First Week in the Peace Corps

Finally, near the end of summer in 2002, all the Peace Corps workers who were headed to Turkmenistan flew into Chicago for a couple of days of orientation.

I remember making it to the hotel and seeing if I could guess which of the guests were my fellow Peace Corps workers.

We were assigned rooms and roommates (mine was Jay, a philosophy major with guitar in hand). Soon, we met the others, and, much to my surprise, I was not the oldest (although I was the eldest male -- a position that carried a certain amount of stature in the culture where we were heading).

It was quite a mixed bag of personalities, and people quickly began to interact and find others with common interests or personalities. Of course the young men and women also started to check each other other out for possible romantic matches in the weeks and months ahead.

To my surprise, there was another Lance in the group, and I soon became known as "Papa Lance."

When it came time to head to Turkmenistan, he and I became the official travel leaders, responsible for making sure everyone got on board and made our connecting flight.

We were also the first two off the plane when it landed in Ashgabat. I remember the first thing "young" Lance did was walk over to the drinking fountain and take a big swig of the unfiltered water that was the downfall of so many of the volunteers. Lance, however, seemed to have an iron stomach and survived numerous gastric adventures in the coming months. (He would often be the first to try some local food. Then, the rest of us would wait a day or two to see if he survived.)

After a grueling flight, we were greeted at the Ashgabat airport by a skeleton crew of volunteers who had been there preparing for our arrival. All Peace Corps workers had been evacuated from the country after 9/11, and we were the first full legion of volunteers to come back.

That night, we headed out to what passed for a resort area outside of the Turkmenistan capital. It was there, at "Camp Chuli," where we started our language and cultural training and got our first experiences with Turkmen toilet facilities.

The picture at the top of this post was taken at the camp during a mock Turkmen wedding. The women in the foreground are wearing typical Turkmen dresses and colorful scarves that reflect their ethnic tribes.

The first few days at the camp were both exciting and difficult, as I struggled through Turkmen language lessons. But, by the fourth day, they selected a small group of us to study Russian, because we were going to be stationed in either Ashgabat or Turkmenbashy, where it was generally easier to get by speaking Russian. Since I at least knew how to read the Cyrillic alphabet and pronounce a few words, I was suddenly a language god.

Several of the volunteers had a natural talent for languages, however, and it didn't take them long to bypass what limited skills I had.

One story from Chuli that I'll alway remember involved a night guard stationed at the camp. (What they were guarding, I was never able to figure out.)

In any case, one evening, as I lay sleepless in the heat and worrying about the stinging and biting insects that infested our sleeping quarters, I got up to take a walk and ended up talking with one of the guards. (Turns out he was a third-year student at the Azady Languages Institute where I was later assigned to teach.)

He said I should be very careful because there were some dangerous spiders in Turkmenistan. "There are black ones with little red spots on their stomachs, and, if they bite you, you can die," he warned. I told him we had lots of black widows where I lived in northern California.

Not to be outdone, he then said there were brown spiders that hide under toilet seats and, "If they bit you, you can die." I said we have brown recluse spiders in America that can do the same thing.

Visibily irritated, he said, "We also have the Varan!," extending his fingers as wide as they would go.

"Big spiders?" I asked, "like tarantulas?"

"No," he said. "Tarantulas are small. Varan is BIG, and it will chase you. If it bites you, you will die! Never turn your back on Varan."

About this time, Ian, a volunteer who had been listening wide-eyed to the conversation, nervously asked, "Are they around here?"

"Oh, no," the guard reassured him. "They are in the desert. ... Well, SOMETIMES they come here."

It didn't take long for the story about the giant, killer spiders to spread around camp.

I spent several months wondering if the guard was pulling my leg until someone finally explained to me that the guard wasn't talking about another spider, but about a giant desert lizard.