Trains, Planes and Automobiles

I decided that a corny movie reference (or song reference or something?) would be the perfect way to frame my week in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital, where I hadn’t been in five months.

Trains

The reasons I hadn’t visited Ashgabat in five months, despite housing Peace Corps’ country headquarters and the country’s fine dining, is because it is a fourteen hour train ride from my home (plus the hour long trip to the train station).

Now before you go on imagining horrific third-world country train rides with no heating or cooling, hard seats and overpowering BO, I must confess that the trains are pretty cushy if you travel with people you know. The two times I took the train, we have gotten a sleeping car, called a coupe, with four beds stacked in two sets of bunks. Again, as long as you travel with friends, the coupe isn’t too bad, More comfortable than Amtrak, though I have never been in a sleeper car on Amtrak.

On the ride to Ashgabat, we shared all the food we had prepared for the trip, including Josh and Rebekah’s bloody marys. They had prepared the peppery tomato juice in their new blender. There was even green pepper garnish. Unfortunately, despite the popularity of vodka in Turkmenistan, the drinks were not a hit with the two Turkmen colleagues traveling with us.

The pre-conference conversation about project and service related concerns (do you have a project idea? Will this conference be a waste of time? Will we be able to speak several hours a day in Turkmen about project ideas?) was interrupted by the periodic wailing of peripatetic salespeople. “Popcorn, ice cream, silver jewelry,, bananas,” they call. Some chemical in the ice cream seems to prevent it from melting properly in the spring heat of the train. The sales women (for they are all women) carry their wares in large plastic bags or unwieldy boxes that take up the entire width of the aisle. I wondered if the salespeople always lived on the train. Well, while wandering from car to car trying to find an open bathroom (squat toilet, in case you’re interested), I saw one of the bag-laden salespeople settle down onto a mattress in a small room the size of a closet. So at least there is somewhere to sit some of the time.

Our conversation is also interrupted by the people selling sheets and the ones checking tickets. I don’t quite understand the selling of sheets, because you are required to buy them (or rather rent them), yet you must pay extra. About 21 cents. The sheets are rented out around 8 pm, and collected (one hopes) for laundering around 6 or 7 am depending on when the train arrives.

At one point that evening, the police who ride the train opened the door to the coupe as Josh was getting onto the top bunk. He had his shoes on. The policeman began to question a Turkmen colleague who was in the coupe with us, “Who are these people? Where are they from?” he barked at her. “America,” we said. Though we answered him, the policeman spoke only to our Turkmen colleague. “Well tell them that in Turkmenistan they must act Turkmen. They can act American in America, but they must act Turkmen here. Tell them that.” It wasn’t until he left that I realized the policeman was yelling about Josh’s shoes on the bed. Our Turkmen friend/colleague was very embarrassed.

While the bunk beds are hard, and the blankets scratchy, the hardest part of the overnight train is the severe stops. The train moves at a glacial pace, stopping every hour or so through the night. On the way to Ashgabat, I slept fitfully, waking up every hour, but on the way back, I was exhausted enough to sleep through most of the jerky, poorly executed stops.

Planes

We arrived at Ashgabat at 9:30 am, dropped our bags in the Peace Corps office, as the hotel wasn’t open yet, then waited around for the glorious free internet. After a lengthy lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Yes, a real Chinese restaurant with delicious beef and chili peppers, I headed over to the Aero Kasa (airplane ticket sales building) to buy my ticket to China for vacation. It’s a large, modern building with a huge decal of a TurkmenAir airplane. Despite planning this trip for the past six months, I was very nervous. Things that might be simple business transactions in America are not always so simple here. Another volunteer who came with us to the office had tried to by an in-country plane ticket in Turkmenabat, and the salesperson had insisted that she must pay in dollars because she only had her American passport, not her green Peace Corps ID. Talking to other people who had bought tickets before, this seemed to be a spur of the moment requirement.

The ticket purchase went off without a hitch. I was in line behind four people, and waiting only fifteen minutes as a women handwrote the ticket. The flight schedules and reservations are computerized for the airline, but the tickets are handwritten, so the ticket will be a nice souvenir. It should go without saying that I couldn’t have bought the ticket online if I had wanted to. Also, Turkmenistan is an all-cash economy. There is no credit unless a local seller as the bazaar wants to keep a handwritten record of his customers. As a result, I had been traveling around with all the cash to buy my ticket. It was a thrilling relief to dispense with all that cash and finally get the ticket. My plane leaves at 2:30 am in the morning on a Sunday, and gets to Beijing at 12:20 pm Beijing time. I still need to look up the time different to find out exactly how long the flight is.

