I've been thinking a lot about the difficulties I'm having convincing certain 9th-grade-educated, 21 year-old librarians that I know what I'm doing. So I figured it might be worth meditating on a Turkmen librarian working in America.
If the programs were switched. . .
Akgul arrives at the Mills Music Library a random day in June asking if she can "help". After talking with one of the student workers who seemed friendly, she decides to come back each morning and get to know how things work at this library. Two weeks pass and the library staff has started to notice that this foreigner is hanging out quite a bit. They've even had contact from the Foreign Students' Office wondering who she is and what she's working on. They finally approach her and ask if there was something she wanted to work on while she was here. She says she'll think about some type of project if they are really interested. The librarians shrug and figure, heck, what does she know? Aygul arrives the next day with a 10-page plan in Turkmen language. She says it describes her grant she's written to the Turkmenistan government asking for 1,235 dollars to provide our workers with tea, candy and cake twice a day. Everyone looks at her quizzically, and a few even say some positive things. The library director decided, well, this can't be all bad. It's just tea. If she really wants to take two years of her life to bring us stupid tea, let's just let her. So Akgul begins her work. The first week or so she moved a few tables and chairs from the study area to her "workspace" to provide a tea area. The third week, she arrived, finally, with her supplies. She brings in a plastic bag of loose tea in one hand and an uncovered cake in the other. She tells everyone how difficult it was to find the right tea here! The stores are just not the same as back home! And the cakes here sit in the store for days! No one bakes cakes homemade anymore. This country is so backwards, she says.
The first few days of the new tea policy, everyone came over and thanked Akgul politely for bringing everything and had a fine time chatting for a few minutes before getting back to work. After a while, however, it got old and not too many people were taking advantage of the tea. Akgul then, to make up for everyone's lack of vision, began bringing the tea to each worker's desk with a piece of cake. She told them they should eat and have tea or they won't have any energy to work. She told them she was just trying to help the library. The director, worried about intentional tea spills, told everyone just to drink the tea and try to keep her happy. Two weeks later, however, Akgul arrived with a letter saying that her organization recommends that everyone have at least three cups of tea each day, or the program will not be successfull, and that in order for our government to have good relations, these programs should be maintained at high priority. . .
Well you see what I mean. I think many people in our library think of my work as obsolete--though the tea times are veeery important. The opposite is true of us. I try to convince them I know what I'm talking about. That doesn't really work. I get a lot of suggestions--"maybe we should glue the whole back page of music into the folders so it doesn't fall out" "maybe if we stapled the oldest ones into the folders they wouldn't fall out" "let's photocopy 80 copies of the biggest textbooks since they're the ones we use the most" "instead of putting a new table here, why don't we just have someone build my desk longer"
I have gotten frustrated recently with some of the workers, but all in all, we're learning to get along--even though Akgul (a real person!) doesn't like to use capitol letters in titles. .. and shortens fortepiano to "f-no". . .
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