayram means?). It was called Ayal Bayram. Ayal is the word for woman, so it was kind of like a day to celebrate femininity. It was similar to our Mother’s Day, but instead of just celebrating mothers, we celebrated EVERY woman in Turkmenistan. Quite the event. It’s customary to buy little gifts and give them to the important women in your life, a way to let them know you think they’re special. I bought all of the nurses at my clinic, as well as Bagila flowers, and I bought fabric for new dresses for Rayhan and Shukerjan. They all liked their gifts, and I was just stoked for a chance to shop in the bazaar. I love the bazaar… all the cool stuff, all the haggling, all the people, all the colors… ahhhh. Anyways, I’m digressing.

To celebrate the bayram (since it was totally a day off from work), I was sitting at home reading a book, when Akmet (host dad) came in and told me there was someone at the door for me. I was a little confused at the expression on his face, because normally he would tell me exactly who was at the door, and to be honest, I couldn’t really think of a time anyone had come to the door specifically for me. I jumped up to solve the mystery of the door and to my surprise got to it only to not recognize the man standing there at all. He was an older man, maybe in his late fifties, and he was holding a bouquet of roses (real ones!) for me. After a rapid exchange in Turkmen between him and my host family members, he wished me a happy woman holiday, handed me the flowers, and left. I absolutely confused. Flowers are expensive in Turkmenistan and I had no idea why this absolute stranger would have stopped by to give them to me specifically. After talking to my host family, they told me he had driven a taxi for me once, thought I was really friendly, and had remembered where I live, so he brought me holiday flowers. Hmm. I think I was flattered… I think. Meanwhile my family told me to be less chatty in taxis in the future. Oops.

The Week of Arts and Crafts

2008-03-02T05:44:00.000-09:00

Monday dawned with a fair amount of promise, I finally got a second chance to prove myself as a health teacher in the school. I had thought that after my less than stellar performance with the teeth lesson, they would never let me come back, but there I was standing in front of a group of third graders. I decided that in light of the recent Valentines holiday, I would teach them a lesson about love. It went really well, we talked about how love was just as important as all of the other basic needs (food, water, etc.), then we talked about who we loved and who loved us. After that we made (slightly tardy) valentines for those we loved and I taught them the Barney song (I love you, you love me, blah blah blah). It was a good day in the classroom. I repeated the lesson on Tuesday (two teachings in one week, crazy, huh?) and it met with equal levels of success. A few of the kids (and by a few, I mean more than half), made their valentines for ME. I was quite touched, and put all of their pretty pictures up on my office door at the clinic. It added some needed color to the hallway, and I get warm fuzzies every time I look at it. Awww…

I spent another day this week redoing all of the filing labels in Shukerjan and Bagila’s office. They have this set of shelves with a little cubby for each year that their patients were born in. They stick all of their patients’ records in the little cubbies, and that’s the extent of their filing system. The year labels on the cubbies were horribly faded, and getting more difficult to read by the day, so I decided to rectify the situation. It took forever, but when I was done, it looked great. There’s something deeply satisfying about rows and rows of matching year labels, all in the same handwriting and color. The fact that I considered that a “fun” work project doesn’t make me anal retentive, does it?

Besides the door decorating, and shelf relabeling, I managed to find even more arts and crafts projects to participate in this week. There’s an old examination table in my office that is covered in this gnarly-looking faux leather (do they call that pleather, or is that just the stuff stripper outfits are made out of…?) that had been ripped up and taped back down in several spots. I decided to make it into a coffee table since I do a lot more tea drinking in my office than examining, and that was simply no way for a coffee table to look. I bought a few yards of vinyl from the bazaar and spent Friday ripping my exam table apart, and reupholstering it with the vinyl. Not to toot my own horn, but I must say that it looked rather exquisite when I was finished with it. I immediately celebrated my success with tea and cookies (on my new table!). Way to go me.

On the home front, the fun was non-stop this week. It was Rayhan’s (my gelineje) 24th birthday and we had a big birthday party at our house for her with 50 of our closest friends and family. It started at 4:30 with tea, cookies, apples, and chorek (bread). It officially ended at 12:30 (am!) when all of us took one last celebratory vodka shot and said goodnight. In the between time, we went through dozens of bottles of vodka, cognac, and wine, multiple roosters, about 20 pounds of palaw (fried rice), and more pots of tea than I was capable of counting. I could barely find my way to my bedroom (which was only two doors down the hall from the festivities) due to the way the room insisted on spinning, but I had a really good time. These people really know how to celebrate a birthday party.

Bagila came back from her tuberculosis training on Saturday, I was so happy to see her. She told me that we’re really going to start working on projects now that she’s done with all of her comings and goings. I’m looking forward to it.

I went to the city on the 29th (by the way, happy leap year guys!) to get my salary for March. After the snowstorming of last week, I was looking to my trip with a great deal of apprehension, but it turns out it was for naught. The weather was a-ma-zing! I don’t know how it happened, but in the course of one week Turkmenistan went from winter to spring. There was bright warm sunshine, all of the snow had melted, and I was walking around without a jacket or sweater on. Trust me, this is a significant development. Yay for spring! Now the bummer is that I hear this weather is only supposed to get significantly warmer for the next six months. Boo. If I think the weather is perfect right now, I can imagine I may be slightly less enthusiastic about it by June. Maybe I shouldn’t have complained about the cold so much, at least I know how to deal with that…

The other big drama around here is in the form of cell phone service. Our village’s district just got cell phone service last week, its like a fever has swept the village ever since. EVERYONE has been buying a cell phone! The phones here aren’t cheap, the least expensive phone is $60, but they get up to $300. For people who are making somewhere around $100 in an entire month (frequently less), that is crazy expensive. These people can barely afford to eat like they should for the month and somehow they have managed to scrounge funds together to buy a cell phone with a camera and mp3 player. Its very confusing to me.

Confusion or not, I was still very excited to find out that my family would be getting a phone. (Yeah, yeah, I’m a hypocrite) Keep in mind that I have been existing for the past two and a half months with no phone at all. The idea that we’ll now have a cell phone in our house is completely mind blowing. We’re supposed to buy it at the beginning of next week, so I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes. Cross your fingers for me!

The Week of Bayram and Blizzard

2008-02-24T05:43:00.000-09:00

A quick Turkmen vocabulary lesson for you: Baydak (Buy-dock) means flag and Bayram (Buy-rom) means holiday. Using your new vocabulary, you now know that the Baydak Bayram on February 19th was… that’s right! The Flag Holiday! Good job, way to know Turkmen.

Basically it was an event very similar to how most Americans celebrate Memorial and Labor Day. Just a good reason to get off of work, and laze around with friends and family. I was planning on putting some heavy effort into the “lazing” but it seemed that Shukerjan had other plans for me. She came rolling into my bedroom (while I was in the middle of watching the quality cinematic production of “Dunston Checks In” on my computer) and asked me how much dirty laundry I had. I briefly considered lying, since I was pretty sure she intended for me to wash some of it if I admitted to having any, but in the end told her that I had “a little”.

In truth, “a little” was actually more like the Mount Everest of dirty clothes, all piled up on my wardrobe’s floor. I hate washing laundry by hand, like really really HATE it. I’m not good at it, it takes me forever, my clothes never seem like they get clean anyways, and my legs always hurt from squatting in front of the laundry washtub for three hours. My level of dislike for the activity had led me to avoidance of it for more than two months, and the only clothing I had washed since coming to Dashoguz was the absolute necessary quantity of socks and underwear. Even this was a task I was only willing to participate in once my last clean pair of underwear was actually on my body. Don’t judge me, you haven’t had to wash laundry without a machine. You’d be surprised at how “clean” something can seem when you’ve only worn it three times and you want nothing to do with hand-washing it. The worst is washing jeans. They soak up so much water, and they are soooo heavy when you’re trying to wring them out. I actually have fantasies involving a washing machine with a spin cycle while I am washing my jeans… Aaah, if only.

Back to the current issue: Shukerjan’s assessment of my dirty laundry collection. Upon my admission of a small amount of grimy garments, she immediately detected my lie, and simply opened my closet doors to see for herself. After briefly glancing at my heap, she told me we were going to wash my clothes. All of them. Right now. Oh brother.

Many many hours later (since one simply does not argue with Shukerjan), I was the proud owner of one water-wrinkled and sore pair of hands, and a huge clothesline filled with my dripping (but clean) clothing. I thought I was going to faint from exhaustion. I never realized how good I had it with my Maytag in the states. Easily the most difficult part of laundry doing with Shukerjan (besides the fact that she insists that I actually do it), was the differing view of where clean underwear should be left to dry. I was of the opinion that it would be perfectly fine to dry in my bedroom, draped over the heater, behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. Shukerjan was appalled and insisted that it would never get dry if I kept it in the house, that it simply had to be put outdoors to dry effectively. This would have been fine if it weren’t for the fact that our clothesline is in the front of our house, which happens to face the biggest road in our village. Shukerjan won, and all twenty-some-odd pairs of my unattractive granny panty-style underwear were thrown up on the line, in full view of the neighbors, anyone who happened to be driving by, and of course the teenage boys who were playing in the field across the street. It was like a line of hideous flags bowing in the breeze; a salute to the corpulent posterior of the American living within. I stayed in hiding for the remainder of the day, unable to face the neighborhood now that they know what I am wearing under my koynek.

Even though the weather almost seemed to resemble spring on the flag holiday (warm wind, melting snow), Mother Nature was apparently not in the mood to grant Dashoguz a winter weather reprieve just yet. Thursday morning dawned in a shroud of snow, wind, and general blizzardiness. This was incredibly unpleasant, especially considering that our car chose that particular morning to cease functioning, meaning Shukerjan and I had to walk the forty-five minutes to the clinic. I thought my feet were going to fall off.

Friday morning dawned in a similar state, if possible, I think it was even more nasty than Thursday. My little village was in the full throes of a blizzard. Lame. I could only hope that Saturday morning would be better since I was planning to travel into the city (via taxi, gulp!) to meet with the other health volunteers Saturday. With the taxis’ track records of winter driving, I could think of nothing less pleasant than being a passenger while sideways snow obscured the driver’s vision of the road. The good news is that I got my wish. The blizzard came to an abrupt halt around midnight Friday night, leaving in its wake approximately a foot of snow to show for its efforts. No wind, no snow, just peace and quiet, surrounded by a gorgeously whitened landscape. It seemed that my taxi trip may turn out to be pleasant after all. Or maybe not.

I crawled out of bed Saturday morning with a great deal of excitement for my upcoming meeting, as well as an extremely full bladder. I rushed out the backdoor, intent on getting to our outhouse as quickly as possible to rectify the situation. Upon bursting forth into the great outdoors, I found myself in a state of shock as I was immediately surrounded by white. Everywhere. White white white, no sign of the outhouse, no sign of the door I had just stepped from, not even a sign of the hand that I knew I was holding in front of my face. It was the thickest fog I had ever seen in my life, and it was everywhere. I had to shuffle along like a little old lady, cautiously placing one foot in front of the other just to get to the bathroom. If there hadn’t been a brick path for me to follow, I could very well have ended up peeing in the cows’ water trough. It was that difficult to see.

It was going to be a terrifying taxi ride into the city.

Needless to say, I made it to Dashoguz city with my life, but it was only by the grace of God. People are insane drivers in this country. Insane. Why would you try to pass a line of five cars, when you can’t even see if there is any traffic in the oncoming lane. Seriously? There is nothing worth that kind of hurry (with the exception of life, death, and half-off sales at Nordstroms).

It turned out that my scary drive was well worth it. I had the most amazing day with the other volunteers. It was Jon’s birthday, so we all had a celebratory breakfast together at Alice’s house, which included home made doughnuts with chocolate frosting and sprinkles on them. It was heaven in edible form. It was nice to see some of the volunteers that I hadn’t run into since we had parted at Christmas time, and it made me realize again how great the people in Dashoguz are. I really like the volunteers in my weleyat. They pretty much rock.

After breakfast, Alice, Gahmya, Noah, and myself proceeded to have our first official Dashoguz health volunteer meeting. It was so amazing. I hadn’t really talked to Gahmya before Saturday, and didn’t know what to expect from her. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that she turned out to be an amazing resource. She told us about all of the projects she had been working on over the past year in her village, as well as some of the projects she had coming up. It was so inspiring to talk to someone who clearly loved the work she was doing as a health volunteer. I could hardly take notes fast enough to keep up with all of the great advice she was giving us.

I left the city that day as a happy human being. My tummy was full of doughnuts, and my mind had had just gotten the jumpstart it had needed to look at my work in Gok Chage with the right perspective. After talking with Gahmya, I was determined to be an amazing volunteer. No more sitting around, waiting for projects to fall into my lap, bemoaning the cold and homesickness I was experiencing. It was time to get to work… Now I just had to figure out what work I was going to get to.

The Week of Brain Sausage

2008-02-17T05:41:00.000-09:00

So my family let me try a tasty Turkmen delicacy this week. They take everything inside of a cow head (yeah, I really do mean everything: tongue, eyeballs, brain, cartilage… everything), chop it up into little cubes, then they put it in a big pot and boil it for a few hours. After its all soupy, they pour it into molds (usually empty soda bottles with the tops cut off), and they will let it set for a few hours while it cools. Once it has cooled off, it hardens into this gelatinous blob of chunks in a variety of brown and red shades. They take it out of its mold, and you have brain sausage. Bon apetit!