Automobiles

Because we don’t know the bus roots of the capital well, and because our hotel was far from the PC office, we spent a lot of time taking taxis.

On the way back from the Chinese embassy, where I had picked up my visa application, Kelsey and I were pessimistic about finding a taxi quickly. The Chinese embassy is in the ritziest, but most isolated part of town, Berzini where lots of luxury cars drive. As a rule, drivers of luxury cars don’t pick up extra passengers to earn a few more manats. Imagine our surprise when a BMW pulled over. He even asked us to name our own price, suggesting he picked us up for the intrigue of international passengers rather than the money. Immediately he put American pop music on the stereo (it must have been a CD because it doesn’t play on the radio). We spent the whole ride in awe of the smooth roads and working shocks, a major difference from the lawn mower feel of a Lada on country roads.

Then, a few days later, a large group of PCVs heading to the hotel were surprised to get picked up by a minivan. Inside, the man quickly started up in uncertain English He was from Kazakhstan, and a Jehovah’s Witness. But he didn’t spend the time testifying for us. Instead, he wanted to talk politics. Unfortunately, responsibility towards Peace Corps prevents me from relating his political diatribe. Suffice it to say that he compared the fate of Jehovah’s Witnesses in all the Central Asian countries.

A Small Party and a Big One

March 20th and 21st we celebrated the Muslim New Year, Nowruz. Many volunteers used the long weekend as a time to go back and visit the capital, but I had heard from a Turkmen friend that there was a big celebration here, so I decided to stay in town. The whole week before, I started excitedly asking people about the celebration, but they looked at me blankly, “We stay home and do housework.” Then I heard about the concert in the park and convinced my sisters to go. Everyone under eighteen was out, circling the small park in their finest dresses. The park is smaller than a city block. Unfortunately, despite the good turn out, the concert was merely a DJ who played literally two songs before packing up to leave. So much for a spring festival. The exciting part of the park was realizing how many people I know in the town, feeling like I’m starting to integrate.



There is one special thing that many families do for Nowruz: cook sumelek. “Sumelek is a Turkmen national dish,” everyone proudly tells me. It is wheat that has been boiled in a giant vat for twelve hours with constant stirring. Then is it left to sit for another 12 hours. It is a deep brown and has the consistency and likely the taste of library paste. You eat it by dipping your pinky in the bowl and making a wish. You can also make a wish if you are one of the people that helps do the twelve hours worth of stirring.



As it turns out, the big celebration this week was my host-father’s fiftieth birthday. We rented outdoor tables and chairs for fifty guests and served a seven course meal. All the women in the family stayed home to help and I pitched in later when I got back from work. The first course was the hors d’heuvres: four different kinds of salads (beet, potato, layered fish salad and mushroom), a plate of fried foods (chicken, fish, French fries, fried dough and fried meat dumplings), a plate of cucumbers, tomato, dill and scallions. Next came somsas (savory meat pies), followed by goat soup, stuffed cabbage and a sort of casing-free sausage called lule. Each of these four dishes would be a meal in itself on another night. Then came another soup, a broth filled with handmade noodles. The only relatively simple thing was the desert - plates of dried fruits and nuts, chocolates and store-bought baklava.



Throughout it all, the young people served and cleaned while I toggled between trying to help (but generally getting in the way), and sitting at a rowdy table of middle-aged woman, taking shot after shot of vodka. The older women are like frat boys seeking to initiate you, so great is the pressure to drink. Around 10:30, when only the intimate friends and relatives remained, my host uncle gave me a very emotional introduction and called on me to toast my host father. My toasting vocabulary is rather limited, so I had to repeat the toast I had already offered at a smaller table. Though I went to bed around midnight, my sisters tell me that the revelry lasted until three.

The President is Coming!

Last week, for two days, the president of Turkmenistan visited Turkmenabat, the city 45 minutes from my village and the second largest city in Turkmenistan, a fact which surprises me each time I visit. I thought I would take the opportunity to describe both the city and the event.

