January 24

If you’re reading this, you’re one of the one or two dozen who really want to read my blog and have figured out how to get onto it. I didn’t think it would be hard, but some people are having a tough time. I guess I take computer know-how a bit too much for granted. I’ve used computers for over 20 years, and used dedicated workstations for 10 years before that (those are like PCs, except they’re dedicated to whatever they’re attached to… mine were attached to lab instruments). So I’ve been surrounded by computers and using them constantly for – what – about 30 years? I used the Internet the first time in 1986. When Schering-Plough bought out the company I worked for (Key Pharmaceuticals in Miami), one of their IT guys came down from New Jersey and told me about the Internet and showed me how to send him emails. After that I had a geek boyfriend who worked at DEC (remember them?) who told me more about email and Internet, and we emailed a lot across something called DEC Net, which used the Internet to move info.

For my younger readers, DEC is “Digital Equipment Corporation.” It was a computer king for awhile, and some people even thought they’d wipe out IBM. They made the great VAX system – a mainframe computer, software, and networking system. Their mainframes were #1 in computing until one day when their top dog made that famous, fatal decision. He decided that personal computers would never survive – people would never buy them – so he instructed DEC to stick with mainframe computers. But we all know where PCs went. Every one of you that’s reading this is using one right now. Before DEC’s collapse, IBM was doing pretty badly - mainly because of DEC’s success. IBM’s decision to go with PCs and put Microsoft’s operating system on it made their sales soar. And DEC collapsed. They tried everything to stay alive in the 90’s; they even got into PCs eventually, but it was too little, too late. They’re gone.

Enough about the US… back to Azerland. Here in Azerbaijan the USA is called “ABS,” which stands for Amerika Birləşmiş Ştatləri. As you can probably guess, that means United States of America. I was surprised that they translate “USA” into their own language. They don’t translate New York. They do translate North Carolina (Şimul Karolina) and every other place I’ve seen except New York. It would be called “Yeni York” if they did, which I think sounds pretty cute.

Yesterday I spent the day at a conference held by AzRIP. I’m getting to know the language and can figure out what people are talking about, but only the topics – no details. What people look at while they’re talking and the face and body movements they make while they talk tell me much more than I ever realized. In some cases I’ve been able to follow entire conversations based solely on people’s eyes, faces and body language. And I always know when they’re talking about me – the looks are totally obvious. Last night I was listening to the three women I work/live with talk and they assumed I had no idea what they were talking about. After about an hour or so they ran out of things to say, and asked me to talk. I told them I had nothing to say and would rather listen. They said “Listen?” So I told them I knew they’d been talking about me and a door key I was supposed to have, but hadn’t received yet, and about cooking a dish made of eggplants and tomatoes. They were very surprised.

Well, I didn’t understand much of what was said at the conference I went to yesterday, but it was still interesting. And it was cold. We could see our breaths in the huge ballroom it was held in.  I don’t know why, but it had no heat. They ended the conference three hours early because of the cold. My feet were numb. That morning I had walked to work in the rain, wearing nice shoes (not the warm shoes I usually wear), and my feet were soaking wet and freezing from 8:30am on. It was probably around 40 degrees outside, so there wasn’t any ice, but it was darned cold standing in an unheated conference room all day. The lunch was delicious – a five-course ordeal – but the room was so cold every warm dish was cold by the time it got to us. The people who attended the conference were from local villages that had completed infrastructure projects, plus people from communities that were considering AzRIP's help and wanted to learn more. Great group of people and lots of intense discussions about project planning and accomplishments …  one of these days I’ll be able to tell you more of what they were talking about.

Here's a picture of the women having lunch (we don't eat at the tables with the men):

And next is a picture of all the women at the conference, freezing (we took off our coats once - for this picture). I'm in the front row, second from right. The woman second from left in the front row is the Deputy Director of AzRIP, Gulbaniz Gambarova, and the woman on the far right in the front row is my counterpart, Kamala Agayeva. The woman second from right in the back row is the head mobilizer, Telli Ibadova. The rest are women from nearby villages.


(Oh... by the way... people don't smile for photographs in this culture, so any slight smiles you see were probably an accident).

To make the photo bigger, double-click on it:

They closed the conference early because it was so cold, and when we went outside it was sleeting. The stuff was melting, so the roads were okay. Cars coming into town were covered with snow and ice, so we must have been pretty lucky.

