Emailed 23 Oct 09

(This was originally emailed to my blog readers on Oct 23, 2009...)

Sorry it’s taken so long for me to write, but my classes and studies take over 12 hours a day. I get Sundays off, which is the day I try to catch up with homework, shop, and do laundry by hand. Getting over to the Internet café is tough and because I’m a woman I’m not permitted to be out alone after dark here. It gets dark pretty early – right now sunset is about 7pm and I barely get home from classes by then. Next week we change to daylight savings time and I’ll always have to be home by 6 to beat the dark, but they’ll start classes earlier and let us out of classes earlier to accommodate women’s needs. By December it will be dark by 5pm, so it’ll get even tougher.

Peace Corps’ studies are the toughest I’ve ever had, anywhere. We have four hours of language training every morning and four hours of project training every afternoon. For my position – Community Economics Development – I need to speak intermediate-level Azerbaijani by the first week of December. It’s pretty tough to cram dozens of words into my memory, particularly when I had a cold and fever, but I’m doing the best I can. At the same time we’re learning how to develop relationships with the local people so we can figure out what projects they want the most and how we can help them get those projects started and done. Doing things for them is not the goal – figuring out what they really want and need, motivating them, training them, and keeping them self-sustaining when we’re gone is what’s important. This isn’t easy in a culture that was Communist from the Russian Revolution (what 1912-ish?) to 1991. It’s all extremely interesting, but not at all easy. In mid-December I’ll finish my training and move to my permanent town to start my real work. On October 29 I have a meeting with my Program Manager, Elmir, an Americanized Azerbaijani guy, to figure out the best position to place me in.

The 60 trainees who traveled to Azerbaijan with me are very impressive. Most of them are in their 20’s, and almost every one of them has traveled, lived, worked, and/or studied overseas. Not all PCorps volunteers have that sort of background, so it’s obvious that the ones chosen for Azerbaijan are a certain type. A couple of them speak Russian and every one of them has led a very interesting life. Not a boring person in the entire bunch. All of us are living with host families now, and our homes vary dramatically. Mine is far more destitute than most of them, but that alone makes it quite a learning experience.

My host family is a 45-year-old woman named Mehpara, her husband’s aunt (her husband died a few years ago), and her two teenage kids – a 15-year-old girl named Nigar and a 17-year-old boy named Iosef. Their house is in a town called Jorat (“Corat” in Azeri) and is about 100 yards from the Caspian Sea, so even though I may be living in the most meager home around, it’s in the best location of all volunteers. It has four rooms – three bedrooms and a living room – and is a total of maybe 500 sq ft. I have my own room with little privacy, but that’s OK. They’re good people, which is obvious even though I can’t understand much of what they say. Nigar is studying English, so she’s our translator to some extent; my Azerbaijani skills are growing fast, but I have a long way to go before I can carry on real conversations.

Their “bathroom” and “laundry room” are in separate, very old stone buildings that are outside, away from the living home. Some of you received an email a couple of weeks ago describing my first day with my host family. Nigar showed me around, describing the place to me. The room we use for bathing (bucket baths) is separate from the house, and to reach it I walk outside down a sand walkway to a very old stone building and into a dark room with a gas water heater that is lit and heats water only when hot water is needed. The bucket-bath room is roughly 7ft x 7ft, is very dark, and has a faucet near the water heater, a bucket and sauce pan on the floor, a drain in the center of the floor, and a stone bench along the wall opposite the faucet. When I first saw it, I didn’t know what the room was or how to us it, so Nigar showed me – not the real thing, just a demo with her clothes on. Attached to the bathing room is the laundry room. It’s about half the size of the bathing room but looks just about the same (buckets, faucet, stone bench) and the two rooms share the water heater.

Off the sand path between the house and the bathing/laundry building is another old stone building, and it is very small. It's the size of a typical latrine you’d find way out in the country. It’s the “tualet” and is made up of a hole in the stone floor with a small hose running into it, and a pitcher in the corner of the room. That’s all. Use your imagination; I’m not going to describe it any further … if you want details just send me an email and ask me for it. The Peace Corps’ contract with the host family stipulates that they supply me with toilet paper, but they don’t. They did once - when I reminded them of their obligation - but they stopped. It is was a roll of paper towels, not TP, but it worked. It’s obvious they don’t know how we use it. It’s also obvious they can’t afford it. So I'll get my own.

There’s a sink outside that’s used for washing hands, dishes, etc. It’s in the ground in the sand pathway between the stone buildings. It’s really just a faucet in an old well in the ground. Also along the pathway is a small yard with three pomegranate trees (all of them are in fruit now), plus lots and lots of lines to hang laundry.