Each Monday afternoon, after finishing my morning lessons at the hospital, I walk to the taxi station of my site. It is the town’s main intersection, next to the tiny bazaar. I should take a moment to describe taxis here. Very, very occasionally, in Turkmenabat, you will see a car with a taxi sign on it. It is a registered taxi. Those registered taxis are never in my village. Taxis here are anyone with free time and a car. Drivers wait around by the bazaar in their cars until they have enough passengers and then drive twenty minutes to Dunya Bazaar, the enormous market at the southern edge of the city. On Sunday, when many many women make the trip to the Dunya for cheaper produce, fabric, vacuum cleaners, electric kettles, yarn, car parts or anything else, the cabs fill quickly with four passengers. But on Monday, when I go, the drivers wait around for another fifteen minutes for just one more passenger.

The road between my town and Dunya is the main road for the entire Lebap region, starting at the bazaar and extending another five hours or so south to Afghanistan. In America, it would be a two-lane highway, traffic heading north and south. And it is two lanes here, too. Sort of. If the driver owns a car less then ten years old, he will pass the slower older cars ahead in an imaginary middle lane. Two lanes, main thorough-fair of Lebap, and both northbound and southbound traffic using the imaginary lane. Occasionally, I find myself wondering which is safer: a twenty-five year old Soviet Lada whose cabin is probably full of carbon monoxide and which I doubt has an impact-absorbing crumple zone, or a newer safer car, with a driver passes in the middle lane. At these moments, I turn to the camel-hair talisman hung from the rear view mirror and hope that protection from the evil eye includes automotive invincibility. At. Dunya, I hop out of the taxi and hand over my 10,000 Manats, roughly 70 cents.

Though everyone in my town calls Dunya, “the city,” my trip is hardly over. Dunya is on the outskirts, and I have another half hour bus ride to get to the internet café or another volunteer’s apartment. There is no choosing between new and old buses (or at least there wasn’t until recently, but more on that later). All the buses are Soviet era, seating about twenty people on seat cushions so worn, that I recognized a bus by the way my butt fell into exactly the same hole. Each bus has personality, as the upholstery is in assorted garish fabrics probably hand-sewn by the bus-driver’s wife. The passengers are a mix of village women in traditional dress, with covered heads and long yakas (the embroidery on the front of the Turkmen dress), and young fashionable city youth in tight jeans, high leather boots and occasionally with pierced noses. It is probably wishful thinking, but this bus ride feels like one of the most blissfully anonymous parts of my week. The mix of people makes me less conspicuous, I think.

We all bump along together at a snails pace, the ancient cassis of the bus shaking every joint. I once tried to tell my counterpart at work that the bus offered a full body massage, but I’m not sure she understood. Tooth-rattling roads are just a fact of life here. One time, the bus I was on stalled, and the driver hopped out and hand-cranked the bus back to life. All buses have a manual start option in case the alternator fails. The driver was reluctant to come to a full stop at the next bus station, so a passenger hopped out as the bus continued to crawl forward.

Despite its alleged size, the city hardly seems to bustled. In the bus window, I see squat two and three story apartment buildings in pale pinks and greys. Bright white satellite dishes hang in stark newness by every window. Few other things look so new. The stores are under-stocked neighborhood convenience stores, and occasionally restaurants or bakeries. My landmarks on the trip are the “Asia Disco,” with a sign in giant red letters framed in palm trees, and a giant unexplained statue of a rubix cube. The cube would be impossible to solve, however, because every side is full of a single color, save one yellow square on the green side. The cube has ten yellow squares, and eight green. Sometimes the whole country feels like an impossible rubix cube. If I want to go to the other volunteers’ apartment, I get off at the bronze of an ancient Turkmen hero next to an eternally empty amusement park. Otherwise, I get off a few stops later at Gok Bazaar, by the internet café, or I ride the bus to the train station then walk to the post office. Sometimes I ride the bus to the train station just to pass the time, though, since timing my arrival for two pm, when the internet café reopens can be hard.

