Seasons Abroad....

A Pumpkin Like Any Other


Well, the gauntlet of the American Holiday season has officially kicked off, starting with Halloween. The students are off from classes for 11 days, for fall break, so I decided to throw a Halloween party to break up the monotony a little bit, and because the time is quickly coming when I will be winging my way back home. Just last week my advanced students completed their first round of the competitive FLEX exams (the US State Department program that provides study abroad scholarships for Central Asian students) Five of mine passed to the second round, which I was proud of, as last year only two of my 10th graders made it in. To celebrate, I organized a Halloween party at my resource center, and invited Russ, my fellow PCV who lives in the village over from me, to bring his students into town to celebrate with us. Three of Russ’s kids also made it past the second round, which for a village school is a huge accomplishment. As luck would have it, a few days ago I was cleaning out my resource center in preparation for leaving, and I stumbled upon a huge box of unopened Halloween decorations and party favors that had been sent by a previous volunteer and never used. I went a little crazy and hung up plastic skeletons, and ghost streamers EVERYWHERE, bought a crap load of candy at the market, and baked cookies like there was no tomorrow. One of my 8th graders, who is also my neighbor, I made a journey to the Bazaar to hunt for pumpkins for 25 kids, which was an adventure in itself.
In America, pumpkins are basically used for decorative purposes. We stack them on porches or stuff them in cornucopias, and hollow them out for Jack o’ Lanterns, but other than showing the holiday spirit, they really have no other utilitarian purpose. Here however, they are one of the main staples of the Turkmen diet. The main type of pumpkin that can be found most everywhere are long oblong pumpkin-squashes, which are shaped more like thin eggplants, or those blow up toys you can punch and they pop back up again (don’t ask…) and are, I might add, ridiculously scrumptious. Sometimes they are so sweet, a plain steamed pumpkin might taste like someone has slow cooked it in brown sugar for a day. De-lish. Mainly, the pumpkins are steamed, or fried with onions and stuffed into baked somsas or steamed dumplings (which is by far my favorite Turkmen dish I have eaten here). For the last few Autumns I have waited in anticipation for when the pumpkins finally come into season, because I know that it means we get to eat Kady Manty (pumpkin dumplings) for a few months before winter sets in, and we are back to onion and goat meat. As crazy as it sounds, it’s one of the reasons that fall is my favorite season here. This particular Bazaar trip though, I wasn’t in search of a nice tasty orange squash for Manty: I was hunting for little deformed orange balls that would most closely resemble an American Jack o Lantern. After combing the bazaar, my student I managed to find a few sellers who had an assortment of deformed pumpkins that would suffice. After insisting several times that I only wanted the “’kichi-jek togoluk kadys’ (little round pumpkins), I got a good selection to choose from. We went from stall to stall and picked through truck beds full of hundreds of green and orange pumpkins to find the roundest, orangest ones they had, which seemed to amuse all of the sellers-as nobody picks pumpkins here by look-only by how thick the meat it, or how big the pumpkin is, and for sure nobody wants the scrawny under-grown ones. I ran into a woman I knew who explained to one little old lady seller that I was a foreign teacher and we often did strange things like this. That explanation seemed to appease her for the time being, and she forked over her round pumpkins. In a little under an hour, we managed to fill an entire car full of pumpkins, and a taxi driver hauled me, my student, and our pumpkins to my office in his old Russian Lada, where 20 some odd teenagers touting knives and wooden spoons were waiting to unload our bounty outside my office. We caused quite a stir, as nobody could quite figure why the hell we were hauling in scrawny little deformed pumpkins by the cartful into the Education Building on a Sunday afternoon, when everyone was supposed to be hanging out at home washing their laundry.
The party lasted a few hours, and was one of the best times I have had with my kids in a while. As my service is sweeping to a close in less than two weeks, I have been looking back on the last two years and trying to summarize up my service, over which I feel somewhat conflicted. Every volunteer has different accomplishments and experiences throughout their service, although the basic idea of Peace Corps is to do grass roots development projects executed in a sustainable manner. In Turkmenistan, one of our main goals has been to try and work with teachers and execute methodology training. This is meant to be a sustainable method for continuing to improve teaching quality and education effectiveness on a wide level to the population. However, what most volunteers have discovered is that the organization of the school system and the strict regulation of access to resources makes these changes a constant uphill battle, which is enough to make even the most diligent volunteer want to pull their hair out. Personally, though I have tried to do a far amount of methodology training, overall I don’t really see any change in the teachers or our classrooms since I have come to the school. So in this sense, I guess I have failed. But the work that I have instead found to be the most rewarding is working outside of school with my club kids. Though it may not be work on the level that we were trained towards, it is what has kept me going for the last two years, and I hope the impact that I have made on these 30 some kids will be sustainable, if on a different level. As hubris as it may sound, I hope that the memories that they have accumulated and the experiences they have had with me will somehow impact how they change as adults, and in turn impact the lives of the people around them as they grow older. I never really saw myself being a mother-hen type to a pack of rowdy teenagers, but I will honestly say as the day approaches when I am going to have to say goodbye to them all for good, I get more and more emotional about it. I have seen so many of them grow and change over the last two years, and it just hit me today, as I lined all them up together outside my office to take a group picture, that THIS, not the governments’ promise of sweeping global change, or the promise of adventure, or some propaganda pamphlet, was why I gave up two years of my life to fly halfway around the world. So, you ask, was it worth it?

In all honesty, Hell yes.

More pics

Pictures of some of my kids at the center, some co-workers and I in our resource center, and my counterpart with her new grandaughter at the pishme toy (baby shower).

September Blog

And, That’s Curtains Kids!!
Sept and Oct, 2010


Well, I have been completely horrendous over the last four months about updating this blog. Partly, it had to do with the fact that most of the internet places in T-stan have now censored many information sharing websites and to add to that, both my computer charger and my backup computer charger decided to fry out on me, and so I have been virtually computer-less for the last few months. Instead I have been fervently using the internet connection on my little Turkmen cell phone, though I am unable to download or upload anything (like a blog...ha) Luckily, a departing comrade who happened to have the same computer as me loaned me her charger on the promise that I pass it on to another volunteer within the month, so I am taking advantage of this small window and using it as much as I can before the times up. So I will recap, in brief, the last few months of my life here in ‘the distant sands’:

The Summer

The summer, as summers generally seem to do, flew by way to quickly. There were both ups and downs, some great times, and some moments that I literally wanted to throw in the towel and call it quits on the whole game and pack my bags for home. Some of my triumphs were seeing some of my students pass their entrance exams to study at foreign universities in Byelorussia, and Kazakhstan. Also it was amazing to see the progress that some of my intermediate students have made since last summer. Some of them have gone from barely speaking a word to chattering like little English-speaking monkeys!! I had some heartbreaking moments as well, like when one of my prize pupils who was selected for a study abroad program was told she couldn’t go on the day she was supposed to leave, because she was 5 months too young. She was 1 out of only 7 students chosen from the entire country of T-stan, and then on the morning her flight was leaving to Washington DC, she was told to pack up and go back home. It was upsetting to see her dreams (try 10 years of studying English for the opportunity to go to abroad) dashed just because of a stupid clerical error. Also in June, one of my closest friends I have made here, who was a fellow English teacher, was killed in a car accident along with her little sister on their way home from her sisters college graduation. Many of my close students were pupils of her, and it was heartbreaking to have to give them the news, as many had known her since they were little, and then go with my co-workers to visit her family, as it expected in Turkmen tradition to do on the 7th day, the 10th day, and the 40th day after a persons death. It was yet another reminder of how fragile life is, and how important it is to make the most out of the time we have. Because even though Jahan was only 27, she was well known throughout the entire community young and old, and it was amazing to see how many peoples lives she had affected in her short time as a teacher, and how much respect she had gained from so many of the teachers and students. She was one of the most active teachers in Tejen, and it is hard to imagine going back to school without her being there. It’s weird sometimes just how much empty space a single person can leave behind them. You don’t even realize it until after they are gone.

