Alright, I am picking up this entry at 6:36 PM. I have moved into my new family, and dinner is soon. For some reason, I am feeling really tired and a general sense of unwell. I am in a really nice room, but it might be the only heated sleeping room in the house, so I don’t have a door and people come in and out all the time, so no privacy at all. That would be challenging. However, in December when I move in permanently for two years, I will be sleeping in a different room. That room looks really barren now with just wooden planks for the floor and four walls, but hopefully in a month or so, it would look different. Hopefully it will be heated. The toilet situation: there’s no light, and it’s pretty dirty in there, and I don’t really know where to step and it’s super tiny, so I would really love a light in there; maybe I could talk to Peace Corps about that? However, I think I have a shower! That’s so exciting. My 13-year-old brother reluctantly showed me how to work it, and he talks super fast, so I will turn the knobs tonight to figure out how to get heated water through the shower knob.
I think there’s a water supply, though not very readily accessible, and the hose squirts everywhere when I ask my brother how to get cold water. Hopefully, I will be able to explore this place more during these five days. And my 16-year-old sister kind of speaks English! That’s both good and bad. It’s good because I feel more comfortable if she can translate for me, but it’s equally bad because I would love to rely solely on my Turkmen. Hopefully, I won’t fall back on English at all. My sister is more educated than most of the women that I have met. Usually girls finish high school when they are 15 years old and then just work at home, but my future host sister studies in the capital every day. I am not sure what she studies, but her English is very impressive. And to commute every day to the main city – a 45-minute endeavor at least – is very commendable, and at first glance, she looks very modern to me.
I also have a 15-year-old brother and the aforementioned younger brother. The 15-year-old has to be at least 6 feet 4 inches tall. He can almost reach the ceiling, and he has to stoop every time he comes through the door. However, the sister is shorter, around my height. As for the younger brother, he’s very lanky, and I can tell that he’s going to be tall as well.
So this is my second family to integrate into, and I am feeling a bit weird. They are all outside, and I am inside, cranking out these words. I don’t know how to do the first introductions, since there are mostly men out there, whereas with my current training family, it’s an all-female household. I feel like I am not making the best effort here and that the opportunity to make a favorable first impression is already ruined. Not to mention how the young 13-year-old beat me three times in checkers. I couldn’t efficiently communicate with him in Turkmen, but the universal language of checkers overcame all language barriers, and it was such a relief to think of what the next move would be, rather than wrack my brain for an elusive word. It’s amazing how the people in this country make do. I thought we were playing chess, and but it was a checkers board, and we were just using random pieces of chess pieces as checkers pieces. I hadn’t played in a long time, and I really think that the rules here are very different. Either that or my host brother totally took advantage of ineptness. It was very entertaining, actually. This 13-year-old was alone with an American stranger (me), and he was trying his best to be a hospitable host. He poured me some tea, flipped to a channel with American music videos (I saw Rihanna performing “S.O.S.”), and then came up with checkers. He was very generous and allowed me unlimited take-backs. I am now really motivated to practice and improve and then beat him.
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