TURKMENISTAN ~ Learning to Weave (Feb 27 2011)

First trips outside Ashgabat. Soviet nostalgia. Turkmen-dili.

Madeline at National Carpet Museum, Ashgabat

Been here 2 months.  The recurring metaphor is carpet weaving.  I’m at the stage now where no one would buy the thing:  just a mass of warp and a pattern barely emerging.

I’m in the land whose most famous product, not counting natural gas, oil reserves, cotton and wheat exports, is carpets.  I’ve moved from a country that had Basotho hats on its flag (symbolizing mountains) to one with carpet patterns on its flag

TURKMENISTAN ~ First 24 Hours in Ashgabat (Dec 29, 2010)

 
First Impressions.  Breathtaking New Years lights.  

Luxury apartment replaces African mud hut.

Turkmenistan's desert dunes

The Path to Ashgabat from Washington DC:  Pilots followed the path to Ashgabat from Washington, DC which includes flying over the Atlantic Ocean, a six hour wai in Frankfurt (Germany), then up over the Czech Republic, Vienna (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Bucharest (Romania), the Black Sea, Georgia, Armenia, and a landing in Baku (Azerbaijan), on the edge of the Caspian Sea.  There the male crowd of gas and oil workers, including an Alaskan native I’d chatted with, seven Norwegians in hand-knit sweaters, and several Malaysians left the plane.  Only one person boarded in Baku, and suddenly the 20 passengers remaining in the 300-person aircraft revealed they were on first-name basis.  Mostly diplomatic types, peppered with a Scottish oil exec here and a Dutch development worker there, they chatted cheerily in English and Russian about their holidays, golf scores, and where people had been posted previously, a question I initiated.   Their lists of residences lived and languages studied made my world travels sound like a kid’s first trip to the zoo.

In the black night at 2 am, two hours late for my waiting Peace Corps colleagues-to-be, I stepped down the stairs into the cold air.  Rows and rows of bright streetlights stretched in the direction of the city, reminding me of the refinery town in Texas where I lived as a kid.  Electricity went out in the VIP lounge

LESOTHO ~ Africa's Mountain Kingdom ~ 21 letters (2006-2009)

Twenty - one "Letters from Lesotho," Africa's Mountain Kingdom,

are posted on this Global Maddy blog:

www.globalmaddy.moederogall

The letters and handful of photos cover 3 years when Madeline was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mt. Moorosi, Quthing Province,
in Lesotho, southern Africa.

In Mt. Moorosi village, Quthing Province

1st graders in Masia Primary School on paint cans without desks