Keeping busy, however, is always a good salve for the soul, so for the remainder of the summer, I hunkered down into my summer clubs, rotating about 5 different groups throughout the week, and opening up some new classes. I opened up a Spanish Club, which I had been wanting to do for a while now, and I enjoyed teaching it almost more than my English Clubs! I hadn’t realized just how rusty my Spanish chops had gotten, so it was nice to begin practicing again, and crack open my grammar book to refresh myself. I opened up an elementary English Club, and had my hands full teaching a bunch of rowdy 5th graders (though half of the time was spent keeping my Turkmen kids, Russian and Uzbek kids from killing each other (I had almost forgotten about all the racial issues that exist here outside the little Turkmen bubble that I live in). So most of June, July and August I was pretty much AWAL from the PCV community, avoiding most of the volunteer social gatherings in the regions and in the capital in lui of trying to get some work done before my vacation, and also because I wasn’t in the greatest place emotionally. Nobody ever wants to be the Eore of the group.

Also, recently in the last few months, I welcomed a new volunteer to Tejen. Her name is Karla, and she is an older woman from Oregon, who is assigned to the Tejen Hospital to work as a Health Volunteer. She is extremely energetic and exited about her new home, and I was amazed to find out that we had more in common than we realized. It turns out that she used to live in Whitefish, and summer in Glacier Park!! She was part of the Glacier Mountaineering Society, and even knows some of the same people as I do!! Once again, it’s funny to realize that sometimes the world isn’t as big as you think it is. So as she began to settle into her work schedule and figure her way around Tejen, my sitemate Russ and I, along with another volunteer friend of ours, decided to use the last of our vacation days to take a trip to Cambodia towards the end of summer, so mid August I once again bid my students and my host family adieu, packed my trusty backpack, and along with Russ and Collin, hightailed it for the airport. The boys and I spent about 2 1/2 weeks gallivanting around Cambodia, checking out temples, eating our weight in Seafood BBQ and Cambodian beer, meeting new and interesting people, and haggling in the markets, spending all our well-saved travel money (I put pictures up on my facebook page for anyone who’s curious). After we had run out of both money and clean clothes, the three of us dragged ourselves back to Ashgabat just in time to hop on another plane to go to our last conference as volunteers: our Close of Service Conference!!


The Beginning of the End: Conference

Most of the volunteers, myself included, were marking the weeks-months even- to this particular conference, as it is the last milestone that we have in our service. Officially, it marked the completion of our service as volunteers, and from that point on, we were to begin our transition away from our host communities back into the “real world”. It was surreal sitting around the table with all these people, who 2 years ago were nothing more than 43 strangers to me, and realizing how much I am going to miss all of them, and miss being a part of the little community that we have all created over the last couple of years. Two of our fellow volunteers recently got engaged, so we had a celebratory engagement party-Volunteer style-with a duel vodka-pong tournament and an appropriately themed ‘future’ costume party, to end our service with a bang. It was both a really good time, and a little sad, because it was weird to think that it was the last time I will probably see a lot of them (and/or nurse hangovers with them) ever again. Although who knows, life is funny sometimes, you never know what the future holds. We received our exit dates, and I was placed in the third group, slotted to leave my work site the second week of November.

To wrap up the conference, we had a Cultural Olympiad, which basically consisted of the five regions competing in relay events that focused on the “important skills” we have learned during our service, such as “Turkmen Cola Chugging” ,“Toilet Squatting” ,“Chiggit (sunflower seed) Speed Eating”, “Manat Currency Conversions”, and “Turkmen Party Toasts”. I was appointed the currency conversion competitor for my region (Which was a stupid mistake on their part-they were doomed as soon as they gave me the pen. In high school, I was the girl who COPIED off the delinquents in my math classes. Needless to say, we did NOT win that event). All in all, it was good end to a mind blowing two years, and it was the last little push needed as we began the sprint to the end, and now can start thinking about life beyond the next school semester/harvest season. Though the thought of having to pay for car insurance, rent, utilities, a phone plan, and health coverage without a job is already enough to give me night sweats. In some ways, being a poor government volunteer is great, as we don’t have to think about any of that nonsense that exists out there in the ‘real world’. So, as the last few months funnel down to the end, I will begin the dreaded gauntlet of bag-packing-goodbye-party-hand-shaking craziness.

The Final Semester; Work and Farewells

Our Last semester is now coming to a close. At the end of October, work for most of us ends, as a 11 day Fall holiday/ Independence day break from school begins and immediately following it, many of us will begin migrating to the capital to finish the last of our paperwork, evaluations, and meetings which allow us to tie our two years of service into a nice little bow. For most of us, it is the lull when we can begin ‘cutting the apron’ strings from our students, and begin to transition our coworkers into continuing our work without us. I’m already dreading the day I have to say goodbye to my kids, as I have become really attached to a lot of them, and I can already tell I will be an emotional spaz when the time comes to bid them the final farewell. After 2 years of working with them everyday, helping them with their problems, and encouraging them through their failures and triumphs, a lot of them feel a little like my like my own kids (though as I am only 11 years older than most of them, logistically this is definitely NOT the case).

Also, throughout October, for us T-17 volunteers it was a bit of a roller coaster. Every 12 months, pcvs must re-apply to the T-stan government for work visas, and this year we lost our Peace Corps securities director, so consequently the process didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated as the staff was so overworked. We were given temporary extensions at the last minute, and were told we might be immediately evacuated if the paperwork wasn’t approved because they were submitted too late, and it was only this week, three weeks after our previous visas expired, that we were granted permanent visas until December. Which doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in this post-Soviet system where documentation and protocol is followed before anything else, and any little slip up will land you a one-way ticket to who knows where. But in the end no harm was caused, except for a few more gray hairs on the staff’s part, a lot of document shuffling and taxi rides, and lots of phone calls to appease frantic migration officers and disgruntled school directors. Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on lesson plans when you’re not sure if you will deported within the next few days. In the end we get to stay a total of…. wait for it….four more weeks! All that stress for a few more weeks. Sheesh.

Besides all that nonsense, these last few weeks, I have begun preparing a lot of my students for (my last!! Ahh!!) Olympiad and the FLEX test, which I should hopefully be here for before I leave Tejen. If some of my girls pass the FLEX exam, they might be in America in the same hemisphere as me next year! THAT would be a trip. They have been working their tails off, and so I’m crossing my fingers that, for at least a few of them, their hard work will be rewarded with this amazing experience. Besides that, I am preparing two final seminars to train the new Volunteers that arrived in October. We got a fresh new group in at the beginning of the month, although a lot of us were holding our breaths after the disaster of Oct 2009 (where the new volunteers got stopped at the airport, and nobody made it over) But they made it in, our program wasn’t shut down (which would have been the case had they not come) and they are now in the whirlwind of PST training in Ashgabat, learning the language and receiving technical training for the next 2 years. It’s weird to think that was me 2 years ago. Crazy how time flies... So in November I and a fellow pcv will be presenting on “Teacher Training Seminars” and “Teaching Advanced Students”, which should hopefully be interesting and helpful to them as they begin their own services (well, at least I think so…says the inner nerd in me…).
So all that remains will be a few last work parties (including a big Halloween bash for my kids!) and packing my room. It’s amazing how much stuff I have accumulated in 2 years. I am crossing my fingers in hopes that I finish everything in time, and that all my crap is going to fit back into my bloody suitcase. It is, how you say, curtains baby. It’s been a crazy two years. Until soon, as now it’s America or Bust! Peace.

