Derweza “The Gate of Hell” October 31, 2009

So after being in Turkmenistan for a year I finally get to check something off of my list that I had been wanting to do since I found out I was going to be serving in this country. A group of us took an overnight camping trip out to the former town of Derweza, a name that literally means “Gate” in Turkmen, to the appropriately named “Gate of Hell.” The Gate of Hell is this large crater in the middle of the desert that is eternally lit on fire by natural gases that are burning from it. It is an ellipse with one diameter measuring about 80 yards and the other measuring about 40 yards, essentially it’s a huge flaming hole in the middle of the ground.
8 of us braved the freezing cold of the desert in the night to see this awesome site. While it is impressive during the day, you cannot get the true effect of the awesomeness unless you spend the night there. We all shelled out about $35 to a travel agency to make it happen. Unfortunately, this isn’t a trip you can make without the help of a travel agent because you need someone with off-road capabilities to access the site; it’s about 7km off the road into the desert. I must say just driving out to the crater was one of the highlights because you are literally driving off road over huge sand dunes. It was awesome! Anyways, side tracked… so 8 of us went, 4 from my region, Ahal, and 4 from the northern region Dashoguz. We decided to join our trips because it is about a halfway trip between Dashoguz City and Ashgabat, that and we never see anyone from Dashoguz because volunteers there have a hard time traveling to A-bat (and they are anti-social, just kidding!). So we, from Ahal, took two jeeps from the travel company to the turn off in the former town of Derweza (more on why I keep saying former to come) and literally stopped on the side of the road and waited for the group from Dashoguz to come down. This was actually kind of worrisome because there are no signs for Derweza and there is no cell phone reception in the desert. So before we left the city we called the D-gouz peeps and told them we will stop at the turn off and gave them a description of our jeeps. We literally then just had to pray we made it to Derweza before they did, otherwise they would have missed us. Fortunately God was with us and after an hour of waiting D-gouz showed up at our campsite and all was well. We ended up grilling Turkmen style shashlyk for dinner, which is basically shish-ca-bobs slowly grilled over hot coals (not over the large crater though unfortunately, we had to make our own mini version to cook). Then we spent the rest of the evening drinking and taking some fun pictures near the crater. It was actually kind of scary because you really had to be careful not to fall in; there was no railing around the edge. We had good times making poses around the crater and singing all of the songs about fire that we could think of, the top two being “Ring of Fire” by Jonny Cash and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. After playing around the fire we decided to try to sleep (emphasis on try), but we were very unsuccessful because our tent was freezing! Even after squeezing all of us, minus one, into a “2 person tent,” in our high quality sleeping bags we all still froze! I would guess it was probably around 40 degrees F, but with a wind chill that made it more like 25, when you are used to 80 degree weather and 75 degrees at night, that’s really cold! In the end though we all survived and nobody suffered from hypothermia or frostbite.
Now, there are many stories circulating around about how this large flaming crater was created. Some speculate that a team of ecologists doing some ecology excavations in the desert formed it. They found this natural gas and to save the people living in the village of Derweza from dying of gas poisoning they decided to light it on fire to burn all of the gases away. This is possible, but given T-stans history with oil and gas I kind of doubt it. Another story goes along the lines of there was a team of Russian oil drillers drilling for oil in the area. They had driller this large hole when all of a sudden their drill truck malfunctioned and fell off the cliff into the hole of gas causing an explosion, which is now the flaming pit. This is a more likely story, but given the size of the hole I don’t think its possible to create that big of a hole with a drill truck from the 1960s. The Turkmen position is that there was a large meteor shower that hit the area in the 1960s! A large meteor fell from the sky into the desert and it’s crash into the ground caused the flaming phenomenon! Again, I strong doubt this. My theory: during the 1960s the Russian were testing bombs, one good place to test bombs is in the middle of the desert with no people around. So they dropped a bomb over this area of gas and it burst into eternal flames. I guess we will never know though!
As for the former town of Derweza, that is a different story! I actually know that one! Once word got around to travelers and travel agencies about this flaming enigma people traveling to t-stan wanted to make trips out to see it. So people living near Derweza decided to set up a tourist town basically that had shops and offered things like a yurt trip out to the crater. As I said before the site is also located about halfway between Dashoguz and Ashgabat, and there are no other towns until you are about 45mins outside of Ashgabat, so the town also served as a pit stop. Well, apparently in 2004 the government decided that the tourist area wasn’t boding well for the Turkmen culture and they successfully shut down all of the businesses. Now all you can see in the area is small mounds of dirt that used to be the remains of the old tourist trap, in my mind I imagine something like Wall Drug in the middle of the S. Dakota Badlands, I probably would have shut that down too. I don’t think these businesses made a lot of money though because I have not met a Turkmen who knows about this place. The only people who seem to go there are Russians, American Peace Corp Volunteers, and other random backpackers. I showed some of my picture (which you can find one facebook) to my Turkmen friends and family and they were really surprised that a place like this actually exists here, even some of the Peace Corps host country national staff had never heard of this place. Thus, I can see why the tourist town was deemed unsuccessful and closed down. Either way, I had an amazing time there. It was probably one of the coolest things I have done and seen in this country and I am really happy to cross this one off of my t-stan travel list! Maybe some day I’ll publish that travel list here, but for now I’ll just keep it to myself. I am very happy to say that I went to the Gate of Hell and came back alive!

