Work and Play: Part I II: New Year's Eve

Arriving back form work at 10:30 am, I found one sister sweeping, and two cooking. The smell of boiled beets and potatoes filled the kitchen, and I spent the day dicing boiled potatoes and carrots for all the salads we were preparing for the holiday. We made four different salads, all involving finely diced or shredded ingredients, all involving mayonnaise. The Olivie is finely diced potatoes, finely diced cooked carrots, canned peas, cubed pickles, cubed bologna, cubed eggs and mayonnaise. It tastes just like potato salad. Another salad is shredded beets, shredded raw garlic and mayonnaise. The mimoza salad layers mashed sardines, shredded potatoes, shredded cooked carrots and shredded hard-boiled egg between mayonnaise strata. Finally, the spinach salad is shredded spinach, canned corn, croutons and mayonnaise. My host father also roasted pork over and open pit, then doused it with vinegar and finely shredded onions.

I found out that all this lavish feast, set at a table that could hold at least fifteen people was made just in case guests came, and there was no definite people coming. Turkmen New Year’s has an element of Halloween. People, mostly in their twenties or younger, wander from house to house of friends and family, eating food the whole way. I went to three different houses, each of which served me a full meal, and became increasingly distressed that I could not eat vast quantities. I had already stuffed myself on pork with my host family, then politely worked my way through a stuffed cabbage at my second house, when at the third house I was served a full bowl or soup and a huge plate of manty. I picked politely, but my stomach ached, “Eat, eat! Don’t you like Turkmen food? Why don’t you eat? Isn’t it delicious?” my host repeated. On every street, the children throw firecrackers called “Pankledaks” that explode with load cracks. With each crack my belly lurched.

For midnight, I was back at home with the family. We watched the president’s speech, then drank champagne out of pressed-glass flutes in which we had burned papers containing dreams we wrote for the New Year. There was cake, and then we went outside to burn out little fireworks. Being a neurotic New Yorker to the end, I was half terrified, as the feeble little colored streams whizzed out the end. The closest thing I’ve held is a sparkler, but this thin little firecracker has gunpowder and everything. What if one gets stuck and it explodes in my face? I genuinely felt like a “big girl” entrusted with this powerful dangerous toy. My host father also heralded in the new year with some gun powdered, firing a single shot from a rifle. It may be the only time in my life I’ve seen a gun fired. Afterwards there was a bonfire in the garden. Three sisters and five and friends danced around the bonfire. The celebration went on and on. The black smoke from three old tires rose into the night before I finally called it a day and went to bed at 2 am. I’m not sure how long the party lasted after that.

Work and Play: Part I I: New Year's

The big holiday here is New Year’s day. Many details closely resemble Christmas. There are elaborately decorated Christmas trees, in a style any American would recognize, children are given gifts on New Year’s Eve and there is Ayaz Baba - Grandpa Frost - who dresses like Santa and brings these presents. He is accompanied by Garpamyk - Snow Maiden. The whole week of New Years, American Christmas movies dubbed into Turkmen play on TV, with “Christmas” replaced by “Taze Yyl,” or New Year’s. On Russian satellite TV, Russian and American Christmas movies air almost constantly, just as the week before Christmas in America. At work, my colleagues kept asking if I knew “Kevin” in a movie, and after a great deal of confusion, I realized they were asking me about “Home Alone.” Given my ignorance of Russian and Soviet culture, I’m not sure if this style of New Year’s came from the Soviets or not.

Two days before Christmas, there was a large party at work, and I couldn’t help but think of something I heard from a friend; that for adults, the work holiday party is your whole life (a tip o’ the nib to Sarah Berkowitz). In the morning, everyone at my clinic pitched in to make manty, steamed meat dumplings, for the clinic. I was whisked away by my work friend Shemshat to a local kindegarten because I had promised to take pictures of her niece. Little did I realize that I was to witness the fabled Turkmen New Year pageant, and there were four separate groups. Four times, a group of elaborately dressed kindergarteners trouped in to the sound of keyboard synth, clapped for Ayaz Baba, shouted poetry to the audience, shouted a song, received candy from Ayaz Baba, and trouped off again. The older children also performed little vaudevillian sketches. Nearly every girl was dressed as Garpamyk, with an elaborate white or gold dress, many with wands, their hair curled, silver glitter everywhere and eye shadow on their five-year old faces. Naturally, I was enchanted by a spectacle so closely and bizarrely resembling American practice, even if four times around was a bit much.