Some Summer Pics

Here are some snapshots from over the summer. The first two are from our Fourth of July celebration at the American Embassy in the capital (the theme was national parks. p.s Glacier was NOT represented!) Then another picture of a Turkmen wedding I went to with a friend, then a picture from laundry day at our house that I thought was cute, and also a picture of me and the boys from our Cambodia trip.

Ignorance is Bliss

Ignorance is Bliss
June 5th

A common topic of conversation between volunteers is the good and bad sides about being able to understand the local language. As 2 years closes in on us, most of us have gotten to the point where we are generally comfortable with speaking our new tongue. We can chat on the bus, barter at the market, and argue with the neighbor women about the best treatment for a cold. Although our grammar may be far from perfect, and mix-ups are still a pretty normal occurrence (I ironically continue to mispronounce the verb ‘to get married’ with ‘to die,’ per one example), and for most of us the linguistic hurdles are far fewer than they were a year ago. However, it has been brought up in conversations between us that there are also downfalls of understanding most of what’s happening around us, and as one of my fellow volunteers recently put it “sometimes it’s just honestly better for your sanity to be blissfully ignorant of what’s going on.” This usually pertains to moments when the conversation concerns the wedding plans of a various relative for about the BAJILLIONTH time and you feel like your head is about to explode, or when your host aunt is complaining YET AGAIN about the effect the wind is having on her arthritis and blood pressure, and you really just wish she would shut up already. Moments like these often bring back the teary-eyed days of nostalgia when, as new volunteers arriving to a party, we would sit and be blissfully ignorant for the next few hours, tuning out to our rice palov and only taking our cue to leave when we would notice the shift towards the door, and thus guestimat that the gathering was wrapping up.
I was thinking about these moments the other day while babysitting my host siblings. They quickly tired of the television and playing with an assortment of cups that I had laid out for them, and so decided to fall back on their old favorite pastime: using my body as their personal jungle gym while I tried to read a book/ write a letter. Most of the time I generally tune out their constant babbling unless it pertains to either immediate danger or tears, or if of their toes accidentally ends up lodged in my ears while they climb over me. But during this particular instance, as my host 5 yr old host brother practiced somersaulting across my knees and my host sister demonstrated her capability of wrapping an entire braid of hair around my ears, it was a little harder to tune them out. Their kindergarten chatter gradually turned to what they would do if their mother didn’t come home that evening, and somehow my sweet little siblings came to the morbid conclusion that they were going to go Donor Party on me, and feed on my carcass to survive.
“I suppose we could eat pretty much everything except her bones”. Malik concluded, poking at my arm. My host sister agreed, then added, pulling on my braid,
“I guess, but what will we do with her hair?”
“We could sell it at the Bazaar! I bet we’d make a lot of money!”
“Yeah, or we could give it to grandma. She’s always saying she wants more hair anyway. And it would be really fashionable” Malik concurred, and added.
“Ok. But, I don’t want to eat her skin. What will we do with that?” My little host sister thought about that for a minute.
“Mom always peels the potatoes before she cooks them, so we’d probably have to peel her too.”
“Really?!? Oh man, that’s a lot of work!” As I lay there on the couch beneath a mound of squirming children, the Salman Rushdie book in my hands temporarily forgotten, I begin to wonder where this conversation might be leading. But just then, my host brother found a particular flexible position by doing an upside-down backward bend over my tops of my knees, and my host sister screeched at him,
“Holy cow Malik, you look JUST like a monkey!!!”
"No, I don’t! Don’t lie!”
“Yes you do! Do you want a banana, Monkey? Here monkey boy, take the ban-naaaa-naaaa!” This was followed by one of those high pitched screeches you generally hear from spoiled kids while being dragged from the toy aisle at Wal-Mart, and thus the next fifteen minutes consisted of them arguing over his resemblance to Curious George, and insulting and taunting each other with various animal names and offers of fruit. The conversation concerning cannibalism was thus abandoned, leaving me perplexed and thinking, “Man those were the good old days when I couldn’t understand anything.” Which leads to me conclude, it’s not called ignorant bliss for nothing.


An Update of Summer
June 15th

With just a few weeks in, I’m already having a more interesting summer than I have had the last few months of school-where I was basically on autopilot-zombie-mode until the last bell rang. After our All-volunteer conference in the capital, which was a well-needed break for everyone and a good chance to catch up with people that I haven’t seen in months, I went back to my work site to gear up for some extra curricular craziness. As my assigned school is a bit of a slacker, and I really didn’t feel like pulling teeth to organize another camp, I agreed to help the Russian school with a health camp.
Our funding however, fell through at the last minute, so we decided to do just a regular English camp-this year with a Space theme. We planned a five-day camp, and it worked out pretty nicely, with about 25 students, and 2 assistant students. Lots of arts and crafts like paper machete, pop up cards, and solar system mobiles. I had a good time, got to stretch my creative muscles cutting about a billion pieces of construction paper for the kids, managed to get coated in paper machete, and had fun dumping a bunch of squirmy kids in water-all in all good times. Then the following week turned more serious- a five day long teacher conference; organized, written and presented by yours truly. Although I have already presented at numerous seminars over the last year or so, a five day long program was pretty daunting, and left me frantically pouring over all my teacher training materials into the wee hours of the morning to scrape up enough material to teach them that wouldn’t bore them to death. Luckily a few teachers helped out giving short presentations so I was able to write a pretty decent lesson plan of themes we could cover over the course of the week. All in all, it was pretty successful, and I enjoyed working with all the teachers-and I even learned some new techniques and ideas myself from some of the other women! So with that finished, and the center and my time freer, I’ve added some new summer classes to my schedule (including a TEOFL prep class and a Spanish class! Whoop!) and I am ready to cruise until July-when our Fourth of July party (as well as the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps) will be held at the embassy. And everyone knows what that means: Imported wine and an open bar. Let the summer
madness begin!

Documenting the Slow and Eventual Death of my Beloved Mother Tongue

Documenting the Slow and Eventual Death of my Beloved Mother Tongue
April 15th, 2010

It’s inevitable, when you live abroad long enough, that the way you speak tends to change. In addition to getting accustomed to speaking like a five-year old in your new language, you must also- as an Language teacher- learn how to speak your own language using grammar and vocabulary at levels that your co-workers and students will understand. And as most students have the grammatical understanding equivalent of 7 year olds-this results in that between the two languages you end up having the linguistic flexibility of a oversized toddler, complete with bad pronunciation (just think of David Sedaris “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, SO true Sally). And as all the textbooks here use British grammar, and people don’t understand a lot of American idioms or vocabulary, I often find myself saying things like “Yes, Aman is a clever pupil, he should go in for football.” or “Why, what lovely trousers you have today Begench!”, without a single trace of irony.

