Another Week, Another Camp

I feel like summer should be wrapping up, but I still have about a month left until we start school!  This is not complaining at all, I certainly have plenty of things I want to do with my teachers, students, classroom, etc before September 15th!

I just spent a week down in Bilәsuvar helping with a summer camp that my friends Jon and James were having.  It was a really great week.  Their kids were so sweet and excited and we got to do fun things like make picture frames, drop eggs from the second-floor of the school, and play the ninja game (if you haven't played the ninja game yet, try it, you won't regret it! This is a game that involves a bunch of kids standing in a circle taking turns doing ninja moves to try and hit another person's hand, no one gets hurt, every one gets to be a ninja...awesome).  And in addition to all this fun at camp, there were some great volunteers down there as staff and so we would go play softball (really "left-field ball"...the other volunteers can attest to how thrilled I was to be playing...which is not very much at all) and make amazing food (fruit sorbet, donuts, and general overall wonderfulness).  Only downside is that Bilәsuvar is not exactly close to Tovuz which meant I had to take a really long and ridiculously hot bus ride, the highlights of which include the little girl next to me vomiting (she stood up and did it on her father not on me, and I think she and I both are thankful for that because I was in no mood to be barfed on...not that you are ever really in the mood for that...) and the bus breaking down so I got to stand on the side of the road for like an hour and a half before giving up on the bus and getting a ride from a passing car.  Sounds like fun right? Wanna visit me now?

I'm in Baku about to head back to site.  I just went to the dentist yesterday and got my teeth cleaned.  I was talking to staff yesterday before going and one guy asked me if before Peace Corps I would have ever dreamed of being so excited to be getting my teeth cleaned? Especially because I was paying for it out of my own pocket (Peace Corps only pays for us to get our teeth cleaned once a year...and that's a year after actually swearing in, so it would have been a year and a half without seeing a dentist and given the amount of sweets we have here with our çay - tea, I didn't feel so great about that).  I thought he made a really good point because never before would going to the dentist be the highlight of my month, but I'm super happy with my clean teeth haha.