Long Time, No Blog

I’ve decided on a new system of blogging, where instead of waiting for inspiration to hit me for a REALLY GOOD entry, I’m just going to collect a handful of interesting things per month and throw them together into one mashup, and then post all the entries whenever I get the chance.  Somehow, right now this goes as far back as September.

The first entry, however, really happened in August, but since nothing else interesting occurred then (except for my family trip to Europe) I’m simply going to lump it in with September.

For a while, we had been hearing rumors that the president was going to come to Serdar.  I think the earliest he was supposed to come was in March.  Then it was May, maybe.  He had to come sometime, though.  Ever since I arrived in Serdar there was this fenced off area in the middle of downtown, and in order for it to open, the president’s visit was necessary.

Finally, on August 22^nd, he did.  Casey and I weren’t entirely sure if we’d be allowed to go, because we’d hear that foreigners were discouraged from attending events involving the president.  (I’m not actually sure where we got this notion from.)  But if there was any chance of our being able to see the president in person, we were going to do it.

As it turned out, I wasn’t able to sleep in my own house that night because some of my host mother’s brother’s colleagues were staying the night at our apartment.  Since we would have to get up pretty early in order to be in place for the President’s visit in the morning, Casey and I decided that was best for me to sleep over at his house.  We would wake up early (6, I think, or 6:30), have a quick breakfast, and then head into the center of town, although we didn’t exactly know where the gathering was going to be.

What we really SHOULD have done, though we had decided against it the night before, was to go to Casey’s school and spend the night there.  His students (and mine, although I wasn’t going to spend the night in Janahyr) were going to be camping out along the highway heading itno town, forming a human corridor to welcome the President.  But August was still pretty hot and I guess we weren’t Peace Corps enough to want to wake up at 4 am (That’s how early the kids and teachers were being bused out to their spot in the human corridor) and then wait for the President to come for hours.  We chose to take the slightly less adventurous rote of waking up a few hours later.

If we hadn’t, I bet this would be a more exciting entry.  I could tell you about the sense of togetherness that probably comes out of waiting with a group of people for hours at the side of the road, waiting for an exciting event to happen.  (Although given that the group was mostly made up of sleepy school children, who knows?)  Instead, I get to tell you about walking from Casey’s house towards the new part of town, because we figured that if he would be anywhere, he would be near the new buildings that he was supposed to open.

Unfortunately, we left the house way too late, although it was only 7:15.  We got ALMOST to the new section of town, when we were turned aback by someone running security.  Not that easily deterred, Casey suggested that we try crossing over the railroad tracks and going around.  Since the security guard had already herded us in that direction, it seemed like a good plan.

But we were foiled in that too, a few minutes later, when another security guard at the tracks turned us back.  We actually contemplated making a break for it and spent about 15 minutes crouched out of sight with another guy, but in the end we were herded into the courtyard of a house – at least, it might have been a house – and were forced to wait there for about 45 minutes with its residents (who were unlucky enough to have an outhouse somewhere outside the courtyard so they weren’t able to go to it for the entire 45 minutes).  I’m not sure what thread we actually posed, but at one point we were actually instructed to wait out of sight of the crowds around a corner, even though we could hardly see THEM.  We weren’t even sure exactly when the President showed up because we were too far away, and as far as we could tell, the crowd was practicing its cheering.  Unless, of course, the president came and went about 6 or 7 times.

Finally, the President moved on to another town, and we were free to go.  As a consolation, we went to the newly opened square, where we were pleased to find fountains which were at the time still running.  (They’re not anymore, although two of them still have water in them.  The other now houses a really REALLY large fake New Years tree.)  Also, it has benches.  There aren’t usually many places to sit down outside in Turkmenistan.  Since it’s opened (and before winter came on), I’ve gone there a couple of times with a book, and people use it as a place to gather and socialize in the evening.

Thus passes what could have been something really exciting (or really devastatingly awful) and is instead something only mildly amusing.  I’ll know better next time.

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Next, something that really did happen in September.  One of the volunteers in my welayet has her birthday in September, and the weather not being devastatingly cold yet, decided she wanted to spend the day in Awaza.