My mom raised me to “take a polite bite” of anything someone set in front of me, and I could hear her voice ringing in my ears as I looked at the quivering mass of cow setting in front of me at the table. I actually managed to eat an entire slice of it- with a straight face. That was it, I very politely told my family that once piece per day was my non-vomit-inducing limit. And in case you were wondering, it tastes a lot like really salty spam. This leads me to wonder what exactly spam is made out of…

Bagila is gone again this week. She had to go to a conference in Ashgabat about tuberculosis, and she won’t be back until the end of the month. Sad. The only plus side to her multiple periods of absentia is that they really force me to get to know everyone in my clinic instead of just relying solely on her for support. I really do miss her though.

Valentines Day passed without any fanfare. It’s a little hard to get used to the fact that Turkmen don’t celebrate the same holidays I do. I knew they wouldn’t when I came here, but its somehow slightly different when you actually look at the calendar and realize that there was a holiday the day before and you failed to even notice its passing due to the lack of celebration around you. I’m sure I’ll get used to it as time passes, it will just make me appreciate the ridiculous levels of commercialism in America that much more when I come home. And to be fair, my mom totally sent me a valentine that got here on time. Way to go Mom.

In other news, it snowed this week, twice! Six inches in total. When I came to Turkmenistan, everyone really emphasized the fact that it was a desert, and how hot it was in the summers, but no one really remembered to mention the winter qualities. To be fair, the locals are telling me that this is the most brutal winter they’ve seen since the 1960s, so I guess that makes this proliferation of snow, ice, and frost rather abnormal. Apparently I managed to bring Alaska with me, and it didn’t even take up any extra room in my suitcase.

I went into the city to visit Alice for the day on Friday (the first day it snowed this week), and quite honestly saw my life flash before my eyes on more than one occasion during my cab ride. Turkmen are frightening winter drivers. To be more specific, Turkmen are frightening drivers, period. They are big fans of passing in places where no one in their right mind would try to pass. They also like to play with their car stereos instead of looking at the road, and their favorite thing to do is try to carry on a conversation with the American in the back seat, while not looking forward to the road AT ALL. Add icy roads and whiteout snow to this and you’ve really got a recipe for success. Or an aneurism. Whichever.

The good news is that I made it into the city in one piece. I was really excited because in addition to getting a care package in the mail, and buying some tasty cookies at the bazaar, my FAMILY called me at Alice’s house! This may not sound like that big of a cause for celebration, but calling me, and actually getting hold of me in this country, from America, is quite an event. Now that I don’t have a telephone at my house, I have to rely on the charity of other volunteers who actually have phones at their homes that my family can call. I then have to cross my fingers that the phone in question will actually be working on the day I arrange for my family to call me on it, and I have to pray that none of their family members will be in the middle of using it at the established call time. On top of all of that, I have to hope the circuits aren’t too busy so that my family’s call will actually be able to get through when they place it. Now that you understand what all goes into it, you can see why I almost wet my pants when I heard the voices of my mom and dad and Hillary (Andrea had apparently left for a trip to Norway the week before).

After talking to them for more than an hour, I was on cloud nine. You’d be surprised at how much you crave hearing familiar voices. After seeing my euphoric state resulting from domestic dialogue, Alice also really wanted to hear from her family, so we asked my parents to call them and let them know Alice wanted to talk to them and was waiting by the phone. My dad was a little nervous about calling someone who didn’t really know him (especially since it was almost midnight), but Alice and I assured him that as a fellow Peace Corps Turkmenistan parent, he would be welcomed with open arms… if that were possible on the phone. Sure enough, less than twenty minutes after hanging up with my parents, the phone rang again and it was Alice’s family. I really love it when things work out.

Besides city trips and brain sausage, the week was fairly uneventful. I have to learn to be a little less independent than I was in America. It’s a difficult transition. Whenever I go anywhere or do anything in Turkmenistan, I have to tell at least three different people where and when I’m going, how long I’ll be there, and exactly when I’ll be back. Usually I need to tell them all of this information at least a week before the event actually occurs, and there is no such thing as changing my plans mid way through the event since there are no phones in my village for me to call anyone on to inform them of the altered game plan. Considering the fact that I am 24 years old, and in no way accustomed to such tight control on my comings and goings, it has been a challenge to keep my blood pressure in check on several occasions.

Most recently it was the disco. There is going to be a big 80s night (yeah, like American 80s music!) at the disco in Dashoguz City next Friday night, and I really want to go. I figured it would work out perfectly because I am already planning on being in the city Saturday morning for our big health-volunteer collaboration, so why not come in the night before, go to the disco, then just sleep over afterwards at one of the city volunteer’s houses? It made perfect sense to me. Especially because I really really wanted to go out dancing with the other volunteers at the disco.

I told Shukerjan about my plan, and she initially said it sounded fine as long as I remembered to give her contact information for how to find me in case of an emergency. A few days after she’d said yes, she reneged, and told me I wasn’t going to be able to go. Something about a policy…

This would probably be the appropriate time to fess up to the fact that Shukerjan was actually mostly in the right for putting the nix on my grand disco adventure. There is technically a Peace Corps policy that says new volunteers may not sleep “outside of their community” for their first 90 days of service. It’s meant to keep us safe since the assumption is that it will probably take us about three months to fully acclimate to our new surroundings. In my disco-crazed state, I was willing to skew the meaning of the policy far enough to consider Dashoguz city part of “my community”, but Shukerjan wasn’t buying it. She told me that I was housebound next Friday night, and that it really was for my own good. I was mainly pissed because I knew she was right, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. How dare she be a responsible host-parent? You’d think she actually cared about me, or something…

The Week of Being Careful What You Wish For (Part 2)

2008-02-10T05:40:00.000-09:00

After the unfortunate fiasco at the school on Tuesday, Wednesday dawned with the distinct possibility of redemption. It couldn’t really get any worse, right? Ha.

While we had been on patronage the day prior, Shukerjan had been busy recruiting new mothers for my class on breastfeeding Wednesday morning. I had given up on my fetal development stages, figuring the lesson wasn’t meant to be, after resulting in no-shows for three weeks running. I was all ready to make breastfeeding class riveting. I had stuffed animals to practice positions with, a huge picture of a breast with all of the parts labeled, and a nice long story to read to my class about a mother who didn’t breastfeed correctly, and the resulting calamity. Stuffed animals, boobs, and story time! Who wouldn’t want to come to my class?

Class was scheduled to start at ten, and when only one woman had shown up by 10:10, I figured it was time to get my show on the road. At least one person wanted to hang out with me, right? My “student” was a very very pregnant young woman (eight and a half months along) in her early twenties who was on baby number two. As I began showing her the proper breastfeeding positions with my stuffed bunny, I handed her a teddy bear to practice with. She looked at me as if I had suggested she dive headfirst off a high cliff, and instead set the teddy bear down on the table next to her. I decided it was time to move along to the big breast picture. This actually managed to go even worse than the teddy. As soon as she saw the gigantic nipple looming up out of the distance, she turned red and averted her eyes, refusing to look at it. I was beginning to sense the possibility that I misjudged the cultural views on modesty…

As I was frantically trying to think of a way to take my presentation from PG-13 down to a G rating, my student suddenly got a horrible expression on her face, clapped her hand over her mouth, and ran from the room. I heard her retching in the hallway sink. I must say, I was expecting a slightly different reaction to my class. She didn’t come back in. Shocker. I was so sure she’d been waiting on the edge of her seat to see what exciting activity we were going to do next. I spent the rest of the day re-writing my breastfeeding lesson plan to include far fewer visuals, and a lot more anti-nausea medication.

The rest of the week included quite a bit of visiting. I met my next-door neighbors, who invited me in for tea and fresh bread with homemade watermelon jelly. (jealous?) I also went to the next village over to visit Bagila at her family’s house. I wound up sleeping over and had a lot of fun. We stayed up until almost 1am (this is very very late for me now!) watching music videos and looking at pictures. It kind of reminded me of the sleepovers I used to have in seventh grade… except we didn’t dare each other to lick the toilet seat or run outside in only our underwear. What can I say, we were party poopers.

My family took me to see Koneurgench (cone-er-gench) on Sunday. This is the big ruin site in Dashoguz, apparently it has a lot of historical significance, or something… Someone who has internet access on a regular basis should look it up and tell me why its important, because I feel like I should know, but there’s only books about it in Russian and Turkmen, and to be honest, I don’t know either language well enough to figure out what the deal is. It looks pretty cool though.

There were a series of mausoleums and a really tall minaret, all of them from a long time ago. They were beautiful, and I was surprised at how well a lot of the colored tiles had survived on the domes on top of the mausoleums. The only down side was that the weather was still pretty cold, and I could only walk around the ruin sites for so long before my feet went numb. Note to self: come back and look at things longer when the temperature is back to somewhat bearably normal.

I also got to see Julia, the Peace Corps volunteer who is stationed in Koneurgench. It was the first time I’d seen her since Christmas, and I was happy to see that she was doing well. I was also happy to see that she had also given in and purchased one of the expensive long wool coats with fur cuffs. They really are super pretty. I swear.

The Week of Being Careful What You Wish For (Part 1)

2008-02-10T05:39:00.000-09:00

So I’m really starting to adjust better to living here. At first the lack of communication and the isolation were killing me, mainly I think because I wasn’t really expecting them. Now that I know what I’m working with, I’m beginning to figure out how to cope, and as a result, things aren’t so hard anymore. I would say I’m actually starting to enjoy being here.

Bagila came back on Monday and I was surprised at how happy I was to see her. Don’t get me wrong, I have always enjoyed Bagila’s company, but I didn’t realize how much I had bonded with her until she came back from her break and I felt like she’d been gone for years even though it was only a month.

This Tuesday started out very excitedly. I got to work and Shukerjan told me that I needed to grab my dental health lesson supplies because we were going to the school. I was so shocked, we were actually GOING? To the school? To teach? I was suddenly a little nervous. What if my lesson bombed after all of the waiting I’d been doing to teach it? I had little time for further pondering as Shukerjan dragged me out of the door and over to the school. We got there and the director told me that there currently weren’t any students to teach. Oh my, what a surprise. No students you say (again)? I couldn’t imagine… I was getting ready to accept defeat and as I was turning around, he asked me if I would be able to come back at 2pm, because there would be students then. I was shocked and elated, and walked out of his office thrilled with the prospect of my upcoming lesson.

Shukerjan took me on patronage to pass the time between then and two o’clock. I am fairly certain I’ve mentioned this term before, but just incase you’ve forgotten, patronage is how the Turkmen refer to a series of home visits by a doctor. In Turkmen medical culture, it’s far more common for a patient to have a doctor come to him or her, than to go to the doctors themselves. Shukerjan and I popped in on half a dozen Turkmen families and measured their babies, blood pressures, and other assorted odds and ends.

Another interesting aspect to “patronaja gitmek” (aka: going on patronage) is the food. I don’t know what it is, but Turkmen cannot stand to see someone not eating in their house, I think it makes them uncomfortable or something. When the doctors and nurses come on patronage, there is this frenzy of force-feeding that occurs. Tea and cookies is a given, and its considered rude if you don’t partake in those at the very least, but then they bring out the eggs, the soup, the cow parts, the bread, the fried food, the macaroni, and sometimes even a few rounds of vodka. Oh my goodness. I have a hard time going on patronage because after the first few houses you practically have to roll me out the door I’m so full.

So Shukerjan and I were in the middle of a medical-visit/meal combo in a home near to our clinic when one of the clinic’s doctors came running over and told Shukerjan that she needed to come to the clinic right away. When we got there, there was a big group of people from the overseeing hospital in the next city over and they were all waiting to do a shot audit. What is a shot audit, you ask? I can’t be sure if this is what they actually call it, but basically it’s the head hospital making sure our little clinic has been doing its job.

A few weeks ago, there was a big campaign to get everyone vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. It was countrywide, and a huge deal. The shot auditors had come to walk door to door with our doctors and make sure that everyone one in each of their respective territories had actually been administered the vaccine, like our records said they had. I sensed tedium coming on. Longer story shorter, I walked around with the shot auditors and Shukerjan while we spot-checked the houses in Shukerjan and Bagila’s territory. Even though everything went well, I couldn’t help that feeling like I was a little kid who had cheated on my history exam and was now hoping not to get caught. It wasn’t even me who was supposed to have given the shots, and I was practically sweating bullets. Ah, vicarious guilt.

The shot-auditing went on for a good two and a half hours before Shukerjan informed the hospital’s representatives that we would now be heading over to the local school to watch the American teach. I was quite pleased to be heading to the school until I realized that the entire auditing crew was accompanying us. It’s okay, right? No big deal if a bunch of important people from the overseeing hospital watch me teach my very first health lesson in Turkmen. I’m sure I will do wonderfully… I hope.

I got to the school and walked into my classroom of first graders. They all stared at me as if I was some alien being, freshly arrived, but at least they seemed quiet and well behaved. I began to dig around in my bag to set up my posters for my lesson, and realized as I stared into my bag with a sinking heart that I had left a pile of pictures and lesson vocabulary (including the words to the brush your teeth song) on my desk back at work. Oh crap. Ummm, time for plan B: improvisation.