The only real chance for us to speak English with other native speakers occurs when volunteers get together on weekends in the cities, or during conferences in the capital. However, this can be anywhere from once a week, to once a month, or even longer for the more hermitic amongst our ranks. When the latter occurs, and a lot of time has passed without seeing another English Speaking person, what usually results is what one fellow volunteer here diplomatically titled (pardon the vulgarity) “explosive verbal diarrhea”. Even the most private of volunteers might find themselves rattling on and on about the most mundane or personal things, which can range from expressing our deepest darkest fears about the future to a person we haven’t seen in 6 months and who just happens to be sitting in front of us, to launching into a detailed hour-long monologue of the latest gross thing our Turkmen host brother did with a cow head (oblivious to whether or not the story is actually even remotely interesting to anybody besides ourselves). And because of our superior understanding of English, we find ourselves talking at breakneck speeds with the patience of drunken sailors so that a simple sentence might go something like this, and be completed in about 2.5 seconds flat:
“Imean,comeonit’slike,didshereallyexpectmetoeatthatIjustsawherpourlike,ahalfabottleofoilinthere,seriously!TherewasnowayinHellIwasgoingtoswallowthat.”

Previously, there had been a running competition amongst pcv’s to see which volunteer would crack most under the pressure and say the most outrageous things, which would be published in the volunteer newsletter. After some pretty hilarious results though, this competition gradually petered out, perhaps because it has been realized that each and every one of us have reached our moments of verbal desperation at some point or another during the last year and a half (mine was last summer when after nearly 2 months of not seeing another volunteer, I managed a nearly 30 minute monologue about my deeply violent feelings towards “The Mosquito”. Let it be known that EVERYBODY has his or her breaking point).
Added to the hilarity of us speaking like Ritilin-deprived drunken Sailors, over the last year and a half, most volunteers have all acquired certain vocabulary words from the Turkmen language that have become ingrained into our way of life, and thus do not need any translating in casual conversations amongst each other, but which would baffle anyone who didn’t have at least a general grasp of both languages (much like Spanglish, as it were). A typical conversation between two volunteers might consist of something like this:

“Hey Dave, gowumi?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Ehh, boljak. Yesterday my eje decided she wanted to go to our gonshy’s toyy, but my gelneje didn’t want to go because
everybody says he’s like a Narcoman, but we went anyway, and then I got sick cause the chorba had some serious yag in it. But I’m ok now. What’s new with you?”

“Not too much, we’re doing some remont at our school, so my bashlyk wants to close some classes for a month. So my kids don’t have anywhere to meet for clubs.”

“Bummer, can you meet somewhere else?”

“Ehh, bolonok. They only have permission for the school, because there was some problem with the Hakimlik before.”

“Bah!? That’s just samsak.”

“I know man, seriously. Give me a break already!”

Speed this conversation up, and toss in some Russian terminology conjugated with one of the five regional dialects, and you might have a dialogue that even the most hardened linguist would find difficult to crack. I have often thought the army should consider employing ex-volunteers to write military code. The era of Navaho is over my friends-try cracking a partially Russian-Uzbek-Turkmen-English code. THAT will keep you busy for a few days.

It wasn’t until I went to Nepal, where English speakers are a dime a dozen in the cities, due to the proximity to India, and also as a result of the tourism trade, that I realized how pathetic my control of the mother tongue’ has gotten. This occurred when someone asked me what my native language was WHILE I was speaking English to them, thinking that I was a Eastern European on vacation and English was my second language (Kia dear, you will understand that one). And imagine his surprise when I told him I was an ENGLISH teacher. Hah. THAT was a fun conversation.
So, as the months pass here, I continue to fear the slow and eventual death of my Beloved Mother Tongue, and I can only hope that in the time that remains here, it will not completely disintegrate into useless babble. And if that is the case- to be as dramatic as I possibly can- then perhaps I may consider a life in silent religious contemplation, or a career as a professional mime. We’ll see how it goes.

Nepal Photos

In the land of the Buddha...

In the Land of the Buddha,

One perk of joining the Peace Corps is not only to be able to work overseas, but also the possibility of border hopping in lands unknown during the time abroad. As most of the countries where volunteers serve border numerous other countries, it is fairly easy to obtain a visa, cross the border, and do a bit of cheap sightseeing during breaks from school, or when work is slow. For every month of service overseas, we accrue two vacation days to do with as we want, and most of us here hoard our days and lump them into two or three short vacations throughout the two years of service. Even though living overseas might seem like adventure enough, the truth is that after a few months, the daily grind here becomes just as tedious as anywhere else in the world, and it’s not long before most of us are staring dreamily at our maps on the walls in the anticipation of a little excitement. So this March, faced with an entire week of no classes due to spring break, I decided to plan my escape. The destination of choice? Nepal.
Let me say this: I was not meant to be a flatlander. I was raised romping around in hills and am not happy on a flat plane- a year and a half in this deserty place has confirmed this fact. So, fueled by Mountain Wonderlust and stories of friends and family who had visited Nepal before, a few weeks ago I dusted off my backpack and set off towards the airport. As luck would have it, there were some family friends of my uncles who were from the capital and were kind enough to put me up for a few days and get me pointed in the right direction.
I arrived in Kathmandu, tired after a night spent on an airplane, but pumped to start exploring. After filling me with some delicious Nepalese food, my Nepalese friends oriented me a bit around the capital and then set me in the right direction to do some exploring of my own. I visited some of the oldest Buddhist temples in the country, worked my way through the cultural maze that is Dubar Square, and climbed to the tops of the Stuppas to take in the views of the city. It just so happened that the day that I arrived the elderly Prime Minister passed away, and within a day, the entire city turned into a giant procession, with literally thousands of people lining the streets to watch as his family took his body to the river for the burial rites. We watched as they drove past the apartment, then later on TV that night, watched as his family and the elders preformed the lat rites and set his body on fire on the banks of the river. Even though I studied Buddhism a bit at UM, and am generally familiar with Buddhist and Hindu burial practices, I have to admit that for me it felt a bit morbid to see them set fire to him, and watch as he burned to a crisp surrounded by thousands of people. In comparison, western burials are so sterile; besides the viewing, you generally never see the body-it’s comfortably encased by several thousand dollars of wood, metal, and silk for most, if not all, of the ceremony. And even if families choose to cremate their loved ones, it is done in the privacy of a funeral home or crematory, and presented later to the loved ones. So it was quite an experience to watch a dead body burn on live television.
After a few days in the capital, the noise and dirt did me in, and I said goodbye to my Nepalese hosts and took off for what I had really come to see: Some Mountains. Because of my limited time, I decided to forego the Himalayas and instead went west, towards The Annapurna Mountain range, a less famous, but equally as stunning range that runs throughout Nepal. I took an 8 hour bus trip from Kathmandu to the city of Pokhara, stopping off halfway though the valley to take a newly built cable car to a popular temple built on a the top of a mountain, where Hindu families go to sacrifice goats for yearly pilgrimages. At first I was confused at the number of goats people were bringing up with them, and the mysterious lack of goats returning back down the mountain. It wasn’t until I saw everyone hauling large bloody sacks onto the cable cars with us as we went back down that I realized where the goats had gone!
I arrived in Pokhara (a complete haven for hippie trekkers) towards the evening, found a hostel, and began getting things in order for a short trek. I rented the basic equipment, bought a trekking permit, and arranged for a guide. The next day at dawn my guide (a young woman who works for an all female trekking company, for rural gender development) and I set off, and we begin making our way up in the foothills of the Annapurnas on the ABC trek (Annapurna Base Camp). For the next four days we wound our way though small villages, tea house settlements and lush terraced hills, over rivers, up ridges, and down through deep valleys. Nepal was one of my first times I have ever traveled solo, and it was an amazing experience. The trekking routes are like entire communities in themselves-all the guides and porters know each other, as well as the locals who run the teahouses, and within a day or so you begin to see familiar faces and meet up with other trekkers. At the end of every day, everyone gathers around the teahouses, eats piles of rice and Dal Bhat and swaps stories until the lights switch off and the hillside towns go dark. Although even up the hills, technology is never far away. At one point on our decent back to the valley, we were walking past a small group of hill women on the trail, all in traditional garb, barefoot, and hauling overloaded straw baskets attached with straps across their foreheads. Just when I was thinking how neat it was to be in such a simplistic and rustic place, miles away from any cars, trains, planes or technology, I heard a strange beeping noise, and one of the old ladies pulled a cell phone from a fold in her tunic and started chatting away on the trail!
We finished the trek, and I went back to Pokhara with some new friends to get a hot shower and stretch out my sore feet before leaving for the capital. The next day I caught a small plane back to the Kathmandu to start the journey back to Ashgabat. I made it to the airport in time, but due to bad weather our flight was canceled from Delhi. To make a long story short, I couldn’t get a connecting flight, and so after a day and a half at the airport offices, I had to transfer airports, apply for an emergency travel visa through India, and sweet talk my way onto a plane back to Ashgabat without a ticket. It took about 4 days, but I finally made it, a few days later than expected and with my nerves a little worse for wear. And despite the complications of the last few days, this trip only reinforced that I want to return to Nepal for a longer time to do it justice. But for now, the memory of cool mountain nights should be able to sustain me through most of the hot Turkmen summer, and in the meantime, it’s back to the grind once again. So, until the next adventure.
Peace

