Swearing In Means One Year as A VOLUNTEER

Thursday was the Swear-emony for the AZ8's, which means that we have been actual real volunteers for a whole year!! How crazy?  A whole bunch of AZ7's came in for the ceremony which was really nice, not only because we were there to support the AZ8's but because we got to see each other and hang out.  And spend some time in Baku, which is always wonderful.  It was cool to see the ceremony from the other side of things and just appreciate it.  And my friend Carrie sang the national anthems (of Azerbaijan and the US) instead of having these heinous recorded versions that we had last year, and she sings so beautifully, it was wonderful.  All in all, a pretty great time!

Just Hanging Out

Came home one day to find these two dead chickens hanging out on the clothes line with the laundry.  Apparently they died overnight (froze to death because they refused to sleep in the chicken coop with the other chickens and instead chose the tree next to the coop) and so my mom quickly plucked them and all that and decided to hang them up.  Normal.

Thanksgiving!

Even though I wasn't lucky enough to be home this Thanksgiving (it doesn't sound like my house could have fit me anyway since they said they had 23 people...), I did get the pleasure of celebrating it twice here in Azerbaijan!

The first was at my house with my host family.  I cooked chickens (there has been a lot of fowl death in the village so a turkey wasn't available) with stuffing, mashed potatoes, apple crisp, and garlic bread.  And then my mom sent me canned cranberry sauce from America.  And my host mom made a cake-ish thing and bought another cake thing from the store.  It was delicious.  My whole host family got really into everything, helping to decorate the table, wanting to know what I was making and how, etc.  And 2 of my co-English teachers and my neighbors came over too, which was so much fun.  My host mom asked me to translate for her "your daughter cooks very well" so that I could put her on the phone with my real mom, but we had calling difficulties that day.  Unrelated to the holiday except that this happened to my poor family several times as they tried to call me that day, a word of warning to anyone who tries to call me: frequently it will sound like someone answers the phone...and then you are listening to a porno!  No, this is not me, as many of my family members have apparently thought... This has happened to people trying to call my friend Beth too, and her number is nowhere close to mine so we don't really know what is happening.  Just an extra little surprise delight of calling Azerbaijan!


The second Thanksgiving I had was in Baku at the Ambassador's residence (we don't currently have an ambassador) for all the Peace Corps volunteers with our staff and some embassy staff, including the current stand-in for the ambassador.  It was awesome.  We did it like a pot-luck, so every volunteer brought in some food and we had like 10 turkeys and we ate a lot and were very happy!  And, as an added bonus (as if it wasn't fabulous enough already), Peace Corps arranges for us to stay with embassy families.  My sitemate Beth and I stayed with this amazingly sweet and wonderful couple.  We couldn't have been luckier!  They were so warm and welcoming and gave us such AMAZING food (french toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, blueberry scones...and that's all only what they made for us...they also took us to another embassy apartment to have Thanksgiving left-overs which was like a 3rd Thanksgiving with delicious pumpkin and buttermilk pies...mm).  Can you tell that coming home after the weekend was a little tough??  I didn't even tell you how jealous I was of all the gorgeous apartments I saw!  Foreign service here I come??  Tempting.

I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!!

Winter Has Come to Azerbaijan

I guess technically it is still “fall.”  But really, even months ago, people kept telling me that winter had arrived.  At first I would respond by saying it was fall, mostly because I didn’t want winter to be here yet!  But by now I’ve given up.  It is winter.  Yes, for a few hours in the afternoon, most days it warms up a bit and the weather is nice, but the rest of the day/night is just so cold!  Plus we have all the other tell-tale signs of an Azerbaijani winter:

1) Needing to keep your peç (gas stove) on all day: Inside the buildings, it just doesn’t warm up like it does outside during the day.  If you don’t leave your peç on, you’re freezing.  I hate returning from school or whatever because I turn it off when I leave and that means returning to a cold, cold room!  In our house, November 1^st was peç set up day, but a lot of other people had started using theirs a lot earlier in October, and trust me, they had the right idea.  October was FREEZING and before we even started using the peç, I could see my breath while lying in bed in the morning!

2) Getting dark early: It is completely dark by like 6:30 now.  This severely limits what you can do in a day, let me tell you.  I have one conversation club that goes until 6:00 and by the time it ended this week I couldn’t see my students’ faces!

3) No late marşrutkas: I was in Gəncə last weekend and caught the last bus home at 4:30!  In the summer I could get to the bus station at 7:00 and still catch one.

