Hi from Turkey!

I got a panicked email from my mother this morning because my sister Kim and I apparently haven't been checking in enough as we travel through Turkey (sorry Mom) so I thought maybe it was time to put up a little post to let the rest of you know where and how I am!

I'm currently in Fethiye, Turkey (on the Mediterranean) watching my sister sleep because even though for my entire life I've never been a morning person, on this trip I can barely sleep past 6AM (which is 8 on Azerbaijani time, so I guess it makes some sense).  Today we are going to go on a boat cruise to a whole bunch of little islands and swim and see ruins, etc.  Try not to be too jealous :) Before Fethiye we first traveled to Istanbul and then on to Ephesus, but I'll write more about everything later (remember, this post is just so you don't all start sending me panicky emails!).  And from here we are going to Antalya so we can fly to Bulgaria and meet up with Kimmy's friend from school!  So that is my itinerary, you can all feel properly informed now and I'll write more detailed accounts of our journeys later.  For now I'll just say that we are having a great time and everything here is just so beautiful!

The Son Zəng has been Zəng-ed!

Summer is here!  The school year is over!  On May 31st we had "Son Zəng" which literally means "Last Bell" but we would say graduation.  One of my best classes (I wrote about them a few posts ago) was graduating and they asked me to make a speech and sing so I got to be in the ceremony.  I spoke in Azeri (obviously) and I felt more comfortable doing it than last year, so I guess that shows improvement!  And then I sang "Time of Your Life" by Green Day with 3 of my students.  They were so funny about it!  They decided all on their own that we should make cardboard guitars and violins to play when we sang, which I thought took a lot of guts!  Everyone loved the song, even though they couldn't understand it.  They said it was "romantic."  :) Don't worry, I have a video of it and I just might put it on Facebook so you can go look for it!

Now that summer is here that means....more of the same thing!  I'm teaching a second round of computer courses quickly before my sister arrives on June 8th and this time my counterpart Tamilə müəllim is helping me teach which is really exciting.  Makes teaching 6 hours of computers a day (and by that I mean how to point and click a mouse) a bit more bearable!

Right now I'm in Baku (I had meetings all day) and we're about to go out to dinner so I need to stop writing this and get ready!  Delicious food here I come!

A Quick Celebratory Post

Kim got her visa yesterday!! And by that I really mean that Naima went to the Azerbaijani Embassy in DC and picked it up, but regardless it is in the hands of someone I trust a bit more than the embassy staff after what they did with my dad's (don't let me down Naima, you don't want to intense hate thoughts I was sending to the embassy coming your way).  So this means that I can breathe a bit easier knowing that at least we won't have the visa nightmare this time around!  Congratulations Kim, Azerbaijan here you come!

Sorry It's Been A While...

As several people have pointed out to me lately, I've been slacking on my blogging.  My apologies!  And I really don't have a very good excuse because as of the beginning of May we have internet at my school!  It is currently only to one computer in our resource room, but it is certainly a start!  The resource room opened in April.  We opened it with a week and a half long open house where kids and teachers could come and learn the rules of how to borrow books and sign up for computer classes.  Then we had a big party on April 24 where students, teachers, important members of the village, and directors of other nearby schools came to have tea and celebrate the opening of the room.  Since then I have been working super hard to open the room for 20 hours each week (in addition to my normal teaching schedule!), 12 of those hours are spent teaching computer classes.  Ever since coming to Azerbaijan I have realized that I am maybe not the most patient person in the world but my god, teaching computers is a real eye-opener.  I recommend sainthood for anyone who can successfully teach people (especially adult teachers) to use a computer from scratch without losing their cool.  I'm doing my best, but I cannot tell you how exhausted I am all the time now!  So what do I do when I go home?  Watch way too much television!  I've recently watched everything that I can get ahold of: several seasons of "Big Bang Theory", Season 3 of "The Unit", and most recently I started watching all the seasons of "Friends".  I'm currently on season 3 and I got so upset last night when I watched Ross and Rachel break up that I had to stop watching and go work out to let off steam...I take this as a sign that I am watching enough TV to internalize it as my own life...I think I'm going to try to work on that haha... Luckily school will be ending soon (our "Son Zəng" which means "Last Bell" and is what we call graduation, will be on May 31st) and then it will be summer! I'll be sprinting to the finish giving final exams in all my classes and trying to start a new round of computer classes, but I think I can get it all done!  And then once summer arrives, my sister will be coming to visit!  Miss Kimberly Farrell is expected in Azerbaijan on June 8th, so get ready! 

