So I got an email forwarded to me from my fellow T-17s (that is peace corps lingo for the group that will be going to Turkmenistan with me) and it is from a volunteer who is currently serving in Turkmenistan. I thought I would pass this portion of the email along to you all to give you a better sense of what I’m going to be living with. To give you a heads up the original message was intended for a guy. Without further adu… here it is!
About the Turkmenistan program in general:
This is the really good news for you; we have a wonderful program here. In country right now, there are approximately 62 volunteers. The split is 19 health/ 43 English teachers. The gender divide is approx 40% male and 60% female.
Our country director, Steven, is so amazing. He is very honest and straightforward with you and has a very good memory. He is also extremely reasonable when it comes to discussing problems and trying to find solutions. The other staff are also pretty cool, and totally approachable.
Our health program supervisor (sort of our boss) is named Sashlee and she is so incredible. She’s very encouraging, and very good at working with local government officials to iron out any challenges you may be experiencing at your site. The sad news is that she has just been accepted to study in the UK, and she will actually leave before you guys arrive, so it will be an interesting time of transition when you get here, as we get a new program supervisor. Operating in Sashlee’s place until someone new comes in will be Jenet. She is Sashlee’s assistant, so she’s totally qualified, and she is really nice. She is a host country national, and her English is exceptional. She is also a doctor (with a Turkmen medical degree), so she has a great perspective on the medicine field you are about to start work in. She will be the one in charge of all of your training for the health program.
There is a main Peace Corps office, located in Ashgabat. This is where all of the staff are. It’s also the location of our medical unit (the nurse practitioner (Mary- an American) who will be handling all of your medical care for the next two years). It’s also where the volunteer lounge is located. The volunteer lounge has three computers with high speed internet (sorry, no wireless) as well as a HUGE library of volunteer-contributed books. It also has its own phone line and although you can’t call America from it, it is possible to receive calls from America on it. The lounge is open 7 days a week from 5am until 11pm and tends to serve as a congregation point for any volunteers who find themselves in Ashgabat.
About Turkmenistan in General:
You are coming to Turkmenistan at a really neat time, you will get to see a lot of historical changes while you are here. The country is really opening up. I’m sure you know about the former president from reading stuff online. You’ll hear about him a lot while you are here. FYI: please be very careful about what you say about him to Turkmen people. I’m not kidding. It’s just one of those things. The new president is very active in his modifications in the country. He has made a big push to start playing nice with other countries (oil and gas trading, etc), he’s a lot more human-rights friendly, and he’s a big fan of seeing technology grow (think more internet cafes, more cell phones). He was also the minister of health before he became president, so he’s making a lot of reforms to their health system (like outlawing smoking in outdoor public places in Ashgabat). There are also more foreigners here with each passing year (not a lot, don’t get too excited!) as Turkmenistan tries to open up to tourism. Doctors without borders has a very very limited presence here, and besides them, UNICEF, USAID, and Peace Corps are pretty much the only aid organizations. Peace Corps is really the only one who has a significant presence outside of Ashgabat.
There are 5 weleyats (provinces) in Turkmenistan. Their names are Ahal (Uh-hall) which is where Ashgabat is located, Mary (Muh-ree), Balkan (Ball-kahn), LeBap (lay-bop), and Dashoguz (Dah-show-gooz). There are approximately a dozen Peace Corps volunteers in each weleyat (half from the T-16 class, and half from the T-15 class) and once you are placed at your permanent site, those will be the people you see and hang out with most frequently, although it will then be half T-16s and half T-17s. : )
There is a significant ethnic spread here. There are native Turkmen (there’s five different tribal groups of these), as well as Russians, Uzbeks, Kazaks, and Tar-tars. There are also a few Iranians and Afghans close to the southern border, but not a lot. Everyone speaks Russian, most people speak Turkmen, and a lot of people in Dashoguz and LeBap also speak Uzbek.
The Government’s control is pretty absolute. You’ll see when you get here, there are police and military people on almost every street corner, and the ministries (of health, of education, of migration, of communication, etc) control everything from who is allowed to sell goods in the bazaar, to how much gasoline costs, to where cell phone service will be permitted. You’ll get used to it, it’s really not that big of a deal. The government just really likes to involve itself heavily in the lives of its people. Ya know? Turkmen people do not pay for their electricity or natural gas, it is provided to them for free (by the government), and they also receive 100 liters of free gasoline every month from the government, paying approximately 88 cents per gallon (3,300 manat per liter) once they have exhausted that supply.
