Children in this country are treated abysmally. Parents just let them wander off and play in the streets. Sometimes they send children as young as five to the dukon to buy vodka. Yesterday, Linds and I saw a group of boys all around ten or twelve years old walking down the street smoking (though really they were just puffing, not inhaling) and carrying a plastic bag filled with probably eight bottles of vodka. There’s no concept of a bedtime here. In fact, it’s commented on in the Turkmen English books that English children have a bedtime. It’s a foreign idea to them. My five year old host sister was out until after midnight last night. TV is the main means of entertainment here as no one reads or has hobbies like building model airplanes or scrapbooking or running. My sister is fed a diet of Russian TV and while she mostly watches cartoons, she also sees TV programming meant for adults like music videos, so when she dances to her toy computer’s music she sometimes pulls out seductive moves that she has no idea are inappropriate for her to be doing.
Children in most households do the bulk of the chores while the adults do nothing around the house. I’m glad to say this is not the case with my current family, but it was the case with my training family and my first Balkanabat family. The kids cleaned and cooked while the father especially sat on his ass watching TV and called a child from the other room to bring him the ringing phone that was three feet away from him. Usually the burden of work is placed on the oldest daughter who is treated like a slave almost. But at least the oldest girl will have a decent name. By the time the second or third girl comes along they’re getting names that mean “we need a boy” or “a boy is beautiful.”
I think I’ve already mentioned how children are treated in school. They are yelled at and told they are lazy or called stupid animals. And sometimes they are hit by the teacher. The education system here is seriously f-ed up and I’ll talk about that in another post, but it’s another way children are given a disservice by this country.
Most toys available here are plastic crap imported from China that break easily and are probably covered in lead paint. It’s not uncommon to see kids playing in the streets with sticks and broken glass with no adult supervision.
But I guess that’s what happens when people view children as commodities. Free labor. Something they’re supposed to have out of family obligation. And don’t get me started on sexual health and birth control in this country. Again, that’s a whole other post. The idea that a woman must have children is so ingrained here that when I told a Turkmen student who spent a year in the States with the FLEX program that I don’t want kids, she looked at me like I was a monster.
Granted, there are plenty of people in the States who might do that because we also have a concept of what it means to be an adult and that it entails marriage and children. And we still have this notion that women are nurturing and therefore want to make lots of babies. However, in the States, there’s a large number of people who either understand my position or at least would be polite enough not to try to talk me into having a baby like the teacher here did.
To clarify, I should state that my position on kids is ambivalent (in the true sense of the word) and I decided way back in high school that I could be happy with kids and happy without and therefore it would be a matter of whether my husband wants them. But here, I just say I don’t want kids for a couple of reasons. One, if I said I wanted kids I’m afraid some Turkmen would then try to play matchmaker for me so I can get started right away and there’s no way in hell I would ever date a Turkmen. Two, when I say I don’t want kids, I get the reaction the student gave me and the question “why.” That enables me to say the following:
Because I recognize that raising kids is hard work. To be a good parent I can’t just set my kid down in front of the TV. I need to be actively involved in their education even before they start school. (I hope that this sends a message about parenting that the listener takes to heart) And I want to travel to some dangerous places and do some dangerous things and it would be wrong of me to do that if I had kids. I can’t take them with me and I don’t want to risk making orphans of them. (Again I hope this sends a message that having kids requires sacrifice while at the same time sending the message that as a woman I have hopes and dreams that I intend to pursue and that’s okay.)