Today I’m lying in bed with a sinus infection. It had been trying to get its hold on me every day for the last week – I’d wake up with an ear and throat infection, then those would fade away during the day and I’d forget about it until the next day when I woke up with it again. But it finally hit me today, ruining my weekend. But better now than during the next week. I’ll be spending three or four days in a small village way out in the boonies; not the kind of place I want to be with any kind of illness.

In the last week I spent three days in a small village called Celayir, in the Agsu rayon. It’s about 40 miles southwest of where I live and work and it took nearly two hours to get there. For about half the drive the roads were good, but very foggy and winding through steep mountains. Once we got through the mountains, we headed off the main road and onto ones that were on flat ground, but so full of potholes and tire-formed trenches, we couldn’t go much over 10mph. Once we got to the road that took us into Celayir, it was really, really bad - 5mph through the slippery, muddy trenches.

The village is agricultural with lots of cows and sheep all over the place, and they grow many, many crops – everything they need for self-sustainability and to bring in money from nearby markets.

Here's a picture of the people of Celayir who met with us:

Here's a picture of a school teacher in Celayir who got up and talked to the audience, helping to motivate them into action. The picture he's holding is of their president, Ilham Aliyev, whose father, Heydar Aliyev, won the worship of the people of Azerbaijan long ago. Dad was a Soviet big shot when Azerbaijan was part of USSR, and was the third president after it became independent. I hear he had a lot of charisma and did some great things, but... (I won't go into it. Look him up on Wikipedia if you want to  know - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heydar_Aliyev). Heydar put his son into office a few months before he died of congestive heart failure at the Cleveland Clinic. The son doesn't have as much charisma as his dad and people don't seem to like him as much, but he did approve AzRIP, which is a great organization for infrastructure development in the neediest parts of the country.

We went to Celayir to put an AzRIP project in place - "community mobilization and training." AzRIP helps develop the infrastructure of rural communities that were left to rot when Azerbaijan broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991. They have had little-to-no infrastructure support since they broke off the USSR, and no real way to get help from the government until AzRIP came along. Celayir actually had a little support from somewhere, somehow - the school we met in was new and I was told it was paid for by the government. Some of the more open-minded villages (like theirs) have had some development, but many, many villages don’t trust the government at all and are skeptical of any support they’re offered.

The folks I work with who go talk to the village people can cut through a lot of that distrust easier than other government people because they are some of the people who suffered the most. Most of them are Internally Displaced People (IDPs) who were booted out of their homeland, which is in the territory that is under dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. One of the guys I work with lived in an IDP camp for 14 years, and most of my co-workers were split off from their families and friends during the wars. They also have a lot of experience working with the organizations that help the people of Azerbaijan the most, like USAID and a few others. All of them are smart, well-educated, open-minded, patient, and very motivated. Great people.

The real leaders I’ve met in AzRIP are all women, which sure isn’t the norm for this part of the world. At AzRIP they make it obvious, too – the woman leaders go out of their way to show who they are and what they can do. And they make it particularly obvious to the people of Azerbaijan that they help. Most of the women I've seen in the small villages love seeing it and the men show total respect. And almost everyone loves seeing me – an American woman – working with them, too. Only one person I’ve seen so far seemed to not like me. It was a girl, probably about 12 years old, who stared at me with the most hateful expression on her face that I’ve ever seen. I can only guess what was going through her mind, but it certainly looked like it was focused on me. I smiled as I watched her stare at me. Hopefully she’ll read their village newspaper. They’re writing an article about me saying where I come from, what I’m doing there, and that I’m a volunteer. Hopefully they’ll tell them what a volunteer is. It’s an alien concept here and most people don’t understand it. Quite a few people look at me quizzically and ask a lot of questions (why, why, why?) when I tell them that I'm not paid to be here.

During the three days we went to Celayir, we helped the people use a ranking vote to decide what infrastructure project they needed the most. The choices were a new or restructured electrical system, irrigation system, health clinic, school, or road. Each day we drove 2-3 hours to the village, then met in the new school’s gymnasium (no heat). About 210 people showed up from a town with a total population of a little over 1600. Using ranking votes, they decided – overwhelmingly – that what they need most is a new road to get their crops to market. Second to that was better electricity, then a health clinic, irrigation, and a school was last. On the first day they decided on the road project, and on the second day they voted on who would make up the 11-person project planning committee. The committee needed one engineer and one accountant, and all 11 members were elected by the people. On the third day we met with the elected committee to get things moving.

