In the name of peace and justice, Sally Alice Thompson has traveled to Nicaragua four times and to Turkmenistan seven times, and she has walked in both the Great American Peace March of 1986 and the U.S.-Soviet International Peace Walk of 1987.
And Thompson, 69, has more trips in mind: “It all began when I went to a lecture 15 years ago on `The Consequences of Nuclear War,’ and the speakers described the effects of the radiation from nuclear explosions similar to those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I decided then that I needed to do what little I could to help prevent another such catastrophe.”
Before that lecture, Thompson was an elementary-school teacher whose travels had consisted mostly of family vacations with her husband and two children. At first her activities focused on nuclear disarmament. “That was when the Cold War was still very real. I went to a lot of meetings and peace demonstrations at the offices of local legislators.”
After the 1981 war in Nicaragua started, she traveled to Central America to harvest coffee crops, investigate human-rights violations and do construction work.
She completed the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament across the United States, which took her away from home for 8 1/2 months in 1986. On all these trips, Thompson has gone alone; her husband, Donald, has remained at home but he is always supportive, she says.
Daughter Sarita was 26 and son Delano was 18 when she began her travels, what Thompson calls “building bridges between peoples.”
Much of the international work she does now has its roots in the 1987 U.S.-Soviet International Peace Walk. Thompson was one of the 200 American marchers. Among the 200 Soviet marchers was Murad Nazarov, who is now Turkmenistan’s ambassador to India. Thompson says: “Nazarov and I met while we walked. We talked about our hometowns and found they had a lot in common.
“Nazarov was from Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, which was then one of the Soviet republics. Turkmenistan has a population of about 3 million and is located north of Iran on the Caspian Sea. Ashkhabad is a desert town near mountains, just like Albuquerque. Both towns are about the same size and have a university. The two of us decided we would like to make the towns Sister Cities.”
The Sister Cities program, begun in 1956 to foster international cooperation, already included some cities in the Soviet Union when Thompson and Nazarov conceived their plan. The city of Ashkhabad was willing to become part of the program. Back home in Albuquerque, Thompson set to work.
“According to the Sister Cities program requirements, I had to do research on both cities, develop goals for cultural exchanges and raise $2,000 for expenses. I also had to get the Albuquerque City Council to pass a resolution. The whole process took two years, and the resolution was passed in 1989.”
Since that time, Thompson has been to Turkmenistan seven times. She pays for these trips herself. “Luckily, I’m able to do that,” she says. “I go about twice a year, in part because mail and phone communication are so poor. Going there is about the only way I can find out what’s going on,” she says, referring to her various Sister Cities projects.
One of them is simply to bring a different perspective to the Turkmen citizens, who are struggling with reinventing the country’s infrastructure and economy.
Thompson’s approach is low-key. “I don’t try to change the way people live,” she says, “even though I’m bothered by the way many women are treated in Turkmen Muslim culture, especially in the country where young brides are still sold and become the property of their husbands’ families.
“In the cities, things are a bit different. In general, professional women are not so oppressed, but there’s a lot of what I’d call male chauvinism. A man’s masculinity is defined by the number of children he has, so women have many children. Women do all the heavy work, at home and also on the streets, where they perform manual labor on construction crews while men operate the heavy equipment.
“I appreciate that this is a different culture, but from my perspective, women are not treated well. Still, I don’t feel I should tell them how to live. They are good people. We talk about politics and we’re very frank. But traditions change slowly. On the other hand, nothing will change if they never have any contact with other kinds of ideas.
“And people are very happy to see Americans. Many times I hear them say: `I never thought I’d have an American in my own home.’ During the Soviet regime, they never saw foreigners. Now they see American movies on TV, but they have no context for interpreting what they see. One high school student asked me: `Do you carry a gun?’ Some people ask if I am rich. I tell them that I am not. I provide a reality check against what they see on TV. Understanding America is important for them because they want to promote international business.”
Thompson often refers to her work as something that causes a ripple effect. “More than two years ago, I took 12 people from the Albuquerque area on a two-week tour to Moscow, then to Ashkhabad and finally to Leningrad (St. Petersburg). We stayed in private homes. Just like me, these people became very interested in maintaining the relationships they formed on that trip. Many of them now come to all the meetings of the Albuquerque-Ashkhabad Sister Cities Committee. Some of them serve as hosts to Turkmen visitors. One of them has collected a lot of baseball equipment for the Young Businessmen’s School in Ashkhabad, an auxiliary high school where students go in the evening for business training in addition to regular high school classes.”
This school figures in several of Thompson’s projects. On a four-month trip to Ashkhabad in early 1993, she worked on a satellite connection between the Washington Middle School in Albuquerque and the Young Businessmen’s School. “I’m working to get a computer modem and satellite hook-up. NASA was going to fund it, but they’ve had a cutback in appropriations. I haven’t given up though.”
Usually, Thompson spends only a few weeks in Ashkhabad, but her trip in 1993 was longer because she had been invited to teach English at the Young Businessmen’s School.
“I didn’t go with the intention of teaching anywhere else, but after I got to Ashkhabad, I was asked to also teach part of the English curriculum at the Academy of Sciences and the University of Turkmenistan, both in Ashkhabad. The students are so eager to know about America. I would ask them what subjects they wanted to discuss, and I’d develop a vocabulary list for each class. Then, I’d talk about the chosen subject, emphasizing the words on the list.
“The topic might be insurance, or credit-both foreign ideas to the students-or family problems. Altogether, I taught about 50 students. Their English textbooks are 50 to 75 years old, and of course, the English language in those books is archaic; teaching the way I did, I exposed them to current English vocabulary.”
The students gave Thompson a farewell party. “I definitely made some new connections there,” she says.
One of Thompson’s newer Sister Cities projects is a high school exchange program. Ten students from each city will live for three weeks with host families in the other city. “Here too, I’m working on the funding. There’s a lot of competition for Sister Cities funds from other cities in newly independent Soviet states.”
Another kind of exchange came about in an unplanned way. On her first visit to Ashkhabad, Thompson was invited to the home of Redjep Alliarov, director of the Conservatory of Music of Turkmenistan, who writes modern adaptations of Turkmen folk music. She had met him when he visited Albuquerque before the Sister Cities connection had been made.
“When I went to his home, we talked about the deceased Albuquerque composer, John Donald Robb Sr., who wrote adaptations of Mexican folk music at the University of New Mexico. Later, the archives at university provided Alliarov with some of Robb’s music notations. The conservatory now plays Robb’s music frequently on radio and TV.”
Thompson plans to return to Ashkhabad, but now she’s writing a book about her Sister Cities work in Turkmenistan “so that others can learn to see these people as real persons, not as `those people over there.’ “
