St. Patrick's Day

St. Patty’s Day passed me by unnoticed. I didn’t see one – not one – indicator of St. Patrick’s Day here. No funny hats, clovers, or leprechauns. Nothing green, except the natural stuff growing outside. Nonetheless, it was a good day.

I spent the day sitting next to a guy named Keith McLean, so there must be something Irish in his past. He’s from Guyana, and I know from our conversations that his lineage is not from Ireland. He has lived in the States for about 27 years, works for the World Bank, and he is their Senior Social Development Economist in the Sustainable Development Department for Europe and Central Asia Region. For those of you who don’t know what the World Bank is, they fund development projects for needy countries all over the planet. It’s a fantastic organization, and I met three of their employees on St. Patty’s Day. Here’s what happened…

I went to a small conference in Baku on March 17. Its purpose was to bring AzRIP together with an organization that focuses on the social issues of internally displaced people (IDPs – basically, they’re refugees). About half the people I work with at AzRIP are IDPs, and they are particularly interested in helping their brethren. Azerbaijan has 1.5 million refugees due to the Azeri land that Armenia took over about 20 years ago. The countries of the world don’t recognize the occupied land as Armenian – all countries recognize it as part of Azerbaijan – yet Armenia still occupies it and kicked out all of the Azeri people. That’s not the full story. I’m reading a book on the whole thing now, so I’ll tell you more about it later. But it’s a lot like the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, except that more land has been taken here and more people have been killed, the rest of world is in agreement over what's right, and pot-shots that kill people are still regular events. It just doesn’t have the publicity.

There were 23 people at the conference, but the table that its attendees sat around only held about 15 people, plus the translator. Because I don’t speak Azerbaijani well – and because the head of AzRIP likes me a lot – I was offered a chair right by the translator, which was where Keith McLean, Joana de Berry (World Bank Social Development Specialist), and Satoshi Ishihara (World Bank's AzRIP financing guru) were sitting. The questions they posed and issues they raised during the conference really kept things going – conversations that were very open and prodding. Like nothing I’ve seen since arriving here. Being near the translator was great, too, so I could better understand the intricacies of what people were saying. Also a first since I left training in December.

Keith is a guy who really understands the plight of minorities and refugees at the local level. He’s obviously seen it all and he says it’s all the same everywhere – ex-Soviet countries, Africa, Europe and the Americas, the Middle East, the Far East, everywhere. Everywhere, at the local level, there are self-appointed leaders who really run the show, no matter what the electoral (or other) system is like.

Here, in Azerbaijan, the self-appointed leaders are recognized. Every city and village has an elected set of officials (called the Ex.Com, for Executive Committee) and an unelected set of officials, called the Municipality. They also have other leaders who run the show that don’t fit under either heading, and we often have lunch and tea with those folks when we visit the villages. The last time we had an elaborate lunch was a few weeks ago with a guy who had lost the December election, but was still running a lot of village organizations. What I’ve seen in many villages is the most vocal school teacher running the show (Keith said that’s common, worldwide). They're often math teachers, but sometimes they can be history teachers, too. I’m not talking about university professors – these are grade school teachers in rural villages. They are always men, and are often the most highly respected people in the community.

The villages have women teachers, but they aren’t part of any authoritative group – at least not until AzRIP arrives. When AzRIP mobilizes a community, they guarantee that a certain percent of the people present are women. It’s not a lot, but if they didn’t have that policy, few women would be there at all. And after the people decide on their project (roads, water, electricity, whatever) and hold elections to decide who will lead the project, a certain percent must be women. It’s about 10 percent. Not much, but better than nothing. But it's probably about the same as what we have in the US government. Youth minorities are also accounted for during decision-making, as are older people (which isn’t a problem – older people are always held in highest regard here).

During the conference, Keith asked questions about open and closed ballots. The Azeri IDP organization’s leaders said that they always have open ballots when they elect people to head their committees. They do it by a raise of hands. Keith explained to them the limitations of open ballots – the social pressures put on people by their friends, family, and social or political leaders. It never occurred to me that this concept would have to be explained to anyone – particularly to a government-based social development group. But they didn’t seem to understand it. They said that closed ballots caused more problems because nobody knew how other people were voting, so they couldn’t trust each other. They gave some other explanation – one I couldn’t understand, so I can’t tell you – and they never seemed to understand the point of social pressures during open elections.

Keith kept asking many good questions, but his real influence came the next day when the World Bank, AzRIP, and IDP people went to Samaxi (the rayon I live in) to visit a village community that completed a project last year. Once there, Keith asked questions of the villagers, through the translator, and politely instructed the AzRIP and IDP people to keep their mouths shut so the villagers could talk. It was great to finally hear what the real people had to say.

First, some background: this Samaxi community has worked with AzRIP, which uses closed ballots. They have not worked with the IDP organization, which uses open ballots. But to show the IDP people who came with us the villagers’ views on balloting, he asked them point-blank whether or not they would have elected the same people if they had used an open ballot during the AzRIP project elections. And they said “no.” They said that they would have been pressured into voting differently if others in the community could see their choices.