4) Bundling up to teach: My school hasn’t put the peç in my classroom yet, so it is pretty darn cold in there.  I teach wearing my coat and my fingerless gloves (so I can write on the chalkboard) and I’m still freezing.  I’m hoping they give my room a good strong peç this year because our electric one last year just didn’t cut it.

5) The return of weekly showers: Who needs to shower more than once a week anyway right?  The other week I literally had this thought: “Geez, why is my hair looking so dirty? It’s only been 5 days since I showered.  That’s not even a week!”  Gross.

But, on the brighter side:
   -  Winter makes you very appreciative of the Azeri love for hot tea.
   -  All this cold gives me an excuse to lie in my bed and watch movies on my computer.
   -  I get to wear my very large collection of scarves.
   -  The rain/mud of winter hasn’t set in yet!
   -  The cold and darkness means that my whole family spends more time at home hanging out together.
   -  Our garden looks all pretty with the leaves turning yellow.

In other news, my home has been a cesspool of chicken pox for almost 3 weeks now.  My oldest host sister came home from where she goes to school in Gəncə just before Halloween with the chicken pox (she had kissed a baby that had chicken pox on the mouth having never had chicken pox herself...go figure she got sick!) and has been home ever since (yes, she has been better for about a week, don't worry, she doesn't still have it).  And then, because my 2 younger sisters hadn't had it, they got it too.  Their pox started last weekend, so they are still nice and spotty.  In Azerbaijan instead of pink calamine lotion, they use this green/teal stuff, the result being that my sisters have looked like swamp things for a few weeks.  And now there are green smears all over things in our house from them touching them.  The Azerbaijani fear of cold and showers also means that the doctors tell them that they cannot shower while they are ill or even as they are getting better because it will come back/get worse/whatever.  I'm sure I've painted a lovely picture of my house for you and now you really all want to come and visit don't you?  I'm just thankful that I had chicken pox in 2nd grade so I don't have to worry about getting it from them!

Coming at You Straight from Qədirli!

Well, I finally did it.  I finally bought an internet card to use the dial-up internet at my house.  I have always predicted that if I got it I would become addicted and then I would spend countless hours in my cold, slightly funky smelling kitchen at night on the internet when I won't disturb my family's phone line too much.  We will see how accurate this is.  What finally made me break down, you may be asking?  When I was in helping for training I was staying with my friend Emily and her family bought her an internet card but we couldn't use it on her computer but realized we could on mine and, as I knew would happen, once I saw how easy it was (regardless of how slow and painstaking), I had to buy one for myself.  It isn't fast enough for anything besides basic html gmail and my facebook chat won't even load (it did when I was in Sumqayıt though...), so don't get super excited that now I have so much more internet access.  False.

Yesterday was Halloween (as you all know, duh) and thus Beth and I put on a big Halloween party at my school.  It was nuts.  We had at least 70 kids and 6 teachers all running around and doing things like making masks, getting their faces painted, playing pin the tail on the black cat and musical broomsticks, etc.  Pandemonium.  In the end Beth and I declared it a success because our kids had fun, but man was it stressful!  My throat hurt so much afterward from having to yell over the din of 70 students at a party.  Ouch.  One special party surprise (even for us party planners) was that my new friends from our local (and by local I think I mean like 1/2 of Azerbaijan) TV station came and filmed our party!  I had mentioned it to them when we were filming my new TV show (have I mentioned this before? The TV station approached my Azeri teacher Nuranə and me and asked us to teach a televised English class and now we are doing that with the help of 2 other TEFL volunteers in Tovuz) but I didn't think that meant they were going to come...and then all of the sudden my school was calling my house to say my "guests" had arrived...2 hours early for the party b/c they thought I said 12 not 2.  But they stayed around the village and waited for us, which was really nice and exciting!

On a sadder note, we had a death in the village this weekend.  Not that that is really uncommon, but this time I actually knew the person for the first time.  It was the mother of our shopkeeper (and the shopkeeper also happens to be my mom's best friend and really, really likes me).  I went to the 3rd day after the death funeral ceremony today and heard the shopkeeper telling everyone how much her mother loved me and how I was like her granddaughter.  It's a custom here that at every funeral ceremony, the women sit in a room crying around a big photo of the deceased and, although I haven't seen it yet, I have been told that for hers they are using a photo I took of her a few months back.  We did a little photo shoot so that I could send the photos to her son's family who lives in Germany.  Apparently it was the only photo of her with good quality because it wasn't taken on a cell phone.  Anyway, just pretty sad.  And I feel especially bad because she didn't start getting really sick until I was in Sumqayıt for training so I didn't know it was happening and by the time I came back, she had died the day before.  It hasn't really hit me yet.  I don't know when it will.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I'm back in Baku about to go out and "mentor" this week as the trainees begin their practicum teaching.  It will be interesting because just watching a lesson is always tough now.  I just want to jump in and teach it myself, especially when I get bored.  But it will be nice to get to know some more of the trainees!