I proceeded to fake my way through my healthy teeth lesson with a lot of “ums” and enthusiasm, hoping it would compensate for my lack of materials and correct word choice. I’m not sure if it worked. There was a point where I was pointing to the picture of molars, asking the first graders “what is that?” repeatedly, while all of them gave me blank stares and refused to answer. The sad thing is that I was asking them because I didn’t know the word for molar, not because I was testing their knowledge. In the end I just used the word “molar” and hoped they got the general point. It definitely could have gone better. All I know is that when the hour was up, I felt a bit like a performing circus monkey who was ready to go on coffee break. How do teachers do this every day for six hours?

The shot auditors gave me smiles on the way out, but they were less like “way to go” smiles, and more like the sympathetic smile you would give someone who just fell down the stairs. Headfirst. Sigh. I am so good at impressing people in positions of authority. I see a great career as a Turkmen teacher in my future.

Maybe I’ll do better next time? I hope there is a next time.

The Week of New Stuff

2008-02-03T05:39:00.000-09:00

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.

The Week of Ennui

2008-01-27T05:38:00.000-09:00

Okay, I’m getting a little cranky and a little homesick. Maybe more than a little. It’s cold here, like really cold, like all the time. Our clinic hasn’t has any gas (as in natural gas, as in the stuff that makes our heaters and stoves work) all week, so I’ve been freezing to death for seven hours a day, and the only consolation I’ve had has been the constant stream of warm tea that I’ve been making with my new electric tea pot. Best invention ever.

I realize it seems like I’m whining a lot about the cold considering my home state, but let’s discuss for a moment the crucial differences between “Alaska cold” and “Dashoguz cold”, shall we?

1.Alaska and Dashoguz are both approximately the same temperature when its “cold” outside, and both have low humidity, and a fair amount of snow. So far we’re batting pretty evenly, right?

2.Alaskans usually drive everywhere, with cars that have heaters that sort of, kind of work sometimes. We also have snow tires, four-wheel drive, and a general knowledge of winter driving.

Turkmen drive almost nowhere, and when they do, it’s in a taxi that has the most archaic non-functioning car heater known to man. No snow tires, no four-wheel drive, rarely even seatbelts. You can’t even stomp your feet to keep them warm because it’s possible they may go through the car’s decaying floor. Suddenly the public bus system in Anchorage is looking pretty posh.

3.Alaskans do all of their shopping in malls and supermarkets. This is typically a fast process that involves shopping carts, reasonably organized aisles of merchandise, set prices, and a bagger boy who follows you out to your car to help put the groceries in.

Turkmen do all of their shopping in an outdoor bazaar. In the freezing cold. This is a painstakingly tedious process due to the fact that Turkmen bazaars have no rhyme or reason in their product placement (one stand will sell onions, eye brow tweezers, socks, matches, and toilet paper). You could wander for hours and still not find everything on your shopping list. In addition, there is no such thing as a final price, everything has to be haggled for. This is particularly torturous when you can hardly count the agreed upon amount of money out to the seller due to the fast developing frostbite in your fingers. Finally, once you have managed to find everything you need, and managed to carry it all around the bazaar with you in a motley collection of plastic bags, you then have to find a car to take you home, with all of your groceries barely contained in your lap, as you share the back seat of a tiny four door sedan with three other people.

4.Finally (and most importantly) there is the issue of indoor heating. In Alaska, most people have pretty good insulation in their walls, and typically employ the use of natural gas heaters to keep the inside of their homes comfortable when its cold outside. If that gas should ever “go out” all we have to do is pick up the phone and call our local gas company whose perky customer service attendant will assure us that our problem is being rectified immediately.

In Turkmenistan, people most commonly use mud and hay as their primary means of insulation (and building materials, coincidentally). This is not always the most effective method of keeping one’s home warm, particularly when your primary heat source (natural gas) has a nasty habit of disappearing for days at a time. Not joking, people around here will be without gas for days, sometimes weeks. It’s hellaciously unpleasant. And when there aren’t any phones in your village, its rather challenging to call one’s gas company to complain… because I’m sure those complaints would be met by a perky customer service attendant who would reassure us that our problem is being rectified immediately…

As a result of the cold this week (and the lack of gas), I once again found myself without a school to teach at, and no one came to my pregnancy class at the clinic on Wednesday (I’m beginning to wonder if my fetal-development lesson is cursed). It was very sad. The stupid cold weather is taking all of my friends away. To compensate, I’ve begun writing letters, long ones. Having never been a big fan of letter writing, this is a big adjustment for me, but in light of the lack of internet, I think its probably my only shot at remaining sane. We’ll see how it goes. It’s nice at least to have an opportunity to express myself in English.

In other news, I found out that my gelineje is going to have a baby in August of this year, and my host-sister (who doesn’t live with us because she lives with her husband) is going to have a baby in May. I think this will make me an aunt… sort of. A host-aunt maybe? Anyway you look at it, I’m going to have two brand-new babies to play with this summer. It should be interesting. I miss Bagila, she’s been gone for three weeks. On the plus side, I feel like I’m getting to know the other nurses and doctors in my clinic better since Bagila isn’t here for me to hang out with. It’s funny how much I crave close relationships here.

Sunday came, and my homesickness came to a head. I needed to talk to my family. I had been asking around the village and other volunteers, and had finally figured out that you need to dial 101 before dialing the state code in America. So now you know, in case you were having the same trouble.

I hopped into a taxi to head into the city, and once there, headed straight to the one place I was always sure to find an American: Kelly and Dennis’s building. Peace Corps was terribly considerate, realizing that I am occasionally imbued with difficulty in finding my way around large metropolitan areas, and as a result (of me, I’m sure), they decided to put two of our city volunteers in the same apartment building, only two floors apart. The building is even on a major street, which makes it an ideal first stop whenever I happen to be in the city.

Anyways, my sister’s 21st birthday was Saturday and I was bound and determined to call and wish her a happy birthday Sunday morning (still her birthday in Alaska). I was really bummed that I wasn’t there to actually spend her birthday with her, but figured a phone call from across the globe would have to suffice. To my shock and awe, it actually worked. The cab ride into the city was cramped and bumpy, and the connection at the telegraph office was weak and static-filled, but I was able to talk to my family for almost ten minutes. It was amazing hearing their voices. I never thought a ten-minute phone call could be so important, but I was amazed at how much better I felt after talking to them. I guess just knowing that they hadn’t forgotten about me, and being able to tell them how much I missed them was all I really needed. We made a date to talk again in February, and I skipped home to the village in much better spirits. (Except I didn’t really skip, I took a long, cold, bumpy cab ride there, but almost the same, right?)

The Week of Disapointment

2008-01-20T05:37:00.000-09:00

This week started out so promisingly, but quickly found itself in a strong backslide. Tuesday I was supposed to teach my very first health class at the local school. I decided to teach about dental health, and I was so excited. Whenever we had taught health to the kids in our training village, they had loved it, and I was hoping it would be the same story with my new village children. I went in, armed with my prettiest pictures of teeth (which I had stayed up all night drawing), the words to the “brush your teeth” song, and my flashiest Turkmen dress. I was unstoppable. Or so I thought.

I showed up to the school fully expecting to be welcomed with open scholastic arms, but instead was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Through chattering teeth, the school staff informed me that their students were MIA due to the fact that the school’s heater was broken and the resulting ambient temperature made learning next to impossible. I could have cried. Drat mother nature for conspiring against my healthy tooth lesson. I went back on Thursday, hoping for another shot at it, but was tragically informed that the heating would be out for the remainder of the week. Wimpy kids. So what if they couldn’t feel their fingers or toes while we sang the brush your teeth song, at least they’d have pretty pictures to look at. Right?

Wednesday dawned with a distinct opportunity to redeem the week. It was the day of my second seminar for pregnant mothers. After the success of last week, I was heading in with high hopes. I had planned out a lesson on the stages of fetal development, and couldn’t wait to tell my mothers all about it. All of the ladies who had been there the week before had promised to return for this week’s exciting continuation, and as I sat there waiting for the minutes to tick by until ten o’clock (the class’s starting time), I could hardly contain myself.

I’ll admit, when the clock had reached 10:25, and there was still no sign of any pregnant mothers, my enthusiasm began to dim slightly, but I remained optimistic. Maybe they were stuck in traffic or something. Because I’m sure there’s a lot of cows and stuff on the road this time of day… By 11:30, I resigned myself to the fact that no one was going to come for my lesson on fetal development. I wanted to cry (just a little), but instead decided to drown my sorrows in an emergency snickers bar I had been saving for just such an occasion. Even though the circumstances were less than optimal, it was still pretty dang tasty.

On Friday, I knew things were going to turn around for the better. I had talked my boss into letting me skip out on work for the day to go into the city to use the internet and check my mail at the post office. Usually these things would be minimal blips in the schedule of my life, however, it had been almost a month since I had had an opportunity to check my e-mail, and for someone who checked it multiple times during the day in America, the wait was killing me.

I met up with another volunteer (Alice), and the two of us proceeded to track down the first stop on our wild list of communication tasks: the post office. I had a package that I’d been meaning to mail to my parents for the better part of the past two months, and figured that it was the perfect opportunity to do so. After waiting in line for almost two hours, I suddenly began to doubt the intelligence of my choice, but was far too committed by then to cease and desist. Upon getting to the head of the line, Alice and I were so happy to see the final postage being placed on the package, we could have kissed the wrinkled old woman manning the counter, it didn’t even matter to me that I had paid twice what I should have to send it, and had absolutely no incoming mail in the mailbox. At least I had managed to accomplish something.

After eating lunch, we were ready to tackle the local internet café. Accustomed to the notion of waiting after our morning of post office merriment, the two of us weren’t even fazed by the forty minutes it took for the internet to dial up and connect. Once the internet finally came, I realized the tragic reality. Somewhere in all the excitement of welcoming the new volunteers, the current Dashoguz volunteers had failed to mention that access to America-based internet sites (including Hotmail, Myspace, and Blogspot) was blocked. Do not pass go; do not collect two hundred dollars. After dreaming of internet access for the past 24 days, I finally had it, but couldn’t access any of the sites that I needed it for. The irony was overwhelming. Alice mentioned to me that there was a Russian-based e-mail that I could sign up for, which I did, but after seeing that it took over half an hour to send a single e-mail with it, I began to realize that I very realistically was going to have to kiss internet use goodbye until I made it into Ashgabat in July. Whoa Nellie. So this is what they mean when they talk about “roughing it”. Boo.

My morale was absolutely in the toilet by the time Alice and I left the internet café, and at that point I was desperate; I needed contact with America and I needed it right then. I was so desperate that I decided to go to the telegraph office to call my parents. There are two important factors to keep in mind as you picture this. First of all, it costs a dollar a minute to call America from Turkmenistan, and my salary for an entire month is only $93. Secondly, it was 3:45 in the afternoon as I headed to the telegraph office, which would make it almost 2 o’clock in the morning in Alaska. Clearly I was in a very reasonable state of mind.

As I came into the telegraph office, the woman at the counter could tell from my stormy expression that I meant business. As I began writing out my request to call home, I realized tragically that I had no idea what code I needed to dial to get to America. I hoped the counter lady would know, but as I asked her (in less than excellent Turkmen) what numbers I needed to put before my state code, her blank expression told me all that I needed to know. I was SOL. I tried asking a few people in line if they knew what numbers you needed to dial to call America, but the results were similar to my having asked them if they knew how to walk to Antarctica. (“America? Why would you call America?”)

In review: no phone, no internet, no mail. In short, no communication at all, and no chance of coming into the city to try again for at least another two weeks, according to my boss. My best chance of getting word from the outside world was to employ the use of a carrier pigeon. Where am I? The twilight zone? I understand that as a Peace Corps volunteer I’m going to have to get used to living differently than I did in America, but this is… hard. At least harder than I thought it would be. I miss home.

There were some plus sides to the week. For one thing, I think my office has developed into the official lunchroom at the clinic. I’m not going to kid myself into thinking its entirely because of my sparkling wit and charm (although I’m suuure that is probably the bulk of the cause); my office actually has somehow been blessed with the most effective heating out of all of the offices in our clinic. I realize that heating doesn’t usually enter one’s mind when considering a good lunch location, but when its negative thirty degrees Celsius (this is very very cold in case you were wondering), effective heating suddenly becomes a major consideration for the location of anything you do, from eating lunch at work, to doing one’s laundry, to going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (I’ll admit it, one night I opted to pee in my Nalgene bottle instead of braving the elements. Don’t ask for details, you don’t want them. Trust me.) Anyways, the point is that socially I am beginning to fit in at the clinic really well, with all of my nurses and my counterpart eating in my office every day. It’s a nice feeling.

I’ve also started running. Not a lot, don’t get too excited, it was really only jogging, but it was really great to get outdoors and in the fresh air. There’s been a significant amount of snow here lately, and my family lives near to the outer edge of our village, so after about five minutes I am out of the village and surrounded by an empty snowy wonderland. Just me, my iPod, and an occasional passing car on the way to the next village up the road. There’s even a railroad track that I can see from where I walk. I love it. Everything is quiet and clean. It’s a great cure for the homesickness and isolation I’ve been feeling the past few weeks, I just clear my mind of all of the mental clutter and appreciate the surrounding Turkmen wilderness.