He asked the women if they felt they had an active role in the process, and they hemmed and hawed, saying not much of anything. Their response was just about as good as a “no.” There were only two women there, surrounded by about 15 village men, and they looked pretty intimidated by the whole situation. Being surrounded by a black man (Keith), a couple of Westerners, and their self-appointed village leaders was probably frightening enough. (BTW - I’ve only seen two other black people in Azerbaijan – one was on a bus in Baku and the other is a PC volunteer.)

Keith also asked the people direct questions about how their money was handled and invested, how they were mobilized (what kind of pressure was put on them to help), whether or not they got what they wanted or expected, and how they were treated.

While the villagers tried to answer his questions, the head honcho from AzRIP couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She kept trying to answer questions for the people, as though she knew more than they do about their village’s situation. Granted, she is Azerbaijani, is smart, and knows a lot, but I don't always understand where her ideas come from. I do try, though. During lunch the day of the conference, I sat with Keith, Joanna, and the AzRIP honcho, and she gave incorrect answers to questions from Keith and Joanna. So I corrected her. I couldn’t help myself. Simple things. For instance, she told them that the people in Azerbaijan don’t speak Russian. Well, they do. Everyone who was in school before 1991 does, and most in school after that do - there are plenty of leftover Russian language teachers to go around.


Until 1991, Russian was taught to every student in every school in the country, so anyone over about 25 or 30 years old knows Russian. And everyone over 35 is fluent. As I told Keith, Joanna, and the AzRIP honcho at lunch, whenever people in the villages find out that I don’t speak Azerbaijani, their next question always is “do you speak Russian?” – and they ask me in Russian! Nearly everyone here knows it, and because so many people know it, there are plenty of people who can teach it as a second language in the schools. And they do. After all, it’s better than no second language at all. In Azeri markets, every good from everywhere in the world (even from the US) has a Russian label. The Colgate toothpaste I bought today has a Russian label. PCVs in the northernmost parts of Azerbaijan tell me that the people mainly speak Russian, particularly up by Dagestan and over by Georgia. To hear the AzRIP honcho, you’d think nobody here knows the language. I don't know why she'd lie to Keith, but I corrected her right then and there and she didn't seem to mind. She still likes me a heck of a lot.

I corrected a few other errors of hers over lunch, and am curious to know why she felt she had to bend the truth so much. She’s about 50, so she was about 30 when Azerbaijan broke off from the Soviets. That means she was born, raised, educated, and lived most of her life in the Soviet world. From what people here tell me, authorities back then were never to be trusted, just as the current authorities (the police and others) are not trusted. So maybe not trusting World Bank authorities is a natural behavior. Luckily Keith could see through all of that and was able to manage her and the others at the conference and at the village visit so smoothly they didn’t seem to know they were being managed. He's a very impressive guy. Another World Bank person at the conference with the same skill was Satoshi Ishihara. Both Satoshi and Keith are openly direct – so direct and honest with no side-stepping or passive aggressiveness at all, just the facts. Very refreshing! They hit people with whatever topic they needed to cover and that's that. No pain, no nothing. It's beautiful.

Well, I’ll probably never have the chance to go out to a village with a translator or a World Bank Social Development Advisor again. But now I know what questions to ask the villagers when I'm more Azeri fluent. I’m learning more every day and hold conversations regularly. I still can’t understand people when they’re talking full-speed, but I have the same problem in Boston.

I hope to stay in touch with the World Bank folks I met. Keith is going to give me the web address of one of World Bank’s internal web sites where I can find out more about projects that are similar to AzRIP. He said that a third of World Bank funding goes to projects just like theirs. One of my goals here is to help internationalize AzRIP, so knowing what the others are doing will help me a lot.

In return, I am giving Keith the map of the political structure of Azerbaijan that I showed you in my Ides of March blog entry. He also said he’d be happy to answer any questions I have. We’ll see about that. He’s got to be a very busy guy. After Azerbaijan, he’s going to Romania and Albania, then back to Washington on April 1. Joanna de Berry is a British woman who has done research in Afghanistan and several other places with warfare and lots of displaced children. She’s written a book on it with a few other people. She has a PhD in Anthropology… if only I had known a person could get a useful job like hers with a degree in Anthropology, I might well have changed my major. But I’ve ventured off into some very interesting fields with my couple of degrees in Biology.

There was a photographer at the conference and some people took pictures during our visit to the village. I should be able to get my hands on copies of those photos, and will put them on my blog if I do.

The biggest holiday of the year is coming up in a few days and I’ll have another 10 days off that I’ll use to catch up on work. Because I go to villages and conferences all the time, I have no time to do the “real” work I have told AzRIP I’d do. Last month I found about 10 projects to do – all having to do with editing their English documents and helping their web site. Now I have too much to do again, so I’ll work during the holidays.