Travel writers

Dust devils swept through the courtyard lifting up the discarded sunflower seeds left from a night of crouching young Turkmen men. I sat on the top john, the sound of Beck's Sea of Change album, emanated from my nearby computer, sipping a cup of freshly made coffee. I turned my attention away from the most recent dust devil that had sent a young Turkmen boy running away, howling with laughter and asked Stephanie, "Do you consider yourself an ex-pat already?"

She looked up from her magazine let out a sigh and responded, "I can't see myself living in America anytime soon."

"Me too," answered another PCV.

"Me too," replied another in Russian.

"Why so?"

"When I was back in the states I began to realize there was a part of me that the whole time couldn't wait to get back to Turkmenistan," she answered. Stephanie recently spent a month back in the states because her mother was going through chemotherapy and helping her father around the house.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah, because I realized that there was nothing there for me. That this time in my life I am supposed to be in Turkmenistan."

I nodded and took another sip of my coffee. For one that considers himself a novice when it comes to living abroad, I understood her point. When I first came to Turkmenistan there was the awe and appeal of something completely and utterly new and different. Ashgabat was a city that looked like Oz, which streets immaculately swept, gold grinning statues guarded by teenage soldiers with black and white striped sticks. Through training it was a challenge to see how far I would go as a person and as part of the community. Then in the past six months, there has been a battle within myself at many moments when I felt an isolation like no other that I had felt before. I knew that I was not happy here in Turkmenistan, but that I could not go home. While my parents told me over the phone that I could come home if I wanted. There was a part of me that knew that would be giving up. Plus, what would I be going home to, my mom and dad's house in Arizona, my friends in DC whose writing has dwindled to a mere trickle, no job and no idea where I would go next.

One might say that there are moments like that in the states when it feels that the only decisions that you have to make are tough life altering ones. The difference, apart from being in a land a thousand miles away, is that Peace Corps is in itself not solely a humanitarian venture. It is a personal journey to see how far you can go. Conversations with numerous volunteers will let you know that their primary reasons for coming to Turkmenistan are not to help people, while that is certainly the means to an end, but to travel to places that few have been to before, to truely live in another culture and find out the way that they live, or in my case it was a challenge to my self. Like the saying goes, "There is no such thing as an unselfish act."

However, recently I have begun to feel comfortable in knowing that I do not have to have a plan for the rest of my life yet. While other PCVs are headed off to grad school, jobs in Russia or Europe a great majority will head back to the states and have to decide what they will do for the rest of their lives. There is a strange sense of comfort now that I could only describe as serene that fills my days. Perhaps this is the point in the cycle of a PCV's service where things just seem to fall into place. While your language ability might still be developing, you are no longer struggling with finding the right word in the normal stream of conversation and the frustration that used to accompany not understanding what someone says is replaced with a shrugg and a slight smile of non-understanding.

"I also realized when I got off the plane, just how far I had come in six months," she continued.

"It took you going home to realize that?" asked one of the volunteers sticking their out the door to the patio.

"Yes. I mean we can all pat ourselves on the back for getting through training and accomplishing our projects and what not...but I did not realize just how far I had come until I started to have conversations with people back home."

"So what did you tell them," I asked.

“The big man, the situation and what the day to day life is like.”

“What did they think?”

“They couldn’t even begin to contemplate what this place was like.”

I took a long sip from my cup, lit a cigarette and nodded. There are moments I see on a daily basis that makes you want to sit down and write about what happened and tell everyone that you know about it. The hard part is actually sitting down and writing that letter or the journal entry. For the past month I have not written much, a few isolated things here and there, and for a person that finds a sense of therapy with unraveling tales of the day, it was somewhat disheartening. But, this is perhaps the best way that people back in America can understand what your life is about, because for all tense and purposes every PCV no matter where they are becomes a travel writer. In their letters home they begin to give dashes of paint to an ever evolving canvass of the land in which they are living. Some tell of recent escapades with other Peace Corps Volunteers, some tell of problems with their host family or counterparts, some send postcards or trinkets, but like all good travel novels they make the reader want to see that place for themselves rather than relying on the writer.

If there are things that you have picked up about Turkmenistan since you have read this blog, please let me know about them. I would love to hear your comments.