Awaza is Turkmenistan’s sea-side resort, full of lots of tall white hotels (mostly empty), restaurants, and even a man-made river.  Or canal, really.  And sandy beaches, lots of sandy beaches.  The sand isn’t even half-bad either.  It’s all about a 20 minute ride out from Turkmenbashi, one of the major cities of Balkan welayet.

Casey and I arrived in Balkanabat, where the birthday girl lives, FAR too early in the morning for politeness, especially as we were staying with the aforementioned birthday girl.  Later that day, we took a minivan from Balkanabat to Turkmenbashi (about a 2 hour ride) where we met up with the volunteer who lives there, and bought lunch.

September isn’t really a peak season for Awaza, so the beach wasn’t very crowded.  Still, I think we may have offended at least a few Turkmen sensibilities when we started stripping down to our bathing suits in the gazebo by the beach that we had requisitioned for the purpose of eating lunch.  There were other people in bathing suits though, and let me tell you, it is a little weird to see Turkmen women in bathing suits, even one piece ones.  It’s a far cry from ankle length dresses.

Even though it was getting colder, I couldn’t help but swim at least a little.  I mean, I had recently been on vacation in Italy, where I had swum a bit, but come on, I’m from California!  Water is kind of irresistible.  (If you have evidence to the contrary, just remember that

I now live in the middle of a desert.)

It was freezing.  Pretty much as bad as the Pacific Ocean.  But it was fun to swim around a little and even more fun to enjoy a nice, warm drying-out period back on the sand with a book.  What with the cold water and the book and the sand and the sun, it was almost as if I was  back on Stinson Beach in California.

There was even a whole lot of wind.

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I have this family in Janahyr that I call my “not host family”.  They’re the family that I was originally supposed to live with, and I’ve kept up a pretty decent relationship with them.  I used to visit them about once a week to have tea and now I tutor one of their daughters twice a week in English.  (In a quick but touching detour, I recently received a dress from this friend.  Previously I had asked her sister-in-law to sew me a dress, so they already had my measurements.  I really only have a handful of dresses, so new ones are always welcome.  Anyway, when she gave it to me, I hugged her.  She hugged me back, and then asked me if we were friends.  She’s always been really sweet to me, but it made me really happy because I already felt as if she was my first local friend, and having her affirm it was awesome)

This family’s main occupation is in making carpets.  (The father also cleans his neighbors’ wool, as well as teaching at my school.)  The girls who have graduated do it most of the day, (the exceptions are one daughter who works in Serdar and another who is going to college in Ashgabat.) and the one daughter who is still in school now helps out when she gets home.

The Turkmen method of making carpets is like nothing I have ever seen before.  They’re not woven at all.  In fact, I’d liken them to close-shaved shag carpets.  Learning how to make a Turkmen carpet is incredibly difficult.  When I first visited this family, back when they were still my host family, I was offered the chance to help them with the carpet.  Of course, I wildly screwed up the one single piece of yarn I tried to add to the carpet.

You see, to make a Turkmen carpet (at least, the traditional way, though there are carpet-making factories too), you start with a horizontal loom.  The one my not-family has is HUGE and takes up most of their second-story room, with is not small either.  Metal pipes form the frame of the loom.  Between the two end pipes, strong string is strung, (try saying THAT five times fast) looped around each end so that it crosses itself in the middle of the loom.  This creates and upper and lower layer of string.  This string is called erş (pronounced ersh).  About halfway down the loom, there is another metal bar, which can be pulled or pushed with a rod.  One of these is called the kuji (koo-ji) and the other one is the darti, and I can never remember which is which.  I THINK the purpose of this bar is to further to compress the two layers of string.

Now that we’ve got the loom frame explained, it’s time to get to the actual making.  (I keep wanting to call it weaving, but that’s really not what it is.)  The girls used yarn (jupe, pronounced ‘yoop’) to make these carpets.  But instead of weaving the string together, they tie small pieces around the string of the loom.  They do this by inserting the yarn between the two layers of string, and wrapping it around both the upper and lower layers.

