Super Volunteer

This post is a testimonial to how awesome one of my fellow volunteers is.  For a long time I have been promising my host sisters that I would take them up to Qazax (a region about 40 minutes away) to visit one of my friends, Connie.  My sisters love her, but even more importantly, Connie has been doing an awesome job developing a killer bike program to teach the kids of Qazax how to ride and how to do it safely and my sisters really wanted to learn how to ride.  Wanting to be true to my word, I arranged for us to go up to see Connie the day after camp ended, knowing that I wouldn't really have that much free time at site for awhile after.  Connie said that day was fine and I told my sisters and they got all excited.  Unfortunately, I woke up the morning of with a bad stomach virus.  Gross.  Being the dumb idiot that I can be, I thought that I would be fine and had gotten everything out of my system (along with my breakfast) and decided to go to Qazax anyway.  Boy was I wrong.  I showed up in Qazax in pretty rough shape, but Connie didn't hesitate one second in helping get me settled and then teaching my two sisters how to ride bikes all by herself.  I lay in the shade of her school's courtyard while she ran around with them for about 2 1/2 hours in the hot Qazax sun of late July.  I was so impressed by her dedication (and the fact that she never said to me "you're an idiot, you are ill and still came up here, loser" or something to that effect).  And this was the first time that I was able to see the bike club I have been hearing so much about and let me tell you, it was fantastic.  So basically what I wanted to say in this post is that Connie is a super awesome volunteer and my hat's off to her.

Connie helping my sister Gülnar learn to ride.

Turkey, Bulgaria, and Camp!

Alright, I promised a post about my travels in Turkey and Bulgaria with Kimmy, so here goes, but I’m going to keep it short and sweet.

Turkey

• Our trip was 4 nights in Istanbul, 2 nights by Ephesus (staying in Selchuk), 2 nights in Fethiye, and 1 night in Antalya.
• Ephesus was cool but had way too many tourists.  And I must say, the picnic that Kim and I put together to have at the end of our walk through the ruins was phenomenal.
• Fethiye was gorgeous, just beautiful.  And our day long boat cruise around the Mediterranean was awesome: stunningly clear blue water to swim in, distant mountains on the coastline, hilarious British tourists sitting by us who smoked like chimneys, super interesting father son pair from America who had been travelling for 5 months, etc.  Only downside: I got ridiculously sunburned.  Like ridiculously.  Big time ouch.
• In Antalya I accidentally made Kimmy walk way too far to go to a museum.  There was a very convenient tram that could have taken us.  My bad.  My continued apologies Kim L  But the museum was pretty awesome right??  And the tram back was like a nice treat! Haha
• Between Turkey and Azerbaijan, I have never had so many people fight with me over the fact that Kim and I are sisters!  I get it that we don’t look much alike (except we both have blue eyes) but I guess I never realized we were so shockingly different.  Didn’t help that as the trip progressed my hair was starting to bleach to be lighter brown and she was getting more freckles on her face…just soooo different!

Bulgaria

• Our trip was 6 nights in Varna at Kim’s friend Vesko’s house and 2 nights in Sofia at Vesko’s friend’s apartment.
• Varna was really pretty on the Black Sea coast and we drove north to see more of the coast, which was great.  It was way colder than I expected and since I idiotically lost one of only two cardigan sweaters that I brought on the trip during a night out in Istanbul, I was constantly relying on Vesko and his friends to lend me various clothing.  And we all know that I’m constantly cold regardless of if it is actually cold, so this was just a bad situation haha.
• We went on a walking tour of Sofia with one of Vesko’s friends and saw the really pretty downtown.  Then we went to a really cool lookout over the city at sunset.  Again, I froze.
• Vesko’s friends were all really great to us and we loved meeting them.  They were so welcoming!

And now back to my real world where it is all about camp, camp, camp!  On Friday of this week we finished off our Healthy Bodies, Healthy World week by talking about the environment and trash.  Our activity for the day was to make creative things out of trash.  Luckily for my kids, I’m an incredible pack-rat and I have been saving “interesting trash” for them basically ever since I arrived in the village.  The result was 1) some pretty cool creations from the kids, 2) my room is cleaner because I finally got rid of all that stuff!  I’m going to put up some photos of their projects and your job is to deduce the contents of all the packages my mom sends me from America!  (I thank you for the real stuff Mom and my students thank you for their packaging! haha)

With all the trash explaining the activity

A lowly tube for glowsticks becomes glasses

The sign reads "Most Beautiful City" and another sign that you can't see from this angle explains that it is Harry Potter City (that's Harry Potter wrapping paper underneath it, very timely!).  My vitamin bottles and orbit boxes make the buildings, bottle caps are the people.

This kid jumped up first thing to grab this box and was like "I'm gonna make a car."  It ended up being a bus, and I really liked it.  I also really liked the Reeses eggs that originally came in that box haha.

Houses, cars, and boats.  Mostly out of Orbit boxes.  What is my favourite type of gum again?

At camp we have 3 teams (Awesome Team, FCB - Football Club Barcelona, and Bomba) so we were counting up their points for the week.  They get points for almost everything we do.  So far FCB is in the lead...but there's one week left!

All photos courtesy of my awesome week 2 photographer (and all around awesome person) Peggy!

Back in the Land of A

I realized just now as I'm online for my daily 20-ish minutes of internet that I never got back on to write another blog post about Turkey or on to write any blog post about Bulgaria!  And now that I've been back in Azerbaijan for 2 weeks, that all seems like a distant memory, especially since those 2 weeks have been spent doing summer camp here at site! Camp has been going really well and the kids have been really enthusiastic.  I've had some great other volunteers up to help (so far I've had Moses, Alec, Julie, Peggy, Mariel, and Lori!) and my kids have been so happy to meet some other volunteers.  Last week our theme was countries and their big holidays and then this week we have been doing stuff about health.  We're going to finish up next week with arts and crafts.  I'll try to remind myself to write a post about Turkey and Bulgaria at home to put up the next time I come online, but I can't make any promises as I've already been forgetting to do it for so long now!  Sorry for being such a lame blogger :(