My Last Pomegranate Season

When I came to Azerbaijan in September 2008, one of the first things I learned was that autumn is “nar fəsil” -- pomegranate season. From mid-September until December, nar is everywhere. Most volunteers have never eaten a pomegranate before coming here. During my first week in-country, I remember my host mother, her fingers stained black with nar juice, showing me how to cut an X into the top of the nar with a knife and then twist the fruit open, exposing the glowing, ruby-like seeds inside. Nar is not an American fruit in more than one sense; you can’t find it at Safeway for 20 cents a pound when it’s in season, and you can’t peel it like a banana and scarf the whole thing down in 45 seconds while you’re on your way out the door. Eating nar is a distinctly Azeri experience to me – like all fruit during harvest season, it usually comes free by the bushel from your neighbors and friends, and is best eaten when there’s nothing else to do but sit down for a nice long chat (or, for my host mom, the latest episode of her favorite Turkish soap opera) because it takes more than 10 minutes just to open it. First you X the top, twist it in half and then into quarters, then gently peel out the delicate red seeds and shake them into a bowl. Then after you’ve lingered over each juicy seed you have to go wash your hands and clean up the splatters of red juice that are inevitably everywhere. You need to have time on your hands to properly enjoy nar. In Azerbaijan, time is what people have – time for peeling a huge bowl of fruit or shelling a big bag of nuts, doting on family, visiting neighbors, waiting in line, chit-chatting, gossiping, arguing, dawdling around watching the strange foreigner do her laundry (fascinating!) and eating ever more food.

By the time this pomegranate season is over and winter sets in, I will have left Azerbaijan. It makes me laugh to read my application essay about what my expectations of the Peace Corps experience were before I came here two years ago. It makes me a little sad too. I’m not the same person. I’m not so naïve or gung-ho, I don’t have the same overconfidence in what I thought would be a great mission of goodwill and personal growth. Azerbaijan is not a place where you can have the stereotypical Peace Corps experience. I don’t walk to work holding hands with happy barefoot African children, or live a simple existence in a cute little mud hut surrounded by palm trees. The lingering winters here can become one cold, dreary day after another. The people seem always to be wearing black, shuffling slowly down the street. The staring never seems to stop, and neither do the episodes of blatant disrespect, harassment, and narrow-minded prejudice. A few people, the people you grow to love, stand by you, take care of you, and understand what you’re trying to do. But most people never will. Every small success comes with a lot of heartbreak. Everything is just so much more difficult here than it ever was back home! Whether it’s buying and transporting classroom materials from the city to the village, trying to explain the internet to someone who’s never used a computer before, or just fixing a broken lightbulb – everything takes hours, days, weeks or months longer than it ever did before and your stress level rises while your patience gets thinner (as do your molars from the constant teeth grinding.) Of course, the Azeris are just puzzled when they see me in a state of despair over some seemingly unfixable broken household appliance or another work deadline that I failed to meet –“Narahat olma, problem yoxdur! Allah qoysa!” they say – which basically means, “Don’t be worried, there’s no problem! May God make it so!” Because for them, there’s always time to figure it out later.

But I’m a Peace Corps volunteer here, not an Azerbaijani, and my time to fix all my problems is almost up. I have until the first week of December to finish my projects, figure out the logistics of leaving, and make peace with this roller coaster of emotional ups and downs that have characterized my life here. It would be easy to just give up on it all, shrug it off and walk away, if it weren’t for the special people who have always kept me going. Those people are most importantly my two teaching counterparts, the Peace Corps staffers I’ve become close with, and other volunteers, all of which who have been like family to me here.

Nargiz, who has been my primary work counterpart and true friend from the beginning, is the one Azerbaijani person who I feel really understands me. She continually amazes me with the clarity and truth of her insights. From what she’s told me about her life, I’ve put together that she grew up in a large, fairly poor family in a small village without running water or electricity. (When she first moved from the village into the town, she lived in an abandoned boxcar for awhile!) Coming from this background, she graduated with a teaching degree from the Foreign Languages University in the capital. She speaks Azeri, Lezghi, Lahij dili (a Farsi dialect), Russian, English and a little French. Her father is Lezghi and her mother is from Lahij (these are ethnic minority groups in the Caucases.) Often when I am trying to be polite about or sensitive to some Azeri cultural thing, Nargiz expresses confusion over why I’m acting so unlike myself. When I explain that I know such-and-such thing is inappropriate in Azerbaijan, she just shrugs and waves it off, saying, “I am not Azerbaijani, I do not care about these things. They are not important!” Nargiz has a great interest in American slang, swear words and insults. For awhile she liked to refer to a certain faculty member at our school as “our dumb-ass” but after recently watching The Lion King with me, she now simply calls him “Hyena.” Nargiz tells me all the time that she admires me and that she knows it is difficult for me to live here. She is the only person in my community who has ever said this to me. Arzu, my other teaching counterpart, is my other “rock” in my community. She and her mother, who is also an English teacher, have treated me with nothing but kindness and generous hospitality. When I go over to Arzu’s house after school, her mother, Senam, always meets me with a big smile and a resounding greeting of “Marina! You are welcome here! And how is your mother?” Senam, who is very proud of having studied English back when the Soviets taught it in the universities, speaks a booming, grandiose sort of English which never fails to cheer me up even after a really frustrating day or week (“Marina, do you like fried eggplant? You do? Ah, then I shall bring you a plate, and you shall eat it with GREAT PLEASURE!!!” She also sometimes confuses the words “very” and “too much,” creating such pronouncements as “My little granddaughter is too joyful today because you came.”)

My volunteer friends are an amazingly accomplished, smart, admirable, hilarious, loving, and totally wacky group of people who I know I’ll remain friends with for the rest of our lives. We’ve depended on each other, laughed and cried with each other, sat around doing nothing with each other, watched a thousand dumb movies, travelled around, got lost, ate, drank, danced, sweated and shivered and vomited with each other too. It’s only us who can ever really know and understand what this experience was like. It sounds cheesy, but we are truly bonded in a way I can’t explain, I can only just think and grin to myself about it.

I’ll also forever be grateful to some of the people on staff here, like my doctor, our safety and security coordinator, and our language teachers, training and program managers who really care about us volunteers, the Peace Corps mission, and this country. There were so many stressful situations that I never would gotten out of without them. The Azerbaijanis who work for Peace Corps here do so many amazing things on their own as well as make our work truly sustainable for the future.

So what else is there to say about my Peace Corps experience? It’s so incredibly hard to sum it all up, and yet I’ll never be able to say it all. Thank you so much to all you family and friends who’ve supported me from afar, read my emails, emailed me, called me, skyped me, text messaged me, sent me care packages, and even came to visit me!! I can’t wait to see you all again very soon, and to be

Marina Javor
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer
September 2008 – December 2010
Ismayilli, Azerbaijan