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.)
