Nobody is going to see this blog entry, so I'll go ahead and post it. Actually, my neurologist might see it because about an hour ago he said he might go look at it. (If you're here, Hi Dr. F!) But nobody else is thinking about it, that's a given.

This week the New York Times printed an article about women in the Peace Corps - how they're abused and their efforts toward justice are swept under the carpet. I can relate. I posted a comment on the NY Times relating some of my experiences - not all of them, that's for sure. I could write a book about my experiences there, one book on the good and another somewhat longer book on the bad.

Here's the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11corps.html?emc=eta1

And here's my comment: http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11corps.html?permid=200#comment200

You may need a subscription to the Times to access those links, so here's the content of the article. Sorry, but I'm not putting my comment here. (To those of you who can't access it - no, I was not raped while in the Peace Corps.) (Oh, and I wasn't murdered there, either.)

New York TimesMay 10, 2011Peace Corps Volunteers Speak Out on RapeBy SHERYL GAY STOLBERGWASHINGTON — Jess Smochek arrived in Bangladesh in 2004 as a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer with dreams of teaching English and “helping the world.” She left six weeks later a rape victim after being brutalized in an alley by a knife-wielding gang.

When she returned to the United States, the reception she received from Peace Corps officials was as devastating, she said, as the rape itself. In Bangladesh, she had been given scant medical care; in Washington, a counselor implied that she was to blame for the attack. For years she kept quiet, feeling “ashamed and embarrassed and guilty.”

Today, Ms. Smochek is among a growing group of former Peace Corps volunteers who are speaking out about their sexual assaults, prompting scrutiny from Congress and a pledge from the agency for reform. In going public, they are exposing an ugly sliver of life in the Peace Corps: the dangers that volunteers face in far-flung corners of the world and the inconsistent — and, some say, callous — treatment they receive when they become crime victims.

“These women are alone in many cases, and they’re in rough parts of the world,” said Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, who says the Peace Corps’ promises do not go far enough and is sponsoring legislation to force changes in the way it treats victims of sexual assault. “We want the United States to rush in and treat them as a victim of crime like they would be treated here at home.”

Founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps has 8,655 volunteers and trainees, as young as 21 and as old as 86, serving in 77 countries. For most, service is, as the agency’s Web site boasts, “a life-defining leadership experience.”

But from 2000 to 2009, on average, 22 Peace Corps women each year reported being the victims of rape or attempted rape, the agency says. During that time, more than 1,000 Peace Corps volunteers reported sexual assaults, including 221 rapes or attempted rapes. Because sexual crimes often go unreported, experts say the incidence is likely to be higher, though they and the Peace Corps add that it is difficult to assess whether the volunteers face any greater risk overseas than women in the United States do.

On Wednesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will convene a hearing to examine what its chairwoman, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, called “serious crimes” committed against Peace Corps volunteers, including murder; in announcing the hearing, her office cited reports of “gross mismanagement of sexual assault complaints.”

Lois Puzey, whose daughter Kate was murdered in 2009 while posted in Benin, will testify. So will Ms. Smochek, now a board member of First Response Action, a fledgling advocacy group founded by another former volunteer, Casey Frazee. Ms. Frazee was sexually assaulted in South Africa in 2009 and came home, she said, determined to not “let the Peace Corps toss me off like I was an isolated incident.”

In an interview Monday, the director of the Peace Corps, Aaron S. Williams, said he was committed to revamping the agency’s practices to create a more “victim-centered approach.”

He insisted that it was safe for women to serve in the Peace Corps. “We do not place Peace Corps volunteers in unsafe environments,” he said.

But he said the agency must modernize its procedures to “make sure that we provide compassionate care” to crime victims. Already, Mr. Williams has made some changes, including hiring a “victim’s advocate” who began work on Monday and signing an agreement with a nationally known rape crisis group to re-examine his organization’s training and policies.

The changes reflect the work of Ms. Frazee, who has spent the last 18 months tracking down Peace Corps sexual assault survivors by reaching out through social networking sites and her blog. Last year, her work attracted the attention of the ABC News program “20/20,” which ran a segment on the women in January. In recent months, Ms. Frazee, 28, has collected more than two dozen affidavits from other women, who have shared stories that Mr. Williams called “tragic.”

