Teaching my Host Parents to Use the Internet
Since we got an Internet line installed at home after my host brother moved to the US to study for his master’s degree, it has fallen to me to teach my host parents how to use Skype and email and most recently, Facebook. It’s wonderful seeing their faces light up when their son shows up on Skype and they get to talk to him. They come running. I spent about a half hour showing my host mother how to call and receive a Skype call and then practice calling and receiving calls from my computer to their home computer. It’s also great to watch them read every line of their Facebook news feeds, click from person to person via photos and links. It also makes me happy that my parents have always been more technologically savvy, and I have been spared having to teach them this stuff, though having to teach it in Azeri is a challenge unto itself (I’ve had to turn click into an Azerbaijani verb—“clickmek—clickerem, clickersen, cickersiz, etc.”).
Softball
Even though we don’t have enough kids together for a team yet (this is not great news since we’re hosting a tournament in two weeks), I’ve been having a great time with the kids that do come. One of them, Ibrahim, has a pretty good sense of the rules already, having played a couple short games during our ABLE camp, and has recently taken it on himself to start coming up with team name ideas. His ideas have ranged from the intentionally intimidating (Dragons, Wolves, etc.) to the humorous (Bees, Flowers) to the attempts at being representative of Ismayilli (which invariably center around nature (Mosquitoes, Mountains, Apples, Waterfalls).
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