Busy, Busy, Busy

I'm back in Baku about to go out and "mentor" this week as the trainees begin their practicum teaching.  It will be interesting because just watching a lesson is always tough now.  I just want to jump in and teach it myself, especially when I get bored.  But it will be nice to get to know some more of the trainees!

Last week one of the trainees, Julie, came out to my site and watched my classes, came to lesson planning and clubs, etc.  We had a fun and very busy time, constantly going from one thing to the next.  She took a whole bunch of pictures, so the one to the right is of me teaching my 10th form (grade) class in my new classroom!  It's way better than my classroom from last year because it's like 2.5x the size and I've made some much better posters for it (you can see a few of them) and everything.  I'm still working on it, but it's coming together!

Now I'm off to Ceyranbatan so that I can visit my homestay family from last year before going to find my host family for this week of training.  I wish I could be staying with my family, but there are no trainees in Ceyranbatan this year, so I'll have to settle with just visiting for a few hours.  I would go stay a night at the end of my week here, but I have to rush back to site because Beth and I are having a Halloween party at my school!

What a Lovely Time for a Power Outage

This Friday (as in 2 days from now) is the deadline for me to submit my SPA grant which will hopefully be getting money for my school's new resource room.  Unfortunately, a large wind storm 2 nights ago left my village without power.  Some sort of procrastination god hates me.  My computer battery died yesterday morning and I have now been in the internet cafe for like 2 1/2 hours researching for the grant but also waiting for my battery to charge because who knows if we'll have power when I get back to the village!  As I'm only at 83% full, I figured, what a great time to stop staring at book and computer prices and write to my family and friends :) Can you tell from reading this how exhausted but like giddy I am from sitting in this internet cafe surrounded by little boys playing computer games and blasting Azeri music?

When I got back Saturday morning from being in Baku/Sumqayıt for training, I saw my host mom as she was running out the door to go to a wedding in Baku Sunday night.  She still isn't back.  She's going to be arriving tonight though, so maybe she'll be there when I get home from the internet cafe.  In the meantime, it was only me with my youngest host sister for 2 nights and then my middle host sister came home before my mom from the wedding so she has been with us for 2 nights as well.  But basically this means that I get to play fake-mom and make sure the kids get up for school and that they close the chicken coop and walk them to the tualet (that's toilet for those of you who didn't get it) in the yard at night when they are too scared.  And since my youngest sister wasn't in the best of spirits the first night, we got into a pattern of watching a Disney movie a night on my computer...well until I didn't have a computer thanks to the power outage.  I really don't mind watching my sisters (or Disney movies), but I'm just too stressed right now with all this grant stuff to put more on top of it!

In happier news, on Saturday when I got back in addition to starting my babysitting duties, I started filming on a televised English course with 2 of my sitemates.  The head of our local TV station (although I think it broadcasts to about half of Azerbaijan...) approached my Azerbaijani language teacher and me over the summer about starting "English for All" and we agreed to do it.  We've been planning ever since and getting more volunteers involved, and it all really started this weekend!  Our first show was only us introducing ourselves, although I think the episode will really be quite the comedy because they decided that we, the American volunteers, should introduce ourselves in Azerbaijani.  Let me tell you, it is stressful enough to be on television, and then to add to that speaking in a foreign language!  Now we are going to film every weekend (the volunteers will switch off weeks, thank goodness).  This weekend I'm really begin the course by teaching the alphabet!

Welcome to the AZ8s!

I'm about to get on the night train to go back to Tovuz after spending a few days in Baku/Sumqayit for training.  I don't really have much to say except that I'm really excited to see that we have a good group of new volunteers and I want to wish any of them who are reading this luck in the weeks ahead!  Coming back and teaching 4 sessions a day was absolutely exhausting and reminds me of how tough and just draining PST was, but hang in there because it's worth it when you are finished!  I hope I didn't scare you guys too much with all the talk of lesson planning and textbooks and "school reality" and if I did, email me and I'll reassure you that it's going to work out!

One Year (?!?)

Happy one year in country to me! (and to all the other AZ7's too...).  I'm in a state of complete disbelief that I've been living here for a whole year.  That just seems absurd.  But to prove the point, a whole new group of trainees arrived in country about a week ago.  Next week I'm going to head back to the beautiful Sumqayıt to help the newbies learn fun things like how to write a lesson plan and work with the English textbooks.  I know you are jealous you can't sit in on these sessions, try to hold it in.

School started a few weeks ago, as I wrote, and has been amazingly smooth sailing so far, which is unheard of in Azerbaijan.  My schedule has only had one change, which I requested because two of my classes were at the same time.  And my classroom is shaping up (I finally got a bookshelf yesterday!  Tamilə müəllim went and "quarreled" with our director haha).  Work has even been started on our future resource room, which is exciting!

I've been playing catch up all this week because last week my good friend and language teacher, Nuranə, got married.  All the other members of my cluster from training came out to Tovuz and we had matching dresses made like bridesmaids.  Nuranə wanted her wedding to have some American flair to it!  In Azerbaijan at the bride's wedding (there are two weddings remember, one for the bride and one for the groom), the bride doesn't always wear a white dress.  I can just say that makes it more difficult to choose a color for a bridesmaid dress!  In the end, we ended up in the same color as the bride, bright red!  Everyone loved it and it made us very easy to spot anytime we did anything!  Nuranə was told by the owner of the wedding palace that it was the best wedding they had ever had their because of us (and I'll have you know that this was at the most expensive wedding palace in Tovuz, I'd never been before).  I don't know if it was the best wedding ever, but it was certainly the most fun wedding I've been to in this country. I could sit with all my friends and dance and really be genuinely happy for the couple because I actually really knew them (at the other weddings I've been brought to, I haven't known the people getting married).  All in all, it was a huge success.