In interviews and documents, they paint a picture of what many call a “blame the victim” culture at the Peace Corps.

Jessica Gregg, who was drugged and sexually assaulted in 2007 in Mozambique, said a Peace Corps medical officer “made me write in my testimony that I was intoxicated” and suggested that “I willingly had sex with this guy.” She and a number of other women complained that a training video the Peace Corps uses places too much emphasis on the role of alcohol in sexual assaults; in response, Mr. Williams said the video would be replaced.

Many, like Kate Finn, who was raped in Costa Rica and now works in the district attorney’s office in Denver as a victim’s advocate, complain that they are not advised on how to prosecute their attackers; a 2010 survey of Peace Corps volunteers revealed that nearly 40 percent of those raped and 50 percent of those sexually assaulted did not report their attacks. Ms. Finn said that her attacker’s family was on the police force and that she “did not feel safe” reporting what had happened.

Still others say they are given inadequate information about counseling. Karestan Koenen, who sought therapy on her own and is now a psychologist who teaches at Columbia and Harvard, said she was shocked to discover that women today were confronting the same difficulties as she did when she was raped in 1991 in Niger.

“My own experience,” she said, “was that the treatment by the Peace Corps was worse than the rape.”

The women say Mr. Williams’s efforts, while promising, are not enough. They want Congress to pass legislation requiring, among other things, that the Peace Corps develop “sexual assault response teams” to collect forensic evidence and provide emergency health care and advocacy for victims after attacks. Mr. Williams said he was open to such legislation but has not committed to supporting it.

But whether such a bill would pass Congress is unclear. Representative Niki Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts, is co-sponsoring Mr. Poe’s bill, but other Democrats are skittish about it. They worry that the legislation, and Wednesday’s hearing, might be used to undermine the Peace Corps — the legacy of a Democratic president — and cut its funding.

The women of First Response Action insist that was never their intention; they say they want to improve the Peace Corps, not destroy it. Ms. Smochek, now 30 and a graduate student, said her primary goal was to alert future volunteers, and in the process perhaps bring some solace to other sexual assault survivors “to let them know they are not alone.”

Yes, I'm Back from the USSR. I wonder if I'll ever be "Back in the USSR"? Great song - the first one on the White Album.

I spent a week in Raleigh and am now in Beaufort, NC, relaxing, reflecting, and rearranging my future. It will probably be the same as it would have been if I'd stayed in Azerbaijan two years, but the cultural reentry must be a lot easier after only six months.

It's good to be back in a place where I can take care of my health with no hassles. Aside from their local health-related superstitions, preventative medicine isn't practiced in Azerbaijan - at least not that I saw. Granted, it's not as well practiced as it should be here, but we are a good century ahead of most of the world in our basic understanding of the effects of medicines, exercise, fat, cholesterol, sugar, and blood pressure. Just washing myself and my clothing in clean water seems like a luxury. A washing machine feels decadent.

After I spend a few weeks visiting friends in Beaufort, I plan to do some traveling. I don't know how far I'll get or where I'll go - at this point, I'm just planning to go to the mountains to see my mom. She just had knee-replacement surgery and could use my help. Then I might visit my brother over by Dallas, and maybe head to the southwest from there. I'd like to see New Mexico again.

This should be my last entry in this blog. When I'm ready, I'll start another one under another name. Everyone on this blog will receive an email saying where to find it. It will cover my travels in the US.... they maybe not as interesting as my Azeri experiences, but who knows? Wait and see.

*********

Update in August... I spent a month in Beaufort and a month in Brevard helping my mom - she needed a lot after having her knee replaced. Then I spent the summer living in Carrboro, over near Chapel Hill, and started job hunting. On Aug 21, I'll move to Raleigh to continue the hunt. I'll be living in the Five Points area with a friend and her sweet Golden Retriever, which will be a nice change that I look forward to getting used to. Finding a job won't be easy, but I really want to get back to work.

My health is far, far better now. My blood pressure has been 110/70 since May and that persistent earache is gone... it took my body six months to fight it off. Two strong antibiotics - in March and in May - did nothing to make it go away. My sinus infection is just about gone now, too. The after-effects of that bad generic drug cleared up this summer, and my digestive problems went away before I left Azerbaijan. During my last week there, I lived in Chi's apartment in Sumgayit - it has central heat, a bathroom with a shower, sink, toilet, and clean water, plus a kitchen with a sink, refrigerator, and stove. Living in clean digs was all I needed to bring my intestines back to normal. It also helped rid me of the relentless itching on my scalp. There's no telling what that was, and I don't really want to know.