Back at work, we ate our manty in the clinic, made toasts to the New Year (I am inevitably called upon to make a toast, as a guest), then headed for the hospital wide New Years carnival. I was nervous because I had agreed to perform a Turkmen song with one of my colleagues, for which I felt largely unprepared. I found out only the day before that we would be singing with dutar accompaniment. At this same colleague’s request, I was also singing an English Christmas song. Through out this New Years season, I have been asked to supply American holiday songs, and I realize that despite the abundance of these songs, I know complete words to very very few. For the holiday carnival, I chose the first verse of “Deck the Halls” because it was lively, I knew it, and I felt it appropriately secular. As I found out at the carnival, each work unit had prepared a little skit for the day, and these skits or songs were interspersed with dancing. I had no idea what was happening in most of the skits, but I’m fairly sure that many of them mocked Uzbeks and Russians, although the exact attitudes I am unsure of. Of course, everyone was excited that an American had learned a Turkmen folksong, so the ill-rehearsed performance went over well. The next day, December 31, everyone went into work at 8 am as usual, drank tea, socialized for two hours, then went home again.

Work and Play: Part I: Play

Last Saturday night I went to my second wedding at permanent side (giving me a grand total of 8 weddings attended since arriving in country). While in the Ahal region, men and women sit totally separately in wedding, both weddings I have been to here have had mixed tables. In addition, this most recent wedding had a female singer, wearing a short skirt (scandalous on two counts, the skirt and the gender). I drank vodka toasts with my host mother. Eating the palow (national fried rice dish), I settled into my favorite pastime of watching children at the weddings. I continue to marvel at how alike Turkmen and American children are at large parties. There is always the little girl dancing frenetically and with total arhythmia, and another girl who lifts up her skirt without shame in the middle of the dance floor, or takes off her shoes. And the little boys wearing tiny suits, looking uncomfortable and scrambling about underfoot. Little boys may be uncomfortable in their absurdly tiny suits, but that miniaturization charms me. People watching was interrupted an abrupt change in the music to a slow, longing wail. A dancer wearing a long tight velvet coat had taken the stage. She was acting out a scene in which she gracefully refused to be seduced, and the movements looked like belly dancing, despite the long modest costume. There was a silver V of long plastic silver sequence on the front of the coat. The music picked up pace and she began to shimmy, the silver tinsel on her breast plate flying. She kept this up for at least twenty minutes as men offered money and tried to allure her with their dancing. When I asked my host sister about the performance, she explained that this was Uzbek, not Turkmen dancing. As much as I gripe about “On the Road,” I wished the character of Dean could have described the dance, because the erratic, exotic thrill would have perfectly described my enjoyment of the dancer.

Eventually, a girl looking about nine year old joined her in the dance. The girl had obviously studied danced for a while, and performed with amazing confidence in a routine with the professional. Her proud mother or aunt gave her fistfuls of money to hold up as she danced. At the end of the girl’s performance, I could see a man, I don’t know who, offer her two crisp American five dollar bills, a good sum of money here. (It is not unusual for people that have jobs with private companies to be paid in American currency here. I suppose it is seen as more stable, but I wonder if that perception may change given the economic situation).

Work and Play: Part I: Work

I have now been at my permanent site for nearly three and a half weeks, and I suppose that I should talk a little about what I’m supposed to be doing for the next 23 months, although even after 10 weeks of training and three weeks at work, that is not entirely clear.

I’m working at a small clinic (the literal Turkmen is “House of Health“) with six doctors and six nurses, but the clinic is located on the grounds of a county hospital, since my village is the county center. The clinic doctors are all family doctors and nurses who make house visits to their patients and would be considered general practitioners in the US. Each doctor and nurse pair is responsible for about 1,000 patients, and each pair is assigned to a different district of the town (doctors and nurses here are all employees of the government). At the large county hospital, neighboring the clinic, there are obstetricians, two blood labs, surgeons, dentists, internists and other specialists. These doctors do not do house visits.

In Peace Corps around the world, each volunteer is assigned a host country national counterpart, whose role in the community is relatively close to the role of the volunteer. The counterpart is the official link of the volunteer with the community and the government, but there is no requirement that the volunteer work exclusively with the official counterpart. The counterpart situation in Turkmenistan is unique for several reasons. First of all, there are no health educators in Turkmenistan, so my counterpart is a family nurse, and the only existing health education in my town is a few health posters from the government plus any information which may be passed along during patient visits. Secondly, some volunteers are paired with someone who has no interest in working with them, simply because the director of the hospital desired a volunteer. This is not the case for everyone, and many many volunteers are paired with enthusiastic counterparts, but others must work hard to find someone interested in collaboration. Fortunately for me, everyone in my clinic has been very friendly, so even if my role is unclear, I am making connections and am optimistic about building a working relationship with some of the people at my clinic.

