Hello everyone. I apologize for the long silence. Training has been very busy and internet access is rare in Turkmenistan. I am posting this from a hotel in Ashgabat. It is the night before our swearing-in as Volunteers. Tomorrow we get sworn-in, I give a speech in Turkmen, and then we all get sent out to our permanent work sites. My permanent site is in a small village outside of Mary city in the southeast of the country. I visited my future site last month, and was very happy with both my living situation and my workplace. I live with a family down the road from the only school in the village. I have two host teenage siblings who I will also teach in class. My family seems incredibly warm and welcoming. My counterpart (the teacher I will be working with) speaks wonderful English and is very enthusiastic about working with me. The entire community was very welcoming. I am excited to get to site and settle in to my life for the next two years.
So far, my time here has been good, though not without its challenges. Still, I have been lucky in almost every facet of life. I trained for the last two months in Anew, a small town to the southeast of Ashgabat, the capital. Anew may be a dusty little town by our standards, but it does have a café and a bazaar. I lived down the block from mekdep #16, the school where I spent fifty hours a week learning Turkmen and training to become a teacher. My training group consists of four volunteer trainees and a language and cultural instructor from Ashgabat. My instructor was wonderful, and our group has gotten along well. Even better, there is another training group of five volunteer trainees at the other school in Anew, and they live right next to us, so we hang out all of the time at the café, bazaar, and each other’s houses.
My own training host family was wonderful, though only my teenage host brother spoke (a little) English. I lived with my host mother, father, brother, and two younger host sisters. The family got along very well. Many friendly wrestling matches broke out in our main room. Wrestling matches were encouraged by the fact that the only furniture in the room was a television in the corner. Otherwise, the room consisted of one beautiful red Turkmen rug that was very comfortable. After getting home from the school (or café), I usually spent my evenings on this very rug watching Turkish soap operas, reading, and studying. Oh, and of course drinking tea (çay), lots of çay. About five or six times a day. The tea itself is nothing special, but the break and sociality underlying the çay make my day.
Over the last couple of months I have been on many adventures. I have swam in an underground lake, I have seen Turkmen horse races, and I have seen the second largest flagpole in the world and the second largest carpet in the world.
Perhaps my favorite event so far was my first Turkmen toy. Toys are traditional all-day celebrations that include a lot of food and a lot of entertainment. The toy I attended was for a young boy. My training family and I left our house at 9 in the morning and didn’t get back until the eleven o’clock curfew that night. There was a lot of greeting and dancing, but the most interesting part of my day was when I got pulled in to help prepare the food for lunch. I turned the corner into this small apartment room completely filled with a dozen people seated around a huge pile of breadcrumbs and steaming goat meat. Everyone seated around the pile was furiously working away at mincing the entire goat into tiny pieces. And I mean the entire goat: meat, fat, and any organ you can think of. So I crouched down and joined the smelly preparations. After about an hour, my arms were covered in goat, and the mincing was complete. We then collectively raised the edges of plastic holding the pile, and two young men threw themselves entirely into mixing the goat and the bread bits. Within fifteen minutes I had steaming bowl of this mixture drenched in oil. This is how you make dograma, one of the national dishes of Turkmenistan.
It hasn’t always been easy. The language learning has been arduous. I passed my language exam, but I have a long way to go before I feel comfortable with Turkmen. Integration has proven surprisingly difficult In large part because of how close I have become to my fellow volunteers. Still, these are challenges I came here for, so they are the ones I can live with day-to-day. Otherwise it’s the dust. For some reason, Turkmen put an emphasis on proper clothing and shiny black shoes. Even though my walk to my training school was less than fifty yards, I had to spend a couple of minutes every day cleaning and polishing my shoes at the entrance of the school before I entered. The dust always wins here.
Fall and the cold have come here, but the weather here has nothing on America. I definitely miss the burnt oranges, bright yellows and dark reds of falling leaves in the Midwest. One nice trade-off: I can see the mountains every morning when I walk to school, and these mountains separate T-stan from Iran. I feel both right next door to America and a world away. We’ll see what adventures the next few weeks bring. Until then, may those leaves keep falling.