The biggest change is in my perspective. My needs, desires, and expectations are reorganized, re-calibrated, and re-prioritized now. Everything is simplified, thanks to life in Azerbaijan. Now my US life is much happier with much less, allowing me to feel comfortable and happy in an aching, changing, unpredictable US economy.

It will be interesting to see where we're headed now. After all that's happened to me in the last year, I'm more curious than ever about what I'll be doing over the next year. I already know it will be interesting. Most of all, I'm interested in where we're all headed together - our collective future. That's the real question.... what will the world look like in a year? In two?

If you really want to read about my Easter in Azerbaijan, you'll need to contact me directly. I have kept this blog page, but don't want it to be posted to the public. It lives on my computer now.

(No, I don’t keep track of William Shatner’s birthday. It’s just that my blog postings are usually written on some day of significance and today I wanted to write but didn’t know anything significant that happened. So I googled a birthday and this is what I got.)Today I went for a morning walk for the first time in a very long time. I need to do this more often, and now that it’s light out earlier and the mornings aren’t so cold, I will. It’s not hard to walk on cold mornings; it’s just hard to get out of bed when there’s no heat.During today’s walk I wore my white Nikes, and they attracted a lot of attention. Since moving to Samaxi in December it’s been cold, so I’ve worn my dark brown boots. Those get plenty of stares and dirty looks because they have treads are aren’t the heeled things that most women wear around here. But they never got the look of fear that my white Nikes yielded this morning. Some people, mostly older women, looked at me with fear. The men looked kind of amused, and some young and middle-aged women just averted their eyes. The people who know me didn’t have any reaction other than the normal friendliness. I just said “sabahiniz xeyir” (good morning) to all of them, and most of them returned it.I wonder why the older women are afraid of my shoes? I know they see them as little kids’ shoes; nothing for an adult to be wearing, especially someone my age. I wish they’d just try on some Nikes and walk around in them for awhile. Though I guess if they’ve been wearing heels most of their lives, flat shoes might not feel too good. But it’s worth a try. I'll give it a try the next time an open-minded Azeri woman pays a visit.Older women and professional women are called “xanim,” out of respect. When someone is addressing me in a professional setting, they call me “Julia xanim.” It’s pronounced “hanem” – the “h” is really that hacking noise that comes out of the back of your throat before you spit. It’s a common sound here. Two letters in their alphabet use it: the “x” is a hefty version and a milder version is the “ğ”. Plus, people spit a lot here, so I hear it all the time when I’m walking around. Well, the men spit. Women just hold it all in. They don’t use much Kleenex and never blow their noses, but there are lots of people with colds and flus here, so it must go somewhere. I’ve heard Basira spit when she’s in the tualet, so maybe they just wait for the right time and place.This week when I was out for a walk with Basira and her grandson, she taught him how to spit. His name is Ali and he’s 12. He has a cold that’s clearing up, and he was trying to clear the junk out of his sinuses onto the street by holding one nostril shut and blowing it out. To my relief, Basira told him to stop doing that, but then she told him how to get rid of it another way. She taught him to inhale it into the back of his throat, hack it up, and spit it onto the street. It took him a few tries, but when he finally did it correctly, she patted him on the back and congratulated him with a “sağ ol” which means “thank you,” “good bye,” “good for you,” and a host of other things depending on the context and circumstances. I was amused instead of disgusted, but I’ve gotten so used to seeing guys spit around here it wasn’t as big a deal as it would have been six months ago.Lots of things that weren’t normal in October are commonplace now, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll stop coming up with things to write about on my blog. Lots of things that are customary or habit in the States are already lost. And things that seemed unusual to me when I arrived are normal now. While walking by a butcher this morning, I saw the back half of a seal lying on the ground. It was cut cleanly in half. I don’t know where the head half was, but the back half, with fins, was just lying there on the pavement along a major street that runs through town. Now that was something I’ve never seen before, so it stuck in my memory. But how many things don’t I notice anymore? And how hard will it be to drive a car when I return? My guess is that I’ll need to practice somewhere safe – a huge, empty parking lot like I did when I was 16. I just took a break to eat breakfast. The kids who were here yesterday (see The Day After Novruz blog) are still here, and now they’re watching Dennis the Menace cartoons on TV. Dennis, his mom, and especially his dad look really funny with Azerbaijani gibberish coming out their mouths. I couldn’t help laughing. This particular Dennis the Menace cartoon was set in the Mid-East. The bad guys looked very Persian, with turbans, gowns, black hair and moustaches, and black eyes. The good guys that Dennis hung out were from the Mid-East, too, but they didn’t have so much dark hair, no moustaches, and wore their gowns with shirts and ties under them, like the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia. And Dennis was riding a camel. I wonder what these kids think of all that? Anything? They’ve probably never been out of Samaxi and probably don’t know anything about the Mid-East. Much of the Azeri culture comes from Iran, but people here don’t seem very fond of that country. There are no gowns or turbans here – the people dress like most Russians/Eastern Europeans. And, regardless of their location or culture, the people see themselves as European. This is the first democracy in this part of the world and, as I’ve said before, they are not religious, though that might be changing as they try to establish their identity. I look forward to watching what happens here.The local people I know who have enough money are trying to leave. I know a few who are going to the States or Canada and a few who want to go to Western Europe. One is getting a US residence visa for his mom now, and once she is over there, he’ll go over himself. It’s easier to get a residence visa when you have immediate family in the States. But marriage is the quickest and easiest way to get a residence visa, and I know a few American Peace Corps volunteers and employees who have gotten married to Azeris while here.