After they have completed a certain amount of carpet – I’m not sure how much, but it usually takes about fifteen minutes of finger-flashing speed – they pull another piece of string (different from the string the loom is made of, thinner and called argac, pronounced argach) between the two loom strings.  They then proceed to compress it, and the yarn, against the previously completed carpet with an implement called a darak (pronounced…well, like it looks: dah-rahk) bringing it down against the yarn violently.  The darak has these evenly spaced metal teeth, so it slides between the loom strings.  When that’s done, they cut the extra yarn off with scissors that look like scissors turned on their side.  The finger holes are still vertical, but the actual blades are horizontal.  Those are called syndy, which I believe is pronounced a lot like Cindy.  And they are a lot harder to cut with than they look like, especially when they’re not exactly brand new and therefore probably pretty dull. 

As I said, the one time I was invited to participate in Turkmen carpet making, I didn’t do such a good job.  In the first place, the yarn is way more fragile than I expected it to be.  I’m a knitter.  I knit a lot, and mess up an equal amount, so I’m used to yarn being pretty hardy stuff.  Not this yarn.  No, this yarn breaks the first time I try to tie it around the string.  And the second time.  So much for string tying.  What about darak using?  No, not much good at that either, judging by the fact that I caught thee string between two of the metal teeth and managed to break the string, which my host sisters then had to fix.  And as I mentioned, it’s pretty damn hard to cut the string to the proper length with those scissors.

So it turns out I’m pretty much a failure at Turkmen carpet making.  However, I intend to press-gang either these not-sisters of mine or my host mother into teaching me over the summer.  I probably won’t be able to make one, but at least I think I can learn not to break EVERYTHING.

Some interesting tidbits to leave you with about Turkmen carpets:

- Every Turkmen girl, according to my friend, receives a Turkmen carpet.  I’m a little fuzzy on the when and from whom (I’m guessing from her own family), and am not sure if this is a universal thing, but that’s what she tells me.

- Tying the loom strings around your head prevents headaches

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I think I may have mentioned once before that I sometimes take taxis from my hose to my school.  I called it ‘short distance hitch-hiking’ and I think I’d like to briefly return to that subject.

Now, hitch-hiking isn’t something you’re supposed to do, right?  I’ve never done it in America.  I probably never will, because I’m not that brave.  So, why do I fell so comfortable doing it in Turkmenistan?  I mean, it’s the same thing, except payment is (usually) mandatory, instead of merely the polite thing to do.

In fact, gypsy cabs are pretty much the rule in Turkmenistan.  I’m not sure how it is in other Central Asian, Soviet-influenced countries, but gypsy cabs were also a very common form of transport when I studied in Moscow for a summer.  Whenever a restaurant or club was just too far from a metro station, or we were getting out late from said club, we stood by the side of road, stuck our hands out, and waited for a helpful citizen (who wanted some quick cash) to pick us up and take us to our destination.

Of course, in Moscow there was also the possibility that a legitimate, licensed cab might also have picked us up.  Moscow does have them, being a cosmopolitan city.  Turkmenistan has no licensed cab company in the entire country.  (That I know of.  I think they’d be prohibitively expensive if they did exist.)  So the options are either to take a bus (in my village), or walk.  Or, stick out your hand.

Of course, because everyone does it, it’s a lot safer than hitch-hiking in America.  There are some precautions to take, of course.  Girls should probably not sit in the front seat, or get into a taxi with more than 2 guys, especially after dark.  Both of these are from the obvious safety reasons.  Other than that (and the somewhat suspect state of Turkmen roads, especially out in the country) the only real danger is from a speedster driver.  Then again, bus drivers have the tendency to drive just as fast, and that’s a LOT more uncomfortable.

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So, what is it like to be a Peace Corps volunteer, living in Turkmenistan, teaching at a small village school, and living in an apartment with a small host family?  I’m glad you asked, because it’s time for A Day in the Life, with your friendly neighborhood Ilana.

Unfortunately, at the time of this entry, my schedule is a lot less full than it was a few months ago.  But I want to be honest with you, and what follows is a general sense of my life as it is now.

I don’t go to work until the second shift at school these days (Turkmen schools are mostly taught in two shifts, with the younger grades going to school from 8:30 to 1:30, and the older kids from 12:45 to 5:40) because I had been doing an extracurricular English club in the morning three days a week.  Right now, in my incredibly crowded tiny little school, there is just no extra space.  So I only work in the classroom with my teachers.