The only down side is the occasional canine companions I encounter on my forays into communion with nature. As we have discussed, I could live without the dogs in this place, and the dogs I ran into this week were no exception. They usually just growl and bare their teeth from a distance, but one afternoon a particularly irritating specimen actually came hauling after me, hell bent for ankle grabbing. My normal reaction in the situation would have been to freak out and hope that a large able-bodied Turkmen man was nearby to protect me, but I was in an especially intolerant mood and had a particularly aggressive song playing on my iPod. Instead of retreating in fright, I turned around and started running after him hollering expletives and death threats while making like I was going to grab him. It turns out the dog was all bark and no bite (thankfully) and the little coward tucked his tail between his legs and took off after realizing that I outweighed him by more than a few pounds. Ha. One bastard dog down, 1.5 million more to go. Bring it on.

January 13th

2008-01-13T05:36:00.000-09:00

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.

The Week of Village Life

2008-01-06T05:35:00.000-09:00

Okay, I miss home now. I never realized how hard it was going to be to be the only American within a huge distance. Dashoguz Turkmen is a lot different than the Turkmen I (sort of) learned in training and its really hard to communicate with people in my village. I can tell they really want to include me in things, and they all seem really nice, but I just want to cry at how hard it is to understand them, and how much I miss having another American around to talk to when I’m feeling stressed. Right now my most significant confidant is the cat who lives with me. His name is Puffy (it used to be “cat” until I got here, but I decided to name him) and he is now my official boyfriend in Gok Chage.

Turkmen don’t really celebrate Christmas, but they most defnitely celebrate New Years. It’s a huge deal around here and they actually celebrate new yers in a fashion very similar to how most Americans celebrate Christmas. They have a “New Years Tree” and “Ayaz Baba” (who bears a striking resemblance to Santa Clause). They also have a tradition of visiting a huge amount of houses on New Years Eve, and doing a massive quantity of vodka shooting at each house before they move on to the next stop. Welcome to a new year in Turkmenistan. When it finally came to midnight, I had managed to drink upwards of seventeen shots of vodka and multiple glasses of cognac and champagne. I gotta tell you, Americans have nothing on Turkmen when it comes to alcohol tolerance. Meanwhile, I could hardly focus to see the hands of the clock tick to midnight. Welcome to 2008.

For the rest of the work week I tagged around with Bagila as she went on house visits (aka patronage), and worked in her office. As much as I found it fascinating to watch her work with the villagers, it still seemed incredibly frustrating that I could hardly understand anything she said to me or any of the conversations that were going on between her and the villagers. I know I’m whining right now, but I really wish someone in Gok Chage spoke English!

By Friday my linguistic isolation was driving me stir crazy, and I decided to do something about it. I knew that Jon (another T-16) lived in Boldumsoz, which is a village only half an hour up the road from Gok Chage. I couldn’t exactly remember where he lived there, but I figured that in my desperate state, I would be able to sense his American-ness regardless of his location. At least I hoped so… I tried to go both Friday and Saturday, but each time something managed to come up that prevented me from making it out there. I did manage to go to a wedding and a few birthday parties though.

Sunday was such a relief; I finally managed to get over to Jon’s village and after asking around for “the American”, we managed to find his house. He and I talked (in English!) and he came with me and my family to run errands in Dashoguz city. We had planned on trying to check our e-mail and the post office box while we were there, but were unfortunately informed that both the internet café and the post office were only opened Monday through Saturday. At least I got to see another American, even if I still wasn’t able to hear from anyone “on the outside”. I realized it’s the first opportunity that I have had to speak conversational English (unless you count the cat) since the 27th of December when I had a chance to talk to Noah.

The Week of Transition

2007-12-30T05:34:00.000-09:00

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…

The Week of Being A Real Volunteer

2007-12-23T05:34:00.000-09:00

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…

Gurban Bayram

2007-12-20T05:33:00.000-09:00

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.

The Week of The LPI

2007-12-16T05:32:00.000-09:00

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…

December 9th

2007-12-09T05:31:00.000-09:00

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.

The Village Visit in Review

2007-12-04T05:30:00.000-09:00

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.

November 26th

2007-11-26T05:29:00.000-09:00

It’s officially fall here. The locals are actually referring to it as winter, but by Alaskan standards, its fall. It has been raining constantly, its incredibly cold outside, and all I want to do is curl up in a big blanket on the couch while reading a book. Instead, I have been trudging around the village going between language lessons, the clinic, the dressmaker’s, and the other volunteers’ houses. A lot of people’s phones aren’t working very well because of the rain, and some of the other villages have even been losing power.

We had club again on Saturday, and even though it was raining and gross outside, we still had about forty kids show up to hang out with us. We drew big posters about healthy lifestyles, and the kids got to use markers from “the America”, it was quite the event. The markers were Mr. Sketch markers (the ones that smell really yummy, like different foods), so the kids were in heaven. Turkmen kids really like to draw, and there aren’t markers in Turkmenistan, so anytime they get to make posters with markers, they are happy as clams.

I’m really starting to dig my host family, they take really good care of me. My mom and dad were supposed to call from America on Sunday morning. I had been looking forward to hearing from them for two weeks, and my host family knew it. Sunday morning dawned, and because of the heavy rain, the phone wasn’t working. I was so sad that I wasn’t going to be able to talk to my family, but I was trying not to act disappointed in front of my host family since I knew that it wasn’t their fault that the phone was out of order.

They realized how much it meant to me, and before I knew it, my whole family was sitting in the middle of the living room ripping apart pieces and parts from three different phones. One half hour, a butter knife, a spoon, and a large roll of duct tape later, we had one functional phone, and still fifteen minutes until the appointed call time. Life was good.

This morning was a little stressful. I was supposed to be at the bus stop (a twenty minute walk from my house), ready to visit Dashoguz for a week at nine am. Being myself, and completely incapable of punctuality, I was still working on packing my bag at 8:50. I don’t know what it is, but I can never seem to travel light. I always start packing with the best of intentions, but it seems that by the time my bag is ready to travel, it alwayshas grown to monsterous proportions. (Case in point, my luggage for the plane ride to Turkmenistan was classified as “cargo” because it were so heavy.) My “small travel bag” for my week in Dashoguz was no exception, and by the time I had managed to hoist my 26 kilo (That’s a little under fifty-five pounds for all you non-metric users) bag over my shoulder and toddle out the door, there was no way I was making it to the bus stop by nine. Realistically, there was probably no way I would have made it to the bus stop at all with that bag… My sweet little family came to my rescue again, and my host brother (the one who never talks to me) actually offered to drive my behemoth bag and me to the bus stop. Phew, thank goodness!

I spent the rest of the day catching up with the other volunteers as we spent the day in Ashgabat going through training sessions from Peace Corps. It’s amazing how much I find myself craving that American interaction. It concerns me a little because right now I live in the same village as four other Americans and I still get excited when I get to see more. Hhow am I going to hold up when it’s just me in my village? We are going to spend the next few days in Ashgabat meeting what they call our
Counterparts. These are the Turkmen who will be assigned to us at our workplace when we get to site. We’re supposed to meet them in Ashgabat, then travel with them to our site on the 28th. Cross your fingers for me that everything goes well…

Pictures!

2007-11-24T18:08:00.000-09:00

Hope the pics work out guys! The fun picture of food and tons of people is at the Tekke Bazaar, not quite a shopping mall, but as close as I can get for the next two years. The large group of Turkmen with babies are my current host family, the large group of Americans are my village-mates (Carrie, Kelly, Lex, Me, and Dan). The pretty Turkmen women are brides, the sunrise is right by the clinic I work at, and the mosque is the biggest in central Asia and its a twenty minute walk from my house. Love you all! Promise to post more blogs after I get home from Dashogouz visiting next week.

November 22nd

2007-11-22T05:28:00.000-09:00

I’ve been hanging out with my host sisters more, I really feel like we’re starting to bond. They all came trooping into my room the other night with a tub of ice cream and four spoons. We sat there looking at pictures from America and eating ice cream, it was great. I even helped (sort of, at least) them make dinner the other night. I’m tragically bad at cooking and preparing Turkmen dishes, but they were patient and I think they anjoyed the fact that I was trying to be helpful, even if it wasn’t necessarily the end result.

The big battle at my house right now is breakfast. “Breakfast” actually only consists of a cup or two of green tea, along with a slice of bread with some jam on it. It’s hardly what you would call a hearty start to your day. I’ve been really bad about hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock lately, and will wind up getting out of bed in the mornings only ten minutes before I need to be at Kelly’s house to go to school. As a result, I’ve been skipping “breakfast” in favor of those few extra minutes of sleep. My family finally confronted me in an intervention of sorts, and told me I was no longer going to be permitted to leave the house in the mornings without breakfast. Apparently even if it is only one cup of tea, it is the only way I’m getting out the front door to go to language classes. Oh lord. Bring on “breakfast”…

We went to see Iran. Okay, not literally, but sort of. There is a big mountain range that separates Turkmenistan from Iran, and there is a cable car that runs up the side of the mountain for people to go up to the top and appreciate the view. There are still a few mountains that technically obstruct the actual view of Iran, but to know that it’s that close is kind of cool. It was a beautiful day, and it was really nice to be up in the mountains, it reminded me a lot of home (except that Alaska’s mountains specifically will always have a special place in my heart).

Monday was quite the day for me. Lex and I spent the morning in the clinic, pbserving the dentist at work. This was horrifying and fascinating all in the same moment. I got to see a molar pulled out with a pair of plyers. I’m not kidding. It (the molar) had a hole the size of a ballpoint pen head, that went all the way from one side to the other (from a cavity), and I couldn’t imagine what would have hurt more, having a tooth rot completely through, or to have the tooth in question pulled out with a pair of plyers similar to what I would fix my kitchen sink with. Hopefully I won’t ever have to find out firsthand…

After our morning with the dentist, I went home to help my family get ready for our “gelin party”. In Turkmenistan (and especially in the more conservative villages), it is a big deal to be a Turkmen bride (a gelin). They have this special bridal clothing they have to wear, along with about 80 pounds of silver jewelery (no, I swear I am not exaggerating) for forty days after their wedding. They have to have an escort walk around with them due to the extreme weight of the stuff they’re wearing, and they don’t really talk to anyone, their escort talks for them. People will hold “parties” for these new brides, and they’ll make a lot of food and invite all of the neighbors to come over to look at the new gelin. The tragic part of all of this is that the gelin doesn’t really even eat at the party, she just sits there, trying not to move or talk, while everyone else stares and eats.

Anyway you cut it, our family hosted a gelin party on Monday. I helped them set everything out and then I pigged out on a spread of vegetables, salads, fried rice, and beef. Yyyuuuum. I also took a few pictures of the guest of honor. She was absolutely gorgeous, I was so impressed with how many details go into her outfit. The embroidery on her dress and robes was amazing, and the jewelry was absolutely stunning. The jewelry is so extravagent and there’s so much of it, that most Turkmen actually just rent it for the forty days that the gelin has to wear it, instead of buying it. Kind of like tuxedos in the US, except a whole lot more intense.

The biggest deal this week was the announcement from Peace Corps as to where our permenant sites would be. We all were together for a hub day and there was this big map of Turkmenistan on the floor of the room we were in. They called each of our names one at a time, told us where we would be going, then had us stand on the map in the approximate location of our site. We had all been DYING of curiosity for weeks to find out where we were going to be working for the next two years after training, as well as to find out who our American neighbors were going to be for that time. It was a big day.

I had been campaigning with the staff to be sent to Dashoguz weleyat (the Turkmen word for province), which is the northernmost weleyat, and also the coldest one in Turkmenistan. I figured it would be the most like home for me, and I also heard it was the least conservative out of the five Turkmen weleyats. As much as I enjoyed my long dresses and demure behavior in public, I thought it might be a nice change to see how the less conservative Turkmen conduct themselves. Sure enough, when my name was called, I was told that I was going to Dashoguz weleyat, to a little village by the name of Gok Chage.

I’m in excellent company. There are seven other T-16 volunteers going with me. (This is how we refer to people in our training class. We’re the 16th training group to come to Turkmenistan, hence “T-16”s, the group from last year were T-15s, the group next year will be T-17s, etc.). On the Dashoguz roster is myself, Val, Jon, Alice, Noah, Dennis, Julia, and Kelly. I realize these names may not mean much to you right now, but I get the feeling that I’m about to get to know these guys a whole lot better over the next two years. I think they all seem really great so far, everybody has a good sense of humor, and they’re all pretty outgoing. Of course I’m really exciteds that Kelly and I are still going to be close to one another. After being neighbors for the first two months of training, it would have been really hard to have to say good bye to her at the end of December. After site announcements, the Peace Corps staff let us know that we’d all be going to visit our new site in the last week of November. I’m a little nervous, I really hope my new village likes me…

Thanksgiving was an interesting day here. It was cold. The weather has been consistently hot since we came from America, it rarely went below eighty degrees (which for an Alaskan is HOT!), even at night. There was actually rain on Thanksgiving, and a cold wind. I think its possible that fall actually might be coming. Our training group all got together and made a big Thanksgiving lunch (all vegetarian for Kelly, carrie, and Lex!), then we went into Ashgabat to drink some beers and hang out for awhile.