I haven’t done much site-seeing in the city, as most people attest there isn’t much to do. There is a Russian Orthodox Church I entered, with the usual filigree icons. It is a single room, surprisingly light and the smell of incense sent me scrambling to remember all the Russian chants and hymns from my chorus days. I can’t tell the number of times I regret not bringing my Russian chorus music, because I really think the folk songs would be a great community-integrating tool, and I can’t remember the full words to many of the songs. I have also been three times to Lebap restaurant, which makes a totally decent Margarita pizza, the only thing I have eaten there. I tried, once, to order blinis (Russian crepes), but they were out. The other option is soup, but I never want to order soup, because I eat it for every single dinner. The only patrons I have ever seen at the restaurant are the other volunteers. The Bratt travel guide to Turkmenistan calls it the “closest thing to fine dining in Turkmenabat.” One time, the volunteers met at Owadan Café. I order the mushroom pizza. It was tasty, with plenty of mushrooms, but there were no tomatoes, very little cheese and it was topped with mayonnaise and ketchup. I still need to visit the Russian bath house and the city’s museum. They are probably closed Sundays, though, so I will need to take some time off work to get there.

And now on to the President. Starting several weeks (or was it over a month?) before his visit, news of the impending arrival was being whispered around, “The President is giving us a hospital, a school, new buses.” For his visit, Dunya Bazaar, the second largest bazaar in the country, was shut down for three days. My host father, who works at a pharmacy in the bazaar stayed at home, but my host mother, a doctor in the city, stayed late each day at work for meeting about the new hospital.

On Turkmen TV, whenever the president is shown (and this is very often), he is surrounded by an adoring public waving flags. This is because all employees of the government in my county ( and in the city and other neighboring county), had to go and wait for him. This means the hospital was empty of all but a skeleton staff, and all the schools were closed because the teachers went off along with the oldest grades to greet the president. The new hospital was opened along with the new school and 180 new buses were given. My hospital even got a new ambulance, though we’re not in the city. All the new vehicles have a clear message on the front, “A gift from our respected President.” My family, who watches almost exclusively Russian satellite TV, watched the Turkmen news to see the ceremonies. Children in the new school gave a concert, recited poetry and used the schools new computers. It is hard to gauge reactions to the event because most people were simply tired for waiting around in the rain for their head of state.

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.

Turkmen Health Beliefs

I am too overwhelmed by the month and a half of events to try and catch up on my blog, so I’m just writing some short entries and I’ll slowly make up for the empty time in the coming entries, I hope. This entry is a summary of Turkmen health beliefs. These beliefs are prevalent enough that I have heard them multiple times, but they are by no means universal, and they are far less prevalent among doctors with whom I have talked. Despite the prevalence of some of these beliefs, I would say that many people lack confidence in their own convictions, trusting the knowledge of doctors above others to the exclusion of seeing value in what they may know already.

1. Eating apples cures and prevents anemia.

I hear this almost every day because I do an anemia lesson with pregnant women who are at risk of anemia.

2. Spinach causes high blood pressure.

I asked a doctor about this belief, and she said that spinach gives some people a headache. The same is also believed about lentils. So basically, if the food is iron rich and high in fiber, it will give you high blood pressure.

3. Headaches cause high blood pressure.

4. Eating eggs during pregnancy deforms a baby’s head.

I have a theory about this belief. There could easily be a virus or bacteria in eggs that causes birth defects. In America, pregnant women are told to avoid cold cuts because of listeriosis and German Measles does cause birth defects. But one of the doctors claims this belief just comes from eggs being expensive. I always tell the women to cook their eggs thoroughly.

5. Cold drink and ice cream cause soar throats.

I asked a doctor about this belief, and she explained that cold makes the throat more susceptible to pathogens.

6. A compress of vodka soaked towels should be put on the neck for a soar throat.

7. Food that is more than a day old should be avoided even if it is stored in the fridge. This only applies to the main course; salads, old bread, canned goods and meats are all fine.

8. If boys have sex too young, they get high levels of hormones and this can give them breast cancer.

I heard this from an oncologist who is my host uncle. He is a cancer surgeon, and he was talking about operating on a boy with breast cancer. When I commented on the fact that this was very rare, he said that breast cancer wasn’t rare in men here because boys have sex too young.

These are just beliefs I have personally encountered. I have heard other volunteers talk about other beliefs, but I am not including them here because I haven’t heard them directly. If you think you know the origin of the belief, or if you know any could medical anthropology texts, please leave a comment and recommend one.

Ahhh!

MS words doesn't work on this computer, so once again, my beautifully-pretyped posts will be left to languish. And I can't seem to open the files in Google Reader either. Maybe it will happen next week.