Update to Spring Update

I had a wonderful time in Dashoguz. Things there were similar to where I live, but there were a few things that were different. They do have a lot of Uzbek people there, but I was able to understand everyone okay. They also have some Korean people there, so we got to eat some food that is a bit different than normal Turkmen fare. We saw the new Twilight movie with Russian dubbing in a real movie theater. It was a fun movie to watch, but we got a bit confused at a few parts. We could hear a little of the English, but not always enough to understand what was going on. When we got back, I talked to some girls who read the books and I finally understood the story. It was a nice in-country vacation.

Unfortunately things weren't so great when I got back to my host family. On the day after I got back, my host mom sat me down and told me I needed to find a new place in 3 days. She said that they needed more space with my younger host brother getting married and my host sister-in-law having her baby. I was stunned. It was a very stressful week spent looking for a space. Peace Corps has to check our living conditions too, so I had to wait for them to visit. I found 2 places: one with a woman and her young grandson and an apartment. By the time Peace Corps got to my site, both places fell through. With one hour to spare before the Peace Corps staff member had to fly back, I found a place near my old host family. I'm living upstairs from an older lady and some other renters. I share the kitchen and bathroom with the renters. Everyone seems nice, but I'm still hoping for an apartment. Keep your fingers crossed that I find a good apartment.

I have to come to the capital 3 times this month: 2 times to give a presentation for the new volunteers and once for a health committee meeting. I'm currently on my second trip and wishing I didn't have to come back next week. I took a taxi this morning which is always a frustrating experience. It's a 4 hour trip, but you have to factor in at least another hour to find a taxi to get to the taxi stand and then wait around for the taxi to fill up. I also usually have to deal with a barage of questions about me and America. You can look below for a sample question line-up. On the way here, I realilzed I've probably answered the line-up literally hundreds of times by now.

Here's the normal line-up of questions:

Where are you from? (Usually this is followed by a comment to the fellow passengers about me being able to speak Turkmen. They expect me to speak Russian, not Turkmen.)

Really!?

Why did you come to Turkmenistan?

You work here?

Really!?

How much money do you make? (this is a common question here and not culturally inappropriate)

How old are you?

Are you married?

Do you have parents?

Did they come with you?

Is it fun here?

Sometimes the questions stop and other times they keep going. Sometimes I'm in a good mood and ask them questions too, but other times I keep praying they will stop.

The weather is very cold, windy and rainy today. The countryside, which is normally brown and blah, is green and beautiful right now. There are lots of yellow, purple and red flowers too. The red flowers look just like tulips with black centers. I hear that Turkmenistan is originally where the tulips are from, but I'm not sure. Last year at this time, it was already hot, so I'm really glad for the weather we are having right now (don't worry I knocked on wood after I typed this).

I hope all is well with all of you!

Spring Update

Winter is slowly giving way to spring at the moment. We’ve had some hot weather, some rainy weather, and recently some cold and windy weather. I’m savoring the cooler weather and not looking forward to the hot weather to come. I will be able to assure myself during the upcoming summer that this will be my last summer in Turkmenistan at least.

There is not much new in my life at the moment. Most of the things I’ve been doing I’m still doing. I work at the clinic in the mornings usually. In the afternoons I teach English and health clubs for students in my village and in the city. I teach kickboxing/yoga the women’s gym 5 times a week. This has been great for keeping me in shape. I teach one Advanced Club that a volunteer passed on to me who finished her service in December. I have started doing debating with them which is a lot of fun. A few of the village kids have gotten good enough at the basics of English that I will start an intermediate English club for them. I will have a test in 2 weeks that will determine who will be in this new club. Many volunteers write grants for various projects in their communities. I tried writing one earlier in my service, but I ran into a lot of trouble and I have not attempted to write one again. My counterpart has ideas for projects, but she hasn’t come up with an idea yet that has good community support and is sustainable. It will be okay with me if I don’t write a grant though.

I will be traveling to Dashoguz next week. It is a state in the North of the country. It is supposed to be the coldest of the states with the most snow, although I still don’t think it rivals the Midwest winters I grew up with. There are many Uzbek people in that state which influences their language and dress. I’m excited to see a different area of Turkmenistan.

I am still living with the same family I started with. Everyone is good, although my host mother’s father is currently ill with what they think could be stomach cancer. I haven’t seen him recently, but my host mom said that he can’t walk by himself and does not eat much. On a happier note, my host sister-in-law is planning on moving back in with us in a few weeks. She’s almost ready to give birth and she wants to do it near her parents and my family. She was living in Ashgabat with her husband who works at the airport there.

