Global Maddy in Turkmenistan

2011-03-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

Public Letter #2

February 27, 2011: Learning to Weave

First trips outside Ashgabat, Soviet nostalgia, Turkmen-dili

Been here 2 months. The recurring metaphor is carpet weaving. I’m at the stage now where no one would buy the thing: just a mass of warp and a pattern barely emerging.

I’m in the land whose most famous product, not counting natural gas, oil reserves, cotton and wheat exports, is carpets. I’ve moved from a country that had Basotho hats on its flag (symbolizing mountains) to one with carpet patterns on its flag (symbolizing the five regions, once tribal fiefdoms), patterns dating back to the 12^th century. I put $100 down on my first carpet, told the Afghan man, host father of one of our Volunteers, that I’d pay the $300 balance “soon,” then realized after I’d left the shop that $400 had just been his opening price. Maybe by the time I return I’ll have my bargaining skills better honed.

The romance of Turkmenistan is its silk road heritage. I imagine camel caravans winding their way across the Karakum desert[1] just on the edge of Ashgabat, up into the Koppet Dag Mountains, where the country of Iran begins, inaccessible to me. Yurts and pots would be wrapped in the carpets, perhaps even a bride astride one camel, bound for her husband’s family, a traditional bride carpet covering her head. But this was a century ago. I hear there are still yurts in use, though I’ve only glimpsed one in a back yard.

The other Turkmenistan: I’ve “escaped” my desk and the overly elaborate city of Ashgabat twice now, traveling with my colleague Rahman on visits to see our Peace Corps Volunteers in the two regions of Mary (near Ashgabat) and Lebap (a stone’s throw from Uzbekistan and Afghanistan). The distances are long, the road terrible (as in Lesotho, there’s a single major road that traverses the country), and flights cheap, so sometimes we fly. The Peace Corps driver slogs it alone, meets us at the airport, and transports us from site to site, drops us off at the airport again after a couple days, then spends an entire day driving home.

In these times I glimpse the “other” Turkmenistan. My time here will give me an insight to Soviet days of not so long ago. Even though Turkmenistan has been independent since 1991, and even though these years have been characterized by a return and celebration of everything Turkmen (reinstituting the language in schools, encouraging women to wear their native dress, extolling its poets and scholars, repopulating the calendar with its national holidays), still seven decades of Soviet life lies heavily atop all. First is the architecture, linear, spaced with military precision, ugly. Second is the approach to industrialization and agriculture – haphazard telephone and power lines, canals pierced through the countryside, gray factories, dust blowing everywhere, though ruddy-faced peasant women in rose-colored scarves still sell fresh vegetables, pickles and freshly slaughtered chickens in open markets. And third is the political heritage: KGB-style local police stationed in front of every government building, the need to report one’s movements, to register when moving to a new city, and even, in Peace Corps’ case, to ask permission (just denied yesterday) to host teacher training workshops. The word “association,” spoken even in English, can get one into trouble. And as one watches anti-government demonstrations sweep Egypt, Tunisia, Yeman, Iran, Bahrain, Libiya, (Wisconsin), one can perhaps understand a government’s healthy fear of its own people.

Soviet nostalgia: Yet in Turkmenistan there is not only a genuine appreciation for what people gained during the Soviet era, but (as I often heard in rural China) a nostalgia for the social security that used to warmly envelope each person, for instance farmers were paid regardless of the unpredictability of the harvest. As my colleague Zohre puts it,

“Yes, for 70 years everything was under the control of Moscow, but everything should be under somebody’s control – in a country, in a family, in any organization. Also, if we had not been with Russians, we would be a very poor society. They educated us and made us intelligent and free of Islam. There was a bad side, too, of course. Turkmen people were not to be trusted as leaders. But now that Turkmenistan is independent, we find out that Turkmen people are not so stupid, that they are able to be leaders. Yes, Russians took our cotton and oil, but in exchange they gave us some good things. Personally, I am glad that we were part of the Soviet Union.”

I now own three Turkmen dresses, called kὅynek, which I wear to the office about once a week, complete with head scarf, ŷalyk. Scarf-tying has many steps, including putting extra scarves under the main scarf to bulk it up, so I come scarf-less to work, and beg my female colleagues to tie me in. The dresses are full length and comfortable stretch-velvet, with elaborate hand- or machine-embroidered bodices, and I have good, though mono-syllabic relations with my dressmakers (see photo). Ethnic Turkmen women wear kὅynek, while the ethnic Russian women go about town in contemporary fashions, heads bare, with a penchant for knee-high boots and big leather purses. All students , kindergarten to university, wear school uniforms, the young women long, lovely kὅynek, and boys formal suits, while the city men dress much like men everywhere, though there’s an abundance of furry Soviet hats and jaunty wool caps, and an occasional Muslim mullah with flowing beard, huge hat, and robes.