A Trip Northland
January 25th

So, on an up-note we just finished winter semester. I had planned to travel out of country, but at the last minute it fell through, so instead I stayed home for the break. I relaxed, read some books, had a few lazy mornings, and celebrated New Years and X-mas with my host family. The next day I went to the capital to meet up with a few other PCV friends who decided not to travel out of country, and then we traveled north to stay at another volunteers place. It was good to get out of our towns, as we were all going a bit stir crazy, and so the break was well needed. The other volunteers’ family was interesting, the host father is a Wildlife Biologist-a pretty rare profession in this country, and actually used to work for the WWF. After exploring the town and meeting some of our friends’ Turkmen buddies, her host father took us up into the hills to where he and his brother keep their horses. He is a real animal lover, and though his income is small and work is scarce, he still puts aside money to keep his horses-even buying feed for them (which in the winter costs $2 a day-extremely expensive for Turkmen standards) just because he loves them. Attitudes towards animals here are so different from western ideas, and it has been a while since I have seen anyone showing genuine affection towards an animal. To put it in perspective, it’s kind of like finding a dolphin in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. I can’t count the number of dead cats and dogs I have crossed on the way to work here in the past year, and so to meet someone who actually likes animals was kind of like a breath of fresh air. He let us ride the horses for a bit, and we watched him and his son feed and brush them. It reminded me of being a kid again, messing around with my dad and ‘lil brother’ Lindsey with our own horses out behind our house. As the sun set behind the mountains, the horses began to settle in for the night, putting their backs up against the night winter wind, and so the six of us all piled in the old jeep to drive back towards town. And as we drove past the old Soviet army tanks and training barracks silhouetted against the mountains that cross over to Iran, I couldn’t help thinking that it’s funny how the most random moments here remind me of home, and how they can somehow manage to put things on an even tilt again, and make it worth it.


The Seasons of Work and Home
January 20th, 2010



So it has been a while since wrote one of these, but life has continued to march on, and it seemed like every time I sat down to write, I could come up with nothing interesting to say. We have slipped full on into winter, and thanks to a generous leaving volunteer who gifted me her winter coat, I have been surviving this school semester in our unheated classrooms in relative comfort and warmth. The last two months has been a whirlwind of checking off dates in preparation for test exams for my advanced students. Last month several of my students wrote their first two rounds of FLEX exams, which is a program that chooses 60 kids from T-Stan to send to an American High School for a year. Last year I had two students go, and this year I am crossing my fingers that I will have at least three of my girls pass it. We prepped dialogues and TEOFL material for weeks, and almost all of my students made it to the second round. So now they will wait until next month, when they will hear the results for the third round and travel to the capital for interviews. I am crossing my fingers like it’s no ones business.
Besides the Flex exam, this month has been the Scholastic Olympiad, where kids from all schools compete in subjects like Russian, English, Math, and Chemistry. It was tough, because I was prepping half a dozen kids, all knowing they would be competing against each other. Added to this, I was on the English Judging committee, and had to determine all their placements for the final round. Teachers are super-competitive here, and many of them try to cheat on the final results so that their students get the best placements. Many are my co-workers, as well as my friends, and so it was difficult to try to be as fair as I could and at the same time watch that none of them tried to change or alter the results. If their students didn’t get the marks or places that they thought they deserved, they would start fighting and yelling at each other, or try to trick me into changing them. Some of it made me very angry, and needless to say I was more than happy when it was over, and relieved that I would not be around for next years Olympiad.
Well, in terms of home life, for the last year I have wrestled with the idea of trying to get my own apartment, even though getting all the government permissions seemed daunting, if not almost impossible. Like most Americans, I have over time settled into my independent routine of doing what I wanted when I wanted, and suddenly having to live in a family setting was frustrating. As my host siblings are young, and my host mother often works, many times I found myself having to cook for the family and watch the kids. My host parents family got it in their heads that I was going to be an English tutor for the whole family (a common problem for TEFL volunteers here), but after working a 9-6 everyday at school, I wasn’t to keen on coming home and teaching more lessons. The idea of being a substitute housewife and live in free-tutor didn’t really settle that well, and it led to quite a few scenes of frustration on both sides. With living with a family, I must say that it has further cemented my belief that I am not ready for the whole family scene-I am still way too attached to my carefree lifestyle (sorry mom, you’re gonna have to wait a few more years on that one…) But over the last year I have become gradually closer with both my host parents and my little ‘siblings’, we have made our compromises, and so I made the decision to stay with them until my contract is finished next year. Although it’s not always smooth sailing, we have all become really close, and I have no doubt that I will keep in contact with them for as many years as I am able after I leave here. And for now I will just dream of the day when I will have a place all my own….with running water and a washing machine J

End of November...

A Bittersweet November
November 26th, 2009

Literally, before my eyes, November has come and gone. And what a month it has been, Jeeze. My site mate deserted me, I aged YET another year (I am now 21, if anybody was wondering), and winter had come roaring in with a vengeance. It has been a bittersweet month, both some really good times, and some sad ones. Due to unforeseen circumstances, no new volunteers have come to join our ranks here in this sandy patch of the world, and with the previous Volunteers contracts being up, well it’s like they say in show business: curtains baby. This month begins their departures, and by the end of December, they will all be gone on to continue their lives elsewhere. It’s also a running joke here that Peace Corps Turkmenistan is a lot like being in Harry Potter Movie, as we are all divided into the five regions (Ahal, Mary, Dashoguz, Lebop, and Balkan) and have thus been given nicknames (my region is the Slitherin house, for any of you Harry Potter peops out there...still don’t know why) We see the volunteers in our respective regions most often, as we spend holiday and birthday events with one another, share work duties such as workshops and camps, and tend to travel in packs sharing taxi rides, planes or trains. So over time our ‘region buddies’ have started to become like family. And as December closes in, it has started to hit us that our family is going to get a lot smaller very soon.
Recently, all the Ahal Volunteers gathered in the capital to commemorate their last days among our ranks, and because it was the last time most of us would see each other, we decided to throw together a early thanksgiving day feast. As we went round the table giving thanks before eating our piles of delicious grub, it was resoundingly apparent from everybody how much of an impact that we have had on each other in just this short amount of time. A year ago, when we were sitting in our training rooms in Philadelphia, filling out the last of our paperwork before we boarded the plane, one of our trainers said to us. “Look around you guys. All these people are strangers now, but in ten years they will be the people coming to your weddings, and holding your babies, or sitting around the table with your families.” A lot of us laughed and were like “Ok, dude, cut down on the cheese factor a little, why don’t ya…” But to a certain degree, he was right. We have all come from vastly different walks of life as far as Americans go, but looking at my comrades around the table on our last day of celebration before they left and listening to everybody’s heartfelt speeches, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘It’s good to be around family’. I can only imagine what another year will bring. And ignoring the dangerously high rating on the cheese-o-meter, on my part, I’m thankful for family, whatever form or shape that it comes in. So, with that said, I wish everybody a Happy Thanksgiving. And to Dan’s mom, remind him to write me. He will be missed. 

