Belated Post: Naima and Jessica Came to Peace Corps It Up, Azeri Style!

I should have posted about this a while ago, but I think we can all see that my posting record isn't the most consistent!  My older sister Naima and Jessica Bruce, her best friend from Peace Corps, came to visit me from July 31 st to August 11th.  We got off to a bit of a rocky start when Naima's plane from America was delayed so she didn't meet up with Jessica in London to fly to Baku (Jessica was sitting at Heathrow longing looking about the terminal for Naima, she even bought Naima lunch...and then had to take one for the team and eat it herself haha).  Instead of arriving with Jessica at 9:30PM, Naima arrived at 4:30AM but then didn't make it out to us until about 5:30...without any bags.  The next few days turned into us making several trips to the Turkish Airlines office where I horrified the staff by listing off all the items of my clothing Naima was wearing because she had none of her own.  By the end of the few days every member of the staff seemed to know who were, would come in to check on the progress of our case, and would tell me how great it was that I could speak Azerbaijani...so that I could yell at them.  We did eventually get both bags back.  After Baku we went down to Lerik (which is a mountainous region down south) and to Lenkeran (which is down south on the Caspian).  In Lerik we did a homestay through Community-Based Tourism Azerbaijan (http://www.cbtazerbaijan.com/) which is a project PCVs started.  And then in Lenkeran we stayed with some volunteers.  Naima and Jessica were really struck by how similar the housing could feel to the volunteer houses they stayed at in Benin.  After that we went up to my site for a few days to meet my students, neighbors, family, friends, etc.  We went to the mountains, my school, my counterpart's house, the bazaar, etc.  It was a really nice few days that passed all too quickly!  It was really nice to have the two of them visit because their perspectives as returned Peace Corps volunteers were really refreshing to have and I appreciated being able to show them all my work and get their feedback.  I'm at our Close of Service Conference now and we have been talking a lot about how once we return home some of our best support systems will be other RPCVs (from all countries, not just Azerbaijan) and having them here could really make me see how that would be helpful!  Makes me feel really lucky to have an RPCV sister!

The Saga of the Dead Dog in a Sack

So I definitely owe you all a post about my sister Naima and our friend Jessica's trip to Azerbaijan, but first I have a more current story to share, the story of the dead dog.

A few days ago as I went to school, cutting through the bushes behind my house, I noticed a big grain sack in the little canal.  These canals are part of the irrigation system we have so sometimes water flows in them but generally they are just stagnate water or mud or dried up.  As you can imagine with the stagnate water and goose poop and trash, these canals aren't always the most pleasant places, but this day it reached a new low.  I could see that something was in the sack and at first I thought it was a sheep skin because often times the nearby butcher throws a gross skin from an animal he butchered (or random stomachs, etc) in the bushes.  Then I realized the fur didn't look sheep-like.  No, it was a dog, a dog dead folded up in a sack.  Both gross and really sad.  I immediately told my host mom when I got home and we both started ranting about all the disgusting things that people throw in the bushes by our house.  Apparently just a week before my mom had to go throw some dirt on a dead cat that she could smell in our backyard when she went to the latrine (I missed that loveliness, but I did see the dead goose in the canal a few weeks before that, although that dead animal ended up thrown into the basement of the school to rot...but that's another story).  As the days passed, the stink from the dog got worse (really? a dead dog in stagnate water/mud smelling bad? never!) and the breeze so nicely wafted his odor into our backyard.  By yesterday morning it was getting really strong.  I was trying to sit outside and work on my computer where it was a bit cooler than my room, but the smell was just rank.  Finally I gave my mom a manat to go pay some kids to bury the thing.  My mom and I vowed that we would go over to the mayor's office today or tomorrow to complain about the government's neglect (this is public land on the edge of a soccer field and connecting to the school property).  But before we got a chance to go today, my wonderful and highly respected neighbor Hüsəyn müəllim called the mayor himself.  My mother reported back the conversation to me and I found it quite funny.  Here's my cliff notes version "People keep putting bad trash there behind their house.  It is smelling so much that Jess müəllim can no longer do her work outside!"  That's right, it's not important that putting dead animals in the water is just asking us all to get diseases, no problem that kids play on the soccer field next door every day, no problem that there are another 4 people living in my house with the smell, what's important is that I cannot sit outside and comfortably work on my computer!  It leaves me with the following thoughts: 1) I'm glad that they respect me so much that they wouldn't want anything to be offending me, 2) I'm happy with anything that will stop the litany of dead animals that have been showing up near my house!