Most Azeri people don’t have the means to leave, though. And their family ties are super-strong, so if their immediate families can’t go, they rarely leave. Another Azeri I know speaks English, French, and German, and wants to move to Europe. I don’t know what’s keeping her here, but it looks like she’s stuck for now. Someday I’ll ask her.I received good responses from the blog I sent by email yesterday – most people see this as a pretty tough place to live. What I haven’t talked about is what is easy about it compared to the US. In the US, people are regularly bombarded with decisions, choices, and dealings that create a high-stress environment that I don’t see here. I’ll write more about that later. Right now it’s time to go to the Internet Club to post this and then get some work done.Çox sağ ol!

I thought I was done writing about Novruz. I figured I had to be after all I've written over the last week. But I’m not. I woke up today with another sinus infection. Actually, it’s the same thing I mentioned before – the cold that never goes away. It’s been a constant ear infection for nearly three months, and every now and then it expands to my throat, behind my eye and into other sinus-connected areas of my head. I’m so totally fed up with being sick, I got out of bed this morning, boiled some water and used it to clean my hands and face. Then I pulled out some cleaner that actually kills stuff and cleaned all of the surfaces in my living space. Some of these areas haven’t been cleaned in years. The dirt is thick, like paint, the paint underneath it is peeling off of everything. There are dead fly and wasp carcasses lying in every crevice and corner. Most of them are hidden by curtains and furniture, so you don't see them unless you live here.That pretty well explains the world here. Generally, the people here think that if you hide it from the surface, nobody will see it. I hate to say it, but that’s true of the Azeri people at the Peace Corps offices, too. I forget sometimes that they aren’t really Westernized, even if they think they are. Granted, many people in the States see or show only the surface of things, too, but it’s not as prevalent as it is here. It’s really the standard here. Along with that, they believe that if you say something is true, that makes it so. They don’t get the concept that what a person says and does is very often a totally different thing. These people are intelligent, so I suspect they understand that and know it, but they don't show it. If you refute them and point them at the truth, they see it right away. So, maybe I’m wrong – maybe they just act that way toward us (Americans) because they think we’re naïve. Or maybe it's just a whole different way of thinking and behaving that I don't understand yet. Whatever the case, they are fooled by the packaging in people, houses, etc. Here’s a good example… Chi (the PCV from NYC) and I were walking down a street in Baku a couple of weeks ago and were admiring the beautiful buildings that were being put up. They’re an elaborate European style -- like the old buildings in upscale Paris, except that they’re new. When they're done, people will feel like they're walking down fantastic streets of Europe. After walking a few blocks, we discovered that they weren’t building new buildings. They were covering the old ones. So when we passed by an open door to a five-sotry apartment building that was being covered with a European facade, we went inside. It was true. They were covering the old, slummy buildings with beautiful surfaces, but the inside was filthy, leaking, and falling apart. Each building has a courtyard in the middle where people string their laundry lines and store stuff you’d normally find in a garage. We went in and looked around, and it was full of trash, junk, and who-knows-what. The walls looked like the inside of the hemam in my house (see the photos under Novruz Eve) and smelled far worse; like they've never been cleaned at all, with loads of insects, fungus, and surely mice and rats. We entered a couple more buildings, and they were all the same. One was partly painted and didn’t look quite so bad, but the outside of the building that people saw from the street still painted a totally different picture from what was really