Life in Paradise

Being a Peace Corps trainee is not the same as being a Peace Corp volunteer -- you've got to earn the title.

After a week of in-country orientation, we were shipped off on the bus from hell (it must have been 140 degrees inside) to meet our training-host families.

I ended with up Alya (a divorced mother of one) and her pretty teenage daughter, Christina (who spoke English very well.)

They lived in Bezmein, a dry and bleak collection of old Soviet-style apartments near Ashgabat that seemed to cry out, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." (The city was later renamed Abadan -- Paradise in Turkmen -- a misnomer if there ever was one.)

The picture at right is of the view from my bedroom window looking out onto the dirt street that acted as playground, soccer field, and communal bakery.

Now, up to the time I met Alya and Christina (ethnic Russians), all my cultural training was focused on Turkmen traditions and customs.

Turns out not much of that applied to the minority Russian population, most of whom felt they had been abandoned by the former Soviet Union. Which, of course, was true.

When Mother Russia gave up the Cold War and said goodbye to the "...stan" countries, millions of Russians, who represented the majority of the educational elite of those nations, were left out in the rain. Furthermore, the locals, who for 75 years had been forced to appreciate everything Russian, returned the favor with a vengeance when they took power.

Many of those who traced their roots back to Russia, however, desperately dug in their heels and tried to hold on to some of their old ways, by clinging to their music, literary traditions, language, and vodka. They were also much more open to Western ideas and culture.

In any case, as I entered Alya and Christina's apartment, I was greeted by Cindy Crawford and Britney Spears posters, giving me a clue that my experience was going to differ from most of the Peace Corps trainees, who were destined for the desert.

I spent the next six weeks or so living with these two Turkmen/Russians and learning how to survive in my new environment. During this time, I also started teaching at School No. 7, where they taught Russian children in the morning and Turkmen children in the afternoon.

(It's my understanding that the elementary school has since switched entirely to the Turkmen language, as part of the government's push to reduce and eliminate Russian influences.
During my time in Bezmein, I learned the many uses of vodka (including trying to cure a cold by soaking a rag in it and wrapping it around your neck at bedtime), how to bargain at the open-air markets, how to hail a taxi, and what foods my stomach would and would not accept.

I also learned what "projectile vomiting" really was and came to an entirely new understanding of the word "diarrhea." At one point, I dropped about 30 pounds in a week when I came down with dysentery.

More importantly, I also learned how to simply enjoy a cup of tea and relearned how to laugh until it hurt, even when I wasn't entirely sure what I was laughing about.

It will probably lose something in the translation (humor usually does), but I'll always remember one night when were were sharing photo albums. (One of the few things I could do at that point in Russian was point to pictures and say, "This is my dog. This is my wife. This is my house. This is my friend. This is my car.")

At one point, Christina showed me a picture and asked in English if I could tell what it was. There were some people in the background and a colorful pile of material in the foreground, kind of in the shape of a small haystack.

I said I didn't know, and Christina asked me to guess. "I'm not sure," I said in English. "Maybe it's a goat under a blanket."

Well, the daughter fell off her chair laughing, which started the mother and I laughing, with the mom yelling, "Sto, sto?" and me yelling "What, what?" The longer Christina laughed, the funnier it became, until none of the three of us could breathe, much less speak.

Turns out that the goat under a blanket was a view of Alya's behind as she bent over to pick something off the floor.