Turkmen dili: As for the Turkmen language (called Türkmen-dili; it’s a dilly), it has many y’s and z’s and belongs to the Turkic family, so Turkmen and Turks can understand one another somewhat. My heart’s not yet in studying. I worked so hard, so recently, on Sesotho. I’ve clearly underestimated the tremendous energy it takes to learn a new language, understand a new culture, and create yet another social life, complete with dear friends and lovely parties and casual laughter, three times in five years – Lesotho, Washington DC, and now Turkmenistan. I’m a woman of great energies, but I’m faltering these days, despairing at a page of verbs that refuse to gel inside my brain, or staring out my high rise windows at falling snow on a lonely Saturday night. As in Japan, as in Lesotho, and now in Turkmenistan, I create confusion and comedy as I ask for a cabbage at the market (while pointing to carrots), tell the driver in a gypsy cab to turn right (meaning left) or insist on change in 20 manat pieces - dollars, (meaning 20 tenge - pennies).

Everyone is amused, except me, unable to get what’s so funny, like this exchange, which happened entirely in Turkmen,

Soltan: Next lesson, Magdalena, we’ll learn about TIME.

Madeline: It is now 7:00.

Soltan (smiling): No, I mean, next lesson is about TIME.

Madeline (confused): Next lesson? It’s Wednesday.

Soltan (laughing): No, I mean the topic will be TIME.

Madeline (completely baffled, continuing to hear only the word TIME): Today, it is January 31.

Soltan (laughing hysterically, departing): Good-bye, Magdalena.

Or the apartment manager who banged on my door early on Flag Day, yelling excitedly, “Yash mashine! Yash mashine!” I beckoned her in and showed her my washing machine, wanting her to see that my applicance was no cause for panic. But “yash mashine” meant “your car”, and she thought that a car with blue diplomatic plates, parked in the apartment lot, the only one that hadn’t yet been moved, belonged to me. The President of Turkmenistan was going to be driving down our avenue on his way to a flag ceremony in a couple hours, and our street needed to be “in order.” This takes a paragraph to tell, but a good 30 minutes of time with several people involved as translators, to unravel. Washing machines were not involved, but police escorts, limousines, street closures, street sweeping, building decorating, curtain closing, and car re-parking were. “Do not look out your windows!” my landlady admonished.

So, the carpet weaving has begun – that unwieldy, unattractive stage, when one thinks it will never, ever be complete, and is discouraged just looking ahead, much less out the windows.

Here’s hoping your washing machine is in order, your utterances fluent, and your daily culture so obvious it bears no mention.

P.S. As an antidote to whining, I’m reading INDEPENDENT PEOPLE (1946), by Iceland’s great writer Halldór Laxness, thought by some to be the best book ever written, wherein characters eat one meal a day, go in rags through the winter, ride a reindeer across a frozen river then stagger for two days though a blizzard. Fabulous book.

Magdalena

globalmaddy@gmail.com

Mailing address (Thanks for any mail – especially as my Internet connection is often non-functional):

Madeline Uraneck; 7070 Ashgabat Place; Dulles, VA 20189-7070 (regular US postage)

[1] The desert dusts blown on a powerful east-west airstream carry pesticide residues that have been found in the blood of penguins in Antarctica (Wikipedia). Rainfall averages once a decade.

First 24 Hours in Ashgabat (Dec 29, 2010)

2011-02-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

Public Letter #1

First 24 Hours in Ashgabat - December 29, 2010

The Path to Ashgabat from Washington DC: Pilots followed the path to Ashgabat from Washington, DC which includes the Atlantic Ocean, a six hour wait / delay in Frankfurt (Germany), then Czech Republic, Vienna (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Bucharest (Romania), the Black Sea, Georgia, Armenia, then a landing in Baku (Azerbaijan), on the edge of the Caspian Sea. There the male crowd of gas and oil workers, including an Alaskan native I’d chatted with, seven Norwegians in hand-knit sweaters, and several Malaysians, left the plane. Only one person boarded in Baku, and suddenly the 20 passengers remaining in the 300-person aircraft revealed they were on first name basis. Mostly diplomatic types, peppered with a Scottish oil exec here and a Dutch development worker there, they chatted cheerily in English and Russian about their holidays, golf scores, and where people had been posted previously, a question I initiated. Their lists of residences lived and languages studied made my world travels sound like a kid’s first trip to the zoo.