Here are the results of the ranking vote ("yol" means "road"):

Every day there we had lunch at the home of a man who was the head of their village until Dec 23, when he was not re-elected. It was great to have a meal in a real outback, ex-Soviet village home. The wife and daughter didn’t eat with us (women don’t get to do that), but when they did have the chance to see me they kept staring at me in awe, like I was some sort of celebrity. I'd love to know what's going through their minds about American women.

The food was delicious and everything was totally fresh. I could tell the women spent the entire morning making those lunches, from killing the chickens to picking the veggies, and probably used the best food they had just to impress us. Each day their meals also included fresh veggies that are out of season, so it must have cost them quite a bit.

I took a lot of pictures of the people while I was in Celayir and will put more on the blog soon. Some of them are very cool. I didn’t take any in the home where we had lunch; people here don’t mind having their pictures taken, but taking photos inside their home didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I’m also writing a report about the trip because AzRIP wants one in English.

More photos...

Of Celayir women:

Of Celayir men during the vote...

 

Of the vote count....

 

Of Celayir women during the vote:

 

And this one is of a pseudo-hammer & sickle standing against the outside wall of the school. (Later I learned that this is their fire protection - no fire trucks or extinguishers there... these are everywhere.)

 

Next week I’ll be going to another village to do the same thing. I don’t know where yet, but will get back to you on it and will take lots of photos while there…

I also went to Baku twice last week. Peace Corps made me go in for my swine flu vaccination and while I was there I bought a new AC adapter/recharger for my laptop PC. Mine blew out that morning (a loud pop, a spark, then smoke) - luckily my trip to Baku was already planned for that day, so the timing for a blow-out was perfect. Baku is the only place in Azerbaijan where I’d be able to find one for a US laptop. And Peace Corps has a new IT guy who found the best place for me to buy one, which was a huge help. A friend I went through training went with me. Her name is Chi Chan; she’s originally from Hong Kong, but has lived in NY City most of her life. After we found the adapter, we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant right by the computer store; it was a pretty good meal, but way too expensive. Baku is ultra-expensive, along the lines of London and Paris. (When we get back to the States, Chi promises to take me to the best Chinese restaurant in New York….)

Last weekend I went to Baku again; that time for AzRIP work. They wanted to use my voice to read a background script for a film they’re sending to Washington DC. I edited its English, too – it needed it badly. They’re sending the English version to DC because they’re funded by the World Bank, so there are heavy political connections in the US. Plus, the work they’re doing is so good, the folks in DC could learn a lot from it. There’s an Azerbaijani version of the script, too, that’s used to promote their work inside the country.

It takes about two hours to get to Baku from Samaxi. Sometimes it’s longer because we drive through mountains most of the way and the fog can be ultra-thick. On the first trip I took a marshutka – one of those little public buses that’s so packed with people, nobody can move. The ones that run between Samaxi and Baku are pretty nice, though – Mercedes vans with a TV to let the passengers watch Azeri music videos and Turkish soap operas. But it is so packed, it’s uncomfortable. On my AzRIP trip to Baku, AzRIP sent a car and driver all the way from Baku to pick me up and then drive me home when it was over. It was a very comfy SUV and was relaxing enough that I could look at the countryside, which is sort of like a cross between deserts, mountains, and pastures. A little like eastern Colorado. Or California, east of Los Angeles. The AzRIP people I worked with in Baku were nice, too – I worked with their PR guy, their journalist guy, an administrative assistant who translated for me, and a couple of folks from a Baku news station.

The people in Baku dress very different from the folks in the villages. It’s much more western over there. The women dress overly flashy in Baku, but are ultra-conservative here. In the city they wear lots of big, gaudy jewelry, and I don’t see any jewelry at all in the villages. Except in their mouths. The teeth of everyone over 40 are loaded with gold. There are many, many dentists here, but my guess is that people only go to them when it’s time to pull teeth and replace them with gold. Preventative care isn’t popular. They don’t use floss – there isn’t any in stores, and we can only get it by asking the Peace Corps doctor to send it to us. And they don’t have fluoride in their water. The people I’ve seen do brush their teeth, but the biggest problem is all the sugar they eat. They are constantly eating candy, sugar cubes, and sugary pastries, and they drop endless cubes sugar into the tea they constantly drink. The top count so far is 8 cubes in one cup of tea... not a mug: it's a real teacup - maybe 6-8 ounces. The people I’ve talked to don’t know that sugar rots teeth. Or that it causes weight gain, heart problems, or anything else. Most folks over 60 I’ve talked to have dentures – my guess is that their gold teeth are an investment that later pays for their fake white teeth.

