Despite the fact that what has been posted on this blog is somewhat of a downer or at least fairly contemplative, we do have fun here. Take for instance, the last couple of days. The 18th was my birthday. I was worried about this. I knew that I would be homesick and depressed, missing my family and friends and normal birthday traditions. But the other volunteers here were really great to me. They let me sit on the bus to Sumgayit (usually, as a male, I have to stand when women get on the bus, and I seem to have bad seat luck), they paid for my lunch (chicken pizza with real cheese!), and my cluster mates came over for dinner after our language lesson. That night, I celebrated with Giovanni with a nice beer I bought in Baku and a couple glasses of cognac and coke. Oh, bromance.
Today, they followed me home and made a spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and a cake for dessert that they had more or less kept a secret from me. I knew they were planning something, but they refused to say what. I think by now my host mother is tired of us taking over the kitchen (my house hosted our recent Mexican food night as well).
Going through a birthday a long way from home was a hard experience to go into, and I almost didn’t want to plan anything. Partly this is because I don’t like being a center of attention, but I think I partly didn’t want to admit that I was having a birthday. Halloween was hard to go through here, and I expected other holidays to be the same way. Last birthday, I was whisked away to Washington, DC, something that certainly could not be repeated here. Baku’s not the same, and I missing a certain someone to spend the time with. Besides, I’m saving my Baku trip for the last weekend of training, the first weekend of December. I’ll need to stock up on certain essentials before going to site.
I was depressed, to be sure, and was almost to the point of drinking my beer alone, listening to calm acoustic indie music, but I’m extremely glad I ended up with a drinking buddy and such nice site mates who would plan a dinner for me. It’s almost enough to make me dread going to site, because I will definitely miss being this close to people. We settle into this way of living just to have it yanked out from under us after three months.
That brings me to the other big event of this week, our first meeting with our Azeri counterparts. These are Azeris who work at the organization we’ve been placed at who will be our main point of contact with the organization and with the community. We returned to the Neapol Hotel where our time in Azerbaijan started for the meetings.
My counterpart is the director of the school I’ll be working at. He speaks no English (though Russian of course, and apparently a bit of German and French). After meeting our counterparts we went the Neapol’s restaurant and had awkward broken conversations sometimes assisted by LCFs and other Peace Corps staff. We then went to a conference room and we (volunteers) presented our expectations and concerns to the counterparts (I was chosen by peers to stumble through our Azeri translations of our concerns) and they presented their concerns and expectations to us. Then we finally had a sit down with the counterpart to discuss our ideas and specific expectations. Rashad, my LCF, was kind enough to be our translator for this discussion. I’m excited by how open to my ideas he seems, while also having some specific ideas and goals of his own to build off of. Or course I’ll start with conversations clubs (after sitting in some on English classes to meet the students and get to know their language levels a bit, he suggested). One of his major goals is building exchange of ideas and culture between the US and Azerbaijan, so he suggested some sort of writing exchange with American students (and between teachers, as well, which was a cool idea I thought).
He also said that their sports teams had done well recently, and suggested sports as being something I could be involved with. I mentioned the softball league that Peace Corps volunteers have started here, with teams traveling between sites and periodically playing in tournaments.
Also, he mentioned he had created some sort of museum at the school and wanted me to develop a website for the museum. I’m thinking of doing that with someone there once I’ve gotten more of the language under my belt or if there’s an English teacher there who’d be interested. My counterpart is very interested in building technological knowledge. The school apparently has Internet and something like 30 computers. Now to see if they just sit there looking pretty in statistics about the school or if anyone knows how to use them.
To go along with his goals and ideas, I mentioned two other programs that are major Peace Corps programs here, the summer camps ABLE and GLOW, and the Writing Olympics. ABLE (Azerbaijani Boys Leadership Experience) and GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) are organized by Peace Corps volunteers and run along with Azerbaijanis and welcome students from across the country. Last year, the camps were held right near my site, so that seems something I should look into being involved with. The Writing Olympics is an international Peace Corps project, a competition for creative writing, the winners of which are published in a book and are invited to a conference (last year it was in Georgia). Peace Corps Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova all participate in the program.
So that’s what it looks like I’ll be doing. Of course, subject entirely to change at a moments notice. The counterpart seemed to like me a lot, and we got along very well, regardless of language. After having heard some more negative/less than exciting things about my site (staring, conservative, etc), this meeting went a long way to make me feel more comfortable about my site and look forward to getting to work (or volunteer).
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