Emailed on Christmas, 2009

(This was originally emailed on Christmas, 2009.)

Today is my first Christmas in Azerbaijan, and it’s in my new Azeri town. I arrived on Dec 11 and started work on Dec 14. It’s been quite a trip.

The town I’m in, Şamaxı (pronounced sort of like this: Shamakha) has about 30,000 people and is the center (seat or capital) of the rayon I’m in. The President of Azerbaijan visited Şamaxı last year, so one side of town has a lot of fancy new government buildings and a huge, beautiful park dedicated to the President and his father (the previous President), and its roads are in great shape – all of that was put in place to make the President proud. Towns he hasn’t visited recently don’t look so good.

I live right in the center of the town. It actually has a Russian department store - something I’ve never seen in Azerbaijan - and a grocery store about a block from where I live. It’s in the foothills of the mountains and sits on a plateau, so the elevation is higher than many towns deep inside the mountains. It has a lot of earthquakes, so there are no tall buildings, and it’s over 2000 years old, so there are a lot of cool things to see. Not far from me is a mosque built over 1000 years ago.

It’s a conservative town. Few people speak English and they have a heavy local accent, so I’m having a tough time understanding anyone. People are helpful and they aren’t staring at me as much as I thought they would, so it's really not bad. But it can be pretty frustrating to not be able to carry on a real conversation with anyone for days. There are three other Peace Corps volunteers in this town – a married couple that has been here for a year (he is an English Teacher and she is in Youth Development), and the other is an English Teacher who arrived with me on Dec 11. Last week she and I got together and went for a long, long walk venting our frustrations and both found that just talking to someone who can understand what we say is so valuable we’ll schedule a regular “Peace Corps Meeting” of our own to do it every week.

For those of you who don’t know, there are three areas of work that Peace Corps Volunteers in Azerbaijan are in: Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), Youth Development (YD), and Community Economic Development (CED). I’m in CED and my job is to help the organization I work with, AzRIP, and the community I live in. It's up to me to figure out what they really need and whether or not they really want it. All of us end up teaching some English, and everyone where I work wants to learn. So, to help my Azerbaijani and their English, during the first week I set up three English teaching sessions. One is for three guys who don’t know English at all, one is for two guys who speak some English, and one is for a woman who speaks some English, but she's a viper that nobody wants to work with (including me, but I have to… I’ll talk about her later).

Teaching English is a real trip. The class for guys who don’t speak any English is very hard work, but it’s helping me with my Azerbaijani. The three guys are all huge, with heavy, dark clothing, rough red skin, and very short hair. They look ultra-Russian, like they could be working the docks up way up north somewhere or as gangsters on the streets of Moscow; two are engineers and one is an accountant. On the first day when we were going through the alphabet, one of them stood up and started arguing in Azeri about the validity of the pronunciation of one of the vowels, as though he was right and the English-speaking world is all wrong. Then the other two got in on it. Arguing! I don’t know what they were saying, but all I could do is laugh. After a few minutes I clapped my hands as loud as I could to shut them up, then told them to sit down (luckily it’s a word I know). The macho guys sat down, kept their mouths shut, and listened to me for the rest of the session.

Lots of guys here look overly macho. This Internet club is loaded with them. The only women who go to the Internet clubs in town are the three American Peace Corps workers – all the other people in them are men wearing black jeans, black leather jackets, and black leather boots. With their black hair and black eyes, and cigarettes hanging out their mouths while they pound on filthy keyboards they can look pretty intimidating. The first time I went into an Internet club alone, I was really uneasy. It’s a big room with about 10 desks and computers in it. About half the room was empty and it has no carpeting, no curtains (no windows), and no wall covering, so it echoes whenever the tiniest sound is made. I wore all dark clothing and sat at the only empty desk in the room, trying to make very little noise and giving them as little to look at as possible. After about 20 minutes two more Hell’s Angels-looking guys walked in the room and walked up to two macho guys at the desk next to me. Those two stood up and they all shook hands. Then… get this… they all hugged each other and kissed each other on both cheeks. Yep. It was delightful! Ever since then, working in the Internet club has been a lot easier. Now when I see them kiss each other – they do it repeatedly and I see it all the time now – I have to hold back my smiles, but it can be really hard to do.