Go to Hell

Go to Hell!
October 29th, 2009

Fellow PCV: “So, are we still going to Hell this weekend?”
ME: “I don’t know, it might be really cold”
PCV: “Dude, even if we froze, I would still go.”
ME: “Alright, Hell it is then. But pack extra socks.”

Yeah, this snippet of conversation might seem a bit odd. Actually, what we were talking about was the Crater of Darveza, known locally as the Pit of Hell. To backtrack, a while ago some fellow volunteers has told us about a place they had heard of that was this huge burning pit literally in the middle of the desert. To reach it, you had to go north into the center of Gara Gun desert, drive off the main road a while through the sand dunes with a 4 x 4, and then camp out at the site overnight. There was no cell phone coverage, no town within a several hundred-kilometer radius, and no marked road to show where you needed to go. For a normal person this might sound like more trouble than it’s worth. For a bunch of entertainment and adventure-starved volunteers, it sounded like GOLD. And rumor had it there was a group of Russians who rented out SUV’s and for a dime or two, would take curious travelers out there to check it out. So it was then that on fall break a group of fellow volunteers and I, faced with a week of free classes, escaped our work sites, piled into SUV’s, and headed into the desert. As I hadn’t left site for nearly two months, I was more than ecstatic to be out and about. (I suffer from a bad case of zip code claustrophobia-too long in one place and I start to go a bit bonkers. Ecstatic might have been an understatement.) Although I have lived here for over a year now, working a six-day week and travel policies really limit how much of the country I have seen, and as my work site is a fair stretch from most of the other volunteers, my social calendar is pretty much slim to none. Thus far my experiences have been mostly around my region, and so little excursions do a lot to make life here a little bit more exciting.
Added that this week was the celebration of Turkmenistan’s independence, a few of us decided the best way to ring in another year of Independence would be to camp out under the stars next to a burning pit of gas. As 4 of our assembled group live in the south and the other 4 live in the north, we had to coordinate meeting up before hand. Being as there is no cell phone service or road marks, this process was a bit tricky. But we did know that the stop was exactly halfway between the capital city and the Northern city of Dashoguz (about half of a 6 hour trek in), so what we came up with was to leave at the same time, and the group with the SUV’s would pull over on the side of the road where the halfway point was and wait till the other half of the group arrived, roughly within the same hour. When the second group spotted our vehicles, they would stop, switch to the SUV’s, and we would all head into the dunes together. As retarded as this sounds, believe it or not it actually worked, and in the middle of nowhere almost without a hitch we managed to locate the correct lone vehicles on the side of the road, exchange rides, and head inward in search of the pit as the evening closed in on us.

The history of the pit is a bit sketchy, and there are a few different versions to how it came about, but most of the stories circle around the Russians drilling expeditions. One story goes that in the 50’s or so the Russians were drilling for natural gas like they did over most of the country, and they hit a small pocket, but concluded it wasn’t large enough to draw from. So they decided to burn it out it so that the stagnant gas wouldn’t be left exposed. Apparently there was more gas there than they bargained on, and 50 years later the pit is still burning. Another story goes that while they were drilling, one of the workers accidentally dropped his cigarette into the pit and it lit the gas on fire. There was no putting it out, and so they had no choice but to leave the deserted pit burning. Probably was kind of hard for him to find another job after that. Yet another story says that while the workers were drilling they hit an unexpected air pocket that collapsed underneath them and took the drill head with it. When the drill hit the bottom of the cave, it hit rock and sparked, and the sparks hit the gas, and ta-da, the oversized Bunsen burner was born. Whatever the real story is, it resulted in a large fiery pit about the circumference of a small football field and the depth of a three story building, that has been nicknamed by the locals the Gate of Hell, or The Pit of Hell, and is pretty damn cool when the sun goes down amid miles of stretching sand and dunes.
So we arrived around sunset, cooked some BBQ with our fearless Russian leaders Sasha and Vladimeer (our drivers, who proved true any stereotype you’ve ever read about burly Russian men), met some fellow travelers from Austria who had also managed to hear about this odd place and found their way out into the sand, and settled in to watch the sun go down and the flames burn bright with some old fashioned Russian vodka to keep us warm. It was a pretty neat evening all around, and a nice change from watching my family’s Russian Soap Operas, which make up our normal evening entertainment. And let me just say, who needs fireworks on Independence Day when you have an endless supply of blazing flames coming straight from mother earth? All in all, going to Hell was a good time. Even if it was bloody cold out there and I am still recovering feeling in my toes  In the future, I will definitely tell anyone to go to Hell. It really is quite a nice place.

Dirt and Glory

Uses and Abuses
Oct 5th, 2009

So, a while ago I wrote that I was going to start keeping a running tally of all the funny stuff that my students came up with. And though the last few months have been pretty devoid of interesting topics, the other day I stumbled upon an activity that yielded GOLD. Looking for something to teach modal verbs (can, could, must, should), I found a game in an old lesson-planning book, and after making a few alterations on the rules and explanations, I decided to try it out on my intermediate club to see what they could handle. Basically, the students had to come up with two separate lists; one of items, and one of people. After we had a manageable list, they had to mix and match the two lists and make up questions and answers using the phrases “What can a so-and-so do with a so-and-so?” or “Why does a so-and-so need a so-and-so?” Once they got the hang of it, my kids went wild. With the help of my dictionary, they slapped together some phrases that literally made me want to pee my koynek. Here’s a ‘lil sample of what a few of them came up with:

Q: “Why does a crocodile need a safety pin?”
A: “To catch fish with when he has no teeth.”

Q: “ What can a baby do with a beer?”
A: “ He can take a bath with it.”

Q: “What can Harry Potter do in a Chamber?”
A: “He can find Valdemort.”

Q: “What can a writer do with a chick?”
A: “He can write a book about the history of chickens.”

Q: “Why does a teacher need a cactus?”
A: “To punish bad students.”

And my very favorite, thought up by some of my rock stars…

Q: “What can an old woman do with a walking stick?”
A: “She can dismantle small children with it.”

After some thought, I have decided to call this game ‘Uses and Abuses’ and I think I am going to try it out it on some of my beginner classes to see what they can come up with. Anything to make my life a little more interesting…


The Dirty Thief
Oct 1, 2009

I have never thought of myself as a horribly dishonest person, and as an everyday rule I try to stay on the moral straight away. And, despite a few bumps along the way, I think I have done a generally good job. I know the basics: never do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself. Honesty is the best policy. Don’t ever covet anything of your neighbors: wife, husband, favorite gardening tools, or whatever. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and thus also results in a lot of doctor’s bills. Never kill anything with a social security number or passport. You know, all the general things we learn growing up. And although my family is not a particularly religious bunch, my parents did their best to instill upon us children the basic rights from wrongs, the moral guide-posts with which to live our lives by, so to speak. But this week, I failed that upbringing, and broke one of those cardinal rules: I stole.

