4th November 2008 A day in the life of a Turkmen Parahatcylyk Korpusy Inlis Dili Molum Melitinchy (Peace Corps English Teacher Volunteer)
So I’ve talked a lot about the language and cultural things here, I think it’s time to tell you a bit about the Turkmen school system and my technical training. On the mornings I go to school I leave around 7:50am and start heading to the school. As I walk I am greeted by probably 20 kids or more who yell “Hello! Hello! Hello!” It’s one of the things PCVs call “unwanted attention,” I’m cool with it for now. Anyways, I get to school around 8:15 and wait around for my counter-part to show up (she usually does around 8:25… 5 mins before school starts). We say hello as she gets her lesson plans checked by the Vice Principal (I think). All teachers must have their lesson plans checked to make sure they are in line with the Government curriculum. We then head off to our classroom.
For the first lesson I will sit and observe while my counter-part teaches. The lesson usually entails a text out of the Ruhaman; a book written by the first Turkmen President “Turkmenbashy” about how all Turkmen should live their lives. There are sections about Turkmen men, women, and children. The vocabulary for the lessons usually entail words like “pride, humility, meekness, mercy, ect.” That was literally the vocab for the 7th grade lesson (mind you the majority of the kids can only say ‘hello, how are you?’ there is no way they will be able to comprehend the lesson). If the lesson isn’t from the Ruhaman then it is either a poem or a random list of vocab and various grammar.
As the teacher makes a good attempt at teaching she usually has to stop after every vocab word and ask me what the words mean. Unfortunately, because of the newly instituted government requirement for schools to teach English, there is a huge shortage of English teachers in Turkmenistan and those who do teach English don’t actually speak English. While I think that it is an awesome idea that the Government wants all students to learn English, I think it is terribly sad that there are not people to teach English. It’s a terrible cycle of poor language learning. That’s why Peace Corps is desperately needed here.
After I observe the first class and help my struggling counter part teach the various vocab and grammar we head off to another class and the teacher hands me the lesson book and says, “You teach now.” So without any form of lesson planning of my own I am forced to teach a horrible lesson and pray that the kids understand at least part of it. Then after that lesson my teacher has a break where she is supposed to lesson plan. She however takes that opportunity to have me check her homework from HER English class as she so desperately wants to learn more English and become a better teacher. It’s moments like that where I see an opening for sustainability (a PC Buzz word that basically means how we will leave Turkmenistan in 2 years and whether or not a project will continue without us). My counterpart so desperately wants to become a better English teacher and for her that starts with being a better English teacher.
So that’s about it. Tomorrow I find out site placements, I’m nervous and excited all at the same time. I’m really hoping for a good placement. We also find out about the president tomorrow (we’re 9hrs ahead of the states). GO OBAMA!!!! Overall, an exciting day indeed.
16th November 2008 Site Visit… Unwanted Attention… and 3 more weeks of training, YIKES!
So ok I realize you all probably think I have left you hanging on where I am going for the next 2 years and all that jazz and in a way I kind of have, but not purposefully. I mean so much has gone on in the past 2 weeks… America elected the first black President for crying out loud (I’m super pumped about that by the way and almost cried when I found out)! I’ve been super busy and haven’t had time to update anyone on my visit and site info with the exception of Molly Hill because she was randomly online at the same time I was for 15 mins. Anyway without further a due… my site placement is… well I can’t tell you the exact location, safety stuff, but I can tell you that I’m only about an hour and a half away from it right now. I’m in a small village near Ashgabat in the Ahal region. It’s pretty much a great site because I have the small village vibe (which means I can do a lot in terms of community development) with the convenience of Ashgabat to escape to when I need a break. That also means that I can update everyone more via Internet! Fire up for that!