Generally, I now try to wake up at 9:30 to do yoga.  It used to be that my family would wake me up to have tea with them in the morning, but my host mother wakes up WAY earlier than me now.  A couple of times, I faked being asleep when they called for me and now they’ve given up.  It’s a little bit sad, but waking up at 8 when you don’t have to be at school until 12 or 1 seems silly.  The result is that I’m on my own for breakfast now.  Which isn’t that great a loss, given that breakfast in Turkmenistan is often just bread and tea at my house.  There was a while there where I wasn’t eating anything for breakfast (I’ve never been a breakfast fan, honestly, at least not during the week day).  Now, however, I hard-boil five eggs every Sunday and have one a day, washed down with a few gulps of whatever juice I have on hand.  It could be a little bit more lush, but it does me fine.

Work is between 12 and 6, depending on what day it is.  Sometimes the day is shorter, sometimes longer.  I teach between two and four classes a day, and twice a week I tutor the young girl I mentioned in a previous entry.  (I have also JUST picked up a second student for tutoring, but we haven’t actually started lessons yet.)  In class I usually contribute about 15-20 minutes of a 45 minute lesson, always accompanied by one o0f the four English teachers at my school.  School can be kind of exhilarating but often, and usually at the same time, the most frustrating thing I have ever experienced.  Sometimes the students seem like they’re being willfully ignorant, and sometimes I know they’re trying their hardest and I’m still not getting through to them.  Weirdly, whether or not I’ve truly succeeded, as long as I’ve TAUGHT and TRIED, I always feel good about my time in the classroom.  (Except when the students are being little haywans, little (wild) animals.)  I don’t…really have a lunch period.  There are no cafes, restaurants, cafeterias or prepared food stands anywhere NEAR my school, and I don’t think a diet of soda and candy from the stores would be healthy, so I have to bring my own food.  At the very beginning of service, I tried making sandwiches, but I’m not fond of most of the cheese or meat here.  Now, I eat crackers and cheese wedges, and sometimes fruit for lunch.

Then it’s back home, where I usually unwind with an episode or two of whatever TV show I’ve got on my computer (currently completely addicted to Dexter) or a book.  I tend to do most of my reading at school, though, between classes or when I’m not actively teaching in the classroom.  Sometimes I go out and drink tea with my family before dinner, but usually I want some time to myself after work.  That’s actually not the norm in a Turkmen family – they spend very little time alone – but my family understands now and I hope they don’t think I don’t like them.

Dinner is between maybe 7 and 9 and not really my favorite meal of the day.  Turkmen used a lot of oil.  In everything.  Always.  There are some dishes that I think I would enjoy a lot were it not for the inexplicable dose of oil.  My favorite dish is now palow (rice, carrots, onions; meat, fish or raisins) which is funny because I used to hate eating more than a few spoonfuls of it.  Then again, my family when I was in training used cottonseed oil, which tastes disgusting.  Now my family uses sunflower-(seed?) oil, which is much more appetizing.  My host sister (who does most of the cooking) will sometimes make potato somsa or manty (steamed dumplings) which are delicious.  The meat kind are NOT.  Also she has this tendency to pair fried potatoes and pasta, which is way, way too starchy.  (And sometimes she fries pasta.  No.  Just no.)  Turkmen also don’t usually drink anything with their meals, something I’ve had to get used to.

After dinner, I relax with my family if they’re watching TV (we get Russian MTV, and usually one of the other Russian channels will be showing some dubbed English-language show or movie.  I’ve watched Vampire Diaries, Bones, True Blood, Merlin, Lost, Castle, Mentalist, Fringe, Project Runway, and the whole host of MTV reality shows that make me ashamed of American media), or help my host mother with her lessons.  Otherwise, I read or prepare lessons in my room.  I’m asleep by 12 or 1 in the morning.  (Well, I DO get up at 9:30, so I still get plenty of sleep.)

Also twice a week, I do my shopping at the market and check the post office for mail.  This is not a subtle plug for more letters at all.

A Plethora (Read: 3) of Entries

I promised a blog post about my adventures in a mostly furniture-less existence, so let’s make that the first new update.