Despite all of the busy, busy work that I have been doing lately, I have had the time for one little vacation up to Qax where my saintly friend Lori was nice enough to host a whole bunch of volunteers for the twice annual pilgrimage to the local Georgian church.  It was really interesting, I've never seen a celebration like it in Azerbaijan.  We all hiked up this little mountain to a church and lit candles and walked around the church three times.  Some of us did it barefoot (I'll proudly say I actually did it barefoot twice, thank you very much).  And then at the bottom of the mountain everyone lays out super intense picnics, sometimes even rigging tables and stuff.  We made delicious pork kabobs (mmm).  Luckily we had beautiful weather too, so it was a very delightful day, and a nice break from school! (*note* If you look down at my March 30 post, the picture of my dad and me was taken in front of the pilgrimage church looking out over the Qax and Şəki regions)

Fact: My Students are the Best

Yesterday, my Program Manager Gülnara müəllim from Peace Corps came to my school to meet with my counterparts and me and to observe some of our classes.  One of the classes that she sat in for was the 11th grade class that Tamilə müəllim and I teach together.  Every week we have this class twice and all year we have had a system where one day we use the textbook and the other day we read a novel (I was lucky enough to be able to buy class sets of books from the US with a donation from our local shopkeeper).  In the fall we read Charlotte’s Web and now we are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  While the students liked Charlotte’s Web, they LOVE Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and yesterday they were literally cracking up talking about it.  As we do every class, they gave summaries of the chapters they read at home, answered reading comprehension and analysis questions, and then read a new chapter of the book.  Throughout the whole lesson they were just generally having a great time, laughing and joking around IN ENGLISH!  It was funny to watch.  At the end of the lesson, my manager asked the students to stay after class for a minute.  She told them that she was so impressed with them and that in all of her travels around Azerbaijan (and she visits a lot of schools to decide where to place volunteers and again to visit volunteers), she has never seen an 11th grade class like them.  And then for the rest of the day she kept repeating how wonderful they were, asking me how we got them to such a high level, and was likening their work to college classes she took.  Tamilə müəllim and I were so proud.  And I couldn’t agree with Gülnara müəllim any more, my kids really do rock!  In a system where it is almost encouraged to not come to school when you are in 11th grade, my students come to every class and I am blown away by not only their level of English, but their insights into the books we read.  I really wish you could all meet them!

It's Writing Olympics Time!

Last week we did our annual Peace Corps English writing competition "Writing Olympics."  Basically we get kids grades 6-11 (and university students, but I don't teach university) and give them a few questions to choose from.  They write essays that are judged first nationally in Azerbaijan and then we send the winners to the international round (which includes Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova...and I think a few other countries).

The main criteria for the essays is creativity, which is very difficult for my students.  No matter how hard I tried to help them write more exciting essays during our practice writing activities, I got the same boring essays from all of my students.  Usually they write something about helping poor people because, as I found, they can make anything about how you should help poor people (I guess that's a message that is really drilled into them).  Finally, in one of our last practice sessions, I finally got an interesting essay from one of my kids.  I had given my 6th grade students the start of a story about a magic, blue cat named Joe and they had to finish the story.  While they were writing, one of my students randomly asked me to translate "bığ" which in English is "mustache."  Hearing this, another student decided to use the word mustache in his essay and wrote some strange story about how the cat magician stole a man's mustache and gave it to another guy.  The mustache then became gold and the man was never poor again.  While it was a totally bizarre story and still talked about helping poor people, I was really excited that it wasn't just the same old stuff as everyone else.  With this in mind, on the day of the competition, I gave my students a list of words from the 6th grade textbook that I thought were semi-interesting.  I figured that maybe if they had interesting words in their heads they would write an interesting essay (makes sense right?).  When I gave them the list I reminded them about the mustache story and how different it was…  Here is one of the results (a few spelling mistakes corrected), answering the question "Which would you rather be, a bird or a fish? Why?":

I want a bird.  I fly on the sky. I stole everything. I want a bird and I eat a reindeer.  Reindeer is very sweet.  I fry reindeer.  I want a bird and I eat people.  The people die me.  The people fry me.  The people eat me.  I carve to the people.  I go to my bird’s home.  The people call magician.  Magician made me carve my nose.  I gave to magician my nose.  Magician gave my nose to the people.  The people are very rich.

Can you guess which word was on my list?  And which other vocabulary words from this year the student remembered on his own that were entirely inapplicable?

My word: reindeer

Other vocabulary words: to fry, to carve, magician

So I didn't exactly get the winning story I was hoping for, but I at least got a kick out of the randomness of this essay!

