Visiting Turkmenistan

Post by Mom
It was great to see Kelsey and spend time in her village. We did alot in a short time. Thanks to other volunteers we had very successful programs. The people are great. Our guide was very informative and very helpful. He made a great video for Kelsey and copies for us and Kelsey host family.
It was fun to put names with faces and places. If anyone would like to visit Turkmenistan let us know. There is alot to see ruins of Alexander the Great. Dinosaur prints, Mountains, Desert.
Kelsey will need help when she returns home. We were getting dinner one of our last nights in capital she wouldn't take the first Taxi they wanted about $3.00 it was to much we did get a taxi and only paid $1.50 maybe, for all 4 of us. Yes it was a short distance and we walked back to the hotel after dinner. We also went to the largest market in the world, it is even on the list of 100 places to see. She told vendors way to much in Turkmen and clicked her tongue. It will be interesting for her to have set prices.
We could understand some conversations without knowing the language. It was great to see that Kelsey's community accepts her and likes the things she is doing. I know she will miss them when she returns home. I hope some day she will be able to have some of them come and visit in the US.
I felt like I had been tranported back to my childhood with all the families having farms or at least gardens. My grandmother would butcher a chicken every Sunday for dinner, I grew up on fresh cows milk and made butter. I do know I still like fresh veggies right from the garden.

Life in T-stan less stress but having grown up on a farm I would not say simple. Gardens and animals take work.

bureaucracy

Goal: to write a grant that is asking for money to remodel my office and turn it into a safe place for females to learn about their bodies, health, and to exercise.
Obstacles: Turkmen bureaucracy.
I started the process for this grant two months ago when, after our mid-service conference, my counterpart asked if we could create a room with the above goal. I got very excited and said that as long as she was willing to do a lot of work we absolutely could. Peace Corps has a program called SPA (small program assistance). It is in place to provide monetary support for small community driven projects and our goal was to get this room remodeled and then to provide lessons to the community on general health, healthy lifestyles and exercise classes.
The process has been slow in coming and to demonstrate the process I’m going to describe one small aspect of this process – getting the budget done for the remodel aspect.
Step 1: get a list of supplies needed to do the remodel. I had no idea where to start with this so I asked my counterpart to head it up. I told her we needed to find someone who could do the remodel and that they had to list everything they needed. EVERYTHING right down to the last nail or paintbrush. I asked her if she could let me know when this person arrives so I could be there in case anyone had any questions. Several days later I got a list written in pencil in really bad handwritten Turkmen with words I had no idea what they were. I spent several hours working through what they were (the grant had to be written completely in English) and then we went to the bazaar and attempted to find out the prices of these items. I discovered very quickly that this person had not included anything to redo the floor. The floor just outside of my room has huge holes in it. I have had three children fall through the floor – it is entertaining as they fall nearly two feet down to the subfloor.
Step 2: The grant will not pay for general labor, only specialized labor. Therefore, we had to find someone who would do this work for free. The person we had previously asked gave a very definitive no. (It turns out my counterpart had told him we were getting money from America and therefore he expected a huge amount of money for this remodel, he listed that labor alone was going to be about 3 times the going rate) I asked around to see what other volunteers have done to get over this obstacle and the easiest answer was to see if the etrap (local) hospital could provide someone from their staff to do the work. My counterpart called the etrap director and he said that would be a good idea. Success!
Step 3: Get new list of supplies needed from the new remodel workers. I asked my counterpart when we could expect the new list of supplies (including supplies for the floor). Her response was that the men who would be doing the work were really busy and the director said they couldn’t come look at the room until after we purchased the supplies. I tried not to get upset and went with the flow. We (my counterpart and I) would go to Halach (the location of the etrap hospital) and find new prices for the things the previous worker had listed and ask if anyone could give us guidance on a new floor. I have a decent understanding of Turkmen but the conversation about the floor was totally beyond my ability. We ended up settling on a floor that was totally premade. I had no idea how we would go about installing this floor but hoped that someone could help us figure this out. Our next stop was the hospital.
Step 4: Find construction worker and talk with them. The goal is to get a contract listing all of the supplies needed to complete the project, the number of weeks required to do the work and the total cost of all the supplies. We arrived at the hospital and went to the directors office. We were told he was busy and we would have to come back in 1.5 hours. We then went downstairs to what I believe was the accountant’s office. We asked him about a letter we had to get from the director regarding his support of the project and we asked him about the construction worker. He repeated what the director said earlier that this guy was too busy to come and look at the room but that he would try to get him to take a minute out of his busy schedule to come and talk with us. About 20 minutes later this very humble looking older man arrived, he wore very nice dress clothes (not the kind of clothes you would do construction work in). He listened to the accountant talk about the project and the fact that we needed a contract with all the above details. This man immediately replies that he can’t do any of that if he doesn’t see the room. (Finally! Someone with some common sense!). Following this is a long discussion about the quick response time required, problems with this proposed project, and many other things I barely understood. The end of the conversation was resolved with the goal of this man coming with my counterpart and I back to our village that very day and looking over the room and talking about the intended project. I am beginning to think this is going to work out.
Step 5: Drive from Halach to Guychbirleshik. Sounds fairly simple. I’m not sure I could have been more mistaken. This man had to get permission from no less than three different people to make the trip (even though we had been given permission from the director for the whole thing). Then we waited a half an hour for him to get his car. My counterpart began talking to me about various issues Turkmenistan has and about the tendency for people to require bribes for any small thing to get done and also the tendency for Turkmen to pocket any extra money they could get their hands on. This moved on to a conversation about the fact that the etrap hospital and the director responsible for all of the small clinics in the area doesn’t even provide blood pressure cuffs and stethoscopes to the doctors and nurses here. (Quick thanks to Judy Atkinson who was able to send 4 cuffs/stethoscope sets with my parents when they came! My co-workers were so incredibly thankful!) Nearly an hour and a half after we had decided on the necessity of the construction man coming to my village we finally arrived (the drive normally takes 20 minutes).
Step 6: Get new list of supplies and enter them into the budget. This step is still in the works. We did have a very productive conversation with the construction worker about what our priorities are and what we hoped to complete. He wrote down a bunch of measurements and told us he would get back to us on Monday with a list of supplies needed and hopefully their prices and the number of weeks it will take him and his team to do the work. Now I wait.

