Two for the Price of One This Week! February 28, 2010

So it’s been a while since I’ve wrote here for the shear fact that I haven’t had a lot of stuff to update on. Well, today I got 2 pretty big pieces of news that are blogworthy. One inspired by someone in America and the second inspired by my Turkmen host family. So feel free to check them both out: “9 Months Left of Service… What to do?” and “Addition to the Family”

9 Months Left of Service… What to do?

So I got a letter from my dear Aunt Kay this week and she asked me to share with you all what my goals are for my last few months of service and seeing as how I’ve been at a lose of what to write here lately I thought she had a good idea. She challenged me to think about what I want to accomplish over the course of my last year of service (the letter was themed around New Year… gotta love the international postal system… it’s officially the end of February). So anyways back to the point what am I going to accomplish this final 9 months of service. Before I think about the future I think I need to think about the past and look at all I’ve accomplished over the past 15 months.

I thought about this actually around New Years time, but never actually published it for some reason. Over the past 15 months though my community and I have accomplished a lot (because let’s be honest, this experience and job isn’t really about me, it’s about the us that I’ve formed with my community). We’ve successfully completed two grants one for volleyball equipment to open a club for girls and one for English resources and materials to use in our classroom. We’ve opened three clubs in our school, two English and one volleyball club. We’ve incorporated new teaching methods into our classes like games, songs, and new books and made our lessons more interesting for our students. Our students where we teach different methods from the institutionalized curriculum have shown higher scores in English, mostly As and Bs when before we had mostly Bs and Cs. More students have become more interested in English clubs as a result. Two of our teachers have expressed more interest in learning about Methodology in teaching and one is considering continuing her education to get her masters. Finally, two of us have learned how to play instruments, both guitar and for my fellow teacher Serdar, dutar. So we’ve done a lot over the course of the 15 months!

Now we do have a few things we want to accomplish these next 9 months and their coming fast! The first thing is we would like to make our new library that we have developed more open to our students. I ideally would like to see our students checking out books from our English room and reading them at home. I want to see the library run by teachers and students. We’re going to start that this month hopefully. My school also really wants to put on a summer camp for our students this summer that the students will actually attend. In case you don’t remember last year that didn’t go over to well for me, this year I’ve got a lot of good ideas and I think my counterparts will be really excited about it, but I’m not telling just yet! You’ll have to wait! My school has also expressed interest in building two new toilets. We hope to build those this summer through yet another grant and have those open by this fall! Finally, a goal that Serdar and I have is to help train one of our students to apply for the FLEX program next October. In case you’re not sure what the FLEX program is, it’s a program for Turkmen students to go to the US for one year and study in an American High School as an exchange student. The girl we want to train is a really good student and with some extra practice I really think she can do it, Serdar does too. So there you have it Aunt Kay, those are what I hope my school can accomplish with me in the next 9 months. It’s a lot, but I really think it can happen! Ench Allah!

Addition to the Family!

So I was having evening tea with my family tonight and it turns out that my host brother had an exciting piece of news. He’s getting married this fall! Obviously, we were all very excited for him and his fiancé and I thought this would be a cool cultural thing to blog about. I think I’ve mentioned before about how important weddings are to Turkmen, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone into detail about marriage in Turkmen culture and how it works. So seeing as how my host family is going through this new process I thought I’ld give you a bit of a play by play as it all happens!

Let’s start from the beginning, dating in Turkmenistan. Dating is very secretive in Turkmenistan because of how much of an impact it can have for young women. Basically, it’s ok for a Turkmen young man to date and have a girlfriend, but if a young girl has a boyfriend people will start to gossip about her as being, for lack of better word, loose. So while my brother and his girlfriend were dating (they’ve been dating for over a year now) my family knew about it all, but her family didn’t know anything about it. This was pretty interesting because he could never call her house and she always had to call our house. If he was to call and ask for her, her father and brothers could have figured it out and that wouldn’t be to good.  For example one of my friend’s brothers found out that she had a boyfriend and he found the guy and kicked the crap out of him, according to her it wasn’t pretty. So she would call our house and at first always ask for my younger sister. We’ld give her the phone and then she would immediately give it to my brother, it was pretty cute. Sometimes his girlfriend would whisper if my brother was home, but she has to be very careful about it. I always found that to be pretty cute. I’m not for sure what their actual dates were like, but going off of what I see on Turkmen TV and have seen in real life, dates mainly consist of walking in parks talking and whatnot, not a lot of physical touch that we Americans traditionally think of.

Now if you are a guy and you decide that you want to get married proposing is a lot different from our culture. In Turkmenistan men do not propose to women necessarily, I mean yes it’s a conversation, but they don’t have proposals like we have, the man must propose to the woman’s family, or actually someone from his family must propose to them on his behalf. That may sound confusing, but it basically looks like this. The elder women from the man’s family will go to the woman’s mother and plead the case of the man on his behalf. Usually two or three women will go from the man’s family to the woman’s family and they must talk about how the woman will be provided for and how the man is a good an honorable man. Fortunately for my family, my brother really is a good guy and they only needed to make one or two trips to his fiancé’s house before her family gave their blessing. Sometimes this can take three or four trips though. My brother in law for example had to make four trips to my family to marry one of my sisters, not because he’s not a good guy, but because she was the first daughter from the family to get married and they just weren’t ready to let go yet.

Once the family gives permission they are officially engaged, which is what we were celebrating tonight. The next step in the process is for the woman and her family to write out her “list.” That is her dowry list. In Turkmen culture men have to pay dowry to the women’s families in order to get married. This dowry can consist of anything from money for the family, clothes for the woman, TVs, gold jewelry for the woman, basically anything under the sun, and it can get quite expensive. Dowries can cost anywhere from $4000 to $16,000 depending on the families. One of my friends said he knows a woman in his village whose dowry was close to $24,000… this is US dollars mind you.  My brother’s fiancé and her family are now in the process of writing their list and they should have it available for us next week. So stay tuned to see just what is being asked for! As I said I couldn’t be happier for my brother, he’s a really good guy and someone that I really respect because he doesn’t drink (a rarity here). I’m excited to help my family plan his wedding and excited to report it all back to you!

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