More School Conferences and Pondering

School’s about to start, so it must be conference time! Last week, the rayon’s teachers and staff met at the Youth Center auditorium in Ismayilli’s Heydar Aliyev Park. I hoped to sit in the back (or at least the middle) and observe, especially since I am not strictly speaking a teacher, and because I knew the event would be in Azerbaijani, but no sooner had my counterpart and I selected seats in a reasonable location than we were ushered straight to front and center. Had this been a rock concert, I would have been thrilled. I know they mostly mean well with this sort of thing, but I always worry that they’re also in some way using me, showing me off, reminding their superiors that they have an American working with them. I guess that’s part of Peace Corps, but it’s not one of my favorite aspects.

The conference was fairly interesting, reviewing the current state of education in Ismayilli, and the progress the schools are making. The only downside came in that when reporting the numbers, they only considered the straight numbers. I know that sounds strange, but when you’re comparing a school with 122 students and see that 96 graduated against a school with 50 students and 48 graduated, it doesn’t make sense to come to the conclusion that the former is necessarily better because more graduated. In some cases, percentages are also important.

The head of the department spent a period of time showing the schools that have been recently been built and are being built to replace older, smaller schools, particularly in local villages. Watching the small dilapidated school houses flashed by, replaced by their huge imposing uniform brethren, I was reminded of how different my Peace Corps experience must be compared to volunteers in other countries—in small villages in the mountains of South America, or on an island in the South Pacific. Here I sit, with Internet access in my house, electricity almost every hour of every day (storms and periodic scheduled outages notwithstanding), with running water and gas for cooking. This is the Peace Corps, but it’s not the Peace Corps I expected, or that imagined growing up. I love that Peace Corps must be different for me than it is in Mozambique and China and Belize and Honduras, but at the same time, we have many experiences, goals, ideas in common, across the world and across generations. That’s a pretty cool feeling, one the idealist in me loves.