inside. Chi and I commented that the buildings were a good metaphor for the country. They’re making Baku look fantastic, because that’s the only place that the visitors with real money will ever see, while the rest of the country is aching for schools, roads, water, power, and other basic infrastructure. And that metaphor carries through to the businesses and the people.That is true in all countries and cultures to some extent. The extremities are broader apart here, with almost nothing in the middle. One of the things Peace Corps is trying to do is fill in that middle part. It'll take a lot of work. More than two years. It's already been more than two decades, and will surely be more than two more.Well, Basira's grandkids and grandnieces/nephews arrived today at 8am, which reminded me that school is out this week for Novruz. It’s like spring break, except here the teachers don’t work during the break. The other three PCVs in Samaxi all work in schools, so they keep me informed about what’s going on (or not going on).The kids are watching Toy Story on TV. They could be watching it at home on a big plasma TV instead of Basira’s tiny old one, so their parents must be off doing vacation stuff on their own. The ones who are here are good kids and kind of nice to have around. Most kids here are quiet and don’t cause any trouble. The friends who work in schools tell me that the boys can get obnoxious when there are a few of them hanging out together – it's the same everywhere – but the extent of the trouble that they get into is way more limited here than I remember from when I was a kid. But I was in a suburb very close to Chicago. Samaxi is probably more comparable to smaller US rural towns.I need to go find an Internet connection so I can upload this to you. Then I need to work - my vacation will be spent catching up on loads of work for AzRIP's Baku office.Novruz Bayram Mübarək!Julie

Novruz Bayram Mübarək! That’s the greeting for today, and it means New Day Holiday Congratulations! It's a spring equinox holiday that is celebrated in all the places with Persian influence, particularly Iran, the Central Asian “stan” countries, and some of the Mid-Eastern countries. In the Azeri language there are a lot more “stan” countries than there are in English. In Azerbaijani, Georgia is Gürgüstan, India is Hindistan, and Armenia is Ermənistan. India does’t celebrate Novruz, and either Armenia or Georgia doesn’t, but I’m not sure which. They’re both a pretty good mixture of Catholic and Islamic, so it’s hard to remember. Anyway, those are the stans that don’t celebrate Novruz.In the weeks leading up to Novruz, people do their spring cleaning and cook for days and days. Basira cleaned up a bit, but nothing like most of the people I’ve seen around here. That’s all the women around town have been doing for the last week. She does work full-time (a rarity in Azerland) and she has been cooking a heck of a lot, though, so food is sitting around everywhere. Stacks of baklava, fruit (apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, oranges, tangerines, pears, raisins), salads, walnuts, chestnuts, rosehip cake, and a lot of breads and other rolls and stuff. Everything that takes any sort of preparation or cooking is done at home, except the candy. There’s a lot of candy lying around. That’s pretty normal for an Azeri home, but in January I told Basira I don’t like that stuff and she hid it away somewhere. It only came out for Novruz. For Novruz she made my favorite foods, like mimosa salad – a layering of thickly shredded beets, carrots, more vegetables, and hard boiled eggs, usually with a little bit of yogurt or mayonnaise spread between the layers. Because of Novruz, I’ve had mimosa salad every day this week, except yesterday when I filled up with a new salad I’d never had before – don’t know its name or what it is, but it’s raw vegetables that Basira says will help clean out my digestive system (whether they’re making things better or worse is debatable). Here’s a picture of what’s on the table now. The mimosa salad is the round one in front. The cake up in back is rose hip cake. And the little green box is my gift to Basira – some Russian aspirin to help her arthritis:(Remember: double-click the picture to make it bigger!)

