by Gideon J. (9th Grade)

As y’all should already know if y’all’ve been paying enough attention, this year we SCAers have been studying world geography. We have gone (in spirit) all around the world—from Central and South America, to Europe, to Asia, to Oceania, to Canada and the United States of America. The former of the final countries is a land renowned, according to our ACME Gears agent debriefing, for such threats as its wild, life-endangering moose, its “suspiciously aggressive geese,” and its polar bears. ACME Gears has very politely warned us that any encounter with said polar bears is marked as no longer field research, but instead training for the 400m.

I have already expressed my wish for y’all to be attentive readers. You have hopefully already observed my digression. What does Turkmenistan have to do with Canada? Absolutely nothing, except that like Canada, Turkmenistan is a really cool place! It’s such a cool place, in fact, that I have decided to share a few of the most interesting facts that I learned while researching the country:

Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat, is the Guinness world record holder of the “highest concentration of white marble buildings” in a city. This alone gives the capital the look of a whitewashed penguin, but the city’s law that all the cars in the capital must be clean (which isn’t necessarily easy for a city in the middle of a desert) and painted either white or silver, adds a second and excessive coat.

A couple of random facts I collected are that dogs were once banned in Ashgabat on the grounds of their “unappealing odour,” and that, excluding the few exceptions, it is illegal for men to have beards in Turkmenistan. A slightly more applicable fact is that the writing script of Turkmen, Turkmenistan’s official language, is the Latin alphabet, which is odd because most of the country’s neighbors use Cyrillic.

Turkmens celebrate the second Sunday of August as national Melon Day. I did not go in depth in researching Melon Day—a great folly, I am sure—so I cannot tell you why Turkmens have a national Melon Day. I guess it’s just because they like melons so much. It makes me wonder why we don’t have a national Melon Day. Anyway, on Melon Day Turkmens celebrate melons (they have 430 different varieties) and participate in melon competitions and parades.

Somewhere far from the capital and likely far from melon parades, in the great nothingness of the Karakum desert, is a massive inferno that has been burning for decades. The Darvaza gas crater is thought to have been formed about fifty years ago by Soviet geologists who set fire to natural gas in order to burn away leaking poisonous fumes. This thought, however, is not fully confirmed. I don’t know about you, but I find a gigantic blazing pit that’s been burning a hole through the desert for half a century, whose details of origin are not fully confirmed, just a little worrying. Unfortunately, the fire in the Darvaza crater is actually beginning to die, so whatever issues it used to have will matter little soon.

In my cursory examination of the government I learned that Turkmenistan is currently under the control of a totalitarian dictatorship. The current president (dictator) is Serdar Gurbangulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow (if you have not done so already, please repeat that out loud). His mother is an “Honored Carpet Weaver of Turkmenistan,” a title which strikes me as very peculiar.

I also learned that Turkmenistan had a dictator twenty years ago, Saparmurat Niyazov, who wrote a book, Ruhnama, which had to be memorized and recited everyday by Turkmens. It was legally required to be placed in every mosque, a statue of it was made, it was sent to space, and Turkmens even had to answer questions about it before getting a driver’s licence. This same dictator renamed all the days of the week and the names of the months after his family members.

There are lots of other, even more cool things about Turkmenistan, I’m sure. I recommend researching it! I found it a really cool place! And if you are an exceptionally eager researcher of foreign countries, I’ve recently heard of another really interesting country. I can’t quite remember its name, besides that it started with ‘B’ and ended with ‘a’ and most certainly does not have ‘olivi’ in the middle, but I do remember that it was a really cool place with a fantastic culture, a unique history and people, and a small but excellent international Christian co-op school somewhere in the nation’s capital.