Tuesday, April 7, 2009
April blog
Spring has Spruuuunnnngggg!!!!
March 25, 2009
I want to sing it from the rooftops, I am so happy to see green! Five months in a brown wasteland is enough to make any nature lover go a bit bonkers, and coming home a week or so ago, I saw a tree near my house in full bloom, flowers and all, and I almost up and hugged it right there in broad daylight. Thankfully, I stopped myself, being as the last thing I need is another bit of gossip circulating about ‘the American’ (Murat said that Jeren and Shemshat saw her hugging a TREE yesterday! Do you think, maybe she really IS crazy???) No thanks. It doesn’t matter that there is still no grass here to speak of, but just the reassurance that something grows in this land outside the well-manicured lawns of the Capital is enough for me. I was beginning to despair that my surroundings would be an earth colored monotone for the next two years of my life-but no, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it is colorful.
Added to this epiphany, I have been complaining to my host mom about the lack of nature, and announced a week or so ago that I was going to start a garden in the wasteland that is our backyard, and then this week my host father turned off the TV, arose off his caboose, popped outside, and dug out a well organized garden plot, and planted some cucumbers in about an hour! Needless to say, I was pretty impressed, not to mention a wee bit embarrassed. In preparation of this grand garden idea, I had gone so far as to check out some appropriate reading material from the Peace Corps Library, researched what kind of seeds I should get, and made plans for where I should map out the compost pile to better fertilize the soil. Although I have a bit of experience with gardening, I have never embarked upon a solo veggie garden, so I have been gearing up for it. But in a little less time than it takes me to get ready in the morning, my host father had the entire plot dug up, trenches set it, seeds mixed in, and had begun to water it. Moral of the story: in learning to do something, just ask a local-it’s a lot faster than trying to learn from a damn book. But I did my part and went and bought some tomato plants and carrot seeds, as well as some flower seeds to start a flower plot in our front yard, which somewhat resembles a crater on the moon. So this Wednesday I am going to finish the job and set in some tomatoes and some petunias, and get our little garden a’ growin! Now to see if it will actually survive the scorching hot sun of this summer-that is the true test. But I am going to save some reserves to put in flowerpots and put them in my room for a bit of color. Now I just have to remember to water the damn things….
My first Field Trip,
March 23, 2009
Over this spring break, I held a few clubs and gave a seminar, and as everyone else was vacationing, I felt that I was due for a little trip. I agreed to help my host mother, who is also an English teacher, chaperone a picnic trip with her students to Kaka, a town about an hour away from us. She had planned a lunch at the foot of the Kopetdog Mountains, which makes up the Northern border of Iran. Kaka was actually the site of some volunteer training mates of mine, who went back to America a few weeks ago, but before they left they had visited the valley and said it was gorgeous, so I was pretty excited to see it.
Monday morning, at about 5:30am we were all up and about as a bus honked outside our door. Imagine 15 16-year-olds motivated enough to get up on their own at 4:30 in the morning to pick up their teacher just for a picnic! I don’t think that would ever happen in the States! We all piled in the bus and drove about 45 minutes to a large mosque which is in this empty field miles from anything, where we all got out and walked to a huge tomb. It is a special place for my host mother, as her son is named after the Turkmen buried there, because as a new wife she had gone there every week to pray for a son, as well as for my host fathers’ safe return from Turkey, where he was working. As both things came true, she has a strong attachment to the site, and it is very holy for her. The tomb itself is impressive-a black marble structure about 20 feet wide by about 50 feet long. One by one all the students gave thanks to Malik, and we walked in a line three times around the tomb in silence, dragging our hands over the marble all the way around. After the third go around, we sat in a circle, and one of the mail students ‘read’, or prayed, for all of us. I am not a particularly religious person, but I do respect how the power of ritual can unite people, and listing to the Arabic words repeated as the sun peaked over the horizon was a pretty neat experience.
After the stop at the mosque, we continued on past Kaka, and began our accent into the Valley. It was like we had entered another world- there were rolling grass hills in every direction, and everywhere we turned there were waundering herds of goats and sheep, all kept guard by a man or woman propped atop a shaggy donkey. My little host siblings were cranky from being woken up so early, so the students cheered them up by yelling “ Huny Malik Aylar, Eshek!” (Look, Malik and Aylar, there’s a donkey!) every time we passed a heard. Our bus driver, who I nicknamed the Surgeoun, and his assistant, keep constant guard over our ancient bus the whole way up, and every time we passed a stream would stop and refill the radiator and coaxs the engine a few more miles. We finally made to this little town at the gateway of the valley, and passing through that, made towards the river. After about 15 minutes, we pulled up alongside the river and unloaded, yelling hello’s to all the other picnicers who were out. My host mother cooked a huge vat of stew with water pulled straight from the stream, and my host father and his nephew tended the fire dutifully to serve the bundle of hungry teenagers. Afterwords, we took turns exploring, and I hiked with my host sisters to the top of the bluff, where we could look out over the valley. I pointed out the mountains to one of my host sisters. “Enegul can you see what’s over there?” I asked her, referring to the snow. “Yeah,’ she said “That’s Iran.” “Oh yeah, well, that too….” says I sheepishly. All in all, it was probably my favorite day I’ve had thus far in this country, just for the mere fact that we were froliking in nature. Thus far all my trips here in T-stan have been either chore-filled or involved the capital in some way or another. On our way back the bus broke down a few times, and while the Surgeoun tore out the engine, cut some pipes and started putting it all back together on the side of the road, some of took advantage of this, and we explored the ruins of an ancient city nearby, complete with castle wall and hundreds of house foundations. Also there was this thing, which is called the Uly Tamdyr (big tamdyr) by locals, that was the bread oven which supplied bread to the entire city of a few thousand people. It literally was about the size of a tw-story house, and the brick side had a doorway width the size of three grown men. It put the little Tamdyr in our backyard to shame, to say the least. It was like a bread oven on steroids, and hundreds of years old. Definitely a pretty neat place, and totally worth getting up at 5 am for…. So after the nice holiday, it’s now it’s back to the daily grind. 8 weeks and counting until summer!!
Peace
Megan
March 25, 2009
I want to sing it from the rooftops, I am so happy to see green! Five months in a brown wasteland is enough to make any nature lover go a bit bonkers, and coming home a week or so ago, I saw a tree near my house in full bloom, flowers and all, and I almost up and hugged it right there in broad daylight. Thankfully, I stopped myself, being as the last thing I need is another bit of gossip circulating about ‘the American’ (Murat said that Jeren and Shemshat saw her hugging a TREE yesterday! Do you think, maybe she really IS crazy???) No thanks. It doesn’t matter that there is still no grass here to speak of, but just the reassurance that something grows in this land outside the well-manicured lawns of the Capital is enough for me. I was beginning to despair that my surroundings would be an earth colored monotone for the next two years of my life-but no, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it is colorful.
Added to this epiphany, I have been complaining to my host mom about the lack of nature, and announced a week or so ago that I was going to start a garden in the wasteland that is our backyard, and then this week my host father turned off the TV, arose off his caboose, popped outside, and dug out a well organized garden plot, and planted some cucumbers in about an hour! Needless to say, I was pretty impressed, not to mention a wee bit embarrassed. In preparation of this grand garden idea, I had gone so far as to check out some appropriate reading material from the Peace Corps Library, researched what kind of seeds I should get, and made plans for where I should map out the compost pile to better fertilize the soil. Although I have a bit of experience with gardening, I have never embarked upon a solo veggie garden, so I have been gearing up for it. But in a little less time than it takes me to get ready in the morning, my host father had the entire plot dug up, trenches set it, seeds mixed in, and had begun to water it. Moral of the story: in learning to do something, just ask a local-it’s a lot faster than trying to learn from a damn book. But I did my part and went and bought some tomato plants and carrot seeds, as well as some flower seeds to start a flower plot in our front yard, which somewhat resembles a crater on the moon. So this Wednesday I am going to finish the job and set in some tomatoes and some petunias, and get our little garden a’ growin! Now to see if it will actually survive the scorching hot sun of this summer-that is the true test. But I am going to save some reserves to put in flowerpots and put them in my room for a bit of color. Now I just have to remember to water the damn things….
My first Field Trip,
March 23, 2009
Over this spring break, I held a few clubs and gave a seminar, and as everyone else was vacationing, I felt that I was due for a little trip. I agreed to help my host mother, who is also an English teacher, chaperone a picnic trip with her students to Kaka, a town about an hour away from us. She had planned a lunch at the foot of the Kopetdog Mountains, which makes up the Northern border of Iran. Kaka was actually the site of some volunteer training mates of mine, who went back to America a few weeks ago, but before they left they had visited the valley and said it was gorgeous, so I was pretty excited to see it.
Monday morning, at about 5:30am we were all up and about as a bus honked outside our door. Imagine 15 16-year-olds motivated enough to get up on their own at 4:30 in the morning to pick up their teacher just for a picnic! I don’t think that would ever happen in the States! We all piled in the bus and drove about 45 minutes to a large mosque which is in this empty field miles from anything, where we all got out and walked to a huge tomb. It is a special place for my host mother, as her son is named after the Turkmen buried there, because as a new wife she had gone there every week to pray for a son, as well as for my host fathers’ safe return from Turkey, where he was working. As both things came true, she has a strong attachment to the site, and it is very holy for her. The tomb itself is impressive-a black marble structure about 20 feet wide by about 50 feet long. One by one all the students gave thanks to Malik, and we walked in a line three times around the tomb in silence, dragging our hands over the marble all the way around. After the third go around, we sat in a circle, and one of the mail students ‘read’, or prayed, for all of us. I am not a particularly religious person, but I do respect how the power of ritual can unite people, and listing to the Arabic words repeated as the sun peaked over the horizon was a pretty neat experience.