My family just bought a used Infiniti SUV. They got it from Dubai. A lot of people buy used vehicles that come through Dubai from the U.S. or Europe. I’ve seen quite a few cars around here with Honor Student bumper stickers or college window clings. It was very surprising to me when I first saw it. It made me feel like I accidentally wandered back to America for a moment.

I’m currently thinking about taking a vacation to Thailand this summer. I’m not sure I want to go from a really hot climate to a really hot, humid climate though. I would like to go in September, but we are not allowed to travel in the last 3 months of our service and I don’t know exactly when I will be coming home. I would go in August, but I will be applying for graduate schools in August. It’s weird to think about what I will do after Peace Corps, but all of the volunteers that finished their services and went back to the U.S. said it is important to plan ahead.

I guess that’s it for me for the moment. I hope everyone reading this is doing well!

One year done!

I have just finished my Mid-Service Conference meaning that I am moving into my second year of service. Sometimes I can't believe I only have one year to go and other times it feels like I'm never going to get back home. Since I haven't been keeping with this blog all of the time, I thought I would give a quick update of what's going on right now for me.

I am still with the same host family I started with. Everything is still going well with them. Every once in awhile I think about getting an apartment, but it's not really due to any problems; it's more of just the feeling that I would like to live by myself. They just got a new SUV sent in from Dubai, which they are very excited about. My new sister-in-law is pregnant. She is living in Ashgabat with my host brother who's working there. She will be moving back in with us in the Spring once she's ready to give birth. My younger brother, who's 24, may be getting married soon, but they are not sure right now.

I'm still doing an English club and Health club for kids in my village. It feels like the most successful thing I do here because the kids always come and are always excited to learn something from me. They don't learn much English because it's only once a week, but I try to teach them other things like geography, American culture and Math. For the health club we work on things like exercise, hygiene and nutrition. I've started a girl's club at a school in the city. I wanted to do a health focus for that one too, but I'm doing it with an English teacher and she wants more of an English focus. I'm still working at the women's gym in the city, but it is a bit of a frustration at the moment. Before vacation I had 2 women who were coming regularly, so I could really work them up to a good aerobic level. Since returning from vacation, those women have not returned and no one else is consistently coming. Some of the women who are coming really want to do more than 30 minutes, but they are so out-of-shape that I don't want to do anymore than the 30 minutes. I hope I can find some consistency with them, but so far it seems unlikely.

I'm still doing a lot of presentations and home visits with my counterpart. She's always interested in doing projects together, but she's not always great about the follow through. She also has a lot of other responsibilities that make it hard for her to help me out. She also came to the mid-service conference. We worked on behavior change together. We talked about how to encourage behavior change to stop the spread of infectious diseases. I hope we can do some work on this topic once I get back to site.

I hope this year brings a true sense of accomplishment before I have to leave.

A long awaited post . . .

I'm not sure if anyone is reading this blog anymore, but I thought I might update it just in case.

The picture to the right shows from left to right: KT, Jason, Dan and Molly. KT, Jason and Dan are volunteers in my region and Molly is KT's sister.

I recently went to Kenya over Christmas and New Year's. I stayed with another volunteer's family. Her mother and father are doing aid work in Nairobi. It was nice to stay with an American family over the holidays. We ate a lot of good American food at their house and then were able to eat at a lot of good restaurants in Nairobi too.



While in Kenya, I went to an elephant orphanage and giraffe center. The elephants at the orphanage were all under 1 year old, so they were all very cute. They only let tourists see them for one hour a day so that they can be sent back out into the wild at some point. The giraffes at the giraffe center, however, are not let back out into the wild, but it looked like they probably don't mind. They give visitors pelleted to feed the giraffes. I even put a few pieces of food in my mouth so the giraffes would "kiss" me. I joked on my facebook page that the dating game has gotten a little rough so I've resorted to kissing giraffes.



We also went to 2 national parks. The first one we went to had a lot of animals that were easy to see. We saw ostriches within 5 minutes of driving into the park and then saw other animals about every 15 minutes after that. We saw zebras, giraffes, water buffalo, warthogs, monkeys, and lots of different types of deer/antelope. We camped for the night there and then headed over to another national park. The second park was harder to find because it was a bit off the beaten path up in the mountains. At one point we weren't sure what way to turn. A right turn would take us further into the moutains, but there was a sign saying there was blasting ahead. A left turn would have taken us into a small town. We decided to follow the car in front of us which took a right turn. Not only did we not get blown up, but it was the correct turn! The second park was gorgeous because it was in the mountains. It was also really forested, so it made it difficult to see many animals. There are supposedly 2000 elephants there, but we only saw 2! There were also lions there, so we could not get out of the car as much as the other place. We did see some amazing waterfalls there though.