In the black night at 2 am, two hours late for my waiting Peace Corps colleagues-to-be, I stepped down the stairs into the cold air. Rows and rows of bright streetlights stretched in the direction of the city, reminding me of the refinery town in Texas where I lived as a kid. Electricity went out in the VIP lounge (actually CIP Lounge, Commercially Important Persons), as we waited in complete darkness for our luggage to appear. No one groaned or commented, just business as usual, though I did happen to have one of the few flashlights. At the curb, I was charged $45 in American dollars for having used the lounge, and now fathomed the difference between a CIP and a VIP.

Breathtaking city at night: The drive to my apartment was breathtaking. The new part of the city, stately white marble buildings, often with gold-coated mosque-shaped structures on the top, was strewn with millions of blue, green, purple, and gold New Years lights (in a 92% Muslim country they are not called Christmas lights). They went on for miles. The boulevards were wide and at this hour, completely deserted. I noted the driver steered down the center line, rather than between the lane lines, a practice which was continued by all cars the next morning, only in heavier traffic, rendering the three lanes into four lanes. Noted: no bicyclists.

It is rare to see an architecturally monogamous city: buildings of the same height lined with ample space between. The population of Ashgabat is 600,000, and an entire new and perfect city has sprung up since 1991, when Turkmenistan declared itself independent from the Soviet Union. The white marble glows in the sunshine, and the landscaping of plants, trees, fountains and bushes is intentional and formal. A holiday tree, festooned with lights and silver garlands, stood in city center, the largest I’ve seen in my life – my neck craned to see the top. In the precise, science fiction-esque city, it seemed impolite to reflect that Turkmenistan’s GNI is only $6,980 per capita. (Lesotho’s was $1,800).

My apartment is spotlessly clean, long and modern, the fifth floor of one of the white buildings, across the street from the Chinese and Saudi embassies and US Embassy residential compound. I count 25 steps to walk down the hall from the master bedroom to the living room. Unpacking felt like a hike, back and forth to the laundry room, two baths, bedrooms, huge living room, sizeable kitchen, study. No balcony -- too bad, as one side looks out to the Kopet Dag mountains of Iran, and the other toward the sleeping city, now a sea of twinkling lights. No neon, just street lights, and lights of expensive apartments (many empty), museums, theaters, university and government buildings. I want to juxtapose photos of these new digs and my one-room thatch-roof mud hut from Lesotho.

Peace Corps Office in older part of town: The Peace Corps office is in an older part of town, very charming, and as I’d been promised, populated with one of the nicest staffs a person could hope to work with. Five Peace Corps Volunteers were there too, in a familiarly messy Volunteer lounge, left “homeless” several weeks already, while waiting for their residential visas to be granted for a part of the country that has more strictly controlled access.

By the end of the working day, I’d met everyone and acquired a case of diarrhea – possibly from the zesty Turkish restaurant lunch, or possibly from having crossed too many borders in one day. My colleague suggested I might want to pick up a few groceries, so we stopped at a giant supermarket. It was upscale and festive, as today was one of the last shopping days before New Years, the major holiday (lots of eating and drinking in family homes, and then visiting friends and relatives ). That wasn’t a good idea: the aisle labels were in Russian; the place was a zig-zag chaos of children, shopping carts, and fashionably-dressed women (chic leather coats, uncovered heads); and checkout lines were long. It seemed a fun way to plunge into urban culture until I got to the head of the line. A young male and female clerk began asking me questions. They were probably saying, “Are these yours? Paper or plastic? Do you want the cake in a bag? ” I nodded yes to everything but I don’t think they were fooled. It may well have been, “So, you’re new here? You really think you can survive by speaking neither of our languages? Are you an idiot?”

But my colleague’s hired driver seemed to be patient about waiting, as did everyone in the long lines. American impatience must strike people from the patient cultures as pompous and rude.

I sigh at this new form of sanitized journalism, and hope you will become good at imagining nuances. Even in the USA, we read or listen to what a person claims is “true” (stone in desert) and meanwhile carry on internal conversations that place this “truth” within broader perspectives (wet rocks in tropical forest stream).

New year, new country. May your 2011 contain new vistas as well.

globalmaddy@gmail.com

Turkmen Folkdance

2010-11-06T12:06:00.000-07:00