Summers in Turkmenistan

6-4-06

Summers in Turkmenistan

What is Turkmenistan like in the summer?

The mornings are cool until about 7:00 am when you wake up in a hot sweat.

It’s women in white head scarves with just a slit for their eyes sweeping the dusty streets, watering the flowerbeds around the Turkmenbashy statues, and painting the curbs in white a black with a sponge.

It’s Turkmen men sitting under an old pagoda, smoking cigarettes while playing chess and the Turkmen version of backgammon making the board snap with the crack of the die against the edges of their wooden boards.

It’s old Russian grandmothers donning purple parasols, pink faces, smiles of gold teeth, and bottleneck glasses standing by the side of road waiting for the next broken windshield van.

It’s sipping fountain sodas made from syrup and mineral water made in front of you for two cents.

It’s Turkmen boys in their underwear swimming in the chocolate brown canal water while their friends try to pelt them with the pebbles from the shore.

It’s caramel colored little girls with puff balls of shiny silver mesh adorning their pigtails, skipping along hand in hand eating the Turkmen ice cream that doesn’t melt.

It’s pick up soccer games in sandals and bare feet with a flat ball in the courtyard until 11:00 at night. Shouts of young boys saying, “Pass it to me! Look! Hey stupid, what are you doing?”

It’s old Turkmen women, bent over from a life of sweeping and cleaning with hand brooms sitting on the cracked sidewalk selling cigarettes, gum, and sunflower seeds.

It’s middle-aged women adorned in Turkmen traditional dresses with bright colors, colorful patterned collars, and head wraps selling fresh plums, cherries, and apricots out of buckets in the shade of the freshly painted curbs of the street.

It’s the rotting smell of sewage coming from the same drain that a woman with tangled hair, is washing her family’s clothes.

It’s the occasional whiff of burning trash.

It’s a walk home from work through an alleyway where the smell of lilacs wafts to my nose.

It’s sitting out on the family metal porch on carpets trading anecdotes and vodka shots.

It’s playing basketball where the hoop is a piece of sheet metal with a metal ring of rebar for the rim.

It’s the occasional meal at a restaurant with a luke warm beer, underneath a pavilion of grape vines, sashlik kabob cooking nearby over an open flame while you share stories with other Peace Corps Volunteers of what has happened in the past week.

It’s wedding season. Caravans of white Toyota Camries wrapped up in ribbon like a giant Christmas present, honking and speeding past each other and taking up all three lanes of the avenue. The bride, with the traditional carpet over her head, and her party pose for pictures without smiles in front of a plastic scene of Hawaii. A statue of the only “acknowledged” Turkmen poet Magtymguly rising up behind them and a child in a long since broken big wheel is seated in front of them.

It’s Turkmen yelling from half a block away “Chang-uh Dollar?!”

It’s a walk through the park where couples of young Turkmen men and women crouch on benches and lean on trees smooching, necking and snookering since they can not do anything at home.

It’s rides on the rusty Ferris wheel where the enthralling part of the ride is not the view from the top, but the thought that the groaning coming from the gears will be the last thing that you ever hear.

It’s classrooms, with rows of plywood chairs bolted to the floor, the light blue paint chipping off, where teachers sip endless cups of tea and chat about the hard work they are doing.

It’s sitting on carpets in the courtyard in the evening with raisin, dark cherry faced Turkmen elders with sparse beards down to the middle of their stomachs remembering the memories of those that have passed.

It’s reading letters over and over again in the post office while you wait for permission from the manager that your mail meets approval and you can leave with your mail.

It’s the midday heat that can reach 110 and stay hot until the sun sets at 9:00 pm where all you want to do is sleep.

It’s shaving you head with your friend so you can finally feel cooler from the heat.
It’s dust storm sunsets; beige, fascinating and stinging. Turkmen boys, with scarves on their faces, smacking the rumps of their camels and cows to hurry them back along the road to their pens as the sand blows in sideways.

It’s the neighborhood Turkmen kids knocking on the door of my apartment, then running away squealing with laughter when I answer.

It’s sweating through your shirt thirty seconds after you walk out the door.

It’s reading back copies of New Yorkers, sipping on freshly made coffee, while listening to Bob Dylan on my ipod delaying making the lesson plans for next week.

It’s teenage soldiers in uniforms three sizes to big for them polishing the golden bust of the President Turkmenbashy statues.

The evening brings on a coolness and with it the mosquitoes or chibin as they are named, that you have to brush away with a dish rag.

It’s realizing that this strange place that just a few months and another lifetime ago you thought that as the end of the earth is now your home.



What do you think? Does it sound like something that you might want to experience?

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.