After the stop at the mosque, we continued on past Kaka, and began our accent into the Valley. It was like we had entered another world- there were rolling grass hills in every direction, and everywhere we turned there were waundering herds of goats and sheep, all kept guard by a man or woman propped atop a shaggy donkey. My little host siblings were cranky from being woken up so early, so the students cheered them up by yelling “ Huny Malik Aylar, Eshek!” (Look, Malik and Aylar, there’s a donkey!) every time we passed a heard. Our bus driver, who I nicknamed the Surgeoun, and his assistant, keep constant guard over our ancient bus the whole way up, and every time we passed a stream would stop and refill the radiator and coaxs the engine a few more miles. We finally made to this little town at the gateway of the valley, and passing through that, made towards the river. After about 15 minutes, we pulled up alongside the river and unloaded, yelling hello’s to all the other picnicers who were out. My host mother cooked a huge vat of stew with water pulled straight from the stream, and my host father and his nephew tended the fire dutifully to serve the bundle of hungry teenagers. Afterwords, we took turns exploring, and I hiked with my host sisters to the top of the bluff, where we could look out over the valley. I pointed out the mountains to one of my host sisters. “Enegul can you see what’s over there?” I asked her, referring to the snow. “Yeah,’ she said “That’s Iran.” “Oh yeah, well, that too….” says I sheepishly. All in all, it was probably my favorite day I’ve had thus far in this country, just for the mere fact that we were froliking in nature. Thus far all my trips here in T-stan have been either chore-filled or involved the capital in some way or another. On our way back the bus broke down a few times, and while the Surgeoun tore out the engine, cut some pipes and started putting it all back together on the side of the road, some of took advantage of this, and we explored the ruins of an ancient city nearby, complete with castle wall and hundreds of house foundations. Also there was this thing, which is called the Uly Tamdyr (big tamdyr) by locals, that was the bread oven which supplied bread to the entire city of a few thousand people. It literally was about the size of a tw-story house, and the brick side had a doorway width the size of three grown men. It put the little Tamdyr in our backyard to shame, to say the least. It was like a bread oven on steroids, and hundreds of years old. Definitely a pretty neat place, and totally worth getting up at 5 am for…. So after the nice holiday, it’s now it’s back to the daily grind. 8 weeks and counting until summer!!
Peace
Megan
Friday, March 20, 2009
March Post
Freedom has arrived
March 15, 2009
Third semester is officially over (well, in five days). And about damn time I say. This last week was pretty wacky, because the Ministery came to check out the English Department, so all the teachers had to give presentations, and get evaluated. Pretty stressful for a lot of them all around, so I think everybody is glad for the break. I don’t feel like I have very productive this semester with teaching, so I have made my version of a new years resolution decided to be a more organized teacher this next semester. This includes cutting down my schedule so that I am not running from classroom to classroom unprepared, spending more time with teachers that I think will benefit from co-teaching, rather than trying to work with all of them, because some of them who just use the time to take a nap in the back, and also cracking down on my students in general so that lessons become more effective. I am finding discipline and classroom management here is the hardest thing, because besides the fact that my grasp of the Turkmen language is rudimentary at best, kids here aren’t raised to respond to normal punishment. Corpral punishment was just recently banned here (that’s not to say it doesn’t still happen a lot) but kids are used to it, so merely just speaking firmly to them doesn’t do a damn thing. Teachers scream and use any sort of verbal abuse to control their lessons. Anything less and the older children aren’t phased or don’t take notice. Threatening bloody murder to a group of 14 year olds was never something I saw myself doing, but in this land it seems the only way to get through to some of these kids. A lot of them here actually remind me of a lot of the punks in my class back in high school, when a lot of them considered it their personal duty to see how far they could push the teacher off before pissing her off. Now being on the other end of that stick I have a lot more respect for those teachers, although I didn’t think much of it at the time. But this doesn’t mean I don’t want to pummel the little jerks any less. Maybe from now on I’ll request just working with the 1st graders, at least I can hold them in a headlock when they get unruly... In any case I have 4 glorious days of freedom coming up, and I plan on using that to escape my work site and travel to the capital, get some chores and stuff done, and start prepping for my next teacher seminar. Summer is fast approaching!!
March 4, 2009
The Name Game
The first test of a teacher: remembering their student’s names. I must say this is one of the trickiest parts about working in a foreign country, because the names are all wacky and thus harder to remember. No Katies or Dannys among these kiddies. Last year I worked with a total of about 300 kids, and by the end of my contract, I knew about maybe 75 of their names, which I thought was fairly decent. Granted the names were pretty easy, in every class I had give or take a few Marias, or Jose Andres, or Jorges. We have enough Spanish names in America to remember these pretty easy. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember Turkmen names here. I have had my club kids for nearly two months now, and I still only know about a handful of their names. I resort to tricky ways to remember them, like making them call on each other, having them write their names on the board, or making them do roll call, but alas, I still cannot remember all of them. I will list briefly several girl names from some of my classes, to give an idea of the problem that I’m having.
1. Olgulnabat
2. Oguljeren
3. Ogulshat
4. Ogulgerek
5. Ogulsheren
6. Bagtlygul
7. Gulbahar
8. Gulnabat
9. Guljahar
10. Gurbangul
Need I say more? My newest hobby on my trek to and from school everyday is trying to translate all these names in my head, because most of the names are combinations of Turkmen words that have to do either with nature or astronomy. For example, pretty much any girl name that has ‘gul’ somewhere in it means flower-something-or-other. For example, I have several Bagtlyguls’ in my classes, which in Turkmen translates as bagtly=happy, gul=flower. So, you can imagine me saying seriously “Tell me Happyflower, what is the present continuous form of ‘to clean’?” I resist the urge of giggling a lot when I do roll call. It’s also happened on a few occasions where I have stumbled upon a sudden translation in the middle of my daily trek, and stopped in the middle of the street yelling either “Ah ha!” or just guffawing out loud, which usually draws a few curious stares from the street sweepers or the unlucky random persons within earshot. My favorite name thus far that I’ve translated is Ogulgerek, which is the name of one of the teachers that I tutor. In Turkmen, ogul=boy, gerek=want. Literally: I want a boy. I might add that she’s a woman. I wonder what it’s like going through your entire life with that kind of a name? Why not just name her Letstryagain? Or Secondtimesacharm? Outwardly, she doesn’t seem to display any sort of complex or insecurity from this, so I take it this must be a culture thing, and it doesn’t have the same significance that I ascribe to it. But in any case, I do like the idea that each name symbolizes something, even if I can’t tell them all apart. I mean, in America if somebody were to ask me what George means I’d be like, dude, heck if I know… So, I decided to see what my name would be, if I were Turkmen. In Latin Megan is Margarita, which I’m pretty sure means Daisy. So, being as there is not a Turkmen word for that particular flower, if I were Turkmen, I’d probably be Akichigul- small white flower. This to me though sounds a little bit like someone sneezing. If someone yelled after me “Hey, Akichigul!” I’d probably just reply, “Dude, bless you!’. Think I’ll stick with my given name.
Until next time,
Akichigul
March 2, 2009
Rematch with the Enemy: Rain
True to form, I washed my clothes yesterday, hung them out to dry, and the clouds gloriously appeared, the heavens opened up, and commenced dumping rain. I am beginning to believe this is a theme that will follow me until the day I die no matter where I end up. In the last year or so pre-T-Stan I have gotten pretty use to hand washing and line drying most of my clothes, because drying machines are kind of a unnecessary item in Spain as things dry lickity split and water is spendy. However, it was a running joke with my roommates last year that you never needed to watch the weather channel if you lived with Megan, just wait until she does her laundry and hangs it outside, and it will most likely rain that day, or the following afternoon. I can probably count on my hands the number of time that my drying clothes were not drenched in rain. It was pretty normal for our apartment to have every available perch covered in my clothing the day after I did my laundry, due to a downpour outside. My roommate Fernando had actually lived in our apartment for four years and had never needed a drying rack, but after a month of living with me, he went out and bought one due to my uncanny timing with storms.
My luck, it seems, has followed me here, for today I woke up to the gentle pitter-patter of rain drops on the tin roof, and the first thing that crossed my mind was, “well crap, there goes my dry underwear’. I thought that being in a desert, where it only rains a few times a year, my chances would be dramatically improved, but no. In fact, I think my presence here may have actually increased the average percentage of rainfall in the country. At this rate, if I wash my clothes regularly at least once a week for the next two years, Turkmenistan may go from being an arid desert climate to that of a subtropical dry climate. The other problem (besides my lack of dry underwear) was the muddy havoc that the roads were once again reduced to. This morning I stepped gingerly out the front door, reminding myself that my last encounter with treacherous Turkmen mud landed me in the hospital, and began my perilous journey to school. I arrived to work looking a wee bit like a war refugee, but nevertheless intact. I stepped into my office and took off my heels, which had a generous 2-inch layer of mud caking every available surface, and placed them next to the rows of my student’s pristine black shoes. So my question today is: how the hell do their shoes stay so pretty and shiny while mine look like I have just waded through the Caspian sea? I’m pretty sure most of us take the same general route to school. It is yet another mystery about this country that I have yet to figure out. But on the bright side of things, I made it the entire day without catapulting myself into the mud or losing a shoe in a suck hole, although there were a few close calls. So now: Turkmenistan: 1, Lowly Volunteer: 1. Thus far it is a duel match.
