New Year's Day 2010

Yeni Ilini Mubarek! Happy New Near!

I know you just received an email from me on Christmas, but another thing came to mind and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t resist writing it down...

The local fruits and veggies here are incredible. It’s winter and Mandarin oranges are in season. At the bazaar this morning they cost about 70 cents a kilo (2.2 pounds). Persimmons just finished their season, and they were awesome. During my first two weeks here we grabbed them from the tree at work every day. There are still about 10 of them hanging at the top, so I’m ready to pull out a ladder so I can get my hands on them. Just before persimmon season, and through all of autumn, the fruit everyone was eating was… agghhh! OMG, I'm forgetting my English! It’s “nar” in Azeri…. I’ll think of it… hard, red, seeds, stains … aggh… I can’t forget English! I'm a writer!!... POMEGRANATE!!! Whew!! Anyway, the last time I bought a persimmon or a pomegranate in the U.S. was last summer and they cost $3 each. Here they’re 1 manat per kilo - a manat is about 80 cents, so that's less than 40 cents a pound. Red and yellow apples are still in season now. I buy kilos of them out of car trunks in town every week. I get to eat stuff like this every day.

Walnuts, chestnuts, dried fruits, etc. are all local and cheap here, too. My host mom, Basira, made a batch of baklava for me my second day here. It was amazing. I watched her make it, and it takes a heck of a lot of time. A real heck of a lot of time. One batch took hours of work. I fell asleep before she cooked it, so I don’t know how it was done. She doesn’t have an oven; not many people do. She has an old Russian one in her kitchen that doesn't work, and no money, service people, or desire to fix it.

During my first weekend in Şamaxı, almost all of my meals consisted of fried potatoes swimming in butter or oil, so I was getting pretty worried about my health. I lost weight in my first two months here – probably 10 pounds or so – so weight gain isn’t a real worry. Just my health, attitude, and overall well-being are concerns. I knew that Basira cleaned at my office, but I didn’t know she cooked there, too, so I had no idea I would be eating lunch and dinner there every day until it started. And luckily they like good food there. They eat way too much butter, fat, and starch, too, but at least they balance it with some veggies and protein.

One meal I’ve fallen in love with is a salad called mimosa. I had it for lunch and dinner today, and it feels great. The healthiest meal in Azerbaijan. (If I’ve already mentioned it, my apologies. It’s just that good.) It’s made of beets, carrots, hard boiled eggs, and some other stuff all chopped up and layered in a pie shape. There’s some sort of dressing in it. Not mayonnaise – they don’t eat any condiments here that I can see – something homemade that’s lighter than mayo, but I don’t know what it is. Probably made of yogurt or something similar.

From what I hear from the locals, no fruits or veggies will be in season from January to March. But they told me nothing would be in season during November and December, so I’ll wait and see. Lots of foods are canned or dried, so there will be plenty around. And the bazaar will always have tons of stuff at good prices (good to me, anyway – even the rip-off prices that they throw at me, the foolish American, are good compared to prices at Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, or Fresh Market). It’s loaded with fresh greens, exotic spices, thousands of heads of cabbage, never-ending piles of potatoes and onions, nuts, and even tropical fruits that I didn’t price.

The first time I went into the Samaxi bazaar, the first thing I saw was a guy coming out carrying three pheasants upside-down by their feet. I think they were dead, but I’m not sure. If they were, it was recent. Yesterday I read in a book that poultry falls asleep when it's held upside down, so maybe they were napping (the book: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver - great book!).

This week I walked to work with Basira carrying a just-killed chicken in a plastic bag, dripping blood. It was used to make the borscht cooked by the women at work and we ate for dinner that night. Delicious!

I still have meals of fried potatoes drenched in butter now and then. In fact, today both my lunch and dinner were potatoes swimming in fat with bread on the side (and nothing else), but at least Basira listens when I say I don’t want any more and she doesn’t load the sugar on me like some PCorps Vols have to deal with from their families. I always have plenty of fruit and nuts to eat at home, so I should be able to stay healthy while I’m here.