In general the vacation was just nice because it felt a little like home. We could watch tv in English and drink coffee at a chain of coffee places called Java House. We could eat cereal in the morning and drive wherever we wanted afterwards. It's been hard to get back into the swing of things in Turkmenistan. Some of my projects have fallen apart just because I was gone for 2 weeks. Now I'm at a conference, so I'm gone again. Hopefully I can get everything back up and running when I get back.

Fall Update

I'm in Ashgabat for a health committee meeting and therefore have more time on the computer for the next few days. I've heard through the volunteer grapevine that the internet cafe has allowed blogger again, so I should be able to keep this blog up a little bit more.

My birthday was last week, so I can now say I'm a quarter of a century. I had all of the volunteers in my region over for a pancake breakfast. My mom sent me maple extract, so we even had something like maple syrup to go over the top. It went pretty well. I invited my family to eat with us, but they spent the whole time hiding in the kitchen. I guess 14 Americans in one room could be a little intimidating.

Now that school has started up again, I hope to start working a little more. A long day for me in the summer was about 3 hours. I came to Turkmenistan with the hope of doing a little more work than that. I'm hoping to get a volleyball club started at a local school and I hoping to get some people coming to regularly to the gym again.

In 2 weeks the new group of volunteers will be coming to start training. That means I've been here for a whole year already. Sometimes it feels like it's going so fast and then there are other days that just drag by. I'm excited to meet some new people, but I honestly find my own group a bit overwhelming sometimes. The new group will have 45 members and ours had 38 members. If everything goes as planned, meaning no one leaves during training, I will have 2 of the new volunteers living relatively close to me. One will work at the clinic where the gym is meaning that I won't necessarily have to work there anymore.

I will be going to Turkey next week to meet up with my mom and dad. It's my first out of country trip and I'm very excited. We'll probably just stay in Istanbul for the week. I'll try to get another post up saying how it went.

a Long Time Coming

Sorry to anyone who may still be checking this blog, but the internet cafe where I check e-mail has decided blogger.com is not a worthy site and has locked it. My wonderful sister is typing this entry, and maybe she can be encouraged to do other entries too.

In my opinion, the summer has been absurdly hot with tempartures in the 100's every day. Since it's not humid, it feels like I'm being slowly baked. Thankfully the Turkmen take sisteas too, which I enjoy each afternoon.

My oldest host brother (a few months older than I) got married in late June. Turkmen weddings are officially 3 day events, but some guests arrived up to a week early to help out and some didn't leave until 2 weeks after. It was very intersting, but I also found it a bit stressful due to all of the guests all the time. The first day of the wedding was just an easy meal of meat and potato soup for a couple hundred people. The second day is called the girl's wedding because her parents put it on. We got her from her from house and took her to a banquet hall by car procession. The third day we brought her to our house by car procession, this time with a Turkmen horse in front (very cool !). The bride then had to sit in a room of the house with just other women from the family visiting until the meal later that night. Mr host parents have a beautiful yard, which they fit 500 people into. There are a lot more details I would like to include, but I don't want my sister's fingers to fall off!

My first big trip into the city

I made my first solo trip into Ashgabat this weekend. It's about a 4 hour drive by taxi. The train is much cheaper, but it is an overnight trip and I would have to be in a compartment with 3 other strangers. The drive is a little bumpy, but because it rained recently there were some flowers out.

I got a room in one of the nicer hotels and enjoyed some wonderful showers as well as nice continental breakfasts and in general freedom and independence. I was really craving cereal, so I was happy to see cereal waiting for me at the hotel's continental breakfast. I also met up with some friends that I haven't seen in awhile because they live in other areas. We had some nice meals at restaurants here in Ashgabat. I had a cheeseburger at one place and a club sandwich at another.

We have a conference this week in Mary. Unfortunately I'm close enough to commute, so I will not get to sleep at the hotel. I will get to see other friends I have not seen in awhile. We are going to talk about project planning, which I think could be helpful for my counterpart (the physician's assistant I usually work with on projects) and I. We'll see how it all goes.