In this country, girls don’t kiss guys until they’re engaged or even married. They can’t even walk down the street alone together without escorts until they’re engaged. Girls often walk together arm-in-arm, and guys walk with each other arm-in-arm, but no girls and guys. So kids get married very young. A few years ago they imposed a law here making it illegal to marry before 18 (or maybe 17; I’m not sure) because marriages at 14 were way too common. I know that was a problem in the US not very long ago – I had neighbors in Raleigh who married at 14, 15, and 16 – but that was pretty unusual. It was the norm here until recently. Maybe being touchy-feely with their own gender helps curb some sort of appetite; I don’t know. During Peace Corps training, one of my American friends from Texas thought that all the guys over by Baku are gay - mainly because over there they dress with some style, they stand too close to each other, and they walk arm-in-arm (I didn’t see so much kissing over there). Now that she’s deeper in the country and seeing the macho men hugging and kissing each other, I’m wondering what she’s thinking about stereotypes. I’ve tried to explain that cultural differences make people behave differently… she’ll get it after a spending more time here. All of us (Americans) will have our stereotyping systems recalibrated by the Azerbaijan cultural experience.

I spent Christmas Eve with four other PCVs – three from the town I’m in and another from a town about an hour away, and it was nice. One of them was in Baku that morning and brought back a huge box my mom sent to me – it had been there for a week or two and had lots of Christmas gifts in it. I didn’t think I’d get to see the stuff for another month or two - it's hard to get to Baku - so the timing was perfect. We spent the evening eating a lot, speaking English, and exchanging 2-manat Secret Santa gifts (1 manat is about 80 cents)

For some reason, the office I work in is closed for Christmas. Some of the people are refugees from the Armenia-held section of Azerbaijan, so maybe they’re Christian. A few of my coworkers are Muslim, but most of them are non-religious – that’s pretty much what Azerbaijan is. Being secular is an important part of their constitution. The culture has an Islamic base, but many of them don’t even know it because they know so little about Islam. And (this might surprise some of you, based on what the US media focuses on) real Muslims are very accepting of other people and their religions and philosophies. And they don’t know it, but they celebrate Christmas. Or something just like it. They have a guy that looks exactly like Santa Claus – some even call him Santa Claus, but they have another name for him that I can’t remember (look at my Thanksgiving blog). So, they have this big guy in the red suit and hat, white beard, etc. and he has a beautiful, young gal who looks like a Barbie doll in a Santa suit that hangs out with him. There’s no sleigh or reindeer, but little Santa and his young gal are usually standing around a tree that looks just like a Christmas Tree. Here’s the big difference – they celebrate it on New Year’s Day. It’s a New Year celebration. The folks with a stronger Russian background have something happening on Dec 25, but the really big deal is on Jan 1. They exchange gifts, but it’s not as big as it is in the US; that’s probably because they don’t have any money.

My perspective of the term “expensive” is still undergoing a healthy readjustment here. Last week I was showing a guy at the office a very cool computer program I use to help me learn Azerbaijani. It could also be used to learn English, so he was interested in getting his hands on it. I showed him the web site where I bought it, and when I showed him the price – right when I was saying “it’s really cheap” he was gagging over how expensive it is. Now that was embarrassing for me (it was $40). Luckily there’s a limited version of the program that’s free that he can download. (If anyone is interested in a free or $40 program to learn a language, go to www.byki.com. Other language learning programs out there cost hundreds.)

I also showed this guy – his name is Bakhtiyar – the amazon.com web site. He had never, ever seen or even heard of shopping online. First he asked me if I send them an email telling them what I want to buy, so I showed him how you select things online, choosing colors, sizes, whatever. He was enthralled. Then he asked me if I pay the post office when it arrives (no postal carriers here – if you get mail, the post office calls you and you go pick it up yourself), so I explained how you pay using credit cards. People here don’t have credit cards or even bank accounts – all their money is in their wallets – so they can’t use amazon.com. But he was totally amazed by it. Then he explained how most people here make about $1000/year… so Amazon is out of the question. He also commented on how expensive American meals are – how a hamburger costs $2, which he says is outrageous. The Azeri counterpart to a hamburger, something called a “doner” and is about 90% bread, costs 20-40 cents. That’s still a bit pricey by their standards, but manageable. The McDonald’s in Baku is a classy luxury here – a meal of a Big Mac, large fries and soda costs $5. Outrageous.

Bakhtiyar is my AzRIP boss’ son. He’s probably in his mid-20’s and his wife and baby live in a town about two hours from here. Everyone I work with lives in towns 2-3 hours away, but they live at or near the office Monday-Thursday. I live in a house owned by a 60-year-old woman named Basira who cooks and cleans at the office. The two highest level women at the office, Kamala and Telli, live with us during the week. Basira makes me breakfast at home, but lunch and dinner are both at the office with my coworkers. And all of the women pitch in on cooking at some point. On Wednesday Kamala and Telli, who develop, plan, and execute huge projects to build roads, schools, hospitals, etc., spent the morning making borscht. It was incredibly, amazingly delicious. They want me to make them pizza, which I’ll do once I find the ingredients. One of Basira's relatives wants me to make spaghetti. Most of them don't know what it is.