According to the official Peace Corps training, health volunteers are supposed to do a “needs assessment” of the community in conjunction with the doctors, and we should “community integrate.” The purpose of the needs assessment is twofold; it should help decide what health programs would be relevant and possible, and it should give health workers a new tool by which they can look at their community to establish effective programs in the future. “Community integrating” means making friends, work connections, learning appropriate local culture and establishing myself as a trustworthy and helpful person. Most volunteers spend at least the first three months improving language and getting to know people at work, or so I have gathered.

To approach my needs assessment, I decided that I would try to go on house visits with every single doctor in the clinic. My plan was simply to talk about what diseases we might see on house visits and good ideas for educating about any preventable disease I saw. So I explained to everyone at the clinic that I needed to learn about the town and its diseases, and that I wanted to do this by joining them on house visits.

The idea that my job could be to observe and listen, at least at first, is pretty novel and has gotten varied receptions. When I have gone on house visits with my official counterpart, or even when she is seeing patients in the clinic, she sometimes asks me to teach about the disease immediately. For instance, we saw an older women who was crippled by a fairly recent disease (in the past five years, I think), and she wanted to know what exercises she might do. A similar question came up with a man with polio arthritis. Because there is no health education, and because many teachers do no write lesson plans, the notion that I am not ready to effectively educate yet may not be fully comprehensible. The vaccination nurse with whom I once went on house visits, thought I wanted to learn house to give injections so I could make some money on the side. Almost all medications, including vitamins, are given by injection. But, I think I have had some small victories that come on house visits. There seems to be a lot of kidney disease here, and I talk about reducing sodium in the diet to patients. Right now, I don’t have a lot of credibility, but I want to co-write a kidney disease lesson plan with a doctor. I also did have one point of credibility when I saw a patient for a house visit a second week in the row, and I talked about ways she might reduce her baby’s scalp rash (with ideas from Where There is No Doctor). At any rate, the brief talk was rewarding because she seemed genuinely interested, and I think she listened because it was my second visit to her. As inspired by the house visits, I have determined that I will work on lesson plans for kidney disease and child development, since those seem to be the issues that family doctors deal with, and one of the doctors agreed these would be good topics.

On the schedule I worked out with my counterpart, I was also going to spend each morning with a different specialist at the hospital: gynecologist, tuberculosis and infectious disease. In reality, the only specialists I have gone to are the gynecologists, because I didn’t realize how quickly there would be requests for lessons, so I need to get them written. In addition, I am teaching English six hours a week, two hours a week at the clinic, by request of the doctors. Everyone asks me to teach English to their children, or to them, but only three people have showed up to my club. And it is really hard to explain to people that I can’t give private lessons, because I can’t give them to everyone, and I can’t accept money for them. The other four hours I teach English are at an English club run by a teacher in the town. I work with the advanced students, and just try to invent games that will keep them practicing speech, since most of the classroom education only emphasizes vocabulary. The town English club has been really great to introduce me to some of the towns most energetic and dedicated students, but it is definitely tricky to figure out two hours worth of programming for each session. I hope that the relationships I build in English club will help me involve students in health activities eventually. I want to start a girls health club. Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now, because the director of the clinic doesn’t want me to start outside projects for three months, and without making room in my schedule, it’s not going to happen.

As far as community integration goes, I just try to talk to any doctor in the clinic who wants to talk, and to accept every invitation to drink tea with anyone. The third day in town, I went out on a walk, and got invited into tea with one of the doctors. I just stepped in, and was treated to a full table display by my new colleague. The next day, a total stranger recognized me as American, greeted me in English and invited me in. Turkmen people are very “myhman soyi” meaning “guest-loving.” This hospitality culture, combined with a general fondness towards the US and mandatory English for every school child, mean that being an American here is probably uniquely favorable. Other Americans abroad talk about the burden of nationality, but here being an American opens doors. People want to meet you. At almost every house visit, I am presented with tea, candy, bread, and often a full meal. After the house visit with the doctor, the mother or grandmother of the patient always asks to come visit, but I often cannot remember ho to find the house again. I’m not sure what to do about this problem, except hope that I go on another house visit. All in all, the “community integration” aspect of my job means that I spend a lot of time schmoozing in bad Turkmen and accepting invitations to visit. I guess I could call it networking.