After we learned our site placements we all got to visit our sites for 5 days and spend time with our new host families. Unfortunately for me, my visit was not very good at all. I got my first real experience of what PC calls “Unwanted Attention” and also got to experience a mini version of a PC Emergency Action Plan. To make a really long story short without going into too many details the host father that I was staying with at my permanent site basically tried to put the moves on me on Saturday night. I guess he saw a beautiful American girl and he liked me or something. Now before anyone freaks out he didn’t do anything but kiss my hand and tried to kiss my cheek to which I threw up my hand and yelled “YOK!” (NO!). That however was a huge red flag and I knew that if I stayed at there it could progressively get worse. Unfortunately the family didn’t have a phone and I didn’t know anyone in the community so I couldn’t call into PC to report the problem right away. I had to wait until Monday to report the situation to my counterpart and to PC. Once I did report it though PC sprung into action to get me out of the home. I ended up staying the next two nights at my school director’s house with her family, which was awesome. I was however in a huge funk for the rest of the time and just didn’t feel right about anything, I think I was a little too shaken up by the situation and worried about what would happen once I move to the community in December. I’m worried about effectively integrating into the community. We shall see how all of that goes. Just to let you know PC is in the process of finding me a new host family for the next 2 years, I won’t be staying with the creepy guy. That just goes to show how much PC actually cares about the safety of the volunteers
The whole trip wasn’t bad though. A lot of positives came out of it. The counterpart I will be working with is awesome. His name is Serdar and he speaks nearly perfect English. He refuses to speak to me in Turkmen because he wants to improve his English abilities. Serdar is also great because he has a lot of vision and passion to make changes in the school and wants me to work a lot with the teachers to help them become effective teachers. I am really cool with that because that is one of the three goals of our TEFL program and it’s probably the most difficult one to accomplish because it involves motivating people to make a change in their behavior. I think between the two of us Serdar and I can do a lot of good work in our school. The actual school itself is pretty small. It’s hard for me to describe so I will take a picture of it for you all to see. The other teachers at the school are also really great, I had a good chance to talk to one of the other English teachers there and she is really nice, a little intimidated of me, but nice. Another positive of the trip was the ability to spend time with my School Director. Being the daughter of a principal I know that it’s really important for a teacher to be on good terms with their principal to get things done. I will need my Director’s help to get permission to do different clubs and activities with the students and I now feel really good about my relationship with her after staying at her house and meeting her family. Her family is also really sweet. She has 2 older daughters (18 and 28), an older son (not sure how old he is, I didn’t meet him), and a younger son (14 and one of my students). They are a really great family. I really enjoyed talking to the daughters in our mixture of English, Turkmen, and their attempts to teach me Russian. I especially liked the 18-year-old girl because she and I had a lot in common and she actually spoke a lot of English. It was a little awkward though when we were watching her tapes of American Music videos and she asked me to explain the meaning of some “Promiscuous Girl” by Nelly Furtado. I basically told her that ‘promiscuous’ means you have a lot of “boyfriends.” She was pickin’ up what I was putting down and immediately said “Oh! Gowy Dal!” or “Oh! Not Good!” It was a good laughing cultural moment. So the whole 5 days wasn’t a waste, I know where I can go in December to make some good friends and hopefully get an in with other people in the community (although they technically don’t live in that village, they live in a different village).
Now I’m back in my training site and have just 3 short weeks until my LPI (Language Proficiency Interview) and Swearing In! It’s hard to believe how fast the time has gone here. One of the hardest parts is almost over and I’m still here, that’s a huge feat to accomplish. As an actual volunteer told me yesterday (after I told her about my site visit family experience) if I can survive half of the stuff I have survived during training and still have a smile on my face and a vision for being here, then actual service will be a breeze. I hope she’s right. At this point I am glad to be back at training because my friend Mayagozel is back. It was so great to see her on Thursday; I almost cried tears of joy when I hugged her. Our whole group missed her a lot and I think we all became a bit closure during her absence. Unfortunately, our group is still not whole. One of my friends in my group became seriously ill and had to be Medically Evacuated (Med-Vaced) to Thailand! It was seriously very sad; she’ll be there for 2 weeks. We all are hoping she recovers quickly and gets some sort of a vacation in Bangkok out of it. If you could keep her in your prayers I would appreciate it, she’s probably one of the nicest kids you’d ever meet and has such a huge heart. Speaking of Thailand… I learned yesterday that it is really really cheap to get plane tickets to Thailand and India from Turkmenistan. If anyone wants to meet in Thailand or India and is serious about it let me know, I know some people have mentioned it and I would be all for it. I can’t leave Turkmenistan until March to go on vacation, but after that I am free as a bird (Katie… you and me in Istanbul come late June).