The Scale of Life
February 28, 2009
I am going to steal this theme from one of my fellow volunteers. This weekend the two volunteers in my region and I decided to meet up, cook some American food for his host family and spend a day not thinking about work. We crafted some makeshift pizza for everyone-which was met with a lukewarm “it’s ‘aight….” from the Turkmen crowd. Why is it that when you are bumming around the kitchen at home in your pjs and no one is in sight, you can whip up a meal worthy of making Rachel Ray bow down with tears in the corners of her eyes and say “Wo-wee, this is scrumptious!!” , but when you have to cook for an audience the mere act of boiling water suddenly becomes a process as complicated as intermolecular physics? Pretty much every one of my attempts to cook American food for Turkmen people in this country has been met with rousing suspicion and looks of “what the hell is that?” The days I have cooked with other volunteers usually results in a three-ring circus with family members coming in and out of the kitchen to see what the hell we were making. Being polite, we would share what was cooking with them, though they usually decided pretty quickly that Americans don’t know how to cook well and abandoned our creation after about three bites. However, this time our Turkmen receivers, although I’m sure will never cook Pizza for themselves, gave it a pretty decent attempt, and ate most of what we put in front of them.
The rest of the visit we hung out at home and read two-month old Atlantic and Time magazines that had come in a package, watched a news program IN ENGLISH, explored the local library, went on an evening stroll with the family through town, drank about 6 pots of green tea, and generally just spent a day in American laziness gossiping (though I’m sure the boys would object to this last one). Upon our departure, my mate said to us “Guys, I think this is one of the best days I’ve had in the last 5 months.” To which we asked, “Well on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” My mate thought about this one for a moment then said “well, on the Turkmenistan scale, I’d give it like an 8. But I guess on like, a general Life scale, it’d probably be like a 5.” This managed to hit us in the funny bone, and after laughing for about 10 minutes straight; we tried to figure out why this was so true. We concluded that when you live in a country where any random person on the street will walk up to you and say first “Hi”, second “Are you from America?”, third “How much is your salary?” and fourth “will you take me to America?”, or that while walking to work you see groups of children playing with either goat bones or the carcass of a dog, your perspectives tend to alter a wee bit. What would seem like a normal, standard afternoon in the general status of things is distorted here a tad. Call us addicted to our culture, or slaves of our generation, but be it crappy pizza or old magazines, it’s the little things that make life a little smoother.
Young at Heart
February 23, 2009
It is official. I have the maturity level of a three year old. Just when I think I’m a mature, grown adult capable of carrying myself in the world, I slip up and boom-the image is shattered. But I dare anyone to try and keep a straight face while a class of second graders dutifully recite over and over harmoniously “I have one ass” (translation: donkey) or “He has one cock” (translation: rooster) in class. Even though I am perfectly aware that it’s British English and has nothing to do with anything, and there is a friggin’ picture of a donkey and a rooster right in front of me, I can’t help that my first instinct in to fall over howling in laughter. Today one of my fourth graders who was working on I have/she has statements, wrote on the chalkboard “ I have two apricots in my pants. What do you have?” and I almost choked on my tea. Since when did I acquire the mind of a twelve-year old boy? I don’t recall being this immature since I was well, immature. I blame it on being surrounded by children 24 hours a day. I calculated I only have about 6 hours each day where I am not constantly bombarded by children-and that is when I am sleeping. In any case, I believe that it’s starting to have an effect. Either that, or I just never matured. I’m really hoping it’s the first one.
I now have a lot more reverence for my Spanish teachers in college for being able to keep their cool while we fumbled around with grammar, trying to figure out what the hell we wanted to say in the correct order. I’m sure we came up with some doozies of our own. But just for posterities sake, I am going to start keeping a running tally of the funny phrases and student works that come my way. I’m rooting for my club kids-they can get pretty imaginative when it comes to slapping together a sentence. We shall see how it progresses from here. In the mean time, I’m going to work on being more mature.
February 20th 2009
The Wheel is a Turnin’
Picture a Hamster running very fast on a wheel. Now stretch this overused metaphor and replace the word Hamster with the word “Volunteer”. Not that you need a lot of imagination, but can you kind of see where I’m going with this one? I won’t say I’ve been counting or anything, but exactly one month from today (i.e. 29 days and 15 hours) is the start of spring break, and after that, 12 weeks of fourth semester, and after that, SUMMER. I can hardly believe that February is over with. It literally- and I’m going to use another tired metaphor here- flew by. I was writing the date on the blackboard today and I looked at my calendar and was like “Whoa, seriously?! Are you kidding me?!?” My students didn’t know what to make of this and so just did what they usually do when I do something weird in class, which is look at each other with confused expressions and shrug. In about a week and a half, I will have been at permanent site for three months. And quite honestly I don’t feel like I’ve done a friggin’ thing here thus far. With the first month being the end of the semester/holiday/and everything being in general chaos, and added to that my week and a half of being on house arrest (due to what I now refer to as ‘the mud incident’), I feel like I have only accomplished about a month of good solid work here. Time is a tickin’ as they say, and the inner workaholic in me is doing the finger shaking thing and saying ‘what have you got to show for it’? I keep telling myself, it’s ok, all volunteers feel like they’re not doing anything at some point, but then I ask myself, how can you been teaching 42 hours a week and still not be accomplishing a damn thing??
Usually the problem with volunteering in general tends to be that when a volunteer shows up the community doesn’t really know what to do with them, or they are just too disorganized and busy to figure out where to utilize them. In some cases they just expect the volunteer to fork over a couple of thousand bucks and have all their problems solved. Or maybe there just aren’t the resources at hand for the volunteer to be able to make an effective impact. I could probably make this list of problems about 4 pages long, but right now none of those reasons can be blamed for the predicament in which I now find myself. In the Peace Corps wheel of life, it seems to me I remember hearing that the ‘brick wall’ phase of service tended to come along a bit farther along than a few months into it But here I am: month 5-or 3 if you count my actual time in the community- and I’m just about three steps away from pulling all my hair out. I have all the general ingredients for a successful work site: an involved and experienced counterpart who is willing to let me drag her out of class at the drop of the hat to ask stupid questions, plus my very own work space with the ability to pick and choose the students that I want to teach there. I even have oodles of resources that have been left for me by previous volunteers at my site and a staff full of teachers and students dying to work with me for whatever I want to do at the moment. After school some days I literally have a trail of students follow me home asking me when I’m coming to teach their classes. Generally, the teachers seem to think I am doing a decent job, so why is it at the end of every week I feel as if I have done a whole bucket-full of nothing?
In order to better contemplate this problem I have decided to reclaim my Saturdays. I don’t know how people in Muslim countries can function with a six-day workweek. When I was in Spain, I was amazed at the Moroccan students because while we chilling back on Saturday afternoon, they would still be going at it full boar. I don’t know if I could have survived 4 years of that. One day is not just enough to recollect the sanity needed to persevere through the following week, especially since this day consists mostly of doing the chores you don’t have time to do all week-i.e. Cleaning, washing, organizing and-if you’re a teacher- writing lesson plans. It all seems like a perfect setup for the inevitable crash and burn. Although I haven’t reached this point yet, I don’t feel like continuing until I do so, seeing as how I don’t think it would be very pretty. So, as of this week I have cleared my Saturday schedule except for a few ‘chai sagatlar’- (tea time) which is basically just conversation practice with advanced students that doesn’t take much effort other than refining my gossiping skills and thinking of synonyms for all the thousands of phrasal idioms that we use every day in the English Language. Hopefully this extra day will help me step back, refocus, and kick my ass out of this rut I seemed to have found myself in. We shall see. Stay tuned…
Also, Footnote:
Thanks to all the lovely people who have shipped me AMAZING packages these last few months, I am golden in the coffee and tea department. I am like the Y2k of coffee beans right now. I am now drinking, like, three cups of really strong coffee a day in the hopes that I finish my stash before the end of my service Although I must say-I literally don’t think I could survive an entire day of work now without a bloodstream full of caffeine, so every last bag of that beautiful java goodness will go to good use. But for now, I see no immediate need for more to be hauled across the ocean. Thanks again everyone! Keep me posted on how live is over yonder via snail mail
Until Next Time,
Moi
Pros and Cons
February 14, 2009
This last week, after my visit to the hospital post-mud incident, for which I was ordered to a week of being chained to my bed, I have had a lot of time to contemplate both my ceiling, the position of the curtains, and the particular route of the ants around the perimeter of the room. The 7 days of what I like to consider now as ‘jail time’ brought out my inner neurotic OCD tendencies, and I somehow became that weird person who re-organizes the books on the bookshelf first by size, then by theme, then by the quality of the book jacket summary, then by the particular style of narration (i.e. first person, third person omniscient, ect.), then by year of copy write. I blame in on a mix of pain meds and extreme boredom. Lets just hope I never do hard time anywhere, because Lord knows what would result from that. I would probably start rearranging the bricks based upon density content.