It really hit me while I was sitting there with the girls as to how much in my life had managed to change in the course of only one year. Last year, at Thanksgiving dinner was when I told mom and dad that I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. I had never talked about it before that day, and I think they were a little skeptical at first as to how serious I was about going. Only one year later, here I am sitting in a café in the middle of Turkmenistan… I really hope I made the right choice.

November 14th

2007-11-14T05:28:00.000-09:00

We’ve started to accumulate a posse here. It’s quite entertaining. The kids love to walk with us as soon as they notice there are Americans on the street. They don’t talk to us a lot, for the most part they all talk to eachother and point and giggle at us, but they absolutely insist on walking as close to us as possible. Every now and then, a really brave one will say hello (in English!) and then ask us a few questions in Turkmen about why we’re there and what we’re doing. You can tell the kids are starting to think we’re pretty entertaining. Last week was our first official club day and we had planned a lesson on healthy nutrition. We weren’t really sure how many kids were going to come since we hadn’t told that many about it, but we figured maybe 15 or 20 would be a pretty good turnout. You can imagine our surprise when we had more than fifty kids show up Saturday morning, all of them ready to learn about healthy food. It was so great, and it made me feel really good about our village kids.

I’ve found a new dress maker, I’m excited to see what she makes for me. I really love this whole custom tailoring. I’ve never been in a situation where I could decide exactly what I wanted my clothes to look like and how I wanted them to fit me. Admittedly, all of the clothes I’m getting are floor length dresses with high necklines, but at least I get to pick which colors and shapes they are, right? It’s amazing how much I’m already starting to acclimate to the Turkmen idea of “proper dress”. I saw someone wearing a skirt that showed a portion of their knees the other day, and before I could stop myself I actually heard myself tsk-tsking them and shaking my head in disapproval. Are you kidding me? What happened to me?

Lex and Maya and I went to a big birthday for the father of one of the doctors at our clinic. It was really neat, he’s a big figure in the arts community in Ashgabat, so for his birthday party, they rented out a concert hall in the city and prestigious artists, singers, musicians, and actors all came and performed for him. It was my first real exposure to the Turkmen aarts, and I enjoyed it tremendously. There were a few opera singers who were absolutely phenomenal.

November 8th

2007-11-08T05:27:00.000-09:00

I woke up and my eyes still were really sore, so I had to wear my glasses again, and I had forgotten it was Thursday, so even though I needed a shower in the worst way, my family wasn’t going to let me within a ten foot radius of the bayna. Needless to say, I walked out of the house looking like I had been run over by a Turkmen cement truck. I was so busy focusing on how gross I was, that I didn’t even notice my host brother trying to talk to me at first. Really, my older host brother was talking to me! On purpose! He asked me if I wanted a ride to school, which is huge since he hasn’t even said hi to me since I have lived here! I had to go meet Kelly, so I had to thank him profusely and refuse his offer, but I was beyond stoked that he and I had experienced a major communication breakthrough. I was on cloud nine all the way to Kelly’s house.

My morning stayed interesting as Kelly and I headed towards school. Ahead of us, we saw this lone old man who was pushing his clearly broken-down car up the street while he attempted to steer it around the random smattering of animals and children walking to school. We felt really bad for him, so we both came up and started pushing his car from behind. He took this as a good sign and started pushing faster. I kid you not, we seriously RAN with his car all the way past where we usually turn to go to school. I have never been so thankful that I live in a completely flat village. I realize that we were only pushing this fairly light car for maybe 10 minutes, but I was totally exhausted by the time we got it to the garage. I think it’s time to lay off the massive quantities of choreck and surprise ice creams.

The morning stayed in a super high-speed sort of mode because as soon as we got to school, some people from the Peace Corps showed up to teach us how to take blood pressures. We are going to be doing a big hypertension project and part of it will be doing blood pressure counseling. I am really excited, but I feel a little bad for my family now because I am absolutely obsessed with trying to practice on them. I’m like that annoying little dog that is constantly trying to hump your leg, except I’m really into arms, and I come with a stethoscope attached. Oh, and I’m really slow, so they have to sit there with their arms going numb for a good three or four minutes while I try to figure out whether they have really high blood pressure or whether I’m just listening to the wrong side of the stethoscope. My poor host family.

We totally get excited about the dorkiest things in language class. We seem to have our favorite game of the week. I use the term game loosely, because in any other circumstance I don’t know how “fun” any of our games would be. Presently, I think they are pretty good stuff.

Our current favorite is sort of like Boggle, but not really. Maya will sit all of us in a place where we can’t cheat by looking at anything on the walls, then will randomly pick a letter of the Turkmen alphabet. We will each write down every single Turkmen word we can think of that starts with that letter (I am happy if I can think of 10), then after 2 minutes of writing, we will go around and see who could think of the most words that no one else had. On a good day, it’s five. Usually the winner has three. We still have a long way to go with language.

One of our other favorites is the “guess what I am” game. We will all think of something and write it on a sticky note on one person’s back. We all give them clues in Turkmen and they try to guess what they are. As silly as it sounds, we could probably play this game for hours on end. You never get tired of it when people are things like “an airport”, “a napkin”, and my personal favorite, “cheap”. Just to hear someone say “am I cheap?” in Turkmen sets me into a fit of giggles. Wow… I think I am officially loosing little bits of my IQ the longer I am here… oh well, at least I am having fun while doing it.

We had the really really good dinner again tonight, the one with mashed potatoes and barley and tomatoes. It was delicious as usual. This makes three times since I have been in the country so far, I think my family officially rocks.

November 7th

2007-11-07T05:26:00.000-09:00

Today was our second hub day since we’ve been here. It was also a really important day because the Peace Corps director came to have lunch with us. I’m not just talking about the Turkmenistan director, but the director of the WHOLE Peace Corps. It was super cool, and he brought his wife, and a few other people from Washington. It’s a really big honor that he is visiting our program, so I was super stoked to meet him. He was amazingly down to earth, a really nice normal guy. He also gave out free pins and patches, and you know how I feel about anything free. Good stuff.

I had the most incredibly sore eyes all day. I think there must be something in the air right now, because it felt like I had some crazy allergies going on. Like seriously, my eyes were watering and it looked like I was crying hysterically for the majority of the day. I had to switch to wearing glasses instead of contacts, and just kind of tried to ignore the constant stream of tears. Even though I could barely make it out through my haze of smog-induced bawling, I was immensely pleased to see that Mohammet brought home surprise ice cream again! Two days in a row of free ice cream before dinner, life is officially awesome!

November 6th

2007-11-06T05:25:00.000-09:00

Yesterday was a really cool day of technical training at the clinic. Even though Lex and I can’t really understand most of what people say there, some things don’t need words to be impactive. We were sitting in a doctor’s office, watching the fascinating phenomenon of file reorganizing (yeah, they do that here too) when there was a big commotion down the hall. Upon sticking our heads into the hallway to see what was up, the two of us were greeted by quite the event. A local man had been using some variety of heavy equipment and had managed to involve his leg in the action a little more thoroughly than he should have. The result was a huge gash in the front of his shin that showed layers of muscle as well as a significant part of his tibia protruding from a gnarled mass of scorched skin. Not to sound really gross and inappropriate, but it was soooo cool looking. What really astounded me was the fact that this man WALKED into the office with a straight face, and asked very casually if a doctor was available. There’s blood gushing everywhere, you can see the insides of his leg on the outside, and this guy is acting like he’s got a sore throat or something. I was totally blown away. Our clinic is fairly small, so the only thing they were able to do for him was wash it out and bandage it up, while telling him he needed to go into the city hospital for furthur treatment. Just like he’d come in, he stood up and walked back out, ptomising them that he’d try to get into the city either that day or the next. What a rockstar.

Monday morning, I was walking to meet Lex at the clinic for a few hours of quality sitting-on-bench time, when I happened to run into our village’s police chief. After a few minutes of strained chit-chat (I really need to get better at Turkmen), he invited me to come over to the police station for tea and cookies. Even though I knew I was supposed to be in the clinic in less than two minutes, I figured the ability to get to know the police in town was far more valuable than an extra ten minutes of confused medical observation, so I told him I would be delighted to come over for tea. We had a really good time, he figured out fairly quickly the remedial level my Turkmen was at, and appropriately adjusted his vocabulary to facilitate a coherent conversation. We talked about his family, his job, and all sorts of stuff. It was a really good feeling, being able to go to tea all by myself and (sort of) manage to keep up a conversation with a local. And it certainly can’t hurt matters to be on the police chief’s good side…

I got home from work on Tuesday and the fun kept coming. After a delicious dinner, involving copious quantities of raw onions (they eat them like potato chips here), my mouth was dying for something sweet to take the edge off of the dragon breath that was pouring forth. I was about to bite the bullet and walk to the corner store to buy a Snickers bar when Mohammet suddenly produced a bag of ice cream cones. It was like magic, and exactly what I needed. It was a fabulous surprise, and I savored every lick. Its funny how little things have become capable of making me extremely happy here.

November 4th

2007-11-04T05:22:00.000-09:00

So an average day for me… I wake up around 8:20 and eat a quick breakfast with my family before walking a block down the street to meet up with Kelly at her family’s house. This occasionally involves a quick second breakfast. Kelly and I walk the fifteen minutes to Carrie’s house, where all five of us are currently taking Turkmen lessons from Maya. We spend 4 hours working on our Turkmen, eat lunch (which Carrie’s host mom cooks, super tasty), then go off to technical training for a few hours. For Lex and I, technical training is sort of a nebulous concept right now. Theoretically, we are supposed to be learning about Turkmen medical culture by observing it firsthand and asking lots of questions. There are a few problems with this particular course of action. First of all, Lex and I don’t really speak Turkmen just yet. Don’t get me wrong, we are learning, and eventually I’m sure we’ll be really good at it, but for the time being we’re not quite there yet. This makes it rather interesting when we try to have any sort of meaningful interaction with the nurses and doctors at our clinic, and tragically limits our time at the clinic to simply sitting down and staring, while wondering what exactly is going on. I’m hoping this will improve as time goes on. After our time at technical training is finished, we will either head home to hang out with our host families or go to each other’s houses for tea and commiseration regarding Turkmen life.

After getting home for the day (which typically happens somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven o’clock), I usually wind up just hanging out with my host family while they listen to music, cook dinner, and play with the babies. I feel sometimes like I’m watching a live action version of the television show Pants Off, Dance Off when we’re hanging out with the babies. Ayjemal loooves to dance to anything, and for a two year old, she has a substantial repertoire of dance moves. There has been everything from samba shoulders to dropping it like its hot. It’s pretty entertaining to watch. While Ayjemal is busy shaking her groove thing, it seems like my younger baby, Hatija, never has any clothes on.

Turkmen have a very different view on how one should go about training their children to use the toilet, and part of their plan includes not using diapers. I’m serious, from the time they’re born Turkmen babies don’t wear diapers, they just keep soiling their pants over and over again. This results in an incredible amount of dirty clothing for their mothers to launder, but in theory, it speeds up the process of baby learning how to use to toilet. Either way you cut it, it means that Hatija is constantly in a “transitional” pants stage while they try to locate a clean pair to replace to freshly dirtied ones she is wearing. You’d think the kid was a nudist.

After dinner and the floor show, I usually wind up falling into bed like an old lady by no later than 8:30. I realize it seems odd that I would find myself absolutely exhausted at a time when most Americans are just settling down for a night of prime time television watching, but this place exhausts me. I think it’s the fact that with the new language, nothing is easy here. At home, I wouldn’t have to think twice about most things, whether it was saying good morning to my family, driving myself to the grocery store, or calling my friends to see how their day was. Here, everything is hard. I have to practice what I’m going to say in my head in multiple increments before I’ll ever say a word to my family or village neighbors, and even when I finally do say it, the effort behind deciphering what they say in response is incredible. It is literally exhausting just to listen to people talk here. I feel like such a wimp. Everyone is telling me that this will get better; its just a matter of time and patience. I’m hoping it will happen sooner rather than later. Right now I think its possible that I am sleeping more than either of the babies at my house.

In other news, this week was our first big American holiday while away from home. Halloween was on Wednesday, and at first I thought I would be really lonely for home and friends, especially when I thought about how everyone is America was celebrating while I was here. In reality, it turned out to be fine. The five of us from my village, plus Maya, all went into Ashgabat and ate pizza at a restaurant and had a few beers to mark the passing of our first month of volunteerism. I had a really good time, and have finally started to realize that as much as I desperately miss my friends and family from home, the people here are really doing a lot to help me fill that void.

I was walking to school on Friday and wasn’t really paying attention to my immediate surroundings. Out of nowhere, this giant dog comes charging at me from the neighbor’s yard, snarling and snapping his teeth. Normally in America I would be thinking rabies, and fearing for my life, but things here are a little bit different. For one thing, the dogs here are jerks. They’re horrible. I have yet to meet a decent dog in Turkmenistan. They all live outside, don’t get enough to eat, and are abused and neglected from the time they’re just small puppies. The resulting product is something of a Cujo-Satan mixture. They all chase you, growl at you, try to bite you, and generally make life tedious and unpleasant. I hate Turkmen dogs. Hate them. The particular neighbor dog in question was run over by a cement truck a few days later. In America the particular event would have saddened me tremendously. Here… let’s just say I wasn’t shedding any tears. Stupid dogs.

