Turkmenistan

I'll be going to Turkmenistan for my PC service. I will be in D.C. on September 29th for orientation, and then in Turkmenistan on October 3rd for pre-service training. My volunteer service ends December 21, 2009. So I'll be home for Christmas. I also plan at least one trip back to the states

Here's what I know about Turkmenistan and my service so far:
- Free water and electricity everywhere (vestiges of communism)
- Ashgabat, the capital city, is fairly modern and it's all white marble and real gold
- Turkmenbashi, the recently dead dictator/president-for-life, ruled with Soviet-style harshness
- The PC office there recently got satellite internet
- I will probably be in a rural area living with my host family for the entire two years.
- They eat lots of lamb and get lots of produce imported from Iran because the seasons are wonky. They have 100 degree summers but it also snows in the winter.
- I'm guessing that if the USA goes to war with Iran, I will be evacuated and my service will end, or they'll send me to Guatemala or something.
- 87% Muslim, though I hear it's not like Saudi Arabia. They are more culturally Muslim in the way that we are culturally Christian, someone said.

I have to go to work now. More later.

It should be here tomorrow

It should be here tomorrow.

Notified of my invitation

FINALLY.

After several months of checking my email first thing every morning, after expecting it to come by the time I finished school, then by the time I had my going-away party, then by the time I left Texas, I checked my email this morning and found this message from Peace Corps:

Peace Corps has updated your Application Status account. Log in to http://www.peacecorps.gov/mytoolkit to see the latest information.

This means that my invitation (exactly where and when I will be going) is in the mail. The mailman here is going to become shortly acquainted with me as I wait for him daily at the mailbox. What happens is I get the invite in the mail, and see what it says, and then respond within 10 days to either accept or decline the invitation. Should I decline, I would have to wait longer for another assignment to come up. This would annoy my PO because she'd have to do more work, and it'd annoy Kristofer and Ashley, since I would have to live here longer than expected.

Here is what I am predicting based on my internet research: Turkmenistan, departing for staging September 29th, returning to the States January 2010.

(this paragraph is mostly for Ben)
So. Turkmenistan. The large majority of the population speaks Turkmen, while a minority speak Balochi (Western) and Kurmanji. I am betting that I will not have to learn the minority languages. Turkmen is an Altaic > Turkic language, meaning it has strong vowel harmony, restricted voicing between vcd/vcl with few minimal pairs even intervocalically, short/long vowel opposition, and simple syllable structure (CVCC at the most complex). It might be agglutinative, I'm not sure. All nouns decline the same way; all verbs conjugate the same way. There are no classes. It has number and case, with a basic set of case markings (NOM/ACC/GEN/LOC/DAT/ABL). Its word order is strictly verb-final.

Thank you to Kerry, who was able to quickly get his recommendation stuff in before my PO went on vacation. I most likely would not have received this today if he didn't complete his shit on time. I finally get to update the timeline in the sidebar.

Finally a second nomination

My PO Julie Thompson called me this afternoon and gave me a more accurate nomination:

Late September 2007
Teaching English as a Foreign Language
Central Asia


This is exciting because TEFL was my first choice of assignment because that would work better when I apply to grad school for linguistics. It's not that teaching science would have been bad, but I just would have rather taught English. Now I need my linguistics books! And I was also reading a book earlier this year by Comrie about Caucasian languages, which might be of use if I learn one of those.

According to the PC website, "Central Asia" is the following countries:

Armenia
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyz Republic
Turkmenistan

A little closer

My PO called my Saturday afternoon. I was surprised she was working then, but she said it was busy season at the placement office.

We talked for an hour about how prepared I am to serve and several other issues like coping with stress, Kristofer, communication with people back home, and timelines.

She said she'd call me back this week, so this definitely means my application is in motion.

Placement officer

I contacted the Placement Office yesterday (1-800-424-8580 opt. 1, opt. 2, opt. 1, ext. 1850) and they gave me a teensy bit more information.