Anyway, besides my re-organizing skills, I also managed to write copious lists of random things, which for any of you who know me, is what I tend to do when I have nothing better to occupy my time. Some of my lists consisted of pros and cons of random things, such as coffee vs. tea, summer vs. winter, American Football vs. Canadian Hockey, and volunteering vs. working-a-real-job-and-making-actual-money, just to name a few. One of my lists were my views concerning the Turkmen Koynek (Dress), which some of you might have noticed by now is an ever-present theme in my day-to-day life here in T-Stan. So, I thought I might share it, being as I have nothing more of interest to talk about at the moment. I came up with is this lengthy- but I think rather accurate- list that describes my mindset on this garment. I present it as follows:
The pros of wearing a Turkmen Koynek:
1. It saves time.
Instead of spending valuable time trying to co-ordinate outfits, such as a blue skirt with a white shirt, or brown top with brown skirt, ect, you can just toss on a Koynek. Perfect for the fashionably lazy, such as myself. For Koynek matching here, pretty much anything goes. You can have a dress of brown African Safari print material with a bright neon pink and blue Yaka embroidered on it, and people will still say, “Hey, nice Koynek, you look great today!” This occurs even if you look like the sewing machine threw up all over you. You really can’t go wrong here.
2. Layering.
For winter at least, when it’s really cold, and heating at work is pretty much non-existent, I can put on like, 3 pairs of long johns and 5 pairs of socks and nobody is the wiser. Plus, it's kind of like wearing pajamas to work.
3. Cheaper taxi fares.
Nobody tries to take advantage of you or charge you that extra 5,000 manat (about 30 cents) more when you look like a homeless bag lady, especially a local.
4. When walking down the street, it makes for less harassment and screams of “AMERICA!! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!”
On days when I want to completely go unnoticed, I put on the most Turkmen Koynek I can possibly find, wrap a scarf around my head, and make a run for it. I like to think of it as my Clark Kent outfit. When he had his glasses and suit, Clark managed to blend into the mob and go quietly about his day-to-day activities without a problem, but as soon as he put that red and blue spandex on, everybody went all “HEY!! LOOK GUYS, IT’S SUPERMAN!!!” And then he had to go catch a building or stop a nuclear bomb or something. And who in their right mind wants that all the time? Dressing like a local helps with this problem.
5. No wedgies.
I know this might not be socially appropriate, but it is very true when you are wearing a potato sack. It is a very loose flowing garment.
…And the cons of wearing a Turkmen Koynek:
1. Danger of tripping is increased exponentially by the amount of walking that is done.
The design of the Koynek has what those in the fashion biz call a ‘pencil’ skirt- meaning the dress is a straight cut from the hips to the ankles. Which for Americans who are accustomed to taking larger strides in pants, makes the mere act of walking a bit tricky (picture, if you will, a mermaid trying to complete an obstacle course). Recently, I tried to demonstrate this fact to my dressmaker by miming a person taking very large, manly, Sasquatch-like steps and spreading my arms really wide while saying “Ulllly kan!” (THIIIIS BIG!) repeatedly in Turkmen. It didn’t translate well. I still have my ‘Pencil Koynek’, in which I’ve tripped three times this week, and now my dressmaker thinks I’m crazy, and that I walk like Sasquatch.
2. Static Cling.
Although the sack-like design of the Koynek (which provides the extra space to wear those 32 pairs of long johns) is a plus, all those layers together can often turn into a wrinkly nightmare that will cling to anything that moves. On a super clingy day for example, picture walking down the street looking like you just rolled out of bed. But not just any bed, mind you. Nooooo, siree. Rather, picture a bed that has been kidnapped by a gang of pirates, used as a sail through a hurricane, then repossessed by the Australian government after a failed ransom attempt and used in a lab to test the effects of electric currents induced by shocking. Afterwards, when the economy took a turn for the worse and the lab was closed down, this bed was stashed in a warehouse, forgotten, but then later rediscovered and given to a retiring Employee as part of his Pension packet, who decided to roll it in a vat of honey in order to attract Kangaroos during hunting season. That people, is static cling.
3. Constant fear of tucking the back of my skirt into my underwear.
Ok, also not socially appropriate, but it is a legitimate fear that I have every time I visit the pit toilet. You know that scene where the girl comes out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck on her shoe and everybody laughs at her? Well, being as no toilets here have toilet paper, let alone a seat, or a door, or sometimes a roof or walls, this is never a very large concern of mine. But I am however, genuinely afraid of exposing my bum to all the world while obliviously walking down the street post pit-toilet one day with an edge tucked into my bloomers.
4. Slower reaction times.
When avoiding Turkmen dogs, wearing a Koynek gives the dog a slightly bigger advantage. I’d like to see one of them try to chase me while wearing one of these suckers. I’d say that would even the playing field a little bit (ok, I still have a little residual anger with Turkmen dogs, I am aware of this). Also, I might have caught that bus last week and not been late to school had I been able to run. How Turkmen girls run (and in 4-inch heels, on gravel roads) is still a mystery to me. I’m thinking it takes years of training at this point.
5. It’s a Koynek. Enough said with this last one.
…..The End
To wear or not to wear, that is the question. In short, this is just one example of what a single week of house arrest will amount too. Although don’t get me wrong, there are there some perfectly dandy Koyneks out there- they are just worn by those with more fashion or grace than this particular volunteer has the capacity for. Also, given more time and boredom (perhaps this summer), I may also tackle the merits of the Turkmen Telpek, which closely resemble that of the Davy Crocket hat, except that instead of a Raccoon pelt, the Turkmen hat contains the hide of an entire sheep that somehow props atop a man’s head. It is quite brilliant, really. Kind of like balancing a lap dog on your forehead.
Also, in answer to the queries- yes, I have kind of given up on the whole picture-uploading thing. How other volunteers here have managed to do it is a mystery to me. I’m basically technologically retarded, and added to that I am living in a technologically challenged country, so that’s two strikes against me right there. If anything, I can try to mail pictures to ‘The America’ and have a family member who is more techno savvy, or who has a better Internet service than I, to attempt to post them or scan them, or however it is done these days. Or they can just pass them around or make copies. By 2010, maybe? (I’m kind of serious when I say that…)
Also, mostly because he told me not to do this (hehe...) Hi Dan’s mom! Your baby is doing just swimmingly here in this little village. I make sure I bug him at least twice weekly for sanity’s sake. Mine, mostly. I don’t know if I do anything to help his.
Love to all ya’lls in The America and otherwise.
Paz.
March 15, 2009
Third semester is officially over (well, in five days). And about damn time I say. This last week was pretty wacky, because the Ministery came to check out the English Department, so all the teachers had to give presentations, and get evaluated. Pretty stressful for a lot of them all around, so I think everybody is glad for the break. I don’t feel like I have very productive this semester with teaching, so I have made my version of a new years resolution decided to be a more organized teacher this next semester. This includes cutting down my schedule so that I am not running from classroom to classroom unprepared, spending more time with teachers that I think will benefit from co-teaching, rather than trying to work with all of them, because some of them who just use the time to take a nap in the back, and also cracking down on my students in general so that lessons become more effective. I am finding discipline and classroom management here is the hardest thing, because besides the fact that my grasp of the Turkmen language is rudimentary at best, kids here aren’t raised to respond to normal punishment. Corpral punishment was just recently banned here (that’s not to say it doesn’t still happen a lot) but kids are used to it, so merely just speaking firmly to them doesn’t do a damn thing. Teachers scream and use any sort of verbal abuse to control their lessons. Anything less and the older children aren’t phased or don’t take notice. Threatening bloody murder to a group of 14 year olds was never something I saw myself doing, but in this land it seems the only way to get through to some of these kids. A lot of them here actually remind me of a lot of the punks in my class back in high school, when a lot of them considered it their personal duty to see how far they could push the teacher off before pissing her off. Now being on the other end of that stick I have a lot more respect for those teachers, although I didn’t think much of it at the time. But this doesn’t mean I don’t want to pummel the little jerks any less. Maybe from now on I’ll request just working with the 1st graders, at least I can hold them in a headlock when they get unruly... In any case I have 4 glorious days of freedom coming up, and I plan on using that to escape my work site and travel to the capital, get some chores and stuff done, and start prepping for my next teacher seminar. Summer is fast approaching!!
March 4, 2009
The Name Game
The first test of a teacher: remembering their student’s names. I must say this is one of the trickiest parts about working in a foreign country, because the names are all wacky and thus harder to remember. No Katies or Dannys among these kiddies. Last year I worked with a total of about 300 kids, and by the end of my contract, I knew about maybe 75 of their names, which I thought was fairly decent. Granted the names were pretty easy, in every class I had give or take a few Marias, or Jose Andres, or Jorges. We have enough Spanish names in America to remember these pretty easy. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember Turkmen names here. I have had my club kids for nearly two months now, and I still only know about a handful of their names. I resort to tricky ways to remember them, like making them call on each other, having them write their names on the board, or making them do roll call, but alas, I still cannot remember all of them. I will list briefly several girl names from some of my classes, to give an idea of the problem that I’m having.