I’ve done my laundry once – three weeks’ worth, all by hand, using two buckets. When done, the clothes were hung outside in the rain. Just my luck, the only day I had time to do laundry was the only day it has rained since I arrived in the country. But the upside is that my clothes were rinsed much better than they could ever be using little buckets.

The weather here has been a lot like southern California and the air is like it was in Los Angeles in the 1970’s. This area of Azerbaijan is known for having the worst pollution in the world. Luckily I brought enough clothing to get me through three weeks so I only have to do laundry every two. Once I get a little more used to wearing dirty clothes I should be able to do laundry every four weeks. Lots of my Peace Corps buddies are smelling pretty bad these days – the ones who didn’t bring much clothing.

The lunches and dinners I’ve had here are great! Pickled eggplant is delicious. So is an eggplant mush they make – it’s like a thick spaghetti sauce made from eggplant, tomatoes, goat cheese (sometimes yogurt), onion, and whatever else is around. You eat it with bread. Their salads, soups, chicken, etc. are also great. They eat bread and drink tea constantly, so I’ve been having more of both of those than I want. I haven’t had any problems with my sleep other than packs of dogs fighting in the roads nearby almost every night.

Last week my host family took me to a fantastic meal at an aunt’s house. There are dozens of aunts and uncles, and most related families have at least seven kids. Most people have dozens upon dozens of cousins, and they all end up marrying each other. The women at the dinner I went to were from 3 months old to over 80 years and we sat together and ate in the main dining room, without any men. The dining room is a long, narrow room that only holds a long, narrow table with benches running along each side. The men stood outside, smoking and drinking and doing whatever else they do. Women don’t drink or smoke at all here, but that’s all the guys seem to think about and do when they get together. The women only see the men when it’s time to walk home. Women can't walk alone after dark.

I met all of the women at the party using my weak Azerbaijani, and two of them spoke a little English. They asked me about sports, music, books, etc. The women are into basketball (now that’s a surprise!), but the guys are all into futbol (soccer), some Russian wrestling, and martial arts. The music the girls like is something I've never heard before – it’s a local folksy type that sounds Persian to me. The young guys are into rap, but (aside from Michael Jackson) it’s mostly different from what we hear in the States. Hard-core rap is banned here.

One of the women who talked to me is named Layla, and was excited when I told her there’s a very famous English song named after her. I probably have it on one of my CDs here, but she’s never heard of Eric Clapton so she’s probably not real interested in hearing music from any of his bands. But maybe I’ll give it a try sometime.

After dinner we went home and watched a DVD of an Iranian horror film about Muslim grave torture. They others watching the movie with me were all pretty scared about whatever was happening, but since I couldn’t understand many of the Azerbaijani words and none the Arabic subtitles, it was no big deal to me. It was definitely a B-movie, and was really pretty funny to watch. But I held back the laughs for their benefit. Their sense of humor is very – extremely – different from ours and the PCorps has given us quite a bit of training on being careful about that. We have to avoid sarcasm and ironic humor, and to avoid making fun of anyone. In our first week we were trained on all sorts of things, from culture and security to humor and how to use their bathrooms carefully. Men and women had separate two-hour training sessions on how to use their bathrooms.

We also have endless training on how to deal with unwanted attention and assault. Lots of Azeri men like to follow women, make unwanted advances, and so on. I haven’t heard of many outright attacks, but the harassment is constant. Even women my age have problems. I’ve been followed by a couple of guys – twice when I was out walking around and obviously lost – but right away I found that they go away when I pull out my cell phone and start making a call. Another guy tried to finagle information from me, like my phone number and home location (there’s no such thing as an “address” here – you find where you are and where you’re going by sight) by pretending to be a cell phone company employee, but I caught onto his scheme before he got anything out of me. And everyone stares at us a lot. We’re aliens. It’s really no worse than most countries I’ve been in, so it doesn’t bother me. And the Peace Corps has fantastic security folks who are available by cell phone 24/7 to immediately solve any problems we run into. The police aren’t so reliable. They’ll ask for money to provide help, and even then you can’t count on the help they give. Plus, they’re about as likely to accost us as anyone else roaming the streets.

Right now I’m in the Peace Corps headquarters office in Baku. It’s built like a fortress – it looks more like an embassy than a Peace Corps office. There’s no sign saying it’s Peace Corps or that it’s American, and getting through the two-story high massive iron gates and stone walls is a lot of work. Security is ultra-tight. Most countries don’t have much security in their Peace Corps offices at all, so surely this is due to Azerbaijan’s location.