My new home has no running water. Everything comes from a well out in the yard. The only hot water we have at home comes off a stove. There is no bath or shower here – I do that at the office where there’s indoor plumbing and a huge water heater. It’s still a bucket bath, but it’s nice to have some plumbing. It's only a few blocks away, it’s indoors, and the water is hot, so I’m happy. I don’t get to bathe every day, but I do about twice a week. Most other volunteers only do once a week. Most people in Azerbaijan bathe once a week – on Sunday. It wasn’t like this over by Baku, but I suppose I spent too much time with Americans over there. Here in Samaxi the world smells fine on Monday, but by Thursday and Friday it’s pretty rank. I mean nauseating. The women I live with smell awful – especially their coats, which they throw all over the furniture in the living room when we're at home, making the whole place stink. They don’t notice it, so I suppose I’ll get used to it… we'll see how long it takes.

There’s furniture where I live now, unlike the last house I lived in - the one in Corat. All of it looks like it was bought at Kmart in the 1960’s. The living room has five chairs, a sofa and two tables (the last place had two desk chairs at a kitchen table for eating, and that’s all). We have no TV, radio, or anything like that, so my computer is a real novelty. Kamala (my AzRIP boss) said she’ll get me a TV, but I really don’t need one.

The house I’m in now is in the “blue-blood” section of town, right near the town center. It’s comparable to the inside-the-beltline area of Raleigh - or how it would be about 20 years after a total economic collapse. There are rich people here, but they live in the hills with a fantastic view of the mountains, sunrises, and sunsets. Most of those people have more than one home, usually here and Baku. My host mom is by no means a yuppie – she’s very poor, but she is a blue-blood. She has lived in this house since she got married 40 years ago and has lived in Samaxi all her life, as did her parents and their parents. My Azeri speaking skills aren’t good enough to find out yet how far back she goes, but I’ll know in another month or so. Basira’s not Persian; she looks more European than that. She looks Russian. Some of her relatives look Persian, though, with black hair and black eyes. Beautiful people. And she’s not very religious, but what she little she has in her is definitely Muslim. The only book she owns is all about Allah and his guys, and it sits on one of the tables in the living room. She doesn’t have any of the Arabic stuff hanging from the walls like most homes here do.

Here’s an interesting historical fact: Azerbaijan gave suffrage to women in 1918. They beat both the US the UK to allowing women to vote. It was also the first Muslim country to be a democratic state. Around 1918, a year or so after Russia fell apart after WWI, Azerbaijan became an independent country with all sorts of unheard of (then) rights. That lasted two years, until the looming Soviet Union decided it couldn’t do without Azeri oil and beat them to a pulp to get it in 1920. When Azerbaijan broke free from USSR in 1991, it reinstated all the rights it had had in 1918, and more. Quite a roller-coaster ride they’ve been through in the last hundred years. The last thousand is a far steeper ride, but I’ll save it for another time.

Basira gave me the best room in the house as my own. It’s a big room – the only room in the house that comes close in size is the living room. It has a king-sized bed, side tables (not at the sides of the bed, though), a huge dresser, and a huge enclosed wall unit – closets, shelves, drawers, the works. I was worried that my queen-sized sheets would be way too big for Azerbaijan and almost went out and bought smaller ones before I left. Now I’m glad I didn’t, because they barely fit on the king “mattress” (actually, it’s a thick, nearly-king-sized pillow lying on a board). The only blanket I have is a sleeping bag that the Peace Corps gave me, and it’s perfect. It’s incredibly warm, and when I open it up, it’s just big enough to cover the bed. The room was filthy when I moved in and most of the drawers are full of stuff, but I’ve been told that’s the norm. When guests are coming, they don’t do anything prepare for them. So I prepped it myself by moving stuff around the drawers and closets to make room for myself. Nobody cares.

One thing Basira did do to prepare for my arrival was fix the little gas stove in the living room. That’s what keeps the house warm and cooks the food. We also use it to dry clothing when we do laundry in the rain. It was pretty darned cold when I arrived, and the stove wasn’t fixed until late that night. From what I could see, she didn’t even start fixing until I arrived, so she's used to living in the freezing cold. She got the stove fixed that night, and the city turned the gas on just long enough to warm the place a bit and cook a meal before going to bed. Not all PCVs are so lucky.  Though I've heard of some who have heat all the time - even in their bedrooms.

(BTW – today it was warm outside; probably around 65 degrees and sunny, with a low at close to freezing. The weather is a lot like Raleigh – anything can happen in winter.)