1. Olgulnabat
2. Oguljeren
3. Ogulshat
4. Ogulgerek
5. Ogulsheren
6. Bagtlygul
7. Gulbahar
8. Gulnabat
9. Guljahar
10. Gurbangul
Need I say more? My newest hobby on my trek to and from school everyday is trying to translate all these names in my head, because most of the names are combinations of Turkmen words that have to do either with nature or astronomy. For example, pretty much any girl name that has ‘gul’ somewhere in it means flower-something-or-other. For example, I have several Bagtlyguls’ in my classes, which in Turkmen translates as bagtly=happy, gul=flower. So, you can imagine me saying seriously “Tell me Happyflower, what is the present continuous form of ‘to clean’?” I resist the urge of giggling a lot when I do roll call. It’s also happened on a few occasions where I have stumbled upon a sudden translation in the middle of my daily trek, and stopped in the middle of the street yelling either “Ah ha!” or just guffawing out loud, which usually draws a few curious stares from the street sweepers or the unlucky random persons within earshot. My favorite name thus far that I’ve translated is Ogulgerek, which is the name of one of the teachers that I tutor. In Turkmen, ogul=boy, gerek=want. Literally: I want a boy. I might add that she’s a woman. I wonder what it’s like going through your entire life with that kind of a name? Why not just name her Letstryagain? Or Secondtimesacharm? Outwardly, she doesn’t seem to display any sort of complex or insecurity from this, so I take it this must be a culture thing, and it doesn’t have the same significance that I ascribe to it. But in any case, I do like the idea that each name symbolizes something, even if I can’t tell them all apart. I mean, in America if somebody were to ask me what George means I’d be like, dude, heck if I know… So, I decided to see what my name would be, if I were Turkmen. In Latin Megan is Margarita, which I’m pretty sure means Daisy. So, being as there is not a Turkmen word for that particular flower, if I were Turkmen, I’d probably be Akichigul- small white flower. This to me though sounds a little bit like someone sneezing. If someone yelled after me “Hey, Akichigul!” I’d probably just reply, “Dude, bless you!’. Think I’ll stick with my given name.
Until next time,
Akichigul
March 2, 2009
Rematch with the Enemy: Rain
True to form, I washed my clothes yesterday, hung them out to dry, and the clouds gloriously appeared, the heavens opened up, and commenced dumping rain. I am beginning to believe this is a theme that will follow me until the day I die no matter where I end up. In the last year or so pre-T-Stan I have gotten pretty use to hand washing and line drying most of my clothes, because drying machines are kind of a unnecessary item in Spain as things dry lickity split and water is spendy. However, it was a running joke with my roommates last year that you never needed to watch the weather channel if you lived with Megan, just wait until she does her laundry and hangs it outside, and it will most likely rain that day, or the following afternoon. I can probably count on my hands the number of time that my drying clothes were not drenched in rain. It was pretty normal for our apartment to have every available perch covered in my clothing the day after I did my laundry, due to a downpour outside. My roommate Fernando had actually lived in our apartment for four years and had never needed a drying rack, but after a month of living with me, he went out and bought one due to my uncanny timing with storms.
My luck, it seems, has followed me here, for today I woke up to the gentle pitter-patter of rain drops on the tin roof, and the first thing that crossed my mind was, “well crap, there goes my dry underwear’. I thought that being in a desert, where it only rains a few times a year, my chances would be dramatically improved, but no. In fact, I think my presence here may have actually increased the average percentage of rainfall in the country. At this rate, if I wash my clothes regularly at least once a week for the next two years, Turkmenistan may go from being an arid desert climate to that of a subtropical dry climate. The other problem (besides my lack of dry underwear) was the muddy havoc that the roads were once again reduced to. This morning I stepped gingerly out the front door, reminding myself that my last encounter with treacherous Turkmen mud landed me in the hospital, and began my perilous journey to school. I arrived to work looking a wee bit like a war refugee, but nevertheless intact. I stepped into my office and took off my heels, which had a generous 2-inch layer of mud caking every available surface, and placed them next to the rows of my student’s pristine black shoes. So my question today is: how the hell do their shoes stay so pretty and shiny while mine look like I have just waded through the Caspian sea? I’m pretty sure most of us take the same general route to school. It is yet another mystery about this country that I have yet to figure out. But on the bright side of things, I made it the entire day without catapulting myself into the mud or losing a shoe in a suck hole, although there were a few close calls. So now: Turkmenistan: 1, Lowly Volunteer: 1. Thus far it is a duel match.
The Scale of Life
February 28, 2009
I am going to steal this theme from one of my fellow volunteers. This weekend the two volunteers in my region and I decided to meet up, cook some American food for his host family and spend a day not thinking about work. We crafted some makeshift pizza for everyone-which was met with a lukewarm “it’s ‘aight….” from the Turkmen crowd. Why is it that when you are bumming around the kitchen at home in your pjs and no one is in sight, you can whip up a meal worthy of making Rachel Ray bow down with tears in the corners of her eyes and say “Wo-wee, this is scrumptious!!” , but when you have to cook for an audience the mere act of boiling water suddenly becomes a process as complicated as intermolecular physics? Pretty much every one of my attempts to cook American food for Turkmen people in this country has been met with rousing suspicion and looks of “what the hell is that?” The days I have cooked with other volunteers usually results in a three-ring circus with family members coming in and out of the kitchen to see what the hell we were making. Being polite, we would share what was cooking with them, though they usually decided pretty quickly that Americans don’t know how to cook well and abandoned our creation after about three bites. However, this time our Turkmen receivers, although I’m sure will never cook Pizza for themselves, gave it a pretty decent attempt, and ate most of what we put in front of them.
The rest of the visit we hung out at home and read two-month old Atlantic and Time magazines that had come in a package, watched a news program IN ENGLISH, explored the local library, went on an evening stroll with the family through town, drank about 6 pots of green tea, and generally just spent a day in American laziness gossiping (though I’m sure the boys would object to this last one). Upon our departure, my mate said to us “Guys, I think this is one of the best days I’ve had in the last 5 months.” To which we asked, “Well on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?” My mate thought about this one for a moment then said “well, on the Turkmenistan scale, I’d give it like an 8. But I guess on like, a general Life scale, it’d probably be like a 5.” This managed to hit us in the funny bone, and after laughing for about 10 minutes straight; we tried to figure out why this was so true. We concluded that when you live in a country where any random person on the street will walk up to you and say first “Hi”, second “Are you from America?”, third “How much is your salary?” and fourth “will you take me to America?”, or that while walking to work you see groups of children playing with either goat bones or the carcass of a dog, your perspectives tend to alter a wee bit. What would seem like a normal, standard afternoon in the general status of things is distorted here a tad. Call us addicted to our culture, or slaves of our generation, but be it crappy pizza or old magazines, it’s the little things that make life a little smoother.
Young at Heart
February 23, 2009
It is official. I have the maturity level of a three year old. Just when I think I’m a mature, grown adult capable of carrying myself in the world, I slip up and boom-the image is shattered. But I dare anyone to try and keep a straight face while a class of second graders dutifully recite over and over harmoniously “I have one ass” (translation: donkey) or “He has one cock” (translation: rooster) in class. Even though I am perfectly aware that it’s British English and has nothing to do with anything, and there is a friggin’ picture of a donkey and a rooster right in front of me, I can’t help that my first instinct in to fall over howling in laughter. Today one of my fourth graders who was working on I have/she has statements, wrote on the chalkboard “ I have two apricots in my pants. What do you have?” and I almost choked on my tea. Since when did I acquire the mind of a twelve-year old boy? I don’t recall being this immature since I was well, immature. I blame it on being surrounded by children 24 hours a day. I calculated I only have about 6 hours each day where I am not constantly bombarded by children-and that is when I am sleeping. In any case, I believe that it’s starting to have an effect. Either that, or I just never matured. I’m really hoping it’s the first one.
I now have a lot more reverence for my Spanish teachers in college for being able to keep their cool while we fumbled around with grammar, trying to figure out what the hell we wanted to say in the correct order. I’m sure we came up with some doozies of our own. But just for posterities sake, I am going to start keeping a running tally of the funny phrases and student works that come my way. I’m rooting for my club kids-they can get pretty imaginative when it comes to slapping together a sentence. We shall see how it progresses from here. In the mean time, I’m going to work on being more mature.
February 20th 2009
The Wheel is a Turnin’
Picture a Hamster running very fast on a wheel. Now stretch this overused metaphor and replace the word Hamster with the word “Volunteer”. Not that you need a lot of imagination, but can you kind of see where I’m going with this one? I won’t say I’ve been counting or anything, but exactly one month from today (i.e. 29 days and 15 hours) is the start of spring break, and after that, 12 weeks of fourth semester, and after that, SUMMER. I can hardly believe that February is over with. It literally- and I’m going to use another tired metaphor here- flew by. I was writing the date on the blackboard today and I looked at my calendar and was like “Whoa, seriously?! Are you kidding me?!?” My students didn’t know what to make of this and so just did what they usually do when I do something weird in class, which is look at each other with confused expressions and shrug. In about a week and a half, I will have been at permanent site for three months. And quite honestly I don’t feel like I’ve done a friggin’ thing here thus far. With the first month being the end of the semester/holiday/and everything being in general chaos, and added to that my week and a half of being on house arrest (due to what I now refer to as ‘the mud incident’), I feel like I have only accomplished about a month of good solid work here. Time is a tickin’ as they say, and the inner workaholic in me is doing the finger shaking thing and saying ‘what have you got to show for it’? I keep telling myself, it’s ok, all volunteers feel like they’re not doing anything at some point, but then I ask myself, how can you been teaching 42 hours a week and still not be accomplishing a damn thing??