My Dad Has Gone Home, Back to Work.

I'm pleased to report that my dad survived his time in Azerbaijan and has returned safely to the US!  He was in my village for 5 nights, even though upon arrival he said to me "Jessie, I give this 2 nights and I'm out."  See what he will put up with for me?  He slept on the floor (I offered my bed but it was too saggy for him, I really wish I had taken a video of him getting out of it when he would get up from reading in it, the effort that it took was hilarious) and used my squat toilet/hole in the ground and he kept a smile on his face the whole time!  I was very proud.  After the village we went to Şəki and Qax regions to see the mountains and my friend Lori, the self-proclaimed "Qax Star."  Unfortunately, as soon as we arrived in Şəki we got news that my dad's father died back in America.  He had been ill and we knew he wasn't doing very well, but the news was still really hard obviously.  I was again really proud of my dad for being strong enough to finish the trip.  He went home on Saturday and I came back up to site to start school again on Monday.  Only 2 more months until summer!  And summer means that Kimmy is going to come visit me!  And maybe Naima and Little Jimmy? Who else wants to come visit so I will have excuses to not work all summer??? haha (only kidding, I'm really looking forward to doing some awesome summer camps with my kids!)

 

Dad and Me in Qax

Jim Farrell Has Arrived in Azerbaijan!

Some (me) thought it wasn't going to be possible, but amazingly enough, I am pleased to report my dad's safe arrival in Azerbaijan!  After his visa failed to come in time for his initial flight, and then again failed to come on Monday, I have to admit that I lost all hope of it arriving in time for his Tuesday flight.  I knew that we had given the embassy like 6 weeks to get the visa, which should have been more than enough, but it just didn't seem possible.  But lo and behold, it made it Tuesday afternoon!

His plane got in a little ahead of schedule last night and I braved the all-male airport (as in there were only males there and everyone was staring at me and it was really uncomfortable, not as in I was not allowed there as a female) to get him.  Then today I took him to see the rock carvings at Qobustan and the mud volcanoes outside of Baku before we went to visit with my host family from training.  And now we are back at the hotel resting up (and by that I mean he is resting up, snoring away while I write this) before our long ride up to Tovuz in the morning!! Get ready Qədirli, here he comes!!

At the mud volcanoes

Village Tragedy

 This week, for the second time since I came here, someone that I know has died.  If you remember, the first time it was the mother of our local shopkeeper.  While her death was of course very sad, she was quite old and ill with diabetes, etc.  This death is much more of a surprise and much harder to bear.  It was one of my seventh form (grade) students.  But she was not only one of my students, she was in the same class as my youngest sister and they were close friends.  She is also the younger sister of one of my very best students/close friends.  She was a really shy girl so I won’t write all the details of her death here, even though it all seems to be very openly discussed in the village, but from what I have gathered she basically bled out after a cyst ruptured in her uterus and then no blood went to her brain.  Even though she was apparently suffering for about a month, she didn’t tell anyone (friends, family, etc) and looked perfectly normal and healthy.  On Thursday night (2/10) just before I went to Baku, I heard she was ill but no details.  By the time I returned Tuesday (2/15) she had had an operation and was very ill in the hospital.  By Tuesday night she had died.  I didn’t know until Wednesday morning when students from my other 7th form class told me.  At first I really thought it must be gossip, that the students had it wrong, but within a few minutes my counterpart confirmed the news.  I went with all the teachers and students to her house after school and watched them carry her body away to the cemetery.  It was so surreal and I still can’t quite believe it has happened.  I think I’m going to use it as motivation to do some lessons about women’s health for this girls’ group (basically a Girl Scout troop) that I just started.

While she is the only person I know personally who died, unfortunately my village has seen a lot of death this month.  In addition to Aytac, one of my fellow teacher’s father died, one of my fellow teacher’s husband died, and a small boy (age 3 or 4) also died.  And probably more that I haven’t heard about.  I guess February is just not our month.  I hope we’ve had all the bad news we’re going to get.

Allah rəhmət eləsin.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Even though I knew I wouldn't be at site for Valentine's Day (I have a meeting in Baku), I used my English after school activity time this week to do Valentine's Day stuff with the kids.  First we learned some new words that related to Valentine's Day (things like greeting card, to hug, etc).  Then we had a guessing jar with conversation hearts inside (one of my students guessed dead on, 193 hearts!).  And we finished it all off by making valentines with all the supplies my mom sent from America.  I'm telling you , these kids had more stickers/doilies, etc at their disposal than I think I ever did when I was a little kid making valentines....not that I was jealous or anything....haha.