Back in March of 2008 when I was going through the volunteer application process, months before I had even heard of Azerbaijan, I went to an interview with Nick, a recruiter at the Peace Corps office in Oakland. He asked me if I had any regional preferences as to where I would be posted. I said, regional preferences aside, I would go anywhere, as long it wasn’t cold. Nick said, “Don’t worry – we can definitely accommodate you on that!”
Ha.
After two winters here, I’ve discovered what sleet and black ice are, became acquainted with the many variants of sticky, unsticky, wet and dry snow, and noted the effects of unplowed roadways and unsalted sidewalks. I spent the last five months in my Soviet-era apartment, bundled up next to my only heat source, a wonderful Russian contraption called a “pech” which is basically a metal box with a smoke pipe and an open gas line which you light by hand each time you use it. On most winter mornings I can see my breath when I wake up in my bed. Along with most volunteers here, I wear the same layers of long underwear for more than a week at a time during the winter, because the thought of actually removing the warm under-layer to put on a fresh one is unbearable. My usual outfit for going to my unheated school consisted of several undershirts, a couple pairs of leggings or tights, wool pants, 1 or more pairs of socks, a sweater, a hoodie, an overcoat, scarf, hat and gloves. Also I wore plastic bags over my socks because sodden Azer-boots tend to leak. Keep in mind I grew up in San Diego, a place where the median temperature is about 70 degrees year-round. Inshallah I will never live in a cold place ever again.
Last April, the spring season finally hiccupped into being after a mid-month snowstorm; this April I am hoping that the green meadows and tree buds are here to stay. 2010 has already had plenty of highs and lows – I’m definitely ready for highs in terms of weather temperature! At the end of December 2009 my hard-core traveler friend Parita came all the way from California to visit me here. We spent about a week together in Azerbaijan before heading to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, for several days of New Year’s celebrations. It was my second visit to Georgia, which is a magical country of delicious food and wine, beautiful sights, and friendly, gregarious people who write their language in elfin lettering and don’t give the stinkeye to foreign-looking women who laugh in public. That was a nice high for me. But as I tried to slog on through the rest of the winter back in Azerbaijan, for the first time in my life I began to wonder if at 28, I was getting old. Not only had a weird frown line suddenly appeared on my forehead, but I started to feel bothered by aches and pains all the time. It started with lingering case of strep throat that wasn’t helped by having to wait 4 days for my penicillin to arrive because of mail delivery delays. I ended up getting a dual sinus/ear infection too… and I began to be plagued by strange, uncomfortable and sometimes excruciating symptoms that eventually got me sent to the hospital in the capital because the Peace Corps doctors thought I had a kidney infection or a kidney stone. That was a low point, especially when they told me they might have to med-evac me to D.C. It turned out to be a much less scary diagnosis after some ultrasounds and blood tests, but it took 3 rounds of antibiotics before I felt normal again.
For now, my challenges are back to being work-related and not please-god-just-let-me-die-here-in-the-bathroom-related. After much soul-searching, hemming, hawing, grumbling and cajoling, I am in the midst of securing a $3000 SPA (small project assistance) grant from USAID to open an English resource center at my school. Teaching resources at most schools here consist of chalk, blackboards, a few abridged Azerbaijani-English dictionaries and the standard English textbooks mandated by the Azerbaijani Education Ministry. These books are riddled with grammar mistakes and boring, useless texts about the “sightseeings” of London. With the grant money, my counterparts and I will buy brand-new teaching methodology, grammar, and exercise books, audio lesson CDs, picture dictionaries, and lots of art materials for creating visual aids and games. Our project is also going to get us a computer from the Azerbaijani Education Ministry for the English classroom, so the grant will also fund a high speed internet connection, a Microsoft Office package and a digital projector. It’s been a lot of work to plan this project, and it’s going to be even more work to set up and initiate the project, so I may end up cursing myself by the end of it all. But the two lovely women who are my Azeri teaching counterparts are trying really hard to help me make this happen, so I’m doing it for them (and for not my school director who is still mad at me for wanting to buy books with the grant instead of an electronic blackboard. The fact that some thing called an electronic blackboard to my knowledge may or may not actually exist, and if it did exist, how it would be affected by daily power outages, evidently doesn’t matter to my school director.)
It seems to me that the career of the Azerbaijan Peace Corps Volunteer has 3 phases. The first phase is when you arrive and begin working; nothing makes sense, you feel like a goofy idiot, and everyone thinks you don’t know anything. The second phase begins when you start to understand how some things work, so you start trying new things to see what else can work. Then you think you know how all kinds of stuff works. But you’re actually wrong. You discover that you’ll never really know how anything works. You are still a goofy idiot and everyone knows it, but they kinda like you anyway. The third phase is when you stop caring that everyone thinks you’re a goofy idiot. You understand how some stuff works but you’re no longer surprised when it doesn’t. Everyone else is still surprised that you know how to do things like buy eggs by yourself. You know you’re in the third phase when you feel totally comfortable accepting a random old woman’s request to go in her backyard and help her stuff her mattresses with smelly unbleached wool. It all feels normal.
The coming month of April is the opening of the final third phase of my service here in Azerbaijan. I have 8 weeks left of school before summer vacation starts, and 8 months left in country. I’m going to spend two and half weeks traveling in Europe at the beginning of June, but after that I’ll be hunkering down to initiate my resource center project, begin summer conversation clubs, and plan my final months of teaching in the fall.
I wonder what changes I’ll come home to, and often I wonder what you all would think and say about my daily life here. I am busy but have plenty of free time to think good thoughts, and I am glad to be where I am. I hope you are too.
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