Usually the problem with volunteering in general tends to be that when a volunteer shows up the community doesn’t really know what to do with them, or they are just too disorganized and busy to figure out where to utilize them. In some cases they just expect the volunteer to fork over a couple of thousand bucks and have all their problems solved. Or maybe there just aren’t the resources at hand for the volunteer to be able to make an effective impact. I could probably make this list of problems about 4 pages long, but right now none of those reasons can be blamed for the predicament in which I now find myself. In the Peace Corps wheel of life, it seems to me I remember hearing that the ‘brick wall’ phase of service tended to come along a bit farther along than a few months into it But here I am: month 5-or 3 if you count my actual time in the community- and I’m just about three steps away from pulling all my hair out. I have all the general ingredients for a successful work site: an involved and experienced counterpart who is willing to let me drag her out of class at the drop of the hat to ask stupid questions, plus my very own work space with the ability to pick and choose the students that I want to teach there. I even have oodles of resources that have been left for me by previous volunteers at my site and a staff full of teachers and students dying to work with me for whatever I want to do at the moment. After school some days I literally have a trail of students follow me home asking me when I’m coming to teach their classes. Generally, the teachers seem to think I am doing a decent job, so why is it at the end of every week I feel as if I have done a whole bucket-full of nothing?
In order to better contemplate this problem I have decided to reclaim my Saturdays. I don’t know how people in Muslim countries can function with a six-day workweek. When I was in Spain, I was amazed at the Moroccan students because while we chilling back on Saturday afternoon, they would still be going at it full boar. I don’t know if I could have survived 4 years of that. One day is not just enough to recollect the sanity needed to persevere through the following week, especially since this day consists mostly of doing the chores you don’t have time to do all week-i.e. Cleaning, washing, organizing and-if you’re a teacher- writing lesson plans. It all seems like a perfect setup for the inevitable crash and burn. Although I haven’t reached this point yet, I don’t feel like continuing until I do so, seeing as how I don’t think it would be very pretty. So, as of this week I have cleared my Saturday schedule except for a few ‘chai sagatlar’- (tea time) which is basically just conversation practice with advanced students that doesn’t take much effort other than refining my gossiping skills and thinking of synonyms for all the thousands of phrasal idioms that we use every day in the English Language. Hopefully this extra day will help me step back, refocus, and kick my ass out of this rut I seemed to have found myself in. We shall see. Stay tuned…
Also, Footnote:
Thanks to all the lovely people who have shipped me AMAZING packages these last few months, I am golden in the coffee and tea department. I am like the Y2k of coffee beans right now. I am now drinking, like, three cups of really strong coffee a day in the hopes that I finish my stash before the end of my service Although I must say-I literally don’t think I could survive an entire day of work now without a bloodstream full of caffeine, so every last bag of that beautiful java goodness will go to good use. But for now, I see no immediate need for more to be hauled across the ocean. Thanks again everyone! Keep me posted on how live is over yonder via snail mail
Until Next Time,
Moi
Pros and Cons
February 14, 2009
This last week, after my visit to the hospital post-mud incident, for which I was ordered to a week of being chained to my bed, I have had a lot of time to contemplate both my ceiling, the position of the curtains, and the particular route of the ants around the perimeter of the room. The 7 days of what I like to consider now as ‘jail time’ brought out my inner neurotic OCD tendencies, and I somehow became that weird person who re-organizes the books on the bookshelf first by size, then by theme, then by the quality of the book jacket summary, then by the particular style of narration (i.e. first person, third person omniscient, ect.), then by year of copy write. I blame in on a mix of pain meds and extreme boredom. Lets just hope I never do hard time anywhere, because Lord knows what would result from that. I would probably start rearranging the bricks based upon density content.
Anyway, besides my re-organizing skills, I also managed to write copious lists of random things, which for any of you who know me, is what I tend to do when I have nothing better to occupy my time. Some of my lists consisted of pros and cons of random things, such as coffee vs. tea, summer vs. winter, American Football vs. Canadian Hockey, and volunteering vs. working-a-real-job-and-making-actual-money, just to name a few. One of my lists were my views concerning the Turkmen Koynek (Dress), which some of you might have noticed by now is an ever-present theme in my day-to-day life here in T-Stan. So, I thought I might share it, being as I have nothing more of interest to talk about at the moment. I came up with is this lengthy- but I think rather accurate- list that describes my mindset on this garment. I present it as follows:
The pros of wearing a Turkmen Koynek:
1. It saves time.
Instead of spending valuable time trying to co-ordinate outfits, such as a blue skirt with a white shirt, or brown top with brown skirt, ect, you can just toss on a Koynek. Perfect for the fashionably lazy, such as myself. For Koynek matching here, pretty much anything goes. You can have a dress of brown African Safari print material with a bright neon pink and blue Yaka embroidered on it, and people will still say, “Hey, nice Koynek, you look great today!” This occurs even if you look like the sewing machine threw up all over you. You really can’t go wrong here.
2. Layering.
For winter at least, when it’s really cold, and heating at work is pretty much non-existent, I can put on like, 3 pairs of long johns and 5 pairs of socks and nobody is the wiser. Plus, it's kind of like wearing pajamas to work.
3. Cheaper taxi fares.
Nobody tries to take advantage of you or charge you that extra 5,000 manat (about 30 cents) more when you look like a homeless bag lady, especially a local.
4. When walking down the street, it makes for less harassment and screams of “AMERICA!! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!”
On days when I want to completely go unnoticed, I put on the most Turkmen Koynek I can possibly find, wrap a scarf around my head, and make a run for it. I like to think of it as my Clark Kent outfit. When he had his glasses and suit, Clark managed to blend into the mob and go quietly about his day-to-day activities without a problem, but as soon as he put that red and blue spandex on, everybody went all “HEY!! LOOK GUYS, IT’S SUPERMAN!!!” And then he had to go catch a building or stop a nuclear bomb or something. And who in their right mind wants that all the time? Dressing like a local helps with this problem.
5. No wedgies.
I know this might not be socially appropriate, but it is very true when you are wearing a potato sack. It is a very loose flowing garment.
…And the cons of wearing a Turkmen Koynek:
1. Danger of tripping is increased exponentially by the amount of walking that is done.
The design of the Koynek has what those in the fashion biz call a ‘pencil’ skirt- meaning the dress is a straight cut from the hips to the ankles. Which for Americans who are accustomed to taking larger strides in pants, makes the mere act of walking a bit tricky (picture, if you will, a mermaid trying to complete an obstacle course). Recently, I tried to demonstrate this fact to my dressmaker by miming a person taking very large, manly, Sasquatch-like steps and spreading my arms really wide while saying “Ulllly kan!” (THIIIIS BIG!) repeatedly in Turkmen. It didn’t translate well. I still have my ‘Pencil Koynek’, in which I’ve tripped three times this week, and now my dressmaker thinks I’m crazy, and that I walk like Sasquatch.
2. Static Cling.
Although the sack-like design of the Koynek (which provides the extra space to wear those 32 pairs of long johns) is a plus, all those layers together can often turn into a wrinkly nightmare that will cling to anything that moves. On a super clingy day for example, picture walking down the street looking like you just rolled out of bed. But not just any bed, mind you. Nooooo, siree. Rather, picture a bed that has been kidnapped by a gang of pirates, used as a sail through a hurricane, then repossessed by the Australian government after a failed ransom attempt and used in a lab to test the effects of electric currents induced by shocking. Afterwards, when the economy took a turn for the worse and the lab was closed down, this bed was stashed in a warehouse, forgotten, but then later rediscovered and given to a retiring Employee as part of his Pension packet, who decided to roll it in a vat of honey in order to attract Kangaroos during hunting season. That people, is static cling.
3. Constant fear of tucking the back of my skirt into my underwear.
Ok, also not socially appropriate, but it is a legitimate fear that I have every time I visit the pit toilet. You know that scene where the girl comes out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck on her shoe and everybody laughs at her? Well, being as no toilets here have toilet paper, let alone a seat, or a door, or sometimes a roof or walls, this is never a very large concern of mine. But I am however, genuinely afraid of exposing my bum to all the world while obliviously walking down the street post pit-toilet one day with an edge tucked into my bloomers.
4. Slower reaction times.
When avoiding Turkmen dogs, wearing a Koynek gives the dog a slightly bigger advantage. I’d like to see one of them try to chase me while wearing one of these suckers. I’d say that would even the playing field a little bit (ok, I still have a little residual anger with Turkmen dogs, I am aware of this). Also, I might have caught that bus last week and not been late to school had I been able to run. How Turkmen girls run (and in 4-inch heels, on gravel roads) is still a mystery to me. I’m thinking it takes years of training at this point.