The entire (furniture) inventory of my 4-room apartment is as follows: 3 large cabinet/shelf units (one for each bedroom, and one smaller one in the kitchen area, 1 sewing machine, 1 accompanying chair, 1 TV stand, and 1 former TV stand that is now my combined beside table, bookshelf and pantry.  Other volunteers have varying amounts of furniture, of course.  My sitemate has a bed and a desk (and a piano, but I guess that isn’t really furniture).  As I type this, I’m sort of curled up on my floor.   Pretty much every action in my house takes place on the floor.  We eat on the floor, we sleep on the floor, we curl up (on the floor) in front of the TV.  In training, it was a little different, because I had a bed, and in that family, they used a very low table at dinner.  We still sat on the floor, of course, but at least our food wasn’t right on the ground.  In the kitchen, we also have a square of counter between the sink (which has a working faucet, except letting water go down the drain is verboten, for reasons I’ve never actually been able to ascertain) and the stove, which is okay for small food preparation, but if you need more space than that, food preparation takes place on (all together now!) the floor.

Talking about adjusting to this change in the altitude of tasks is more difficult that I thought I was going to be, mostly because I think I’ve adjusted, so it’s hard to remember a point at which all of this floor-inhabiting was hard.  Except for one thing.  I do still recall my initial reaction to sleeping on the floor.  It’s not, of course, right on the floor.  I sleep on a mattress that’s about 1 (1 ½?) inches thick, called a dushek.  (Actually, now I sleep on a dushek AND thermarest camping mattress donated to me by my sitemate, who is fortunate enough to be sleeping in a bed.)  But still, in those first few weeks of camping out on the floor, an inch of mattress felt like nothing at all.  I swore I could feel the floor through both the mattress AND the cushy carpet, so much so that they might as well not exist at all.  I still got to sleep (and slept just fine) but it was a little bit more difficult.

Now, my cushy rug has been traded in for this big, brown thin carpet that looks like someone did home repairs or changed the oil of a car on it (I’ve had it for a few weeks, and I originally thought it was just supposed to be a temporary thing until they cleaned my rug.  Guess not?) and has no insulating value whatsoever.  The past week, I’ve been too lazy to pull out my dushek, so I just sleep on the Thermarest.   I don’t even register the hard floor below me that’s probably closer to my body than when I started sleeping on the floor 6 months ago. I’ve stated more than once that by the end of my service, I am going to be fully capable of curling up just about anywhere to fall asleep.  (I did it once a few weeks ago.  I was watching something on my computer about mid-day, and suddenly got really tired.  I rolled over, figuring I’d just shut my eyes for a few seconds and then get up and get a pillow and blanket out.  And then I woke up hours later.)  Maybe not a hardwood floor, okay, but pretty much anywhere.

The only thing I haven’t gotten used to, floor-wise, is managing to eat noodles out of soup without raining little droplets of soup everywhere.  Guess it’s time to start picking up the bowl.

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I think that I’m really learning how to finesse people, or at least starting to think less straight-forwardly about how to go about things.  It’s the end of the first half-week of my first Turkmen (working) summer, and so far it’s been pretty disappointing, to be perfectly honest.  I was so excited about summer before I started.  Working in the classroom is a totally different beast than working in smaller groups for my newly-formed clubs, and while I like working in the classroom as part of modeling techniques for the three teachers I work with, as an actual teacher it is less than satisfying because due to circumstances, it’s not easy for me to gauge how much I’m actually teaching the students.  The Turkmen textbooks don’t have too much build, so I end up jumping from one topic to another.

So I was excited for summer.  I would have my clubs, and I would be teaching English to any teachers at my school who wanted to learn, and I wasn’t planning anything grand, but it would be satisfying.  I informed my club kids of the next club day (a week later, due to their end of year tests and my mini-vacation to Mary), put up an advertisement in the teacher’s room about the lessons for teachers, and went off to have fun in Mary.