Last weekend Basira took me to her daughter-in-law’s place to do my laundry in an automatic washer. It’s right down the street, and we walked there late on Saturday afternoon. The first load was in by 4pm, so the timing was good to get all of it done before dinner. It’s a nice house, but nobody speaks English and my Azeri isn't quite conversational yet, so the TV and the reading materials were pretty boring. I should have brought something with me to read, and kept thinking I’d run home to get a book as soon as I threw the second load in the washing machine. So I waited. And waited. Every 15 minutes or so, the washer would slow down and I’d get up, ready to pull out the clean clothes and start the second load. After about an hour, Basira left to go shopping, and her daughter-in-law kept feeding me baklava and other stuff I don’t need while I waited. I went for a short walk, I played with her two kids and did all sorts of things. And the washing machine just kept running. Finally, the first load slowed down and actually stopped. It was about 6:30pm - it took 3 hours to run a load through the washing machine. I went ahead and put a second load in and set it to run for shorter time, but all buttons and knobs were in Russian so I’m not sure what I did. I hung the first load on lines at Basira’s and did a few things at home, then went back at 7:30 hoping the second load would be about done. It was dark out, so walking alone was a no-no, but I snuck around the streets hoping nobody would see me. The second load was done around 8:30pm. There was no way I was going to wait on another load, so I brought the rest of the dirty clothes home (four weeks’ worth of clothing) and hand-washed them the next day.

Now, hand washing is quite an ordeal in a home that has no running water. Most of all, when you want hot water, it has to be cooked. Plus, there is no indoor room where water can be used, so all of the washing is done outside in big plastic tubs. (I can’t wait to do this in January and February!) The tub I washed in sat on an old, rusty TV stand next to a broken-down jeep from WWII. Yes, the jeep is in the yard. I’ll have to find out what it’s doing there... I'll let you know.

While I washed, Basira did the heavy work by hauling several buckets of water up from the well and boiling enough water on the stove to make warm water for me to wash in. Doing it myself would have wiped me out, but with her help it wasn’t too bad. It took a couple of hours, with her 15 chickens hopping around at my feet while I washed, wrung, and hung my clothes. It was a heck of a lot faster than the automatic washer, and far more interesting. The chickens were fun, and the four Azeri college guys who live downstairs from us seemed pretty thrilled about watching me work from inside their place. Basira insisted on doing all of the laundry herself, but there was no way I was going to let her. Mostly because I don’t want to be taken care of, but also because her hands are always filthy, she smells awful, and she sneezes and coughs on everything around her without covering her face (everyone here does). BTW… the H1N1 virus is alive and well and killing people in Georgia – the country next door – so PCorps is on alert over there. If many more people die, they’ll pack up the PCVs and send them somewhere else. Maybe here!

So, I'll bet some blog reader out there is wondering how I flush the toilet or brush my teeth without plumbing? Well, there isn’t much of a toilet to flush – it’s more primitive than what I had in the last house, mainly because it’s just a hole in the ground and a bucket for cleaning (skin) and flushing that’s shared by 7-8 people. The house in Corat had a hose running into it for a continuous flush. The four college students downstairs are pretty good about keeping the flushing-bucket full of water, but they also tend to clog up the hole a lot. I haul up water from the well regularly to help keep things clean, which is quite a workout, but they don’t want me to. Really, I’m a novelty that nobody seems to want to see doing any work. Or maybe they think I’m going to break something. I don’t know. There’s not a lot around here to break.

For the realists… the toilet is a hole-in-the-ground latrine in a primitive 3’x3’x6’ stone enclosure underneath an ancient, inoperable water tank. Leaning against one of its outside walls is a portable sink, which is a very cool contraption. It’s mostly turquoise metal, but most of the color is rusted over and the sink part of it is white. It’s not hooked up to plumbing – you fill it with water. You fill it from the top, above and behind the mirror that sits over the sink, like any standard bathroom mirror, but smaller. You pour hot or cold water into it, depending on what you want to do. Brush your teeth – cold water. Wash your face/hands or dishes – hot water. It ultimately drains into the same place the toilet does, wherever that is. Basira or the college guys usually fill the sink contraption; I haven’t had the pleasure yet, but I’ve stood out there brushing my teeth on ice, in mornings cold enough to see my breath, using cold well water. When I stand up straight, my hair gets tangled in a bunch of scraggly grape vines that wind around the wall that forms the perimeter of the yard.

The portable sink only holds about a gallon of water, so it doesn’t last long. The first time I used it I didn’t know it wasn’t hooked up to plumbing and I left the water running while I washed a few dishes. The water pressure is low, so it gave me a few minutes. But when I need to brush my teeth in the freezing cold, I usually go to my room (far warmer, but still freezing) and brush my teeth with bottled water (far safer), a cup and a plastic tub. Also, I regularly – frequently – wash my hands with hand sanitizer, which I carry with me wherever I go.

