TURKMENISTAN ~ Springtime & Tribes (May 15 2011)

 The Life of Peace Corps Volunteers. Tribal Identities.  

No HIV here.

Ashgabat’s spring has been rainy, cool, and beautiful. Wild poppies are blooming in the mountains.

I’m at the 5 ½ month mark already; “smooth” so far.  I’m swimming in the outdoor pool at the US Embassy residence compound on some mornings and evenings, and last month rode my bike to and from work. I was the only (fill in the blank: woman / older woman / commuter) on a bike – in the early mornings I smiled and waved at the skirted ladies who hand-sweep the streets 24 hours a day. 
Once or twice in the evenings policemen blew their whistles and shouted for me to get out of traffic and back on the sidewalk (I imagined this is what they were saying), but sidewalks, with their pot holes and constant steep stair interruptions, are more dangerous than the roadways, so I pretended I didn’t hear or couldn’t understand, and pedaled harder, all uphill.

One night last month I took a wrong turn and ended up walking my bike along the canal then across a gigantic construction site.  Builders work 24/7, and huge strobes light the night sky, outlining no fewer than 31 cranes on a single avenue-to-be.  Some of the workers are from Turkey; many are day laborers, lining up early in the morning to get a job; all are men – many from villages throughout the countryside.  It was a long, eerie walk, like being on the surface of the moon, were the moon under white marble construction.

Wedding couple Aysoltan & Meylis pose beneath President's photo

This month I’m getting lifts in the Peace Corps Land Cruiser – a new colleague has arrived from the US and is entitled to official transportation for her first months.  It’s too easy not to tag along.

Trip to Balkan: I just returned from a trip to visit Peace Corps Volunteers living in the Balkan Region on the Caspian Sea, in which, of course, I managed a 10-minute chilly dip in waves upstream from the oil refineries.  One tourist hotel had a magnificent fountain of sea water, jetting up 8 stories into the air, which turned into a multi-color light show in the evenings.  Balkan’s landscape was an odd mix of barren mountains and desert, which reminded me of Lesotho, but also oil wells, refineries, power lines, and camels crossing the highways.  I drank my first chal, camel’s milk,  a cross between warm milk and sour beer.  It’s a summer favorite here.

Volunteer life:  Most Peace Corps Volunteers live with host families, in homes with more carpets than furniture, often sleeping on thin mattresses right on the floor.  There is much “guesting” – visits by extended family – and most of them have been to more toy (weddings) in the 5 months since they’ve arrived than I’ve been to in my entire life.  I’ve attended just one, a big banquet with vodka and soft drinks on the tables, mostly women dancing a disappointingly simple dance to a fabulous orchestra (Armenian), and toasts to the bride and groom.  I eeked out a toast in Turkmen – a couple words of what felt like nonsense syllables, but people continued eating and drinking so being ignored rather than laughed at was a relief. 

Odd though it seems, to get a sense of what Volunteer lives are like I read their blogs, and feel discouraged at how much culture passes me by.  Volunteer life is definitely better than staff life – if one aims for depth of cultural understanding and amazing adventures.  But then, I have chosen to focus these years on career and salary.  Pity

it’s not easy to do both.  Peace Corps Volunteers in Turkmenistan work in one of two sectors, either they teach English in schools (grades 1-10 are in the same building) or else they are health workers in Houses of Health (clinics), doing community health instruction involving mothers and infants, hypertension, nutrition, and infectious diseases.  Turkmenistan is one of the few nations that does not disclose or admit its HIV statistics, so officially there is no HIV here.  Intravenous drug use, active prostitution, and cross-country/cross-border trucking and trafficking are documented, however, so the ingredients for HIV are certainly present. 

On a mellower note, the Turkmen Melon Atlas lists 378 types of Turkmen melons plus 54 watermelons and 55 pumpkins and gourds.  Just hitting market stands now is the prized yellow and green wahermen.  Melons will be in full season by Melon Day, 2^nd Sunday in August.  Peoples’ eyes get a dreamy look when the subject turns to melons. 

National holidays:  The new staff member and I wrote quiz questions (well, it was mostly her – I fail at pop culture) for monthly Quiz Night at the Embassy compound, and this was one: “Which of these is NOT commemorated by a Turkmen public holiday?  Melons, Turkmen carpets, the Ahal Tekke horse, the poetry of (18^th century) Magtymguly, grain, oil and gas employees, or yurts?”

The answer is yurts – probably because nomadic culture was forcibly suppressed by the Soviets and is little romanticized today.  By 1924 the Soviets were well established in Turkmenistan, and set about discouraging both pan-Islam and Turkmen nationalism.  The 1920’s were years of forced settlement of the nomadic Turkmen onto collective farms.  A work colleague said his grandfather was jailed for refusing to sell his large sheep herd to the Soviets, in return for a house and the right to work at pittance wages.  The Soviets encouraged a small range of products -- natural gas, oil, wheat and cotton – exported cheaply to the USSR, and gave in the government in return an annual subsidy.  The arrangement worked for 70 years, so it’s hard today to unravel what is Russian from what is Turkmen. 

A "ducan" is a small neighborhood shop

Tribal identities:  Nonetheless, people here still identify by their tribes.  According to the Ruhnama, the “bible” of Turkmen culture, Turkmen descended from Oguz Han, who had six sons, each of whom had four sons of their own. From these 24 boys originated 24 clans, from which all of the Oguz people in the world are descended.  Tekke, Ersari, Yomud, Goklen, Sarik, Salor are names I learned first from carpet shopping.  I asked three colleagues at work if they always eat lunch together and they said, “Yes, we’re from the same tribe.”  They then recited the tribe or ethnicity of each person in the office. So continues the interweaving of old traditions and new nation-building – the cultural distinctiveness (feuds, stereotypes, marriages, carpet patterns, jewelry designs, patterns of women’s scarves) vs. the pan-Turkmen themes stressed since 1991 independence and continued today by President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. The President’s large, smiling photo greets me on street corners, at the airports, in every school and every office, even in street corner ducan (Turkmen version of 7-11 style mini-markets).  It’s strange to be in the tiny nail salon and look up to see the President checking out my nail polish choice. (Similar to US nails salons run by Vietnamese or Korean immigrants, here they’re run by Azeri or Uzbek women).

Thanks so much for letters & e-mails!  Watch out for camels in the road,

Magdalena

Sent as Public Letter 3 to family & friends on May 15, 2011, Rev. 9 10 2012