A Day in Baku

I'm currently in Xirdalan, a suburb of Baku, because I have come in to conduct sessions for our new trainee group this week.  I was supposed to have to work all day yesterday to prepare for my sessions, but getting locked out of the training office gave me the great opportunity to go into the city and meet up with four of my students who are now in university.  We had a great day eating at McDonald's, walking around the seaside, and taking a boat out on the Caspian Sea.  I was so happy to have time to see them because I was worried that my schedule would be too full this week to give me the chance.

My students with their bunny balloons that the boys bought for them.

Famous

I have had friends at Türkel TV (our semi-local TV station with its studio in Tovuz but which broadcasts to I would guess about 1/3 of Azerbaijan) for a while and last winter we filmed a show called "English for All" a few times.  It was my LCF Nuranə, me, and 2 of my sitemates (Josh and Beth).  We PCVs took turns going in to teach a lesson with Nuranə, but we only made 3 episodes.  The station has decided to start filming again, and this time in their newly built studio.  I went in yesterday and this time they even sent me to their stylist for hair and make-up (I'll tell you right now that Azeris like to wear a lot more make-up than I do, but I let the guy do his thing).  In addition to English for All though, the station has been eager to have me do a whole bunch of other things for them.  This week Beth and I went in on Wednesday and were guests on their live morning show.  They asked us our thoughts about Azeri culture and about our lives here in Azerbaijan.  We even had one person call in, although his question was only would we marry Azerbaijani guys (so typical...and funny because the host had actually already asked us that!).  And now the station also wants me for a new show they are making, Banu-çiçək, which from what I understand is going to be sort of an Azerbaijani version of The View.  We are going to have bunch of women sitting around talking about women and our "world."  We are going to film the first episode this week and the topic is going to be the treatment of children.  They also want to film some other clips of me, first showing me teaching my kids first aid (to show that there are important health lessons we should be teaching our kids) and second showing me at an Azerbaijani wedding.  So basically what I'm saying is soon I'm going to be an Azerbaijani celebrity and the Azeri paparazzi are going to be following me around the village, obviously!

But regardless of how often I am on our little regional station, my fame will never compare to my friends whose music video you have to see.  It has become a huge sensation in Azerbaijan and you should totally watch!

Baku State of Mind

A Weekend Getaway to the Village!

This weekend I was lucky enough to have 2 wonderful guests visiting from Baku, my good friends Evangeline and Eric who work at the US Embassy.  They are the very sweet and wonderful people who let Beth and I stay with them whenever we come into Baku and I was finally given the chance to return the favor.  We had a hectic weekend trying to squeeze seeing everything of importance in the village into a 2 1/2 day trip, but I think we did a pretty good job.  Evangeline got cooking lessons from my mom (3 sisters dolma, plov, and paxlava) and Eric got a saz lesson from Beth's friend Estella.  Plus we went to a wedding where Eric narrowly made it out without having his new best friend Vaqif drink him under the table and we went up for a drive/walk in the mountains where we freaked out some locals who don't get many foreign guests and they watched one of my classes where they learned about real conditional sentences (very thrilling stuff).  It was fun showing them the "real" Azerbaijan and I give them serious credit for wanting to come out and see it!  Not many ex-pats do!

A Sad Day for Peace Corps

Last night, our TEFL program manager, Gülnarə, passed away in her sleep.  I can't even believe it.  She was a really wonderful woman and I loved getting to know her.  I was lucky enough to get the chance to work very closely with her because I was the TEFL representative to the Programming and Training Committee etc.  And I'm just about to go in to work at Pre-Service Training for our new trainees and I was looking forward to seeing her!  It's really sad and my thoughts are with her family.  Allah rəhmət ələsin.

The List Begins

As I was walking through the village the other day, I began to think about some of the things that I will and won't miss when I've gone home.  Here is a the very incomplete list I came up with during this particular walk:

I'm going to miss:
- seeing random women walking around holding chickens upside down by their legs as if this is the most normal thing in the world.  And the chickens just hanging out as if to say "yep, this is life."
- going to people's houses and coming home with an entire tree's worth of fruit without having to even ask for a single piece.
- being able to see what seems like every one of my students by simply taking a 5 minute walk across the village.

I'm not going to miss:
- having to be constantly vigilant to protect myself from goose attacks.  I hate geese, I have never gotten used to them and I doubt I ever will.  They are spiteful creatures.
- needing to wash my feet constantly because the dirt roads kick up so much dust.
- procrastinating washing my underwear until every single pair is dirty and I have to hand-wash the whole load of it until my fingers are red and sore.

Photos of Summer

As I settle into my normal school-year life, I was taking a few minutes to look back over pictures from the summer and thought I would put up some of my favourite summer moments for your viewing pleasure.

June: Kim came to visit and found out just how much she loves outhouses.

June: Another delicious cherry season in Azerbaijan.  Don't let that inviting dish fool you, they are chock full of worms.  And as I was discussing the other day with some other volunteers, I can measure my growth here in Azerbaijan by how little that grosses me out anymore haha.