Everything here is filthy, except at any building named after Heydər Əliyev. They worship the guy, way beyond Washington, Lincoln, or King. He was a big shot in the USSR government back in the 1980’s and did a lot to get Azerbaijan on its feet in the 1990’s after the first two post-freedom-from-the-USSR presidents flopped. He really did do a lot for the country, but he let a lot slide – like allowing bribes to remain as the standard way to get things done. And obvious voting fraud. He got his son elected to the Presidency two months before he died, but from what I hear the kid doesn’t have his dad’s brains, political savvy, or much to make him famous beyond his heritage. I’m not supposed to talk about politics while I’m in the Peace Corps, so I won’t go any further. Ask me about it when I'm back in the US.

I’ve had a few local people try to pry politics from me, but I have to refrain. One told me that Obama is just a racial figurehead, ignoring the fact that he was fairly elected and won by a wide margin. Plus, the guy who said that had no idea what is going on inside the U.S. -- they actually see our President as a guy who runs the world, forgetting that there’s a huge country that he’s attending to and responsible for. Granted, the US Prez is undeniably a (likely “the”) top world leader, but they don’t seem to know much about what’s going on in the 50 states. They have the broader, more global view of things - that's good, but it's only fair to remember that the US has 50 states, and that all but a few of them are much larger than Azerbaijan. They also want me to talk about Bush and compare him to Obama, but I refuse. During training we were told to blame the Peace Corps for anything we shouldn’t - or don’t want to - do, so I say that I can lose my Peace Corps job if I talk about it. Actually, that’s true.

In high school the people here learn all about the American Civil War, in detail. One guy at work talks politics at me endlessly. He knows the Civil War was 1861-65, knows about Lincoln, the blues and grays, everything. More detail than most Americans know, I’ll bet. But they don’t call it the Civil War here. They call it The War Between the Races. They guy at work saw it as a recent war that has never ended. The War Between the Races lives on. So maybe they’re fed propaganda about how screwed up the U.S. is – another thing I might hear more about when I understand the words better. He knew something about the American Revolution, too, but not nearly as much. They learn all about their own history, too, or so I gather. So what do we learn about Russian/Soviet wars in American high schools? Anything beyond the ones that the U.S. participated in?

Okay, this is getting too long again. I planned to write no more than a page. It seems like I just sat down a minute ago, and I’m already at four pages. This is how it goes every time… I get the urge to talk about one thing (this time it was fruit) and I can’t stop. Sorry ‘bout that. I could go on for many more pages, but won’t do that to you.

Perfect timing… Basira just pulled out everything she needs to make an enormous batch of baklava. It’s all in the living room; that’s where she makes it: 10 eggs, a kilo of flour, two kilos of walnuts, a ton of sugar, and layers of lavash – that’s really thin bread, a lot like Nan, a bread that’s popular in India. I saw her make the bread last night – she cooked it by moving the hot teapots on the gas heating/cooking/drying stove out of the way and flattening it out across the top of the stove (in our house, all cooking is done in the living room). The baklava has a paste she makes from ground walnuts, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and whatever, then alternates layers of lavash with layers of walnut paste in a deep, round pan, like what we use for a deep-dish pizza, until it’s about two inches thick. Then she bakes it somehow. It’s 9:20 Sunday night and she hasn’t even ground the walnuts yet, so I won’t be awake when she bakes it and still won’t know how she can get it done without an oven.

Oh … Basira swears that baklava is Azerbaijani. I always thought it was Russian, like from up in Moscow or west of there, but certainly not from down here in the area that I’ve always called the Middle East or Central Asia. Anyone out there know the real story?

….It’s Monday morning now… I woke up at 3am and Basira was still making baklava in the living room. I don’t know when she finished, but we brought some to work today and I ate some of it during a seminar this morning (it was in Azeri – something about environmental indicators and measurements). All the hours she spent on that baklava was worth the effort. Oh - and I finally saw the oven. It’s a portable, red box that looks like a microwave and sits out on the porch. Never noticed it before. Or maybe it was never there. The neighbors tend to borrow things a lot.

Also, most of the people at work this morning didn’t take their Sunday shower. Maybe they’re waiting for the holiday. I’ll eventually to get used to it.

Yeni Ilini Mubarek!

Julie