So yeah that’s about it. Oh and I want to give shout outs to people who have sent me mail and packages! Thank you so much! Over the last week and a half I got probably 15 letters and 3 packages from people and it has made me so excited and happy. I am working on answering all of your letters and should be mailing them all by Wednesday so expect something between then and Christmas. Seriously, thank you… you all have made me the envy of trainees everywhere and I love it! Thank you too everyone for the prayers. If you could pray for my friend in Thailand, my last few weeks of training, and that everything works out at my permanent site I would really appreciate it a lot.
21st November 2008 Almost Done… Mental Breakdown
Hey everyone! So it’s the 21st of November… what?! I have been in Turkmenistan for 52 days already! Where on earth has the time gone?! This week has been especially busy, stressful, and hectic in general and on top of it all I have been sick since last Saturday. This week our group really had to get down to business to learn the rest of the language topics that we had yet to cover, turns out we were about a week behind the other groups because Mayagozel was gone for a week. So we had to kick it into super language over drive, I’m talking like 2 or 3 big topics a day when we usually would only do like one and repeat it a lot. It was super intense, but fortunately because we were used to the language we were able to go through it quickly. That was a huge bonus. On top of the language stuff I had to teach 4 classes this week and 2 English clubs by myself. The actual teaching wasn’t that bad, but the lesson planning is a huge pain. We are supposed to compile all of our lesson plans and turn them into our TEFL Supervisor so he can see just what we are doing and teaching. It’s also good to have an outline of what you’re going to do especially when half of it is in another language. It’s just a pain to organize. It will take me about an hour to plan one lesson or club. That plus trying to study language at night, me having a really bad cold (which turned into Brohncitus), the stress of my upcoming language proficiency interview, and just for kicks throw in a bit of homesickness because Thanksgiving is coming up was all just a little too much for me to handle this week. So I had a bit of a mental breakdown at probably the worst possible time (scratch that the worst possible time would be when I was teaching and I feel very comfortable when I teach oddly enough) during my pre-interview with the language coordinator. Our Language Coordinator came out to our lunch today to give all of us a pre-LPI. Mine started off really well, I was able to answer almost all of her questions and I had good long sentences, the kind you need to get a good score on the exam, then all of a sudden I snapped. She asked me a really complicated question about things that I had never even heard of before and I had no idea what she was talking about, so that apparently was when all of my pent up emotions and stress just decided to come out in the form of crying. In case you don’t know when I get overwhelmed with life or stress in general I just cry over the littlest thing, it’s like something just snaps in me and all of the strength I have is just gone and I have to just cry. The Language Coordinator was so shocked she really had nothing to say except, “Why are you crying?” Which trust me didn’t help the situation. Looking back on it now it’s really comical, but then I was super upset for some unknown reason, I just needed to cry. The funniest thing is the Language Coordinator just didn’t seem to get it and actually tried to continue the interview, to which I just started to cry harder and say, “No, I’m done!” Maybe if I had said that in Turkmen she would have understood. She did get it in the end though.
All I can say is I think I am ready for training to end. I know I will miss it in January when the newness of my permanent site wears off and I start to really miss other Americans, but for now I’m done with this crazy hectic life. I need things to slow down a bit. Consequently, because I have been so busy I haven’t been able to write as many letters as I would like to. I apologize for that, I’m doing my best to keep up with my letters, but I have a pile of probably 7 or 8 letters to write. I promise as soon as training is over I will get them out to all of you, I just physically don’t have enough time to write all of them right now and I really need to focus on my language. Really I am sorry, but I know you all understand. As always I thank you all so much for writing me (especially the 4 of you who seem to send me something at least once a week, that’s awesome… I am way too blessed). Well, I should get heading off to bed. I hope to post this tomorrow or Sunday so you all can know I’m alive! Oh by the way I feel as though I should brag a bit for all of you stuck in Michigan… it’s currently like 60 some degrees here. Last I heard it was snowing in MI… 60s is freaking awesome. Love you all and God bless!