Except, I came back to a sign-up sheet that was still empty a week later (I had asked in my advertisement for teachers to sign their name if they were interested, so that I could get an idea of how many students I would have) and no club kids showing up on the first day of club.  Today, two of my 15 regular kids came to club.  As you can imagine, that stung a bit.  My students had all agreed (or at least, in my mind they had agreed) to come to club.  I knew I wasn’t going to get ALL of them to come, and I honestly didn’t really expect the younger ones to come, but my six 8th form girls?  Yeah, I expected better from them, especially this one girl named Ayzada who is smart and seemed motivated.  I came home feeling defeated.  It was like everyone was saying ‘We’re really not that interested in what you have to offer us.  It’s interesting enough when it’s convenient, but we’re not going to make the effort when it becomes more work’.  And then I thought ‘If I can’t get a group of 15 kids to come to club, how am I going to get ever get people interested in larger projects that take more effort?’  It was really disheartening, and it seemed like one of those moments where I could really imagine terminating my service early.  I’d had a couple of those moments before (“If this continues, if this behavior happens all through my service, I don’t think I’m going to make it”, which had previously been mostly about my teachers not giving me enough time to teach in class, or enough of their attention when we were lesson planning), but this was a little bit more serious.

However, every time I actually think about terminating my service, about going back to America early, it just doesn’t seem like a viable course.  I know I COULD do it, if things got really bad or I just didn’t think I was making a difference, but the idea of not finishing service when it took so long to get in is (almost) unthinkable.  So I had my self-pitying little moment, pampered myself with little treats (which IS my coping mechanism almost entirely), and then sat down to think about how I could rectify the situation.

My plan is this: making this personal.  Reaching out to people instead of waiting for them to come to me.  For the teachers, I plan to try to talk to everyone that  I feel comfortable talking to, and asking them if they plan on coming to lessons.  If they say they’re not, then I intend to ask them (in a lighthearted manner) why not.  Basically, I plan on bullying them into coming, but in the nicest way possible.  With my students, I’ve decided to give up on the younger kids for this summer, but getting the remaining four girls out of six to come back to club sounds like a decent goal.  My plan is to find out where they all live, and go visit each one personally to find out why she isn’t coming to club.  My guess is that most of the girls either just don’t feel like coming (in which case a light dose of badgering will come in handy) or their parents have given them chores which prevent them from coming (in which case I plan to present an argument as to the usefulness of English in getting into university and getting a good job).  Tracking all the girls down is going to be the hard part, but I figure between my counterpart, and the two girls who DID show up to club, I’ll manage to find them all.

ETA: At the end of the month now, this plan of attack didn’t work entirely.  I HAVE started teaching my teachers, but a couple weeks later than I’d hoped.  As for the girls and the club, that didn’t go off at all.  The next club day, no one showed up at all.  I learned from one of the girls who had come the day before that the other girl had gone to a celebration, and that the first girl was embarrassed to come to club alone.  Neither of them have shown up again, but I’ve since moved on, and will hopefully have a new set of students to teach in July, as rounded up by my counterpart.  It’s all about adjusting.

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It’s somewhat humbling when you find yourself getting a lesson in cultural acclimation in the pages of a well-known young adult fantasy book.

I was rereading Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy again for the first time in a while, and on  page 114 of The Subtle Knife, I found this paragraph: “Looking for something she could do, Mary went to the net-makers and offered to help.  When she saw how they worked, not on their own but two by two, working their trunks together to tie the knot, she realized why they’d been so astonished by her hands, because of course she could tie knots on her own.  At first she felt this gave her an advantage – she needed no one else – and then she realized how it cut her off from the others.  Perhaps all human beings were like that.  And from that time on, she used one hand to knot the fibers, sharing the task with a female zalif who had become her particular friend, fingers and trunk moving in and out together.”  Mary, for those who have not read the books in a while, or at all, is a human who finds a portal from our world into another world, where she encounters these people (who happen to look something like small elephants, and have a diamond-shaped skeleton structure, and ride around on wheel-pods, but that’s all sort of beside the point), and spends time with them, learning their language and observing them and slowly learning how to fit in.

What it brought home to me, living in a completely different culture, and doing my own language learning and observing and trying to learn how to fit in, is that I don’t think I’m doing a good enough job on the last one.  It’s not that I don’t WANT to fit in.  I know that I have to, and I want to, because feeling as if you’re an outsider in the place that you live for two whole years is TOUGH.  The thing I honestly think is getting in my way is my Americaness.

