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!

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 :(

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!