5. It’s a Koynek. Enough said with this last one.
…..The End
To wear or not to wear, that is the question. In short, this is just one example of what a single week of house arrest will amount too. Although don’t get me wrong, there are there some perfectly dandy Koyneks out there- they are just worn by those with more fashion or grace than this particular volunteer has the capacity for. Also, given more time and boredom (perhaps this summer), I may also tackle the merits of the Turkmen Telpek, which closely resemble that of the Davy Crocket hat, except that instead of a Raccoon pelt, the Turkmen hat contains the hide of an entire sheep that somehow props atop a man’s head. It is quite brilliant, really. Kind of like balancing a lap dog on your forehead.
Also, in answer to the queries- yes, I have kind of given up on the whole picture-uploading thing. How other volunteers here have managed to do it is a mystery to me. I’m basically technologically retarded, and added to that I am living in a technologically challenged country, so that’s two strikes against me right there. If anything, I can try to mail pictures to ‘The America’ and have a family member who is more techno savvy, or who has a better Internet service than I, to attempt to post them or scan them, or however it is done these days. Or they can just pass them around or make copies. By 2010, maybe? (I’m kind of serious when I say that…)
Also, mostly because he told me not to do this (hehe...) Hi Dan’s mom! Your baby is doing just swimmingly here in this little village. I make sure I bug him at least twice weekly for sanity’s sake. Mine, mostly. I don’t know if I do anything to help his.
Love to all ya’lls in The America and otherwise.
Paz.
Friday, February 6, 2009
change of address
Hey, if anybody is sending my letters/packages, make sure you omit School #7 from the address-because people have just been delivering mail to my schhol and it dissapears.... So if you want me to get it, just take out that part! Loves to you all. Oh and if you haven't figured it out, when I post these blogs, the oldest is at the top, and it goes down so that the most recent is at the bottem of the post.
It's been a while.....
January 15, 2009
The Complexities of the English Language
Happy New Year Ya’ll. Although I do realize it ‘twill possibly be awhile before I make the journey into the Metropolis of Ashgabat and enter this little ditty on the invention they call the world wide web, I thought I’d write for posterities sake. Think of it as a time capsule. So, now that we are in the grand year of 2009, what is my New Years resolution, you ask? My desires are simple:
1). Firstly, I am a realist, so I don’t plan on spreading the joy of linguistic knowledge to all reaches of this country, but I would like-by the end of my 2 years here-for ONE of my students (at the moment I have somewhere around 2000) to know enough grammar to be able to tell me a decent original joke in English. That would be thoroughly gratifying- Lord knows a little humor can go along way around here. On my end, I will reciprocate with a good Turkmen joke. Thus far in my quest, I have learned the phrase “you are killing me!” in Turkmen, which I find quite helpful around here when my kids are being unruly little demons (to put it gently).
2). My secondary resolution is to master walking in a long dress without completely making a fool of myself, or causing injuries to myself or to those around me. I am being utterly serious when I say this. This week alone I have tripped thirteen times, caught myself on a row of heaters (which almost resulted in death by fire) and used the last of my orange thread to mend the tears in my fashionable pumpkin-colored-maternity-style Koynek, most of which were resulted from various klutzy activities. I have never really considered myself an extremely graceful and overly coordinated person, but I have never experienced this grandiose level of personal mayhem in my life until I arrived to this country and dawned this charming national garment. At the moment, my life is a cross between a Mr. Bean and I Love Lucy episode- going about my personal business while simultaneously constantly avoiding and/or causing near disaster. To put it mildly, I miss pants.
Well, in other news, life in general has been very busy here. I am working a BIT more than I would like right now, but right now my personal goal is to power through this semester, so that I can crash from complete exhaustion when spring break rolls around. Personally, I think this is a good, well thought-out plan (ha). On the upside, I am becoming a pro at lesson planning, and can now whip out five different lesson plans in about an hour. The degree of diversity in English levels around here constantly stuns me. I go from teaching I am good for an hour, to working on phrasal idioms, to talking about the difference of countable and uncountable nouns, to teaching cat and dog, all in the course of a day. I am discovering things about the English language that I never thought possible. Take today, for example. Because the pronouns she and he don’t exist in Turkmen, I spent 15 minutes explaining to a student that it is possible to assign three separate pronouns to a cat. Most people generally just call a cat “it”. But some people, especially strange Americans, are very close to their cats, so it is also possible to say “she” or “he” if they to prefer to personify their cats. So somebody can say, “where is the cat?” And any normal person would reply, “It is sleeping.” BUT, take somebody who really loves their cat, and they know that their particular cat is a girl, and suddenly it is also possible to reply, “she is sleeping.” WHOA. A whole different pronoun, because now…wait for it… the sex of the cat had been positively identified!!! Whoodathunkit!! So, if anyone was curious, this is how I spend my days. If anyone so desires, now for only 3 payments of$19.99 plus tax and shipping, you can have all the episodes of “Megan’s Life in Turkmenistan” on DVD, with all politically incorrect footage unedited! (And believe you me, there’s a lot of that going on) Checks made payable to the address listed on this web page. Included is a bonus feature of dancing at Turkmen weddings that is particularly entertaining.
On a more somber note, I was tutoring a student the other day on the complexities of countable and non-countable nouns (which for any of you grammar stumped folks out there means when you can use the determiners much, or a lot of). We were discussing and arguing phrases when you use certain determiners based on the degree of ‘countability’. For instance, we say “I didn’t have much luck at the casino yesterday”, because you can measure the amount of luck that you experienced from the money you won or lost. But other things don’t have a measurable quality, and so we say “a lot of”. In this particular instance we were talking about grief, with the sentence “she has experienced a lot of grief in her life.” When I asked my student why she thought we used this determiner, she said,
“Well, I think the uncountable determiner is correct.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“ Because you can’t measure grief,” she said. So, take that one home with you Jack Handy. That is one seriously deep thought.
Until next time,
Me
Feb 2, 2009
My first student joke
It was only just a few weeks or so ago that I was lamenting the lack of cross-lingual jokes. But hear ye, hear ye…I think I may have just got my first good one. The other day I was doing some scheduling with one of the teachers I am training, and through a bit of miming and pictionary, she drew out for me what she diplomatically titled “Hell’s Calendar”. It appears below:
Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday
work work work work work work work
Ok, so it might not win a slot on who’s line is it anyway, but it sure brightened my day, in the grand spectrum of things. In any case, it was a pretty witty joke coming from a very conservative Muslim woman. Needless to say she got an A for the day.
Also, from the non-related work area of my life, I am just now reading For Who the Bell Tolls, by Hemingway. As someone who holds a bachelors in English literature, I will admit I still have not read a large amount of famous American authors and books (aak, revoke my degree!). I have started and not finished at least 2 dozen classic novels all in the quest to make myself more of a literary elitist/snob. I will also admit I was once a declared hater of good ol’ Ernest (I mean, who’s mother willingly names their child Ernest, anyway?). I think it was due in part to the copious amounts of Hemingway in my High school AP English class curriculum, and also because in various college classes I have had to re-read The Sun Also Rises far too many times for my liking. But now I have turned the leaf, and am thus a fan of ‘The Hemingway’. This particular tale, for those of you who haven’t read it, is about a professor from Missoula, MT who’s hanging out in Spain, fightin’ a war, tryin’ to blow up a bridge, drinking lots of wine, and falling for a chick named Maria. And I asked myself how, out of all the cities in the world, did Hemingway pick Missoula? He can’t be all that bad of a guy, right? (Who knows, maybe I like it just because my last 2 zip codes were Missoula and Spain.) But in any case, I highly suggest to any of those who have not read it, to do so; it’s a pretty swell book. My favorite phrase from the book thus far? “I obscenity in the milk of thy mother.” Take that one to the bank, people. I’m going to use that one some day on an un-liked employer. He’s a jolly good writer, that Hemingway-even if he did steal Gertrude Stein’s thunder.
Well, I hope everybody is swell in the Motherland, or in countries elsewhere. Keep the news a coming and thanks for all the great packages so far from everybody-they make my days brighter! You are all awesome!
Peace.
January 5, 2009
MUD
So, we’ve had our first snow here in the jolly land of Tejen. A whole half-inch that lasted about 5 hours. Winter!! I made my little host siblings come outside and play with me, and showed them how to make a gar adam-snow man. (Although the result was only about 5 inches tall, due the limited supply of snow) But of course with the snow went the power. Pretty much the entire city of about thirty thousand went sans electricity for about a day and a half. My host parents, being the smart cookies they are, took advantage of the cold and hung all of our meat outside. I found our my neighborhood boys have guitars, because without TV they were forced to find different methods of entertainment, and the lack of light goaded them out into the street, thus I heard the same three Enrique Inglesias songs played over and over for about 5 hours straight. Although for a country with such a frequent rate of power outages, people are still remarkably unprepared for it. We have a total of 1 candle in our house, which is ancient and highly unpredictable, and no flashlights. Flashlights? What are those? My small keychain flashlight was the showstopper of the night, and was worth every last cent I paid for it at Sportsmans. For all the future volunteers that come to Turkmenistan and stumble across this little blog-forget hiking boots in your packing list, you won’t need ‘em-use the space and bring a friggin’ flashlight!!