October 28th

2007-10-28T05:21:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I took a bunch of pictures of my one and a half year old host-baby Ayjemal dressed up in her mom’s prayer scarf. Turkmen are big fans of looking at pictures, and pictures of babies in prayer scarves seem to be very high on the “love-it” list. My host-family has been hounding me constantly to get them copies of the Ayjemal pictures, so today was officially the day to get it done. After I swept my carpet. Damn.

My oldest sister Tylla, and my youngest sister Gurbangul accompanied me to the Russian bazaar in Ashgabat to make sure the mission was successfully accomplished. Ayjemal came along to supervise her big pictoral debut. There’s a really big difference between the Talkuchga bazaar and the bazaars in Ashgabat. The in-city bazaars are a little more controlled, a little less insane. While we waited for the Kodak store at the bazaar to print my pictures, I did a little people watching. There is definitely a sizable Russian population here, and it is pretty obvious when you are looking at crowds as to who is Russian and who is Turkmen (Besides the fact that Russians also wear sunglasses). Russians seem to be extraordinarily averse to their natural hair color here, with artificial shades of orange hair that I hadn’t imagined were possible. They are also big fans of tight jeans, short skirts, and fake fur. I felt so boring in comparison. My American flip-flops and long skirt just couldn’t stack up.

In the midst of my people watching, I happened to look over at a vendor who was selling cookies. All of his cookies were sitting in big piles on a table, and as people came up to purchase a kilo or half kilo of them, he would scoop a pile of cookies into a bag for them. While I was watching, a pigeon flew over and perched ON TOP of a pile of cookies and POOPED on them. I swear, I saw it with my own two eyes. The vendor saw it too, so he reached over and stirred around the cookie pile so that the bird turd wouldn’t be noticeable to his upcoming customers. That’s gross. Even grosser, a mom and her three screaming children walked up to him no more than thirty seconds later and bought some of the defecated-upon confections. Scoop. Bag. Pass out to children. Her kids all shut up as soon as they had mouths filled with cookies, I wonder if it had anything to do with the secret ingredient…

After we got our pictures, Tylla told me we were going somewhere really really fun. I was hoping that a Wal-Mart had magically sprung up in downtown Ashgabat, but alas, that was not the type of fun to which she was referring. No more than half an hour later, I was once again standing in line at Disneyland, getting elbowed in the kidneys by a mob of impatient Turkmen. Definitely fun.

October 27th

2007-10-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

So today was a really big party around here, it was Turkmen Independence Day. You just think people in the states get excited about our independence, imagine how much celebrating goes on when you are still celebrating your years of independence in numerals smaller than 20. It was pretty rad.

Ashgabat was all sorts of decked out, with flags and banners and balloons everywhere. The city looked absolutely amazing with all of the white marble buildings contrasting with the bright colors of the decorations. On top of that, it was bright sunshine and somewhere in the low eighties all day (eat your heart out Alaska!) so there wasn’t any of that annoying worrying about the weather ruining our plans.

My sister Mahrie and I woke up early and went in to the city to participate in the merry-making with the rest of Turkmenistan. I wore my new dress (yay!!) and when we got there, we watched a huge parade with all sorts of floats and costumed dancers and confetti. I got to go to my first restaurant since I’ve been here, it was pretty sweet. I had lamb grilled on a stick with a huuuuge pile of onions. My breath was rank, but the meal was well worth it. It was so strange to be sitting there and realize that no one around us was speaking English. There was a couple next to us trying to deal with their badly behaved baby who was throwing food on the floor and across from us there was the cutest older couple who were eating out of the same bowl. I guess sometimes you don’t have to understand what people are saying to know what’s going on.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around Ashgabat looking at fountains and monuments and people. And Turkmen Disneyland. They actually call it Disneyland, this isn’t just my little nickname for the place. It’s nothing like the real thing of course, just a few rides and food stands- similar to a low budget state fair really. To most Americans, it wouldn’t be anything, but to Turkmen, this place is the be all and end all in fun and excitement. There are only 3 “scary” rides in the whole park. One is a (very small) roller coaster, one is the Turkmen equivalent to the Sizzler, and one is a platform with seats that’s attatched to an arm that spins around. The lines for the three rides are always ridiculously long, and Turkmen don’t really appreciate standing in line, so they’re also in chaos while everyone in line tries to cut in front of everyone else in line. When it comes down to it, the best part about Disneyland wasn’t Disneyland itself; it was the people-watching at Disneyland. Good stuff. Where else can you see a woman in her mid fifties screaming in Russian and hitting a teenage boy with her purse while she tries to get in front of him in a line to ride the Sizzler?

While we were in the city, I saw a couple of Peace Corps volunteers; it’s pretty easy to spot Americans in a sea of Turkmen. Usually it’s the sunglasses. Turkmen don’t wear sunglasses. I have no idea why. Americans here all seem to where those ridiculously huge “hiding from the paparazzi glasses”, no guesses on who they think they are being ‘inconspiculous’ for.

We met up with Kelly and her host sisters later in the evening and stood around waiting for fireworks. The great thing about Turkmenistan is that no one actually shows up for the event, they show up for the other people who will be at the event. The fireworks were supposed to start at 8pm, and the five of us showed up to the designated fireworks watching area at 5:30. So did the rest of the city. Everyone just kept walking around and around this tiny little area looking at eachother’s dresses and pretending that they just happened to show up that early because they had nothing better to be doing. Very nonchalant. Really. Mahrie had really sore feet because of her heels, but she kept walking around.

We wound up leaving before the fireworks even started and found a minivan cab (they call them marshrutkas here) to take us home. I cracked up because as soon as the cab driver saw that he had some Americans in his car, he turned up the CD he was listening to. It was Celine Dion’s greatest hits and I could actually feel my butt vibrate to every word Ms. Dion uttered. He kept trying to carry on a conversation over his blasting stereo, so I just kept nodding and smiling. I’ve become very good at that lately. I got home just in time to see the last burst of fireworks off in the distance, and I crawled into bed with sore feet and “My Heart Will Go On” playing over and over in my head.

Life So Far...

2007-10-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

Fri October 12, 2007

Today was great, I got to get on the internet for the first time and it was such an American feeling to post a blog and check some e-mails, I felt like I was in heaven. It was super super good to hear from all of you, I am a total dork and I keep all of your emails on my flash drive to read over again later, so keep the warm fuzzies coming!

I’ve found that my mindset has had to change since I have gotten in country. I find it’s really been for the better. In America, I had a lot of negative things to say about situations that seemed unpleasant to me. For example, that person who cut me off in traffic was a “jerk”, that super-slow service I had at that restaurant was “lousy”, and that mysterious smell coming from somewhere in my car was “disgusting”.

It was really tempting when I first got in country to apply a lot of the same terms to things that were unfamiliar and Turkmen. I have tried to tell myself that using negative terms isn’t going to help me, and no one likes a whiner, so I have decided that my new favorite word is different. Instead of things being problematic, they are simply “different”. Examples of this new favorite word’s use would be: “Young boys that throw rocks at me are… different.” “Burning trash at 6am smells… different.” “Forgetting my flashlight for my midnight outhouse run is totally… different.” And most importantly, “When my baby shares her dinner with me via saliva and dirt-encrusted hands it is very very… different.”

So now you know, there is no such thing as a bad day here. Only one that is… different.

Sat October 13, 2007

Today was the last day of Ramadan. I’ve known this would be the last day of Ramadan for quite awhile, but I never really figured out whether that means people are fasting today, or are not fasting today. Normally I would just ask, but my language skills aren’t quite efficient enough yet to get my point across, and my family just thinks I am asking if they fast during Ramadan in general. Oh well.

As far as my host family goes, they are very “dini” (religious) and they have all been observing “oraza” (fasting) from sun up til sun down. This is actually quite the experience since the sun comes up at an ungodly hour here. I hear all of them get up for breakfast time somewhere in the neighborhood of 4am. They all eat a very hearty (and loud) breakfast since it is all they’re getting until around 8pm that evening, then they go back to sleep for a few hours until the day is ready to get off to its real start.

I feel like such a slacker getting out of bed at 7, and wandering in to the breakfast that is laid out for me and the baby (who isn’t quite ready to take on oraza this year). I’m really impressed with their self-control and willpower. It takes a lot to go without food for the whole day, but to also go without water when it is at least 80 degrees outside all day is what truly seems like it would be too much for me.

From what I can tell, my family’s high level of religion also extends into other areas. For one thing, there is a lot of belief about certain superstitions and good and bad luck. We aren’t allowed to bathe or do laundry on Thursdays because it is some sort of holy day. We also can’t eat anything with our left hands because apparently the left hand is considered to be evil. My pillow on my bed can only face two of the four walls in my bedroom, something about not facing a cemetery… It just seems like there are a lot of rules to remember.

I also have to get used to the idea of praying after dinner instead of before. They all come to the collective decision that we are done eating, then everyone at the table, me included, assumes “the position”. We all hold our hands open in the shape of a book in front of us, wait for a little bit, then we take our hands and “wash” the words from said “book” over our faces. It’s actually really neat looking when everyone does it together. I think it’s supposed to signify the Koran and our receiving knowledge/ blessings from it.

Oh, I almost forgot one of the better rules, we have to sit straight while we are eating, because if we sit with our legs to one side or the other, all of our food will go to only one side of our body. I would hate to be fat on only one side, so I am always sure to be diligent about proper dinnertime posture.

Dorothy, I am definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Sun October 14, 2007

Today we went to the Talkuchga (I’m pretty sure that I butchered that spelling badly) bazaar. It’s the biggest bazaar in Turkmenistan and it is insane. There are so many people, noises, smells, and strange things to see. It would be like if you took a Walmart on the day before Christmas, added produce, raw meat, and price negotiation, then put the whole experience outdoors and on steroids. Really.

It was super hot, with the sun beating down on all of the stands, and everything had sort of a funky smell to it. I think I would really enjoy shopping there if I wasn’t constantly afraid of getting lost. I think of myself as a reasonably resourceful person, but if I hadn’t had Maya with me, I can’t honestly say I would have even been able to find my way out of the bazaar, much less to the area where you catch a cab home. I was so thankful that I was a good 6 inches taller than most people in the crowded little aisles, that was probably my only saving grace in keeping track of our group as we all pushed and shoved our way from one stall to another.

I emerged somewhat victorious from the experience, although still paying full price for everything I bought. I got myself a surge protector, hangars, some beautiful fabric to get a dress made out of, and most importantly, a green bucket. The bucket, as ridiculous as it sounds, was probably my most valuable purchase of the day.

I have realized, after almost two weeks in country, that these people don’t really have garbage cans anywhere in their homes. There is a pile out by the outhouse where you put all of your garbage, and that’s about it. I had been keeping a small pile of trash in the corner of my bedroom, and it really just wasn’t doing the trick. I almost wet myself with excitement when I saw the little trash-can shaped green bucket at the bazaar. Not only was it the closest thing I had seen to a trashcan since we’d left Ashgabat, it even had a lid! (Little things make you really happy here, trust me.)

Me and my bucket went straight home for a little R&R (aka a five hour nap), and then I woke up and walked the two blocks over to Kelly’s house for a little dress making. Kelly’s host sister is a seamstress, and had agreed to make dresses for us four girls with the fabric we had bought at the bazaar.

We all got our measurements taken and drank a little bit (actually a lot) of tea. I giggled a little at the fact that I seemed to be the only one whose booty got its own measurement, but was incredibly relieved to see that she was going to make my dress long enough. It’s so nice to have clothes made for you when you’re tall, I get so sick of nothing ever being long enough.

With the measuring tape put away, and our bladders filled, we set off for our individual family-filled evenings. And I went home to take a bath and play with my new bucket.

Mon October 15, 2007

In the states, there are a few basic needs that give me an immense amount of pleasure. At the top of the list would most definitely be sleeping and eating. Combine the two and you have officially got a winning combination. In Turkmenistan, the two experiences seem to somehow have been lost in translation.

Sleeping here seems a lot more like using the bathroom. You and everyone else have to do it, but you don’t spend any longer than you have to, and sometimes you can’t do it, even when you really really want to.

I am typically ready to hit my flat little mat bed at the late hour of nine thirty (yes, pm) and after waking up every two or three hours all night, I am ready to crawl right back out of my humble little nest no later than 6:30 in the morning. It actually kind of hurts to sleep much longer than that, what with the whole sleeping on the floor thing. Sleeping in is definitely a thing of my American past. People here don’t know why you would want to stay in bed when you could be up sweeping the floor, or drinking tea. It seems like the biggest waste of time ever to them, and they look at you like you’re crazy if you try to explain to them that many Americans list sleeping as a fond pastime and hobby.

As for the eating, food here is so… different.