There is a significant urban/rural divide here. Most people in the cities (there are bigger cities and smaller cities) have plumbing of some variety, they have relatively nice homes, and they have toilet facilities indoors and most everyone has a home phone. Slightly more than a third of the pcvs will be in this type of an environment for their permanent site. Most city dwellers tend to speak more Russian, and less Turkmen, and they dress, as well as behave far less conservatively. As for the villages, there are sort of two different levels of “village” in T-stan. There’s a big village (4,000-7,000 people), and a little village (fewer than 4,000). Volunteers will typically be placed in bigger villages, which have outdoor out houses and typically get their water from a pump, not city plumbing. People in big villages will typically speak Turkmen and Russian, in a mixture, and will dress more on the conservative side. Phones in the homes are sort of a gamble. If your house doesn’t have one, your family most likely knows where there is one. There will be between two and three schools and one village clinic for this size of community. During your pre service training, you will live in a village this size (sometimes a little bigger and better developed since all of the training villages are close to Ashgabat).
Really small villages are less common for PCVs, and these are the real “roughing it” experience. No one has phones, everyone has to pump their water, and usually you have to pump it, then carry it back to your house since the pumps are used communally. Small villages dress very conservatively, have limited resources (as far as bazaars, etc) , and tend to be very cognizant of everything that “The American” does. That said, they also tend to adopt you as part of the village much faster than if you live in a larger community. As is true in most US states, the majority of the government funding is concentrated in the cities, and the villages tend to get less. The level of medical care is much lower in the villages. The rate of malnutrition and disease tends to be higher in the villages, and things tend to cost a lot less in the villages (ex: you buy eggs and milk from your next-door neighbor with a cow and chicken, instead of buying them from the bazaar).
The economy here is sort of crazy right now. When we arrived in October of 2007, there were two exchange rates, one “black market rate” that everyone exchanged money at in the bazaars, this is the rate that most prices were based on. It was 24,000 manat, to one dollar. There was also the “official rate” which is what the Turkmen government would use when dealing with foreign trade, etc. This was 6,500 manat to one dollar. In the past 11 months, the president has eliminated the black market rate, uniting the two rates as one. That unified amount has fluctuated, but as of today the official exchange rate is 14,200 manat to one dollar. As for tomorrow, you never can be sure. : )
I realize this shouldn’t seem like that big of a deal, since the Turkmen (as well as the peace corps volunteers) are getting paid their salaries in manat, but here’s where things get a little sour. The average price of a bottle of water is 10,000 manat. The average price of a DVD player is 1,000,000 manat. The average price of a cow is 9,000,000 manat. The average price of a bride (yes they still pay a bride price here) is between 50 and 80 million manat. The biggest denomination of currency is a 10,000 manat bill. You can see where, in a cash economy, where people do not use credit cards or bank accounts, your savings for any of these bigger items would grow to a rather astronomical size (literally) if you kept it all in manat. As a result, most Turkmen keep their savings in US dollars, only changing it into manat once they are actually ready to purchase the big ticket item for which they have been saving. This was a huge problem for people, when –overnight- their saved dollars lost a significant portion of their value. It would be like if someone just took 40% of the contents of your bank account away, and only told you about it afterwards. Pretty heavy stuff. Still, the country is slowly adjusting to things. Nothing like real life to drive home all of those economics lessons I snoozed through in college.
In other important economic news, the government is launching a new currency in January of 2009. I think they are actually going to start allowing people to change over their current Turkmen manat to the new Turkmen manat in October, but January is when people will start accepting it at the all major retail outlets. There is a grace period of one year where either currency will be accepted, and by January of 2010 only the new currency will be used. They are going to simply remove the “000″ from all of the bills, and add higher denominations. (So now instead of a 10,000 manat bill being the highest, it will be a 10 manat bill, and will have bills higher in value as well). One would think that this shouldn’t be a terrifically painful transition, but you never know. The PCVs in country are waiting with bated breath to see if this is going to significantly impact the market as far as price changes, etc. Like I said, it will be an interesting time for you to be here.
There are not a lot of English speakers in Turkmenistan, so plan on doing a lot of talking with your hands when you first get here. People are usually pretty patient. English is a mandatory subject in the schools here, but most kids don’t take it too seriously. There are pockets of kids who are interested in learning English (they generally tend to hang out together), usually in the cities. You’ll start to recognize them soon enough.
