Women’s Day

The 8th of March is international Women’s Day, and also an official Turkmen holiday, much like our Mother’s Day. Boys give their sisters flowers and everyone gives their mother something. The female employees of the hospital all got a little holiday bonus. Unfortunately, this did not include me, seeing as I am not on the hospital payroll. Though women get presents, there doesn’t seem to be a specific acknowledgement of women’s contributions to society. (Women still cooked and cleaned today, as usual).

To celebrate, my host family had an evening picnic in the desert fifteen minutes from the town. The desert nearby probably doesn’t qualify as a desert technically, seeing as it rains a fair amount here, and it was cloudy tonight, but it still looks like a desert: namely, it is full of sand and sand dunes. The plant life is all scrubby low bushes, like a beach without the water. Still, on our way their, we passed many green fields full of wheat, eliminating some of the barren-feeling of a desert.

We set our blankets in the sand with twelve other relatives near a brown and murky path of water. First came the palow and salads, then cake. The older men and women offered their vodka toasts. I assumed with the cake we were finished, but then we lit a camp fire, chatting and nobody in a hurry to go anywhere.

There is a thorny bush abundant in this particular desert that makes excellent kindling. The thorns catch fire before any other part of the stick, so that put in the fire, then taken away, the bush seems a Christmas tree full of tiny lights. I sat just watching the thorns of the bush catch fire, then a thick stew of lamb and potato came out. Meanwhile, I had already eaten the cake, but there is no saying no to Turkmen food. So I ate the stew. More toasting the holiday and good fortune. The group cleaned the picnic area, full of bowls and tea cups and salad plates and the women (on Women’s Day), did the dishes. But we were not finished; I realized my host father was frying fish. After a good forty-five minutes of fireside catch and wandering and cleaning, we ate that too. Maybe the strangest four course meal I’ve ever had: fried rice and salad, then cake, then potato and meat stew, finally fried fish.

To avoid being force-fed fried fish on my overstuffed stomach, I moved away from the picnic circle and towards my sisters sitting around the dying embers of the fire, enjoying that peaceful drowsy feeling after eating outdoors. An older woman from the picnic whose connection to the family is unclear was also by the fire. She explained that when she was a girl, she had to make tea over the fire every morning: there was no gas stove and the fire was an everyday thing. She also talked about her own children; all twelve of them. But then, one of my host sisters spotted a glowing ember at the bottom of her coat. Her coat had caught fire and was slowly smoldering. But she didn’t take it off. Instead, she sat while my sister stamped it out on the ground. The fact that she stayed wearing her smoldering coat didn’t even strike me as strange until a few minutes later. I suppose when you’ve raised eleven children (one child died), you are just more calm when your clothes catch fire.