To preface my actions, let me first just say that I was basically raised in a big Terrarium. My back yard growing up was- literally-a forest, and I am used to having such things like trees and grass and flowers and crawly bugs around me all the time. And although I have served my time in the Concrete Jungle and enjoyed it just fine, I still prefer to have natury-like things nearby. Which is why I have found one of the hardest things about this country is the lack of growing things. (* See my blog about the near tree-hugging incident) My host family here is not a particularly green thumbed bunch-they know HOW to garden, as pretty much everyone is this country does, and we have our small plot in the back yard where every once in a while we extract tomatoes, radishes, dill, grapes, sometimes figs, or other such small items. But mostly, we get our veggies at the store, and mostly our garden is a lot of weeds. During the school year I found I had no extra time to help with our garden what with all the classes I took on, and so my contribution to the effort was basically nil. And most host father was only interested when the power was out or there was nothing of interest on the TV. Some families here get really into their gardens, and added to this they grow these crazy Rose gardens and have latticed grape vines coming out of their ears-we’re talking garden of Eden style. Not so at my house. Our back yard is basically dirty sand. So in order to make myself feel a little more at home, over the last few months I have gotten lots of plant cuttings and invested, borrowed, or scrounged a variety of small pots and have installed them in my room. Among my collection I have a few vines, a spider plant, and a couple little Aloe Vera plants. These little patches of green do a lot to brighten my day sometimes, as small as they are. But flourish in the sand-mud they do not, and every week I wonder how much longer my struggling little plants will hold out.
So the other day, as I was returning from my weekly expedition to the post office to mail out a few letters, I noticed a large pile of dirt next to the road the telegraph office. But it didn’t look like normal Turkmen dirt, which is basically compacted mud. No, this dirt looked decidedly different. I opted to take a closer look, and upon inspection I made an amazing discovery. Now if you’ve ever taken a biology class, you know that what makes soil so healthy is decomposing plant life: i.e. dead trees, undergrowth, ect. And among other things, dead plants produce this great thing called Nitrogen that-wonder beyond wonders-makes stuff GROW. Well, here in the desert there is no decomposing plant life. It’s basically grainy sand, with just enough nutrients in it to support scrub grass and weedy-type plants. Thus people here just stick a tree in the sand, and hope it grows. And miracle beyond miracles, sometimes it does. But this dirt, believe it or not SMELLED like real dirt, felt like real dirt, and even had real plant parts in it! Jackpot! And it was just SITTING there, glorious and untouched. So you’re probably thinking big deal, pile of dirt, whoopee. Just grab a bucket, right? Well, let me footnote this discovery by saying that in this country every little thing here is highly coveted. Saving a dollar goes along way here, especially when you can buy a kilo of apples for 20 cents. There’s not a lot of wealth to be found, and so people guard even the smallest little scrap piles with their lives. An old metal door and some broken wood piled in the backyard? That’s a frame for the future hen house. A bunch of dusty old jars? They will cover the tomato plants when the frost comes in. That old proverb one mans junk is another mans treasure doesn’t really apply here. There is no junk. People use EVERYTHING. This also applies to grade A dirt. And this grade A dirt was sitting suspiciously near a large dug up flower-bed. So, wary of unseen eyes on me, I continued past the pile non-chalauntly, inwardly scheming of ways to get my hands on some.

As fate would have it, several days later I arrived at school to find my classes with my morning counterpart canceled, the class locked and empty (not a huge surprise) and thus two hours to kill before my next class. So, I did what any normal person would do during a long lunch hour: I decided to go steal some dirt. I arrived at the scene with two large plastic bags in my purse. After carefully checking the premises, I waited until the sidewalk was mostly empty of passerbys, then worked my way around to the backside of the dirt pile. A minute or so after I had sneakily begun to fill my little bags with the precious soil, people began to filter out of the café next door. Panicked, I began to imagine what I would have to tell my director when he asked why he had to bail his American teacher out of prison. “Well, sir. She was apprehended stealing some dirt.” The police clerk would have to say. (Don’t laugh-people are arrested here for stupider things. Just a few months ago my host father was detained for an entire day while he was jogging-all because they said he was running ‘suspiciously’) So, I grabbed what booty I could and dashed down the sidewalk as well as I was able to in my Koynek, visions of sirens ringing in my ears, my heart pounding in my ears. Lucky for me, nobody gave chase, whether for lack of interest, or for the fact they were just to perplexed by the sight of a grown woman sprinting down the street with a giant bag of dirt to do anything. So this evening, as my host siblings and I filled my new and improved flowerpots and displayed them on the windowsills, I had to ask myself, was I wrong to steal the dirt? Yes, probably. Stealing is generally not the best thing, especially when you are clinging to your citizenship by the flimsy edge of a temporary visa. But, do I regret stealing the dirt? No, not really. After all, it IS only dirt.

Until next time
The Thief

A Grab Bag

Well, I've gotten some complaints that I don't put up enough photos on here. So here's a little grab bag of some random ones I've snapped recently.

Host sisters B-day Party at our house


Pictures from work. My office, and me and counterpart.



Some pictures I snapped around my house that I house I thought were nice.

Anniversaries and Eyeballs

My site mate and I Russ,
and Dinner. Yum.


Anniversary Nostalgia and Eyeballs
Sept 20, 2009

Well, put a candle in it, because in less than 2 weeks it will mark exactly 1 year (Oct. 1st) since I’ve touched down into this crazy, interesting, and at times challenging, country. Although it didn’t seem like it at first, two years really is a pretty chunk of time to sign away to uncle Sam and go run around somewhere to play in the dirt and spread my knowledge of English verb conjugations. I’m amazed, yet again, at how strangely time passes in another country, especially when you are trying to set up a life for yourself all the while knowing it isn’t permanent. At this point it is looking like I’ll have spent the majority of my twenties overseas, and there are still times where I ask myself, is it worth it? Trying to keep ties with friends and family is hard enough when people start to go their own ways, and move on with new jobs or relationships-but add a few thousand miles and a constantly changing zip code to the mix, and it makes it ever trickier. Talking with other volunteers, it’s weird to think we’ve already put in a year here, because there are still days when we still feel like we have the cultural aptitude of toddlers, but yet there isn’t a volunteer here who hasn’t missed important events of close friends and loved ones back home-weddings, new babies, and even funerals. It’s amazing how many things can happen in such a short amount of time, and although in the grand scope of things two years is a drop in the bucket, when you start adding all those things up, you realize how precious that time really is and wonder if it’s worth it. So, to all my family and friends back home or elsewhere, I send you a grand hug, and hope everyone is well and happy!