I have also suffered my first mishap in this fair country. Due to the rain and snow, every last inch of dirt here has turned into a giant pile of mud/sludge. While walking to school this last Monday I attempted to avoid a rather persistent beastly dog by vaulting a small hill, and with all the slippery gook in every direction, did a spectacular Charlie Chaplin on my back. Besides being thoroughly covered in mud (my host dad almost peed his pants laughing at me when I came home looking like the abominable mud woman) I also somehow managed to injure myself and am now walking like an old bag lady with a bum hip. So this week I will be making an unexpected visit to the capital to say ‘hey’ to our medic and/or replace my entire spine. How is it that in your home country you can fall 5 thousand times or escape the jaws of death on a weekly basis and nothing ever comes of it, but when you’re in another country and a fly looks at you wrong, you end up with a broken elbow, or whooping cough, or some other equally exotic ailment? I wish somebody would explain that one to me when I’m in another country. As of now, it is Turkmenistan: 1, Lowly Volunteer: 0
The Complexities of the English Language
Happy New Year Ya’ll. Although I do realize it ‘twill possibly be awhile before I make the journey into the Metropolis of Ashgabat and enter this little ditty on the invention they call the world wide web, I thought I’d write for posterities sake. Think of it as a time capsule. So, now that we are in the grand year of 2009, what is my New Years resolution, you ask? My desires are simple:
1). Firstly, I am a realist, so I don’t plan on spreading the joy of linguistic knowledge to all reaches of this country, but I would like-by the end of my 2 years here-for ONE of my students (at the moment I have somewhere around 2000) to know enough grammar to be able to tell me a decent original joke in English. That would be thoroughly gratifying- Lord knows a little humor can go along way around here. On my end, I will reciprocate with a good Turkmen joke. Thus far in my quest, I have learned the phrase “you are killing me!” in Turkmen, which I find quite helpful around here when my kids are being unruly little demons (to put it gently).
2). My secondary resolution is to master walking in a long dress without completely making a fool of myself, or causing injuries to myself or to those around me. I am being utterly serious when I say this. This week alone I have tripped thirteen times, caught myself on a row of heaters (which almost resulted in death by fire) and used the last of my orange thread to mend the tears in my fashionable pumpkin-colored-maternity-style Koynek, most of which were resulted from various klutzy activities. I have never really considered myself an extremely graceful and overly coordinated person, but I have never experienced this grandiose level of personal mayhem in my life until I arrived to this country and dawned this charming national garment. At the moment, my life is a cross between a Mr. Bean and I Love Lucy episode- going about my personal business while simultaneously constantly avoiding and/or causing near disaster. To put it mildly, I miss pants.
Well, in other news, life in general has been very busy here. I am working a BIT more than I would like right now, but right now my personal goal is to power through this semester, so that I can crash from complete exhaustion when spring break rolls around. Personally, I think this is a good, well thought-out plan (ha). On the upside, I am becoming a pro at lesson planning, and can now whip out five different lesson plans in about an hour. The degree of diversity in English levels around here constantly stuns me. I go from teaching I am good for an hour, to working on phrasal idioms, to talking about the difference of countable and uncountable nouns, to teaching cat and dog, all in the course of a day. I am discovering things about the English language that I never thought possible. Take today, for example. Because the pronouns she and he don’t exist in Turkmen, I spent 15 minutes explaining to a student that it is possible to assign three separate pronouns to a cat. Most people generally just call a cat “it”. But some people, especially strange Americans, are very close to their cats, so it is also possible to say “she” or “he” if they to prefer to personify their cats. So somebody can say, “where is the cat?” And any normal person would reply, “It is sleeping.” BUT, take somebody who really loves their cat, and they know that their particular cat is a girl, and suddenly it is also possible to reply, “she is sleeping.” WHOA. A whole different pronoun, because now…wait for it… the sex of the cat had been positively identified!!! Whoodathunkit!! So, if anyone was curious, this is how I spend my days. If anyone so desires, now for only 3 payments of$19.99 plus tax and shipping, you can have all the episodes of “Megan’s Life in Turkmenistan” on DVD, with all politically incorrect footage unedited! (And believe you me, there’s a lot of that going on) Checks made payable to the address listed on this web page. Included is a bonus feature of dancing at Turkmen weddings that is particularly entertaining.
On a more somber note, I was tutoring a student the other day on the complexities of countable and non-countable nouns (which for any of you grammar stumped folks out there means when you can use the determiners much, or a lot of). We were discussing and arguing phrases when you use certain determiners based on the degree of ‘countability’. For instance, we say “I didn’t have much luck at the casino yesterday”, because you can measure the amount of luck that you experienced from the money you won or lost. But other things don’t have a measurable quality, and so we say “a lot of”. In this particular instance we were talking about grief, with the sentence “she has experienced a lot of grief in her life.” When I asked my student why she thought we used this determiner, she said,
“Well, I think the uncountable determiner is correct.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“ Because you can’t measure grief,” she said. So, take that one home with you Jack Handy. That is one seriously deep thought.
Until next time,
Me
Feb 2, 2009
My first student joke
It was only just a few weeks or so ago that I was lamenting the lack of cross-lingual jokes. But hear ye, hear ye…I think I may have just got my first good one. The other day I was doing some scheduling with one of the teachers I am training, and through a bit of miming and pictionary, she drew out for me what she diplomatically titled “Hell’s Calendar”. It appears below:
Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday Monday
work work work work work work work
Ok, so it might not win a slot on who’s line is it anyway, but it sure brightened my day, in the grand spectrum of things. In any case, it was a pretty witty joke coming from a very conservative Muslim woman. Needless to say she got an A for the day.
Also, from the non-related work area of my life, I am just now reading For Who the Bell Tolls, by Hemingway. As someone who holds a bachelors in English literature, I will admit I still have not read a large amount of famous American authors and books (aak, revoke my degree!). I have started and not finished at least 2 dozen classic novels all in the quest to make myself more of a literary elitist/snob. I will also admit I was once a declared hater of good ol’ Ernest (I mean, who’s mother willingly names their child Ernest, anyway?). I think it was due in part to the copious amounts of Hemingway in my High school AP English class curriculum, and also because in various college classes I have had to re-read The Sun Also Rises far too many times for my liking. But now I have turned the leaf, and am thus a fan of ‘The Hemingway’. This particular tale, for those of you who haven’t read it, is about a professor from Missoula, MT who’s hanging out in Spain, fightin’ a war, tryin’ to blow up a bridge, drinking lots of wine, and falling for a chick named Maria. And I asked myself how, out of all the cities in the world, did Hemingway pick Missoula? He can’t be all that bad of a guy, right? (Who knows, maybe I like it just because my last 2 zip codes were Missoula and Spain.) But in any case, I highly suggest to any of those who have not read it, to do so; it’s a pretty swell book. My favorite phrase from the book thus far? “I obscenity in the milk of thy mother.” Take that one to the bank, people. I’m going to use that one some day on an un-liked employer. He’s a jolly good writer, that Hemingway-even if he did steal Gertrude Stein’s thunder.
Well, I hope everybody is swell in the Motherland, or in countries elsewhere. Keep the news a coming and thanks for all the great packages so far from everybody-they make my days brighter! You are all awesome!
Peace.
January 5, 2009
MUD
So, we’ve had our first snow here in the jolly land of Tejen. A whole half-inch that lasted about 5 hours. Winter!! I made my little host siblings come outside and play with me, and showed them how to make a gar adam-snow man. (Although the result was only about 5 inches tall, due the limited supply of snow) But of course with the snow went the power. Pretty much the entire city of about thirty thousand went sans electricity for about a day and a half. My host parents, being the smart cookies they are, took advantage of the cold and hung all of our meat outside. I found our my neighborhood boys have guitars, because without TV they were forced to find different methods of entertainment, and the lack of light goaded them out into the street, thus I heard the same three Enrique Inglesias songs played over and over for about 5 hours straight. Although for a country with such a frequent rate of power outages, people are still remarkably unprepared for it. We have a total of 1 candle in our house, which is ancient and highly unpredictable, and no flashlights. Flashlights? What are those? My small keychain flashlight was the showstopper of the night, and was worth every last cent I paid for it at Sportsmans. For all the future volunteers that come to Turkmenistan and stumble across this little blog-forget hiking boots in your packing list, you won’t need ‘em-use the space and bring a friggin’ flashlight!!
I have also suffered my first mishap in this fair country. Due to the rain and snow, every last inch of dirt here has turned into a giant pile of mud/sludge. While walking to school this last Monday I attempted to avoid a rather persistent beastly dog by vaulting a small hill, and with all the slippery gook in every direction, did a spectacular Charlie Chaplin on my back. Besides being thoroughly covered in mud (my host dad almost peed his pants laughing at me when I came home looking like the abominable mud woman) I also somehow managed to injure myself and am now walking like an old bag lady with a bum hip. So this week I will be making an unexpected visit to the capital to say ‘hey’ to our medic and/or replace my entire spine. How is it that in your home country you can fall 5 thousand times or escape the jaws of death on a weekly basis and nothing ever comes of it, but when you’re in another country and a fly looks at you wrong, you end up with a broken elbow, or whooping cough, or some other equally exotic ailment? I wish somebody would explain that one to me when I’m in another country. As of now, it is Turkmenistan: 1, Lowly Volunteer: 0
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