November 8 letter

11/8/04
Dear Alice,

Well, here I am sitting on the floor (pillows are our only furniture) on my last week with my family. Right now my crazy grandma, that they claim is 83, is muttering and wandering around flipping on and off lights whenever she sees need. She’s the superhero of light switches. As soon as it starts getting dark, there she is. If she were 83, she’d have had my mom at age 60 or so, so I think she’s more like 65. The women here age very quickly. I told grandma (in the states) it’s probably the lack of iodine but I think it’s more like constant work outside in the sun or bent over a sewing machine. The women, once they are married, cover their hair always, which doesn’t help them look young. The strange thing is the young people look old also. We mistake 12 or 13 year-old girls for 22 year-olds. They don’t have clothes for young people. They just have very small adult clothes.

My house here in Gypjak is right out of a National Geographic magazine. The animals wake me up in the morning (usually a rooster/cow duet at about 6:30 am) and my sisters run down the street and hug me when I come home every day. My mother makes bread every 2-3 days which consists of sticking bread to the wall of an outdoor oven with her bare hands. The women work all day and all evening preparing food, cleaning, and taking care of the animals. The...
(my grandma just came up and checked my temperature and kissed me on the cheek)
...the men go to work but are used to such a different level of hard labor. The men are perfectly comfortable going to any house of a friend or neighbor and accepting food service and tea any time of the day. My father here is one of the nicest Turkmen men and still rarely spends time at home unless he’s watching TV.

The kids are very happy here and love any attention I give them. Their education is far behind kids in the states but for such a vast number of reasons that it’s hard to find things in schools to pinpoint and work on changing. Kids copy to be nice to each other to the extent that all homework is identical. The teachers let the best students call out every answer and tell without embarrassment who the ‘lazy' or ‘stupid’ students are right in front of them. The kids have very little creativity and even art class is basically copying pictures of famous paintings.

We’ve had trouble getting used to the way the government works here but the longer I’m here the more I learn. I should just accept it as a learning tool. We’re in a very pivotal time in this country’s history and we can’t do anything but watch. Our frustration will end up lying more in things like gender inequality that we see on a very personal level or the trials of starting programs that the people don’t join. There are so many people that don’t understand why we’re here. They are told and believe that they are an advanced country. People ask which is better, America or Turkmenistan. They ask if they have ‘said household item’ in America. They tell me Turkmen language is the most difficult in the world (it’s not). I want to explain that we volunteer to help developing nations and what that means, but we’re here to gain trust, not make enemies. Politics is off-limits and many are appalled at my dislike of Pres. Bush. (Them's fightin’ words?) What I realize is that Peace Corps people quit not because they’re not tough enough, but because not only is it hard to know why we’re here and what to do, but we’ll never know if the things we did made any measurable difference. I could co-teach here and give my counterpart a day off here and there, or I could increase literacy by great margins. We just won’t know if our programs help. For goal-driven Americans that’s a difficult proposition.

Music here is also in a sense developing. The country is encouraging going back to traditional musical instruments instead of Western which is ‘fun’ to say the least but I think there are ways to teach Western music if students have the desire. My school in Balkanabat is quite wealthy compared to the village so I’ll have to assess everything again when I get there.

Well, I hope this was information you’d like to hear! If you want, you can type it up on karianderson.blogspot.com and add to my small collection! Best wishes and thoughts! Tell Stew and Andrew I say “hi!”

Love, Kari

Essay #6 (Flies)

My sister's bride price party was beautiful! The guests loved it. My sister was great.

But each of the 50 guests left behind 12 flies, and they all wanted to live in my room. I had a little breakdown and swatted about 50 flies while my family, no doubt, sat in the other room discussing how strange Americans are. Exhausted, I finally went to sleep only to wake up to a house once again free of flies.

Dead, you ask? No, I later found out that what I had thought was a strange dancing ritual is really a fly-clearing technique. My first night in my house the women had appeared in my room and had waved scarves in the air while walking the length of the room towards the door. Evidently they also performed the fly dance after my sister's bride price party and successfully removed the entire population of flies in Turkmenistan in a few short minutes.

I can just picture them wondering why this strange girl wants to keep the dead flies instead of just waving them out with scarves like any normal person.

They are used to flies, unfortunately, since flies are present at every meal and on every animal they own. Telling a Turkmen woman to prepare food cleanly is like telling her to serve only food prepared entirely under a mosquito net in covered cups with straws to a family hiding under blankets in a very warm room.