On a lighter note: I have been through some serious gastric Olympics in the last year with the ever-surprising Turkmen cuisine, but this week I trumped my record and ate the most adventuresome thing to date. The other day my host father brought home a goat head and legs from his Mothers house, and by the giddy look on his face, I knew that could only mean one thing: Kellebashlyk. Kellebashlyk, (or Death in a Bowl, as I like to refer to it), is when they take the head and hooves of a cow, goat, or camel, and boil them till the meat comes off the bones. They hollow out the neck or crack open the top of the skull, and scoop out the brain mush and eyes, and eat them with the bone mallow broth, which is basically the leftover water from the boiled head. Sound delicious? Well, it also happens to be my host father’s favorite meal (a DELICACY, to quote him). And after months of avoiding this particular dish, this week I finally manned up and tried it. For one, I am not fasting for Ramadan and therefore had no more legitimate excuses, and two, there was nothing left to eat in the house except old tomato sauce and shredded beets. So I figured hey, what the hell, what the worse that can happen? Just yet another notch on my culinary bedpost. I’ve done weirder things, right? So I bellied up to the bar, grabbed a spoon, and dug in. The highlight of the meal? My host father, so psyched that I finally agreed to try it, dug out an especially goopy eyeball, popped out the hard center, and crammed it in my mouth. My overall feeling on the matter? Although goat eyeball isn’t really that vile, I don’t see Apple Bee’s putting it on their Super Starters Menu any time soon.
Well, that’s about it for now. Getting ready for a nice two day weekend, as there is no school this Monday due to the end of Ramadan (party!!! Because now people can EAT again), and then I’m back to the grind. My grant project is getting close to being finished, and classes are going pretty good. So bring it on year two! I’m ready for you (and if I’m not, there’s always counseling and therapy later on in life). Peace and Rainbow Skittles ya’ll.

Pondering Marriage

A Cultural Pondering of Marriage.
September 7, 2009

Well, before I left on my magical journey back to the homeland that words cannot even describe, I was twiddling away the last days of summer away by making my students do random and abstact assignments, if only to relieve my boredom from the tedious grammar train that we seemed trapped in. In some aspect, I hope it was equally interesting to them, and in any case, from several of the assignments I got some pretty funny, and enlightening results. One of my assignments, the idea taken from a fellow volunteer, and fueled by the fact that I would be soon attending a wedding myself, consisted of having the students translate the short story version of The Princess and The Pea. Once we had a translation that I thought was reasonably accurate, I had them re-write the story, using new characters and inventing different endings. I gave them three days to do the assignment, and when I got the papers back, the results were pretty hilarious. One of my girls changed the story so that the princess, once she was discovered to be a true blue-blood, didn’t want to marry the presented prince, and told her future mother in law that she was in love with a servant and that she should ‘bug off’. Then she ran off. During class, I practically peed my pants laughing while my kids read their new and improved versions of the fairytale. I will present one version here, unchanged, to give an idea of what some of my kids came up with.

The Princess and the Prince
By Bahar

Once upon a time there was two princes. Once prince was from London, his name is Alfredo. The second prince is from Mexico, his name is Carlos. The two princes lived in a very big castle with very many people. They loved one princess, who is named Jennifer. But their mother did not like the princess, and she said to them “You do not marry her!” They fight very hard for many days. But the Prince Alfredo said “No!” and talked with the princess Jennifer. So Alfredo and Jennifer deserted and they now live in another country.

The End

Now for some fun some cultural introspect: what I found interesting about most of the stories, at least the stories written by my girls, was how all the little cultural differences worked their way into the stories. Most of the stories included some version of a bride-price, which is a standard practice here. (When a couple gets married, the grooms family pays the brides family an agreed upon price for the girl). I also noticed in many of them was how important the mother-in-law was in the plot. It seemed that the relationship between the bride and her new mother in law was almost more important than the relationship between the newly married couple. Which, in this area of the world, where genders are often kept separated, is probably a pretty true idea. Normally, once a couple gets married, the bride moves into her new in-laws house, and becomes the Gelin (new daughter-in-law). Once there, if it’s a traditional family, she spends most of the time with her mother in law and sisters in law, cooking, cleaning, and helping with the chores. Pretty much, her new mother-in-law becomes her new ‘best friend’-she spends most of her time with her. So if they don’t see eye to eye? Well, it would make for some pretty uncomfortable days. The new gelin is supposed to show respect to her new in-laws by always covering her mouth with her yalik, or head scarf, in their presence. Over time, once the mother and law and her become cool, she can let down her guard, and doesn’t have to cover her face. But this rule doesn’t apply for the father-in-law. To show respect, she must ALWAYS cover her face. Sometimes, a more liberal man will ask his daughter in law to un-cover in mouth, but most of the time that little cloth guard stays up for as long as they know each other, or are in the same room together. Mostly these practices are just an accepted custom, and are not questioned more than Americans question who should change the oil in the car, or help with the dishes. (Although, yes, we sometimes debate about that).

So this assignment was yet another fun insight into the little, and big, differences between Muslim and Western practices, both for my students, and for me. (And yet another reason why I am still not dating a Turkmen dude, if anybody was wondering.) At the moment I am considering showing Mrs. Doubtfire in my next movie club. Might be fun to see how that gender bender goes over :) Until next time.

August Post

August 20, 2009
The Arrival Day

Well the day has arrived. After watching my collegues and fellow volunteers go and return from vacations, flaunting contraband goodies from the outside world such as gum and Whiskey, and telling stories of a rollicking good time, now my ticket has arrived. This week is my last week before my first official vacation-the first one in 10 months, believe it or not. Sitting at home croqueting cell phone cases during winter break does NOT count, thank you very much. This 2 vacation day-a-month policy kills me, seriously. So, starting this Wednesday, I am officially on ‘leave’. Monday, I am giving my student their last tests of the summer, locking up my office, putting up a ‘the doctor is out’ sign, and putting on pants for three whole weeks. Oh the glory. I will be boarding a plane (well, 4 actually) to return briefly to the motherland to attend a family gathering, visit friends, and stock up on good razor blades, some decent food, and hopefully * cough* cough * a LOT of good alcohol. The day I have plotted for about 5 months has arrived, and I am phyched. So if anybody is in the Glacier area August 20 until Sept 4th, hell stop by, say hey, and check out my bad tan lines and insect bites. They’re impressive. Until SOON,
Megan


August 10, 2009
Money Buys Happiness.

Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness was obviously a trust fund baby. Or a moron. Perhaps even both. Money can, in fact, buy you a number of things, believe it or not. Among these: food, housing, education, transportation, and decent medical care. For most normal human beings, (this doesn’t apply if you are Danish or Finish, as they are issued a government-supplied velvet carriage upon arrival from the womb, per standard socialism), basic necessities cost something. Show me a normal average person who has adequate housing, a full stomach, and basic medical care, and put him next to a hungry person who sleeps in a cardboard box and who happens to have a bad case of goiters, and ask them who’s happier. Honestly. None of that poor little rich girl crap. To put it straightly, in many places of the world your quality of life depends strongly upon the social, and/or financial system, that you are born into. The luck of the draw, so to speak. Just pray you get a flush. A farmers kid? Well, in most places, you’ll probably be picking potatoes until you’re fifty, unless by some chance American Idol is scouring the potato fields that week and they find your voice particularity charming and decide to ship you to Atlanta for tryouts. But a doctors kid? Well, most chances you won’t have to help your family with the sheep, and pop can probably afford to pay for those extra tutoring lessons and extra books to help you out with your studies after school. Public schools really aren’t that great anyway. And, with that little extra boost, most likely you’ll do better on your exams. Not to mention you can pay to sit for an exam, come entrance time. Every exam costs something, you know. And if you didn’t do so hot, even with all that extra help? Well, a little well greased palm here and there can help with that. All universities little a little extra contribution here and there. Everybody knows that, heck that’s how your dad got into school. And then, after graduation, if jobs are a little hard to find? Well, make some calls to dad’s buddies, return some back pats, grease a few more palms, and there you go, that chemical company that wasn’t hiring suddenly came up short one man-would you be available to start next Monday?
No, of course not, money can’t buy happiness. I mean, just ask the guy with the Mercedes Benz. He’ll tell you. So will my students who can’t pay for university.

Sincerely,
Sceptical