Security is the biggest deal. The reason I’m emailing you instead of putting this info on my blog is we’re not allowed to say on the Web where any of us live or where we visit – security doesn’t allow it, just in case any folks in neighboring countries are keeping an eye on us. For those of you who don’t know where Azerbaijan is… Iran, Russia, Georgia, and Armenia are immediate neighbors, and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and the other “stans,” plus the Middle East and all ex-Soviet countries are very close. Any of those places might have people who might be interested in bugging some Americans.

Nine of us trainees are here at the offices waiting to travel to visit Peace Corps sites in the mountains. We’ll be taking a night train deep into the mountains – an 8-hour trip, which should be interesting ….

….Now the train ride is over and I’m in the home of a Peace Corps volunteer in a mid-sized resort town called Sheki. The ride was overnight in a sleeper car that’s straight out of an old eastern European movie. Very dark, plain, and totally Russian – the only sign in the entire train was on the restroom, and it was in Russian. Each sleeper box held six beds that looked like shelves, two stories high, plus top (3rd-level) shelves where luggage is kept. People – stowaways – slept in the upper luggage shelves in our compartment, so my luggage stayed on my bed under my legs. The stowaways were kicked out at 5am, but by then the ride was almost over, so my luggage stayed under my legs for the entire trip. Luckily I was near the only open window – near the ticket-taker’s bunk – because the car was stifling and the air so thick and smelly from Central Asian body odor that friends in the center of the car couldn’t sleep at all. They were pretty nauseous from the nasty air.

Two big women with huge, dark scarves on their heads and wearing layers of skirts and sweaters were in the car with me and another PC volunteer. They were the same age as me, but looked old enough to be my mom. Both were very friendly and patient with our lousy Azeri language skills, and I wish I could have gotten a picture of them because they looked just like they were from 1940’s Bulgaria or Ukraine, but my camera was buried deep in my luggage. On the way home I’ll be taking a bus the whole way and it will be daytime, so photos might be easier to catch.

I’m in the home of a PCorps volunteer now. Today, for the first time in about three weeks, I got to take a shower, use a toilet, and see myself in a real mirror. Next we’ll hike in the mountains then visit several organizations where the PC volunteers work; we'll be there to find out more about how typical operations work. All of the organizations are different, so these will just be examples.

(A little later…) We visited an ancient village in the mountains called Udi. The people who lived in that area long ago were Christian, and they were huge. There’s a 2000+-year-old church there that looks like it’s right out of the ancient villages of Ireland. Like a pagan church. And in its tombs they found skeletons of people who were enormous, and indicators show that they were probably blonde. The theory is that they are Norwegian. Don’t ask me the historic details… I’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia when I have the chance. Norway has some investments here because of it – one of them is a non-governmental organization that the Peace Corps works with. They do lots of interesting work developing agriculture and other businesses all over the country. When Azerbaijan broke away from Russia in 1991, all of its citizens received pieces of land from the Soviet cooperatives. And the Soviets ruined the land – flooded it with pesticides and never replenished the nutrients taken out by farming. So all the Azeris received a piece of nutrient-free land, but few of them knew anything about farming or any type of agriculture. So lots of NGO’s are here teaching them about non-toxic pest control, crop rotation, general planting/fertilizing, and specialties like cattle and artificial insemination, dairy practices, beekeeping, and so on. A Norwegian NGO is heavily involved in that, and the Peace Corps is working with them.

Lots of people have asked me about the upcoming holidays. Peace Corps people spend Thanksgiving together, so that’s what I’ll probably do. I’ll also spend Christmas with Peace Corps people, then again with my host family. Christmas is celebrated in Azerbaijan – yes, with Muslims – on December 31. Instead of Santa Claus they have something called “Saxta Baba” (pronounced Shakhta Baba). “Saxta” means frozen, and baba is a type of uncle. I’ll give you a better description of their rendition of Santa when the time comes.

(Back home, in Corat…) Tomorrow, Saturday, I’m going to see some extra-ancient history here. They have caves and petroglyphs. At over 5000 years old, these relics pre-date the Egyptian pyramids. I’ll also see mud volcanoes. They’re huge piles of mud that have mud flowing out of them continuously, like lava. They aren’t as big as volcanoes, but they’re pretty darned big for mud piles. That’s for another email.

I have lots and lots of stories to tell about my experiences here already, but this message is already getting long. I might not be able to email you much before December 9 – that’s when my training is done and I’ll be tested for my language skills and my understanding of my pending community economic development work. If I pass their tests and am moved into my two-year job deeper in the country I’ll have a lot, lot, lot more time to write and a lot more to write about. But if you have any questions, please email me whenever you want and I’ll reply when I can.

Julie