Turkmen don’t really like a lot of spice in their food, they think adding dill or parsley is pretty wild and crazy as far as flavoring is concerned. Where they lack in zing, they most definitely make up for in “yag” (oil). There is probably four or five times the amount of oil that I would consider excessive in the United States, and I used to think I was pretty liberal with my oil use. It’s honestly dripping off of everything. To make matters more fascinating, they don’t use vegetable oil here, it’s cotton oil, which I have been told is one of those really hearty, stick-to-your-arteries varieties. Awesome.

As for what they actually prepare in aforementioned oil, they have a few favorites. Most of them involve some variety of sheep meat.

Number one thing you will hear about eating in Turkmenistan is choreck. It’s their very dense bread, and it’s kind of shaped like a thick, elongated Frisbee. After seeing it made, I have a huge respect for it. The women make it in these clay ovens that have a really hot fire going in the bottom of them, and they actually reach into the oven with a slab of dough, slap it on to the side of the oven (it sticks there), then reach in and peel it off of the side when it is done. It looks really hot and uncomfortable, and I can only imagine how much more so it is in the height of summer. We met a woman who makes choreck for a living, and she typically makes about 300 loaves daily. What impresses me is that in a village where they refuse to waste anything, they totally manage to eat that much choreck without any sort of major effort.

As far as actual meals, the first one I ate when I came to my host family was palaw (comes out sounding more like plov). I think it might actually be their national dish. It’s basically fried rice with lots of carrots, lots of oil, and a few pieces of meat for decoration on top. I wasn’t super fond of it at first, but after a few weeks of eating it, I am honestly a little obsessed with it. It’s become somehow equated with macaroni and cheese in my mind, and who doesn’t like macaroni and cheese?

The next most popular has to be the chorba. This is the stand-by meal that you can count on eating any time that no one knows what to make for dinner. It’s pretty much any kind of soup. They just throw whatever veggies are around, along with a hearty dollop of –you guessed it- cotton oil into a pot. On good days, there might be meat chunks, lentils, or noodles added to it. After they have sautéed it for a bit, they fill the pan up with water and let it boil for an hour or two. Dinner is served.

There are also a few different things that they like to stuff. Manty is the Turkmen potsticker. It is basically a thin noodly-dough that they fill with ground meat and onions, then fold into a cute little pouch. They usually steam them, but my very health conscious family prefers to fry them in oil. Don’t tell anyone, but I kind of like them fried better than steamed. I know, I’m bad. What can you do?

Also in the “stuffed stuff” family are somsa. Our group has reverted to calling them hot pockets. They are basically little calzones, that most Turkmen prefer to see filled with ground sheep meat and onions. Instead of baking, you can probably guess how somsas are cooked. Nothing like a little yag to make the somsa really tasty. Yum.

One of my weakness while in country (besides the palaw) is the dograma. It is the Turkmen version of stuffing, and it is sinfully addictive. If you like that soggy bread sort of thing…. Mmmmmm. It’s ripped up pieces of stale choreck, that are then soaked in some sort of brothy-substance (I don’t want to know how they get the broth, because I’m pretty sure it involves boiling the bones of some neighbor’s livestock). For the final touch to the dograma, they throw in finely diced raw onions. You would think this would really mess up the overall texture, with the random crunchy part, but it is actually really tasty, I swear.

I’m going to have to start a 12-step program to wean off this stuff.

Tues October 16, 2007

It’s been really hoooooot here. I don’t mean to whine, I do realize I’m in a desert, but it’s October, should it really be in the high 80s every day? I’m melting! I realize my body temperature seems to be in direct relation to my temper. I have absolutely no patience when I am hot, and trust me, there are plenty of things that require quite a bit of my patience right now.

The children here are something else entirely. One of the first Turkmen words I learned was somsek (stupid) and it certainly wasn’t because the other Peace Corps volunteers were yelling it at me. There always seem to be these unruly hordes of children in the streets, and I don’t know what I have more of a problem with, the name calling, or the stone throwing. Seriously, they throw a lot of rocks, like in the bible. And they have pretty good aim.

I am frequently tempted to run after them screaming obscenities, but to be quite frank, it’s way too hot for running. Little boys are the devil. Grrr.

The only reprieve from my heat/child-induced crankiness is the ice cream. I am absolutely in love with it. Turkmen have a significant fondness for ice cream and as a result, there is a market with ice cream bars and cones on just about every corner. The best part is the price, I’m paying a whopping $0.04 for a pretty good sized cone filled with the most fabulous chocolate ice cream. I’m drooling a little just thinking about it…

So who wants to come visit me now that you know you can eat all the ice cream you want for less than fifty cents a day??

Weds October 17, 2007

I woke up at midnight. I couldn’t figure out what could have disturbed me (aside from the barking dogs, the insomniac cow next-door, and the roosters who constantly seem to be on Tokyo time). It was as I lay there, pondering my suddenly conscious status that I realized I had a stomachache that went far beyond your typical case of too-much-manti indigestion.

In a rare fit of excellent judgment, I dumped my entire garbage bucket out, and brought it over to my mat… just in case. At 2 o’clock that same morning, “just in case” became a very unpleasant reality and I began making a rather intimate acquaintance of my bucket’s interior. This unpleasant rendezvous continued at two-hour intervals until it finally got late enough in the day (7:30 am) for me to call someone and beg for medicine.

While waiting for my medical savior to arrive, and hating how hot it already was at only 8 in the morning, I hit my absolute lowest point of the day. Really, it was probably one of the lower morale moments in recent memory. Maybe in my life.

I was losing mass out of both ends of my digestive tract. I had gotten no sleep for the night. I was delirious. Most importantly, I was in immediate need of a visit to the family outhouse, aka narrow hole in the ground with a wooden shack surrounding it. After I staggered in and took care of business, while trying to keep from throwing-up again, I realized I had missed. Like missed the hole. Like the worst-case scenario for any outhouse trip, but especially this one. I could have cried. Instead, I prayed no one in my family was going to use the outhouse for the thirty seconds it took me to run into my room, grab my water bottle, and run back out to the structure in question. I took care of it, thankfully without spectators, but it was a bad moment in the annals of Shannon’s bathroom memories. I promise never to bring it up again.

At ten-thirty the same morning, I received a shot in my rear-end that promised to kill my nausea, and from 11am until 10pm, I slept like a baby. I woke up in regular intervals for the rest of the night and watched my temperature flutter between 100.5 and 101.2 degrees. Sort of like a fickle FM radio, but much more uncomfortable. I finally drifted off to sleep near dawn, strangely looking forward to getting out of bed in a few short hours. It couldn’t have anything to do with having spent more than twenty of the past twenty-four hours on my back, on my very box-spring-free mat on the floor.

Thurs October 18, 2007

Today was so strange. First of all, I woke up and felt no immediate urge to use my trusty bedside bucket. Second of all, I could see my breath on the way to pick up Kelly. No joke, it was totally and unexpectedly cold-ish this morning. It was kind of a nice relief initially; especially after the unpleasant heat waves I had been experiencing the past few days, both in and out of fevered delirium.

I was, unfortunately, so busy being relieved that I decided to roll out of the house with no jacket to speak of, and a light skirt and short-sleeved shirt as my only textile companions for the day. By three in the afternoon, I found myself convinced that the temperature dropping to below sixty degrees Fahrenheit was surely a sign of an impending apocalypse. While walking home in the cold rain at 6 pm, I thought I would seriously lose some bodily appendage to frostbite if I was exposed for another second. I have become a cold weather wimp in the course of a little more than two weeks in this country. For shame Shannon, shaaaame.

In other exciting news, I was given free cucumbers by a neighbor boy on the last stretch of my walk home, and I even remembered to thank him in Turkmen while still keeping my peripheral vision open for incoming rocks. I tried to take a bath tonight, but my family informed me that devout Muslims (and their host-children) don’t bathe on Thursdays. With that, my four-day-no-bathing-streak jumped to five days. I am so gross. I spent the evening wallowing in American television (aka Sex and the City DVDs) to keep my mind off of my building stench. It was fabulous.

Fri October 19, 2007

Today was our second trip to Ashgabat for more shots. I actually didn’t spend too much time on the internet. There were 11 of us who really wanted to use it, and the connection at the Peace Corps office, although lightening speed for Turkmenistan, is still fairly slow, and I felt bad spending more than a few minutes on it while others were waiting.

Today was also my first day of significant clinic activity. Up until now, our technical training has consisted mostly of Lex and myself spending a lot of quality time in our clinic’s conference room looking up useful Turkmen medical phrases in our dictionaries such as “your breath stinks” and my personal favorite, “please don’t put that in your mouth.”

Today we showed up at the clinic at 8:30 in the morning (no small feat when you have to fit in hair, makeup, chorek, cookies, four cups of tea, and a bathroom trip before work). We got to ride along with our doctors as they made house calls to our local citizens in need, and we got to observe one of the doctors as she consulted a few patients who came into the clinic. I’d be lying if I said that I understood the bulk of Turkmen that was being exchanged during these events, however the invaluable part of the day was having the opportunity to experience Turkmen medical culture firsthand. What a difference from American medicine. A really big difference. HIPPA would have a heart attack.

People are pretty comfortable here with the idea of leaving the door open while you medically consult. The door open, and two extra Americans in the room didn’t seem to be much of a stretch in their vision of propriety. People are so willing to immediately welcome you into this personal part of their lives, it doesn’t even enter their minds to tell you they would rather be alone with the doctor. The two home visits we did were for super different reasons, one was a baby with a cold that wouldn’t go away, and one was for a middle-aged man whose kidney stones were so bad he couldn’t even move. Both visits resulted in shots (Turkmen prefer needle medicines over pills, they feel like they’re more effective).

Tonight I took my longest and most luxurious bucket bath to date. I figured that whole business of not bathing from Sunday night, until Friday night, sort of entitled me to a little extra banya time. I used three whole buckets, all fairly warm, and(!) I shaved my legs! It was as close as I could get to heaven crawling onto my mat bed tonight with a warm blanket, clean hair, and smooth legs. Pure. Turkmen. Bliss.

Sat October 20, 2007

Today we went to the big bazaar in Ashgabat for the second time. The first time we went, it was sort of amateur hour for us Americans. We went in the middle of the day, which is the busiest time for the market, on a Sunday, which is the busiest day for the market, and none of us knew exactly what we doing, or how to get anywhere to get anything accomplished. Needless to say, we spent a lot more money than we should have, and had very little to show for it. The good news was, we learned exactly how NOT to have a successful day of bazaar action.

This time, we were ready for some serious combat shopping. We left Dan at home because let’s be real, boys just aren’t usually very motivated to look through twenty four fabric stands before they settle on the perfect pattern for their skirt. Secondly, we four girls (plus Maya) decided to go on Saturday since the bazaar tends to be a little less busy that day. For the pièce de résistance, we actually got up early on said Saturday and were at the bazaar by the wee hour of 8 am.

With the recently colder weather (sixty five is cold, right?), we were all shocked to be able to see our breath while going through the first stalls. Maybe there really will be a winter in Turkmenistan. Doubtful, but looking more possible.

My biggest excitemet at the bazaar came from a scarf purchase. I had wandered down a side aisle by myself and to my delight, I found a stand that was selling Pakistani scarves. On a side note, they are absolutely beautiful, and you are all getting one for Christmas, but most importantly, I BARGAINED FOR ONE IN TURKMEN! It was my first negotiation since I had been in country and even though it was only a seventy-five cent discount, I walked away from there on a total high, with a super pretty scarf. Yay for me!

I bought some more pretty fabric, ate some exciting meaty-sandwhich thing, and then the unimaginable happened, I got lost. I was so freaked out, one minute I knew exactly where all of the girls were, then I got distracted by a skinned goat’s head, and the next thing I knew, I had no idea where anybody was. It was like being a little kid in the grocery store, except I didn’t even posses enough language skills to do anything besides ask people if they had seen Americans. It was a bad feeling.

After about 10 minutes of feeling a little nauseous, and staying in pretty much the same place I had last seen them, I finally spotted my girls looking for me. I was so happy to see them. It was almost as good as the cheap scarf feeling. Almost.

I went home and had some fabulous preserved apricots, apples, and pears. I really like the preserved fruit here. Probably because it’s mainly sugar. My family grows all of the fruits in our yard, then they can it themselves and it’s really tasty. Too bad I’m pretty sure that that makes it lose all of its nutritional value…. Oh well.

I spent the evening playing “checkers” (and I use the term loosely) with my sister Mahrie and my brother Mohammet. They use a checkers board, but chess pieces and they basically move the pieces like you would move checkers, but every now and then they throw in a few chess-like moves with certain pieces. I kinda think they were making up some rules as they went, but it was entertaining to watch, so I didn’t say anything.

Who am I to tell Turkmen how to play checkers when I still can’t form complete sentences?

Sun October 21, 2007

We decided to celebrate our American-ness today. Carrie had the extraordinary foresight to bring cayenne pepper and chilli powder with her, so yesterday at the bazaar we bought ingredients to make vegetarian chilli today. It was awesome. We didn’t add any oil to it, and added lots of spice. My taste buds hardly knew what to do with themselves. After our super awesome lunch (that included freshly baked choreck!), we watched The Devil Wears Prada (in English!) and pretended to be home for just a few hours. It was a nice little escape from reality.