Kamala is my boss, but next week she’s moving to another town, Ganja, which is Azerbaijan’s second largest city and about six hours from here. She'll be gone for five months. I’ll likely visit her, but it looks like I’ll be visiting other offices more. The Assistant Director of AzRIP is based in Baku and is also a woman. I met her this week and she wants me to go to Baku to help her with an international convention being held this summer – apparently nobody in the organization has ever worked one (I’ve done quite a few; it just sounds like a big deal, but is not). Most of the really sharp people I've met in AzRIP are women. They're in positions of authority, which is very unusual for this part of the planet. They asked the Peace Corps to send them a woman, so that's probably one of the reasons they chose me.

AzRIP is a lot like the Peace Corps. They find towns that need and want help - mostly new health clinics, sewage systems, electrical systems, irrigation, roads, etc. They make sure that the needs are real and make sure that the people who live there will do the work (for ownership and sustainability). When all is verified, they give them the training and most of the money they need to get it done. It's a great group, and very successful. Kamala plans the projects, Telli and a few others are community mobilizers and trainers, and there are others who do things like engineering and documentation. I’ll be helping with all sorts of things, but mostly Kamala wants me to help find and implement ways to get things done more efficiently. I’ve already come up with a few things, but can’t communicate them and don’t really want to because they’d require some cultural changes that I can’t recommend until I have more credibility. All of it requires better Azeri speaking skills. For now, I help with anything that has to do with English and translation. I also join them on their trips to educate, train, and motivate people in small villages. Being an American, I'm a spectacle. An icon. The people love it.

The documentation person is a real pain in the neck. She’s the wife of the highest-level person in my office, though he’s never in the office and rarely in town. (BTW - nepotism is the norm here.) She reminds me of the classic community vixen. Like Erica from that 1970’s soap opera – All My Children? She’s beautiful and her evil tactics are so obvious it’s almost hilarious. Her English is better than most, but not great. And she can be dangerous, but everyone knows how wicked and manipulative she is, so most people ignore her. My first day at the office I didn’t know what she was about and she told me (didn’t ask me) to go home with her at 4pm for dinner. It sounded like a good way to see the inside of another home and family, so I said yes. She told everyone else at the office that I was spending the night, but she didn’t tell me. When she got me alone she told me how important she is and that I need to focus on teaching her English – nothing else is as important as that. She kept telling me that I don’t need to learn Azeri, and how we should be best friends and I could spend my weekends with her doing my laundry in her automatic washer, etc., etc. Her kids (2 and 5) are obnoxious and kept going through my stuff while we talked, including my computer. And she kept talking on the phone, leaving me alone with the little brats. On top of that, the power was out half the time, so I knew doing my laundry at her place was a joke. By 10pm I was totally fed up with her and her kids and made her get a car and driver from the office to take me home. She said they couldn’t do it because it was too late and that everyone knew I was spending the night, but I insisted and told her how Peace Corps rules stipulated that I cannot spend the night away from my site without notifying them (true) and how I could be sent back to the US for it (possible). So she got me a car. Since then she’s pulled a few fast ones while translating conversations between Kamala and me – trying to make me look bad – but my Azeri is getting better and she can't get away with it. I do teach her English, but avoid her the rest of the time. Everyone does unless they need something from her. Even her husband.

Another interesting person is the English-Azeri language teacher they found for me. She is “the best tutor in town,” and it’s a solid reputation. During my second lesson I discovered that I know more about Azerbaijani than she does – she conjugated verbs wrong and didn’t understand one of the most basic and unique features of the language. On top of that, she kept teaching me English, out of total confusion. And the book she used to teach me uses the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet, which Azerbaijan changed to Roman in 1991. She’s an English teacher at a local elementary school and a Peace Corps Volunteer who works at the same school told me yesterday that she’s totally incompetent. Anyway, I fired her last Sunday. That’s a long story and this email is getting too long, so I’ll skip it.

Most people here are wonderful. One great person is my Peace Corps Program Manager – an Azeri guy named Elmir. He’s on vacation in the States now and is doing me a couple of favors. I collected seven American cell phones from Peace Corps Volunteers and donated them to an organization in Raleigh that uses them to help abused women – they give them to women to use to call for help using numbers and accounts that their abusers don’t have access to. American cell phones can’t be used here unless they’re unlocked and reset for their cell systems; that can be expensive, so some of us donated ours. They were too expensive to mail, so my manager carried them to the US and is mailing them to a friend in Raleigh for me. And he’s bringing back some stuff for me. A good guy, and a more typical Azerbaijani.

Happy Holidays,

Julie