Girls just want to have fun! October 27, 2009

Hey everyone! So I’ve had another few good weeks here in T-stan. We just wrapped up our first quarter of school so I am on a week long break which is very nice. Before the break though I actually got my volleyball club going and thought I would share with you all how that all is going!
It took me a few weeks to get my life organized again after coming back from America, but last week we finally got our volleyball club off the ground! A made a nice set of posters in Turkmen for my students to see and even though I spelled one word wrong (stupid vowel harmony… bane of my existence in writing in Turkmen) I had about 15 girls show up to my first volleyball club! At first the girls were a little apprehensive because we have to have the club in the school yard and there is always a group of boys around. After I started hitting the ball back and forth with one of them and shoeing the little boys away from the court (sorry boys this club is girls only) more and more girls came to hit with us. We never actually played anything and basically just hit a few balls back and forth to one another (by back and forth I mean they would hit the ball, the other girl would catch the ball, and then she would hit it back), but they were so super stoked about it. I think one of the biggest reasons why they were stoked about it was because girls never get to play sports here in this country. They want to play sports, but nobody ever gives them the opportunity to play. Now that they have a club that is just for them, playing a game they are actually interested in learning, without having to worry about playing with the boys they are super excited about it! They don’t really care if they actually learn the rules of the game; they just want to have fun hitting the ball back and forth and just spending time with me, their American body guard who chews out the boys for stealing the balls. It was a really fun first club and I look forward to more in the future, and hopefully one day the boys will leave us alone and go off to play football… I can only hope! Either way the song is absolutely right… “Girls just wanna have fun! That’s all they really want, some fun!”

Back in the T-Stan October 4, 2009

Hey all! So I am officially back in T-stan and in general it’s good to be back. The flights were interesting and long. I ended up having to have a day layover in Istanbul and was unable to save money by sleeping at the airport, which was my cheap idealistic dream. So I had to venture out into the city for the night and part of the day on Monday. It was a really nice morning in the city once I figured out where I was going and I ended up finding the Blue Mosque and a few other random mosques in the area. It was so crazy to be there though because Islam is really prevelent there. I mean there was literally a mosque on every corner so around 1pm during the afternoon call to prayer there was literally about 50 priests over loud speakers throughout the area calling everyone to prayer. It was kind of really beautiful as you could hear it progressing throughout the whole city. So anyways, I ended up having to spend a bit to get a hotel there, but all in all it was worth it to strech my legs a little bit.

As I said I am now back in T-stan and for the most part it has been a good week with one exception, which I will go into a little bit later. Let me first go into a bit of the good stuff! First off everyone at my school and in my community has been really supportive, I think many of them thought that since I went home I wouldn’t come back as they had a volunteer before who went home without much notice and did not return. So I was given a huge welcome by my school, family, and community in general for having returned. My teachers and students are also really excited to have me back in the classroom and working too which was a huge plus. I also want to give a little plug out to the student at New Lothrop High School as I had given a speech to some of the students there and they had written letters to my students here in Turkmenistan. I have had difficulty getting a lot of my students here interested in learning English, but when I told them that American students wanted to talk with them and wrote them letters they all became very excited about the letter project. So thank you Mrs. Thiel and Mrs. Czymbor’s classes for letting me come in and speak with you and for writing some wonderful letters. I hope to get some responses back to you guys soon!

Now onto the low part of the week and a crushing blow. This week was supposed to be a joyous week as we were to welcome a new group of volunteers into Turkmenistan, the T-18s. We have been preparing and anticipating the arrival of new volunteers for basically the whole summer. Well, on Tuesday I recieved a call from our Program Training Officer telling me that the T-18 group would be delayed due to problems obtaining Visas to enter Turkmenistan. This was a little odd, and then on Wednesday I recieved a call from our Training Manager saying that the T-18s would not be arriving at all as they had been declined Visas. This was a huge surprise to our Peace Corps program here. I can’t really say why the Visas were denied because I can only give some sort of speculation, and I do not want to report anything without having facts.  So thus I am going to leave it as that, the T-18s will not be coming to Turkmenistan, but the Turkmen Government did say that they would welcome 50 new volunteers in 2010.

This whole thing has been really hard for me to grasp because it’s just so surprising and just overall sad. I feel as though it is important for me to have that realization that new volunteers were arriving and become a veteran volunteer. I was excited to look over the hardships I had had over the past year and the positives that came out of it. I was excited to share the knowledge that I had about working here to a new volunteer and just help them through their struggles. My heart also really goes out to the T-18s that had sold their cars, quit their jobs, bought things specifically for service here, said goodbye to their friends and family, got on a plane,  actually had their staging in Philadelpia, and be told that they would not be going to their country and would have to board a plane back home. My heart breaks for them and I cannot fathom what I would do if that happened to me.

So T-18s I want to let you all know that we here in Turkmenistan are devastated, not just the volunteers but even the Host Country Nationals. It was a huge shock to everyone and we are devastated. I wish you all the best in finding new placements. Please stay strong through this hardship and do not give up hope on Peace Corps. You will all make amazing volunteers someday.