On the trail of all this, when I returned to Balkanabat, a student told me she had heard that a young man of about twenty hung himself in our park this past week. I’ve heard other stories of people, especially girls, killing themselves by drinking the vinegar here. U.S. vinegar is only 6-7% acidity whereas the vinegar here is 70%. It has to be strongly diluted. If you drink it straight, it burns through your esophagus and kills you. (It’s why I never even attempt to make anything with vinegar here.) Often the news of a girl killing herself here comes with speculation it was over unrequited love. But the volunteer from Mary also told us about a young gelen (newlywed) who was four months pregnant who killed herself and later the word came out that she had been being sexually abused by her father-in-law even before she got married and she didn’t know whose child the baby was.
All these things, of course, go unreported in the news and there’s no way to get any sort of statistics regarding homicide or suicide. I’ve told you before that any unpleasantness in this country is swept under the rug. Even something as stupid as the Turkmen soccer team coming in last in the Central Asia Games was not reported. Yes, everything is just rosy in Turkmenistan.