June: Welcome to Turkey and my first real vacation since coming to Azerbaijan.

June: I fell in love with all the beautiful tiles in Turkey.

July: Noticing the "Stalker Internet Club" in Tovuz for the first time made my day.

July: At summer camp we learned about countries and holidays from around the world one week.  The kids were all talking about it when they came back to school last week.

July: Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) summer camp, a collaborative project for volunteers all across the country and our awesome counterparts.  This year my host sister went and had a great time.  We are actually getting together with some of her GLOW friends this weekend!

August: I loved seeing all these little guys guarding the construction areas in Fountain Square.

August: One of my favourite places in Baku is the front of this museum.

August: My last trip to Qobustan? (our outdoor museum with petroglyphs)  I only went four times...for Naima and Jessica's visit the guy working there was trying to have me give the tour!

August: Matching pj's for girlie sleepover nights with Naima and Jessica.

August: So many beautiful tomatoes!  My mom was preserving them for winter for days.

August: Proud volunteers as our Close of Service Conference in their sweet shirts! (Thanks to Alex and Beth!)

August: Getting ready for a hot air balloon ride over Göreme in Cappadocia on my 2nd trip to Turkey this summer.

August: Some of the cool (and less phallic) rock formations in Cappadocia.  Do a google image search and you'll see what I mean about the phallic ones, it was pretty ridiculous!

August: Sunrise from a hot air balloon.  Does it get much better than that?

I got a bit carried away so there were a lot of pictures!  Hope you liked them!

Another School Year Begins

School has officially begun!  Today I taught my first real classes of the year because last week was mostly going over classroom rules and getting the kids to talk about summer.  I was very proud to see how many kids talked about coming to my summer camp and how they were still excited about it 2 months later.  And then I didn't have to teach on Friday (I was supposed to have Fridays off but today I just added another class so now I have one lesson...of course).  Today Tamilə müəllim (my counterpart) and I also opened the resource room for the first time this year and we already had 4 kids come to borrow books!  At least now they'll have something to read because my school seems to be having an extreme shortage of textbooks (which doesn't seem to be worrying anyone but my counterparts and I) so the vast majority of my kids aren't getting books so far!  As you may suspect, yes, this makes it very difficult to teach!  But my counterparts and I are powering through.  Tamilə müəllim and I have an adorable 5th form class (this is the youngest that Azerbaijani kids start seriously learning English, before that it is only once a week and they start fresh in 5th anyway) that I'm really excited about.  We started the alphabet today!  For some reason the Azerbaijani textbook doesn't teach the letters in order, so today was E, B, D, N, P, and T.  I also found it very interesting that my kids couldn't say the Azerbaijani alphabet.  When we were planning for the lesson I saw that Tamilə müəllim didn't know it because every time she tried to say it she said the Russian alphabet not Azerbaijani (which makes sense as she grew up in Soviet times).  I guess that's what happens when you change your lettering system like a million times, but I hadn't really thought about it.  I knew that my kids were really bad at using dictionaries, but I just thought it was lack of knowledge of the English alphabet.  I guess not!

This weekend I went to two weddings and I believe that I have now officially attended 20 weddings in Azerbaijan (which really just means I remember going to 20 weddings but there could be some less memorable ones in there somewhere haha, by the time you get to 20 that is highly possible).  My host mom is already stressing out about having to go to weddings alone after I go home (I finish here December 14th!) so now I really have to go to all the weddings with her (although it may not seem like it seeing as I have gone to 20, I have managed to get out of several more).

The First Day of School is Quickly Approaching!

School starts here every year on September 15th which means this Thursday I will be starting my last school year in Azerbaijan!  (For those of you who don't know yet, my close of service date is December 14, 2011!).  I'm excited for school to begin because it will put me back on a normal schedule, but not looking forward to losing the freedom of being able to stay up until 2AM watching Mad Men or whatever TV show I'm addicted to (and I take way too much advantage of that freedom haha).  I'm busily working to try to get all the lesson plans my counterparts and I have developed over the past year and a half compiled into big, complete sets.  It is quite a monumental task! To give you an idea of how big these sets of plans will be, I'm closest to finishing the 7th form book where I am on Unit 6 of 8 and the plans are already 51 pages long.  Yikes.  And I'm doing this for 5 textbooks, with hopes to do 2 more this fall.  I have no hope of getting it finished by the start of school (which had been the plan, unfortunately I like to procrastinate and do other things with my summer time!) but I will have at least the first lesson for each book done, inşallah! 

Other than the textbooks, I spent most of my day yesterday helping Tamilə müəllim, my counterpart, prepare jars of food for winter.  I cut about a million peppers, tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes and in the process made a lot of little cuts on my thumbs!  Here the knives are super dull so we just cut things into our hands instead of using a cutting board, which is fine when you are only cutting for one meal but mass production takes its toll!

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!