I told them I felt very much in the dark about the status of my application, which is true. It's been 22 weeks since I was medically cleared and there have been no developments since then. I told them that my original nomination was to a place I can't go any longer and that I wanted to know what my new nomination was. That in the very least I'd like a vague timeline of future events so that I'm not sitting on my ass until October or something.

The woman who answered the phone was really nice. She told me she didn't have a lot of information about the things I wanted to know, like a list of countries I'm eligible to serve in, but she was able to tell me my PO's name.

Julie Thompson.

All PC employees in DC have the same email format: first name initial then last name @peacecorps.gov. So I sent an email to JThompson[at]peacecorps.gov hoping it was her. I haven't heard anything back. That was on Friday so maybe I'll hear from her next week.

Fingers crossed

The invites for people departing in July finish this week. The invites for August and September have already started.

Nomination information

I contacted someone in the Placement Office yesterday, asking about my nomination. When I got my nomination, it was supposed to tell me three things:

1) The job that I'll be doing there
2) Approximate date of departure (usually a month)
3) Area of service (general geographic area)

But mine only told me the job that I'll be doing -- secondary science education. So when I emailed the guy yesterday, I wanted to know if he knew anything more about my nomination,
specifically about the date of departure. I wanted to know because if the interim between graduation this month and then my departure turns out to be like 5 months, then I would want to know since that means I'd get a temporary job or find some daily volunteer service to get involved with.

Well, he did have the full information about my initial nomination. I was nominated by my recruiter Michelle (Zambia 04-06) to serve in Sub-Saharan Africa from September 2007-November 2009. But as we know this can no longer be a reality because of my condition. It's just nice to know now. I have no idea why they didn't tell me before.

More waiting

I've probably already told everyone that reads this, but I was offered to leave in June 2007 if I wanted to. An email was sent to all nominees who had been 100% cleared (medical, dental, legal) asking if they wanted to take a teaching position that leaves in June. It feels like they were scrambling for PCVs. I guess it's what you can expect when most of your organization is run by previous volunteers. Needless to say, I didn't accept any of that. My earliest departure date is August 1st of this year.

I should also add that I've been checking the PC Yahoo! group regularly for people's "I was invited to Togo!" and "I'm leaving for Moldova in May!" messages, and from what I can tell, people have been receiving their invites ~2 months before departure, meaning I could expect mine sometime in June at the very earliest. But who knows, it could be earlier than that.

Why I wanted to join the Peace Corps, Part I

This post had become really ponderous, so I decided that I would just make it a running series of posts where I tease out the many reasons why I decided to do something like join the Peace Corps.

I first heard of the Peace Corps my freshman year of college when I was at a hunger banquet being put on by H2O. There were some informational brochures and stuff on a table near the exit and Liane and I perused them. Our response to Peace Corps service initially was a resolute hell no. Fast forward to two years later and I am in the process of applying and so is she, along with her fiancé (they have currently dropped out of the application process for their own reasons).

What prompted this decision for me was a number of things. Not the least of these was the question "what am I gonna do after college?"

At the time, I wasn't as interested in linguistics as I am now, so post-graduate studies wasn't an option since I didn't want to go to law school or medical school or anything like that. I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, and to a degree I still don't. What I think sounds good at the moment is grad school for linguistics, but I'll sit on that idea for two years and then see if I still want to do it when I come back.

I reasoned that, if anything, Peace Corps buys you time during the transition from college to "real life". It seemed like a great way to obtain some valuable skills and also, you know, see the world. It didn't seem like a sacrifice to me, but more of a, "You mean the government is going to pay me to live and work overseas? And then pay me more at the end? And everyone who has done this says it was the most life-enriching thing they've ever done?"

These reasons ("Buys time", "Is fulfilling") are close to the front in terms of most important reasons. The obvious one, "Want to help the world", might be first. More on that later, though.