Last week one of the trainees, Julie, came out to my site and watched my classes, came to lesson planning and clubs, etc.  We had a fun and very busy time, constantly going from one thing to the next.  She took a whole bunch of pictures, so the one to the right is of me teaching my 10th form (grade) class in my new classroom!  It's way better than my classroom from last year because it's like 2.5x the size and I've made some much better posters for it (you can see a few of them) and everything.  I'm still working on it, but it's coming together!

Now I'm off to Ceyranbatan so that I can visit my homestay family from last year before going to find my host family for this week of training.  I wish I could be staying with my family, but there are no trainees in Ceyranbatan this year, so I'll have to settle with just visiting for a few hours.  I would go stay a night at the end of my week here, but I have to rush back to site because Beth and I are having a Halloween party at my school!

What a Lovely Time for a Power Outage

This Friday (as in 2 days from now) is the deadline for me to submit my SPA grant which will hopefully be getting money for my school's new resource room.  Unfortunately, a large wind storm 2 nights ago left my village without power.  Some sort of procrastination god hates me.  My computer battery died yesterday morning and I have now been in the internet cafe for like 2 1/2 hours researching for the grant but also waiting for my battery to charge because who knows if we'll have power when I get back to the village!  As I'm only at 83% full, I figured, what a great time to stop staring at book and computer prices and write to my family and friends :) Can you tell from reading this how exhausted but like giddy I am from sitting in this internet cafe surrounded by little boys playing computer games and blasting Azeri music?

When I got back Saturday morning from being in Baku/Sumqayıt for training, I saw my host mom as she was running out the door to go to a wedding in Baku Sunday night.  She still isn't back.  She's going to be arriving tonight though, so maybe she'll be there when I get home from the internet cafe.  In the meantime, it was only me with my youngest host sister for 2 nights and then my middle host sister came home before my mom from the wedding so she has been with us for 2 nights as well.  But basically this means that I get to play fake-mom and make sure the kids get up for school and that they close the chicken coop and walk them to the tualet (that's toilet for those of you who didn't get it) in the yard at night when they are too scared.  And since my youngest sister wasn't in the best of spirits the first night, we got into a pattern of watching a Disney movie a night on my computer...well until I didn't have a computer thanks to the power outage.  I really don't mind watching my sisters (or Disney movies), but I'm just too stressed right now with all this grant stuff to put more on top of it!

In happier news, on Saturday when I got back in addition to starting my babysitting duties, I started filming on a televised English course with 2 of my sitemates.  The head of our local TV station (although I think it broadcasts to about half of Azerbaijan...) approached my Azerbaijani language teacher and me over the summer about starting "English for All" and we agreed to do it.  We've been planning ever since and getting more volunteers involved, and it all really started this weekend!  Our first show was only us introducing ourselves, although I think the episode will really be quite the comedy because they decided that we, the American volunteers, should introduce ourselves in Azerbaijani.  Let me tell you, it is stressful enough to be on television, and then to add to that speaking in a foreign language!  Now we are going to film every weekend (the volunteers will switch off weeks, thank goodness).  This weekend I'm really begin the course by teaching the alphabet!

Welcome to the AZ8s!

I'm about to get on the night train to go back to Tovuz after spending a few days in Baku/Sumqayit for training.  I don't really have much to say except that I'm really excited to see that we have a good group of new volunteers and I want to wish any of them who are reading this luck in the weeks ahead!  Coming back and teaching 4 sessions a day was absolutely exhausting and reminds me of how tough and just draining PST was, but hang in there because it's worth it when you are finished!  I hope I didn't scare you guys too much with all the talk of lesson planning and textbooks and "school reality" and if I did, email me and I'll reassure you that it's going to work out!

One Year (?!?)

Happy one year in country to me! (and to all the other AZ7's too...).  I'm in a state of complete disbelief that I've been living here for a whole year.  That just seems absurd.  But to prove the point, a whole new group of trainees arrived in country about a week ago.  Next week I'm going to head back to the beautiful Sumqayıt to help the newbies learn fun things like how to write a lesson plan and work with the English textbooks.  I know you are jealous you can't sit in on these sessions, try to hold it in.