Most people in Azerbaijan who are in their 40’s and 50’s have some teeth left in their mouths – just the front ones, which are usually rotting, black and yellow. Chewing must be difficult. But they do keep the weight on, that’s for sure. All the potatoes, bread, butter and sugar they eat don’t require a lot of tough chewing, so I guess they don’t really need teeth to stay hefty. And health issues related to any of those foods are unknown to the people here. (None of this pertains much to Baku, which is more like a modern European city.)

Speaking of health… I wonder how often houses catch on fire here. Gas comes into homes via metal hoses that connect to a tube that they stick into the stove that heats the place. They turn on the gas by turning a valve, then light it with a match or a sparker. But the gas is invisible and has no stench added to it. You can’t see it or smell it. I lit the stove in our living room one day and forgot which way to turn the knob to turn off the gas valve. The gas flow wasn’t strong enough to feel it or hear it, and I couldn’t see it or smell it. Only a match could tell me whether or not the gas was on. The good news is that I didn’t blow up the house. The bad news is that I’ll bet people do all the time, but we never hear about it. And with all the earthquakes in the town I live in, I’ll bet they have lots and lots of fires when the fault acts up.

Recently I found out that most people in Samaxi don’t have plumbing because of the earthquakes. The water lines exist and people have water tanks – I can see them on stilts in everyone’s yards – but the lines are broken, so they’re shut off. Most people use wells instead, like we do. Some people probably buy water and some people pay to keep their water lines intact – there are some rich people in this town with washing machines and fancy bathrooms.

And fancy cars, Internet, and satellite TV. People with everything vs. people with almost nothing – that causes some conflict here. The poorer folks do all they can to fit in with the rich folks, and the rich folks buy stuff they don’t need. They didn’t have that problem so much back in the Soviet days and it looks to me like keeping up with the Joneses is such a foreign concept to them that most people don’t even seem to see it. Not yet.

We got a small TV set in our house about a week ago, and it receives one TV station. It has some movies from US, Europe, and India, all overdubbed in Azeri. They don’t remove the original sound – they just turn it down so you can barely hear it and then play their own audio over it. The commercials remind me of the ones we used to see back in the ‘60’s – with some happy guy in a suit coming home from work and giving his wife (a blonde doing her housework in a nice dress, heels, and stockings) a big hug because she bought a new brand of laundry detergent. Or some freckly kid who finally gets an “A” in school after he used the right toothpaste.

Oh – this week there was a TV documentary about Soviet history. They interviewed Gorbuchev (he’s looking very old these days!), and had lots of news clips with Nikita Kruschev, Stalin, Brezhnyev, and a few guys whose names I can’t remember – like the one before Gorbuchev who was drunk all the time. They showed news clips we probably never saw in the US, though they’re probably available now. Clips of all of the guys hanging out together at ceremonies, in meetings, and doing whatever else they ever did. Very interesting.

The people here hate Gorbuchev and love Stalin. On January 20, 1990, Gorbuchev sent military forces and tanks down to Baku and killed about 130 innocent people (check it out here: http://www.january20.net/). They shot them and ran over them with tanks, all in an effort to keep Azerbaijan under control during the revolution. Obviously it didn’t work, and the people here hate Gorbuchev for it. He has apologized for doing it, knowing it was a big mistake, but (understandably) they still hate him. They have huge Jan 20 memorials everywhere, and on Jan 20 everything is closed – schools, etc. My office was open, but a few of us went to a local memorial to listen to the government people speak and watch a commemoration. I have a bunch of photos of it that I’ll put up on the blog.

And they love Stalin. I think I mentioned this earlier, but it’s worth repeating. Stalin liked Azerbaijan and lived here part of his life. I even know a couple of people who look like him here. He was good to the Azeri people, giving them all sorts of things to improve their lives – not many people have done that for these people. They know he murdered millions, but they don’t care because he was good to them.

I could write pages on the things I see these people do that leave a lasting impression, but I need to go to sleep. Next time.

- Julie