I don’t even mean my outward Americaness.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to look Turkmen.  At best, I pull off Russian, but I’ve been here long enough that most people already know me as the American.  It’s not entirely a bad thing, because then I get to have conversations about America, and fulfill Goal 2 of Peace Corps, which is to teach host country nationals about my home.  What I mean is my inward Americaness, that part of me that has been brought up believing that being independent is a really good thing, and that having alone time every day is a necessity, and that doing things because you enjoy them is something that you have every right to do (and I’m talking about harmless little things here, obviously).

That’s not what Turkmen culture is, though.  Turkmen culture is about helping people out and being part of the group and spending time with people and fitting in.  Eastern vs. Western culture, basically.  And it’s really hard for someone coming from Western culture to adapt to that, especially if part of you still believes that the way that you do things is…better.

It was hard for me to type that last word, and I winced while doing it.  Because I’m pretty sure that when I first got here, cultural sensitivity or no, I kind of thought of my American independentness as not just a good thing in its own right, but a better thing.  And even months and months into service, there were still things that I was doing that showed that I wasn’t completely willing to integrate into Turkmen culture.  They were little things, but I think they were really symbolic of that unwillingness.  In Turkmenistan, EVERY woman wears her hair up, all the time, at least in my small town.  (Russians are sometimes the exception).  For a while, my hair was too short to do anything with, but for the past two months, it had been long enough to put up.   I just didn’t LIKE it like that, so I left it down.  It got blown around in the wind, and I ended up coming to work every day with my hair doing crazy things.  I combed it with my fingers before class, but I still was presenting myself to my co-workers like that.

Another thing that I was doing that no other Turkmen around me does was using a small, long-strap-over-the-shoulder (I bet there’s an actual fashion word for that kind of bag) purse instead of a handbag.  When I actually needed to carry a bunch of things, I used a tote bag AND my purse.  I am positive that I was the only woman in Serdar walking around like that.  But I kept wearing my hair down and my purse+tote combo because…well, because they were they way I liked to do things.  My purse was a present from my mom, and my hair REALLY didn’t look good up in a ponytail.  It wasn’t harming anyone, right?

In the long run, it probably hasn’t done my image that much damage anyway.  But after reading that, and seeing Mary recognize that maybe this “advantage” of being alone and sticking out might not be all the advantage that she thought it was, I considered these little things I was insisting on doing that made me noticeably separate from the people around me.  And I decided to make small changes.  So now, although it isn’t a pleather handbag, I carry all my stuff around in my tote bag.  And I toyed around with my hairstyle, and found that I don’t mind it so much if I pull SOME of my hair back in a ponytail, but leave the rest of it down.  (I immediately got complimented on that the first time I stopped by my favorite shop, and got told that I looked like a Turkmen.  Which I find hard to believe, but it just goes to show you.  Now, I just need to work on the suggestion that the shop girl made, and remember to start wearing earrings.)

The Basics of Life

Long time, no write!  I realize that 5 months into my great Turkmen adventure is a little late to be really starting my blog, but unfortunately, circumstances took their toll.  Somehow, I didn’t manage to write a post in the two months of training when I had weekly access to the internet, and then shortly after I got to my permanent site (which doesn’t have anything remotely resembling an internet café) the phone service I had been using declined to renew their contract with the Turkmen government, which effectively cut off my access to the World Wide Web.  But better than late than never.

I’ve been a Peace Corps Volunteer for just over 3 months now, and things are going pretty well.  I live in the Balkan welayet (one of Turkmenistan’s 5 regions, the others being Ahal, Mary, Lebap and Dashoguz).  It’s the region closest to the Caspian Sea, although honestly I live closer to the capital than the big sea-side town.  My work site is the village of Jan Ahyr (or Janahyr, depending on what sign you’re looking at), just a 5 minute bus or taxi ride from the town of Serdar, which is incidentally the district center.  Of course, that doesn’t really mean too much, except that it has an open air market and a lot more shops (and some restaurants).  Although the school where I work is located in Jan Ahyr, I live in Serdar, and take a very retro bus to work every day (or catch a ‘gypsy cab’, which is basically short distant hitch-hiking that you pay two manat for.  It sounds a lot more sketchy than it is, but I do at least 4 or 5 times a week).