Kiek okara

“Does your milk have a smell?” the casual question my host mother posed to me this morning over breakfast. I, bewildered, replied that there wasn’t one I could detect. She and my host father then went on to expand upon the numerous numbers of smells that milk could and did have this time of year due to the things that the cows were eating in the desert. The prime offender was a plant called kiek okara. This is the third time I have heard the name of this desert dwelling plant.
The first time was several months ago at our mid service conference. The setting was very different. We were gathered listening to a panel of NGO’s in Turkmenistan. All of these NGO’s were based in Ashgabat. One of the NGO’s was a group called Kiek Okara – a word I had never heard before and wasn’t sure was Turkmen. I didn’t question the name at that time. The NGO focused on domestic violence support and prevention. It sounded like a great and unfortunately necessary group, however, as with the majority of the NGO’s we heard from that day had absolutely no programs or support outside of the capital.
The second time was during a trip that I took to the desert with my parents, sister, and host father. We parked near a well that was used by livestock wandering the desert and started wandering ourselves. My host father picked up a long dry round piece of wood and started to tell us about all of the medicinal properties for this particular plant. He also talked about how the plant stored water in the top and how it was shaped like a bowl and that the livestock would use it to drink from as they were wandering. Also the leaves from keik okara store large amounts of water and are therefore very nutritious.
From the very first time I learned about the desert, probably in 2nd grade, I knew that desert plants and animals had to adapt to their environment. This plant whenever I’ve seen it, living or a stump from the previous year, looks completely out of place. The grown version looks like a mini-palm tree in the desert. The fact that this NGO started to support women who are victims of domestic abuse used this totally out of place looking plant with healing powers, huge reserves of strength in the form of the water it stores in a very dry place, and an uncanny ability to adapt as their inspiration is something I found awe-inspiring and wanted to share with you.