Before I was allowed to attend American day, I had to participate in the Turkmen ritual of house cleaning. They do your normal dusting, dish washing, and laundering, but then there’s an extra step for added fun and excitement: carpet sweeping! I’m not joking, I have seen a vacuum cleaner in our house, so I don’t understand why we use this broom that has a handle less than two feet long. You literally have to bend in half and move back and forth in tiny rows across the huge carpets that cover all of the floors in our house. I was so sore from being hunched over, that I almost bailed on American day in favor of laying down with some aspirin. I will never again complain about having to vacuum at home.

Mon October 22, 2007

Today we started what the Peace Corps calls ECAs. I think that might stand for extra curricular activities, but basically its like day camp for the Turkmen kids in our village. They have a few days off from school, and we were supposed to give them something to do in the mornings. This sounds like it would be pretty low-key, I mean how hard can it really be to entertain a bunch of kids for four hours?

I will never again utter that last statement. After running out of planned activities after only three hours had passed, I found myself obligated to play freeze tag for the remaining hour of our time today. Turkmen kids are merciless when it comes to freeze tag, and I seriously thought I was going to fall down dead when it was finally time for them to go home. I still have to do this for another two days?

Fortunately, I think my host-family sensed my delicate state and made me the best dinner ever. We each had our OWN plate, and there were actually four different things on each plate! It was super exciting! We had mashed potatoes, cooked barley, sautéed tomatoes and onions, and this really finely diced meat that was also fried with onions. It was so good, and none of it was swimming in grease. I fell asleep a very happy human being.

Tues October 23, 2007

Round two of ECAs went surprisingly better. After staying up for the majority of last night drawing a huge batch of bingo boards (they don’t do photocopying in our village), I felt more than prepared to kill time without the assistance of freeze tag. The kids had a really good time, and more showed up today than had come yesterday. I was shocked to see that a lot of our boys brought friends with them. I was convinced after yesterday that they weren’t going to come back at all. I guess sometimes kids surprise you.

All of them were really well behaved, and I actually left the ECA today (almost) wishing that we had longer than three days to spend with these kids. It’s funny how fast they start to grow on you, and here I thought I didn’t deal well with children all these years. Maybe there’s something in the water here.

After going home and taking a mostly-fabulous bucket bath, I was surprised to find my family ushering me towards their car. I guess they had plans for guesting that they had failed to mention to me, so I simply jumped in and hoped for the really good cookies at our final (and still unknown) destination.

It turned out that my host mom’s brother (my host-uncle?) and his family really wanted to meet the new American, and I was more than happy to oblige. They had a house full of daughters and they were all so sweet and so cute, I seriously could have stayed visiting forever. (This also could have something to do with the fact that they did indeed have the “good cookies”)

The best part was as I was getting ready to leave their house. A couple of the daughters came running up to me with a plastic shopping bag full of something in their hands. I assumed it was something I was supposed to bring home to my host-mom, so I took it, thanked them, and got in the car. It was only once I was home that I realized they had given me a present! (Don’t worry, this was confirmed by my sisters, I wasn’t stealing something that really was supposed to go to my host mom).

They had given me a big new flannel sheet with flowers on it, and as ordinary as that may sound, it was one of the cooler things they could have possibly given me. I have been getting cold at night in my little mat-bed, and this sheet was exactly what I needed to add a little extra heat. Not to mention it was incredibly soft. Yay for random Turkmen presents! I fell asleep clean, warm, and full of expensive cookies. I don’t think life can get much better.

Weds October 24, 2007

The last day of ECAs was bitter-sweet. On one hand I genuinely enjoyed spending time with the kids, and it was sort of a releif to be judged soley on the basis of how well you can do the hokey-pokey and play blob-tag. On the other hand, I was getting to the point where my feet were in serious danger of going on strike from the rest of my body. I never knew you could get blisters on top of blisters. Yowch.

It was Kelly’s host sister’s birthday today. It was the same sister who is working on making my dress, and on the way home from school, I felt it was only appropriate to drop in and wish her a happy birthday. Fortunately (for me) there was a big pot of Palaw and an even bigger birthday cake waiting there when I arrived. Turkmen are notorious for forcing their guests to eat, so I was more than happy to oblige as Kelly’s host mom started in with her familiar cry of “iyt, iyt!” (it actually sounds just like eat, eat when they say it, crazy, huh?) the cake totally rocked, and I don’t think there is really any doubts as to my feelings about the palaw. That stuff is just too dang tasty.

All in all, it was definitely the best birthday party I have been to since I have been in Turkmenistan (never mind that it is the only one I have been to so far). You’ve gotta love any reason to bust out a cake.

Fri October 26, 2007

Today involved some well-deserved heartburn on my part. I was feeling especially lonely for American culture, so to cheer myself up, I walked to the “dukan” (kinda like a 7-11 for Turkmen) with Lex and bought an especially tasty looking bag of peanut M&Ms. In addition to the candy, we bought two different kinds of cookies, something that looked like a Russian Twinkie, and also a bag of potato chips.

After munching our way through this particularly heinous concoction of processed carbohydrates, something neither of us had eaten in quite a few weeks, we realized things might be looking a little grim for our digestive tracts. Both of us spent the afternoon experiencing phenomenal stomachaches that (for once) had absolutely nothing to do with the microbial contents of Turkmenistan’s water. Oops.

I came home tonight and found to my delight that Kelly’s sister had finished my dress. Even better, it still fit me after my afternoon of binge eating! Life is lookin pretty good right about now.

The dress is absolutely gorgeous, and I promise to post pics of me in it as soon as I can. Yay for Kelly’s sister!

--Sorry guys, I ran out of time to post the rest of this month’s blogs. I really do have one for every day though, so I promise to put the rest up next Sunday! Enjoy for now, and look forward to hearing all about how I got to seen a super bloody leg injury, drink beer on Halloween, and go to “Disneyland” twice in one weekend! (Please try to contain your jealousy!)

So I guess they weren’t kidding…

2007-10-12T04:28:00.000-08:00

I am so excited to get my rabies shot today!! We have to come in to Ashgabat to get our shots, and that means that I get internet time in the Peace Corps office for ten minutes, yippee skipee!

Turkmenistan is a-maaaaazing. I have done so many things that I didn’t even think possible of myself. This is hands-down the coolest and most challenging experience ever. I even went to services at the metjit (mosque) by our house a couple of nights this week. It was about the time that I was kneeling down in prayer along with hundreds of other women that I realized this is the real deal. I am really in the Peace Corps and it kind of makes my head spin with how intense that is. As a disclaimer, I miss and love all of you soooo much, but I am trying to avoid making reference to it, because that only makes it worse. The best cure for homesickness around here is to just ignore it. The less we acknowledge it, the easier it is to keep going.

So to update…. I am now living in a village that is approximately 15 minutes outside of Ashgabat. Herrikgala has about 12,000 human residents and around 20,000 residents of the barnyard variety. My host family is composed of a mom (eje), a dad (kaka), 3 brothers, 3 sisters, a sister in law, and 2 grandbabies. No animals, but there are cows, goats, and camels that live near us. We live in a compound that has a big gate around it and a couple of different buildings inside of it. The main house is where I live, and my bedroom is really big.

I was shocked to walk in my huge room and see only carpets from wall to wall, along with a wardrobe and a dressing table. No bed. Anywhere. Oh surprise, they sleep on these roll-up mat things, not beds. Seriously, they’re maybe an inch and a half thick. How I missed that memo is beyond me, but after a week of sleeping sans-mattress, I think I am finally beginning to get used to it.

We have 5 volunteers that live in our village. There are 4 girls (Carrie, Kelly, Lex, and me) and 1 guy (Dan). We all go to language school with our teacher Maya. Maya is like superwoman. She’s 18 years old, and is not only responsible for teaching us Turkmen, but also for babysitting all 5 of us twenty-somethings constantly. She basically rocks.

There were a lot of things I heard about serving in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan.

I heard that there weren’t any toilet seats, only a hole in the ground with a little shack around it. I heard that you had to squat while going to the bathroom, like for the whole time. I heard that there wasn’t any toilet paper, only magazine pages. I also heard that you had to have a flashlight to go to the bathroom any time after dark, otherwise you might accidentally pee on your shoes. I assumed that it was all a half-truth, like some sort of urban myth about how “real volunteers” operate. I was wrong. It’s all completely accurate. I will leave the details to your imagination for the time being.

I heard that they drink a lot of tea. By “a lot” I figured they meant maybe 2 teatimes a day. Um no. Try maybe 5 or 6 teatimes a day. Each teatime typically finds my glass being refilled upwards of 6 times. I want you to imagine how strong my thighs are after a week of constant tea drinking, with squat toilets. I am going to have the most incredibly muscular legs by the end of 27 months.

I also heard that our host families wouldn’t speak any English. Yeah sure, whatever you say Peace Corps. No English probably meant the parents don’t speak English, but the kids would have to, right? I mean, who doesn’t speak English? Wrong again. The only people in Herrikgala who speak English with me are the other Peace Corps volunteers and our teacher Maya. Seriously, that is it.

I have never realized how entirely possible it is to function without any common language. The first day I got to my host family’s house, I was so nervous about this whole communication thing. Literally, I knew maybe ten words in Turkmen, and all of those revolved around how old I was, where I was from, and the fact that I was a volunteer. No knowledge of “I’m hungry”, “I’m tired”, or “I’m totally freaked out and want to go home”.

I realized after about an hour of politely drinking my fifth cup of tea that there were very few important concepts that could not be conveyed with a variety of noises, motions, and pointing in my Turkmen-English dictionary. Don’t get me wrong, I will not be discussing the problems of the world or my life’s goals with them any time soon, but I think we’ve got a basic understanding going, and now that I know the words for apple, and tomato, I really think we are going to have a long and happy three months together.

I have to go, but enjoy the pictures and look forward to next time’s installment entitled “Dogs, Bucket-baths, and other things I don’t like very much….”

Hi-ho Hi-ho, it's off to T-stan I go....

2007-09-29T23:02:00.000-08:00

So I made it to Washington D.C. in one piece.... barely. I cannot beleive how hard it is to keep your stupid baggage under the 100 lb restriction. Most of the time in America, a large group of girls complaining about being "over weight" typically occupies the beginning of some Lifetime original movie about eating disorders. Here, it's just another reality as we all try to decide what not to pack in our suitcases to avoid paying the notorious "heavy baggage" penalty fees. I was only trying to bring 27 sticks of deoderant, I don't see what the big problem was.....

I love it here at training, it's amazing to finally be meeting all of the people I am going to be on this adventure with. There are 38 people in our group. The youngest person is 22 years old, and the oldest is 29, so we are all right around the same age, and it seems like that does a lot to bond all of us. Everyone is going through a lot of the same issues and emotions right now, so it makes it incredibly comforting to know that I am not the only one feeling like this. I know it's a silly thing to be excited about, but there are a bunch of girls in our group who are tall!!! There is one girl who is slightly taller that I am, and a few others who are right around my height. I love it! A group of 8 of us ladies went out to dinner tonight and had an awesome time. It's going to be so much fun to spend the next 27 months with these people.

In orientation today, we taked a lot about the Peace Corps mission and about how to successfully encourage develpment in the communities we are going to. It really hit me while we were sitting there.... this is a really big deal. What an honor to be invited into a community of people who want to welcome you into their culture and learn all about yours. I feel this huge responsibility to be a good person. I'm just hoping that I can live up to the reputation Peace Corps has established. Hopefully a smile and 2 well-functioning ears will get me far...

We have orientation all day tomorrow and then dinner tomorrow night with a group of returned volunteers from Turkmenistan, it should be really neat to meet them and to be able to ask them some quesitons about their experiences. I am so impressed with the caliber of people in this program. Everyone is incredibly friendly and outgoing, and on top of that, they are all smart and very dedicated. It makes me feel honored to know that I was accepted to be in this group when I see the other amazing people who have been selected for it.

I leave for Frankfurt from Washington on Monday afternoon, and then we fly into Ashgabat after an 8 hour layover in Germany. I think we're going to try to do some quickie sight-seeing in Frankfurt, but we'll see how everything works out..... I guess they told us not to anticipate having internet access for the first month or so that we are in Turkmenistan, so don't work about a lack of communication, I promise I will be glued to the computer for an update as soon as possible. And if things go really well, I might even get some pictures up..... keep your fingers crossed. (And thank you Jordan for my really nice camera to take pictures with!!)

I love you all and cannot thank everyone enough for the well-wishes! Keep me in your prayers and I will keep you in mine!

I Wasn't Really Hungry For That....

2007-08-22T01:28:00.000-08:00

I just got back from McDonald's. God bless all night fast-food establishments. I had fries even though I didn't really want (or need) them. It's just that I wanted something in my mouth while I made a list of all of the crap I still have to do before I leave for Turkmenistan. It's scary, this notion of packing up my whole life. It's either going into boxes to be stored for the next 2 plus years or into gigantic duffel bags, to be lugged halfway across the world.

When I finished the list, I kind of thought I might see the fries come back up. It was really big. I still have to do everything from buying two years worth of contact solution, to figuring out how to charge my computer on a completely different electrical system. I think sometimes I work myself up too much, but in this case I am fairly certain that a healthy dose of stress is probably the only way I am going to get out of Alaska on time and with everything I need.

I guess the only way to get rid of a list is to take care of everything on it. Item number one: figure out how to post blogs. Done and done. Excellent.