I’m currently living with a very nice English teacher, Dunya, and her 17 year old daughter, Gulruh.  Living in a household with an English teacher does have its ups and downs.  On the one hand, if I need to speak English, I’m generally understood – and I do need to speak English, because while my Turkmen is functional, it still doesn’t have the capacity to express complicated ideas.  On the other hand, speaking English then becomes so easy, and I’m not always strong enough to express myself in Turkmen, even when I have the ability.  But life is generally pretty good.  I live in an apartment building, which is a huge change from the house that I lived in for my first 2 months of training, before becoming a volunteer.  In the apartment, we have running water, a flush toilet, and a combination bathtub/shower.  In my previous accommodation, I had an outhouse, a bathtub that didn’t actually have a faucet but WAS permanently filled to the brim with water from a hose (and absolutely no RUNNING water), and a small plastic tub from which I poured ladlefuls of water over my head.  Culture shock indeed!

I think currently the best part about living in Turkmenistan is my host sister.  She’s an absolute delight, despite her love of Twilight (I still maintain she’s mostly just seduced by Robert Pattinson).  She’s always laughing and playing around.  Once, when I asked her about all the joking, she answered that she just really likes to smile.  She wants to be an airline stewardess, which I really hope she achieves, because I think it would be wonderful for her to be able to travel.  We bonded incredibly quickly, in fact.  One of the first days in my new home, we were sitting in the main room of the apartment, watching TV, when the power went out.  I dug out my high-power reading light, and we kept talking, and intermittently begging the lights to come back on.  Jokingly, I raised my hands upwards and said ‘Let there be light!’  Gulruh quickly adopted the phrase after I explained it to her, and lo and behold, a few minutes later, just after she had said it, the lights came back on!  We laughed, and she grinningly proclaimed that she was God.

My workplace is school #10, in Jan Ahyr (although there are nowhere near 9 other schools in the town.  I’m not even sure there’s another one, although once when I was in a cab heading to work, the driver started driving the wrong way once we got to town, and explained that he thought I meant the ‘new’ school, as I apparently work at the ‘old’ school.).  It’s a fairly small school, with 500 kids and 51 teachers.  Only three of those are English teachers, and as I teach 4 different grades (4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th, the 7^th graders being way too rowdy for me), I work with all of them.  Officially, my counterpart is an older woman named Arzygul, but I also work with two other women named Gulbahar and Shasoltan.  School is simultaneously rewarding and very frustrating, often in the same day.  My one big struggle just now is getting all the kids in all my classes to raise their hands quietly.  As of now, they practically chant ‘teacher’ while coming out of their seats, even standing up.  I think I’ll be completely pleased with myself if I can get them not to do that in my classes by the end of two years.  And of course, there are the students that just don’t care about English – or care more about having THE AMERICAN teaching them than they do about the lesson – but that’s something you’ll find world-wide.  And just like in America, there are students that already have shown me that they’re very motivated to learn English, like a boy named Matym in my 5^th grade class (who is, incidentally, the son of Shasoltan).

Well, that’s about it for the generalities of life in Turkmenistan.  Unfortunately, I only really get to blog about once every few months, but I promise that the next one will have a lot more scintillating details.  Stay tuned for stories about a life almost entirely devoid of furniture!

And we're (almost) off!

True to form, both my blog and my first post in it have been created in the wee hours of the morning, the day before I leave.

It's hard to believe that in only 12 hours, I'll be on the plane headed for Washington D.C, the jumping off point for my glorious new adventure to Turkmenistan, to serve for 27 months in the Peace Corps.  I've mostly been a ball of nerves up until now, but now that all the frantic packing is done, my bags are still under the weight limit (I hope!), and I'm all ready to go, I think I'm feeling a lot better.  I can't wait to meet everyone, and even though I know it's going to be difficult and frustrating at times, I'm also excited beyond words (or not QUITE beyond, but almost) for the ways in which I will be challenged and grow and experiance all the things I never would had I stayed behind in California or Boston.

But before I sign off to get some well-needed rest, the answer to my blog's title!:

Also, feel free to mail me letters and/or things at this address:
US Peace Corps/Turkmenistan
P.O. Box 258, Krugozor
Central Post Office
Ashgabat, 744000
Ilana Soorenko
TURKMENISTAN