As for religion, technically Turkmen consider themselves Sunni Muslim. There are a few Turkmen who are pretty strict about their faith, but most are not. They will pray after meals (not before meals, like most Christian faiths) and they will tell you that they are Muslim if you ask them, but they don’t do the prayer five times a day thing, they drink alcohol, they don’t usually go to mosque, or observe fasting during Ramadan, etc. You’ll be able to feel out your host family’s level of religious conviction pretty quickly.
As far as gender roles go, its probably one of the more difficult aspects of service to adjust to here, because they are fairly rigid. Expectations for gender behavior do vary from weleyat to weleyat, with Ahal typically having the strictest set of behavior codes. It’s likely that the family you will live with for training will fall into this category, so I’ll give you a few brief examples. First of all, any wives in the home (typically your host parents’ sons’ wives) will be known as gelinejes (gel-nuh-jay). They are expected to do all of the house work, from pumping water, to making meals, to cleaning floors, to washing dishes, to washing laundry. It is considered inappropriate for men to do any of these tasks, but as a female volunteer it is acceptable for you to help, although not expected. As a male volunteer, you’re going to have to fight for every inch of domestic help you want to try to provide. This includes trying to wash your own clothes, and clean your own bedroom. Be firm, and keep trying to explain to them that in America it’s normal. Besides the domestic help factor, there is quite the taboo on men and women talking to one another. As a male volunteer, you probably won’t hear much from the married women or younger women in your household until they have gotten to know you better, as a female volunteer, its entirely possible that your host dad will act like you don’t even exist. Don’t take it personally! It’s just how they do things here. Handshaking is another area that the separation of genders becomes apparent in. Try to be sensitive and understand that as a male it’s not really appropriate for you to offer your hand to a woman to shake, and as a female volunteer, try to keep from having your feelings hurt when men do not want to shake your hand, or offer you theirs. Remember all of this, and you should get along just fine.
Turkmenistan Weather:
It’s insane. This summer, it got up to around 125 degrees Fahrenheit, and this past winter, it dropped down to negative 25 degrees Fahrenheit. The funny thing is that you adjust to it a lot better than you would think, so don’t’ worry too much. Just bring some long johns and wool socks for sleeping in on the cold nights, and resign yourself to the fact that you are just going to sweat in ungodly quantities from May through August.
This gal also included some info about mail. If you post your email address for me here I will send you my mailing address if you would like it. I can’t post it here for safety reasons.
Mail:
Okay, first things first, package rifling. Yes, most packages are opened and gone through by someone. Surprisingly, this is not usually the Turkmen mail workers, it’s usually someone in customs, and not always in Turkmenistan. A lot of times it happens in another country en route. So don’t mail any hundred dollar bills or Lap Tops, and you will be fine. I know the idea of having your mail opened greatly offends your American sensibilities, but you will honestly get used to the idea, and come to realize that it is just part of living here. Meanwhile, tell the post office in America to use lots of the red white and blue priority tape all over the package. It tends to discourage looters slightly because they don’t have the right tape to disguise the fact that they opened your box. Also, tell the sender to include a packing list with everything they sent you. It will help you out in determining if anything is missing.
Other than package thieving, the mail in Turkmenistan will be your new best friend. Emphasize to friends and family how much it will mean to you for them to write you a letter or send you a card. Even just sending some newspaper clippings form home will totally brighten your day immeasurably. It usually takes two to three weeks to receive a package or letter from the states, so tell them to send stuff early. PCVs are also big fans of using the mail to send each other love notes since it takes the post office only three days to get mail from one weleyat to another.
Here’s a suggested list for friends and family of things that will make you happy in your first month of care package receiving:
-Candy
-Kick balls/Frisbees/soccerballs
-Markers/pens/ lined paper/construction paper/hole punch
-Letters and pictures from home
-Processed food (snack bars, lipton noodles that you add water to, cookies, whatever)
-Drink mixes to add to your water
-Halloween novelty stuff (its going to be your first holiday in country!)
-Movies (DVDs) & Books
-Boxes of Cake Mix (like Duncan heins) and silicon muffin cups for you to cook it in.
This gal was extremely helpful and I hope it gives you all some sort of a look into Turkmenistan. An unknown culture to we Americans.