School started a few weeks ago, as I wrote, and has been amazingly smooth sailing so far, which is unheard of in Azerbaijan.  My schedule has only had one change, which I requested because two of my classes were at the same time.  And my classroom is shaping up (I finally got a bookshelf yesterday!  Tamilə müəllim went and "quarreled" with our director haha).  Work has even been started on our future resource room, which is exciting!

I've been playing catch up all this week because last week my good friend and language teacher, Nuranə, got married.  All the other members of my cluster from training came out to Tovuz and we had matching dresses made like bridesmaids.  Nuranə wanted her wedding to have some American flair to it!  In Azerbaijan at the bride's wedding (there are two weddings remember, one for the bride and one for the groom), the bride doesn't always wear a white dress.  I can just say that makes it more difficult to choose a color for a bridesmaid dress!  In the end, we ended up in the same color as the bride, bright red!  Everyone loved it and it made us very easy to spot anytime we did anything!  Nuranə was told by the owner of the wedding palace that it was the best wedding they had ever had their because of us (and I'll have you know that this was at the most expensive wedding palace in Tovuz, I'd never been before).  I don't know if it was the best wedding ever, but it was certainly the most fun wedding I've been to in this country. I could sit with all my friends and dance and really be genuinely happy for the couple because I actually really knew them (at the other weddings I've been brought to, I haven't known the people getting married).  All in all, it was a huge success.

Stealing a Third Grader's Thunder

On Monday I got to go to my very first “kiçik toy.”  Those of you who have been trying to learn the few Azeri words that I sprinkle throughout my posts will recognize the word “toy” because it is the Azeri word for wedding.  But, although the literal translation of “kiçik toy” is “small wedding,” it is unfortunately not a wedding that happens to be small.  It is a ritual circumcision party!  In this case, the young boy going under the knife was about to start 3rd grade, which seems to be a fairly typical age for having this ceremony.  First there is a big party where, much like a wedding, everyone you know comes and has a big meal.  There is music and dancing, the whole nine yards.  The little boy has a sort of godfather who comes with his whole family and brings lots of presents for the little boy.  For this toy, my host cousin was this godfather figure, so I got to come into the party bearing a huge gift of candy for the poor child and dance around showing this pretty present.  Most of the time, the actual circumcision doesn’t happen until the next day, I guess so that the kid can enjoy his party (he kind of knows what is going to happen to him, but not really how much it is going to hurt…), but this time, because his godfather guy had to go back to Baku, they did the cutting day of and I, as the American guest who should learn everything about Azerbaijani culture, was brought into the room to watch the circumcision.  At first I was totally fine.  I watched them set the kid up on the table and hold him down and soothe him so he wouldn’t freak out as they gave him a big shot and then snipped him.  But then, as I was watching them kind of sew him up, I started getting all woozy.  My head was spinning and I knew I was on the verge of passing out.  Of course I thought “no way, I’m tough, I can handle this.  I’ll just go stand by the window.”  Unfortunately standing by the window wasn’t enough and before I knew it, as I was having my mother take me outside for more air (yes, amazingly enough, in my half unconscious state I was still able to articulate myself in Azeri enough to ask for help to go outside), I passed out.  I woke up on the floor, surrounded by large xanıms who were splashing water on my face.  They even took the doctor away from his penis operating procedure to come over and look at me.  How ridiculous is that?  This little 3rd grader was stronger than I was.  I sat in a chair, drinking tea to revive me, as they got him re-dressed post-cutting and brought him out to dance again in front of the party (see the photo).  Nice, Jess.  And in the process of falling, my mother scratched the heck out of my chin, so I have 2 nice gashes to show for my adventure.  I guess I just didn’t want the little kid to be the only one giving a little blood for the party.

On Wednesday school started again.  I am so blessed to have the school that I do.  While a lot of other volunteers had no idea what their schedule would be and are having fights with their directors about it, I sent a note to my assistant director over the summer explaining what classes I wanted to teach and when I wanted to teach them.  He arranged the schedule just to my liking and everything is perfect.  I'm sure there is still the typical Azeri practice of teachers duking it out over their class hours going on at my school, but I don't think anyone will let them touch my hours.  My classroom is not quite ready yet, but it should be for Monday and we can start real classes at that time!

A shout out to Little Jimmy!  Happy birthday!! I’m so sorry I can’t be there to see you turn 18!!!  It seems like only yesterday I was coming to hold you at the hospital (who are we kidding, you were too tall for me to hold you even then and Dad would barely let me because he thought I’d drop you!).