2007-03-25 - 9:36 p.m.
I have a backlog of things I'd like to write about--what to say when someone tries to yank open your stall door, doctors specializing in "internal medicine", when people say "I forgot to eat", and why two days from now will be the beginning of a wonderful food-filled period of my life. However, I am lazy, I am tired, and I have a backlog of e-mails to respond to that I refuse to do right now because I'm looking for Chris Garneau mp3s and going to bed. Fine? Fine.
However, I do have to say one thing.
I was talking to a T-stan volunteer who recently got medically discharged (yes, that happens) and is back in America right now. He was given some Uzbek cds that a friend of a friend of mine in T-stan bought for me in Tashkent and this ejected volunteer was the "Uzbek Record Mule," as it were. So I called him to see if he had the goods. Cause I needed it real bad.
It turns out that he lived in D-guz for the few months he was at permanent site and in addition, he met my host brother a few times. Anyway, this volunteer told me that my host brother told a couple volunteers that I, Steve Lynch, "had a wife and two kids before coming to Turkmenistan." The two volunteers just kind of stood there uncomfortably, not knowing what to say to something so clearly not true.
There's a few reasons why this is so bizarre that I don't even know how to process it. First of all, Serdar was my host brother, one of the siblings who I lived with and was close to and yelled at and got yelled at by and almost got punched by, for two years. For two very wonderful years of my life, I lived, ate, and worked in that house with him. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I reviewed over and over and over again my dating, family, and future marriage/children situation.
So the fact that he's telling volunteers who know me something that is pretty clearly not true on any level is really really bizarre. I've even tried thinking of why, culturally speaking, he would benefit from telling people that.
It's ocassions like this, when logic just leaks out of the pantry in badbad levels that no one wants to fix, that I remember why that country made me so on edge, why the people drove me crazy, and why my host brother and I never got a long. All that insanity just drove me back madly into the arms of my wife and kids.
