The last week in our training village...

We are wrapping-up our final week in Yalkym, our training village. In the past, training has been 12 weeks long, but this year training was shortened by 2 weeks due to Peace Corps budget cuts (we even feel the effects of the economy over here). So we are heading to our permanent site with much more Turkmen to learn, but over time we will master it. Peace Corps will pay a small amount for us to get a tutor at our permanent site—we will likely do this since knowing the language will be crucial for effectiveness at our health clinics. There are about 45 doctors at the clinic where I will be working, so it is quite large. Joshua will be working at a clinic with about 20 doctors—also quite large compared to the clinic we’ve been working in for training (only 3 doctors!).

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Many of you were probably waking up early to put the Turkey in the oven at about the same time we sat down for dinner. The Thanksgiving Day meal preparation here was a lot of fun. We had to take our Turkey down the road to an oven that was working properly, so I’m sure the village was chatting about the “crazy” Americans *lol*. Coincidentally, road workers were repairing the road on the same day, so we looked pretty ridiculous carrying a turkey platter as we weaved our way down the dirt road between road workers and construction equipment. Some Turkmen friends joined us for the meal, and they enjoyed all of the food except the pie (Which we made from scratch:^) I guess the texture of pumpkin pie is probably new to them—and Turkmen don’t use cinnamon or nutmeg in cooking [or any spices for that matter]}. The spices you can buy in bulk at the bazaar are for the Russian population that lives in Turkmenistan.

Our Turkmen is slowly improving so that every week we are able to do a little more in our community. We’ve been teaching some health and hygiene classes in the school. I will try to post a picture to the blog for you to see. The students in this school are so well behaved—I have been very impressed.

We have verbal language exams on Monday, administered by the US government. These tests are administered to justify the cost of language classes for Peace Corps Trainees. We will take a similar exam at the end of our volunteer service. This coming Thursday, 43 current Peace Corps trainees (including Joshua and I) will be officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers! It will be a big to-do here, with several Turkmen government officials, the US ambassador to Turkmenistan, all of our host families, and all of our coworkers at the health clinics and schools. In all, there will be about 500 people. Our head language director asked Joshua to give a speech to this crowd in Turkmen!!! I am so proud of him! He will give a speech to 500 people in a language he has only been studying for 9 weeks.