A lot more food is stashed away in other rooms and places I don’t know about. There are times I’ve gone looking for food and can’t find it, but when Basira is home she brings it out from hiding. And when I have people over, she brings out tons of it. Mariel even tried to help me find the food once. We were both hungry and looked all over the place, but couldn’t find anything edible. Then when Basira came home an hour later, it appeared out of nowhere. And there was plenty. Yesterday we went to the bazaar and I tried to buy a few things that I can’t find around the house, but Basira told me not to buy them because we already have them. So I believe her. It’s okay to not know where the food is. I don’t want to cook and I don’t want to eat too much, so I don’t need to know where the stuff is stashed. But I am curious.I do know where the meat is kept. It's chicken and it lives out in the yard until it’s time for plucking and cooking. There were about a dozen chickens when I arrived in December, and now we’re down to two. The biggest one – Horace – gave his life for Novruz. Every morning since I arrived in Samaxi I have been awakened in the morning by Horace. He's a huge, loud, obnoxious rooster. Every morning Horace would try to one-up all of the roosters in Samaxi with his loudest crow, screaming for hours on end. He was the leader of Basira’s pack of chickens and, although I kind of liked him sometimes because he had such a distinct and boisterous personality, I was fed up with hearing him crow at 4:30 every morning outside my window and go at it nonstop all day long. Sometimes he was so loud it sounded like he was in my room.Today is the first day since mid-December that I didn’t wake up to Horace. I still woke up at 4:30, but was able to go back to sleep until 8am. Horace will be part of the Novruz dinner celebration. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat Horace, though…I know him too well. But it’s very good to know that I won’t have to listen to his squawking and yelling anymore.Here’s Horace – you can even tell from the picture that he had a real attitude: I sleep a lot here. In the States I usually went to bed around 10 or 11pm and woke up around 6am, or whenever sunrise was. Here I go to sleep around 9pm and wake up at 8am every day. Even when Horace was alive I would go back to sleep in the morning, but he wouldn’t let me keep sleeping as soundly as I did today.So I get about 11 hours of sleep every day. Today I took a two-hour nap, too, so I’ll have 13 hours of sleep. I never thought I was capable of sleeping this much, and I attribute it to the cold (the extra sleep today is due to my ailing digestive system) and the exhaustion of translating language all day. It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning without heat, but we’ll see what happens in summer. I always awaken with sunrise, so if things go the way I hope they will, in summer I’ll get out of bed early and go for a walk every morning like I did for the last 20 years before coming here. That’s the only routine I really miss.Here’s where I sleep. It’s the nicest room in the house and not at all typical of Peace Corps Volunteer living quarters. Most PCVs have a tiny little bed like I had in Jorat. This is a king-sized bed covered with my Peace Corps sleeping bag: In this corner, with the blue plastic pan and bottle of water, is where I brush my teeth when it’s too cold to go outside to do it. When the pan is clean I wash my face here, too, by heating water in my electric pot and mixing it with filtered water:And this is unusual for a PCV’s bedroom, too – most of it is filled with Basira’s stuff, but you can see my black wool coat hanging on a door, and behind that door is where I hang the nice clothes that can’t be stuffed in drawers:It’s nighttime now and it looks like all anyone has done for the holiday today is eat and lay around at home. A couple of people have visited, but that’s fewer than we see on any normal Sunday. Basira has spent most of the evening over at her brother’s house, not far from here. I don’t feel like eating because my digestive system is a mess, so I’ve stayed here at my computer all day. A little while ago Basira came home with a couple of grandkids or nieces/nephews or something (they’re hard to keep track of), and they sat and watched me type into my computer. They think it’s pretty cool. Basira insisted on feeding me, so I told her I won’t eat anything that’s not cooked until my digestive system is back to normal, and she made me some dolma.There were some fireworks tonight, but real action was last night, on Novruz Eve. I could hear firecrackers most of the day and there were people all over the place, shopping and visiting. And last night three kids came to the door – knocking and running away several times to cajole Basira into bringing them treats to eat. She gave them lots of baklava, buttery rolls, and fruit. But today not many people are out. They’re probably all pigging out at home, watching TV, and sleeping. The power has been going on and off all night, so TV wouldn’t be great. Thanks to its backup battery, a laptop computer is a far better box to stare at.There were lots of celebrations on Tuesday, too. One thing that people all over town did was build a bonfire and jump over it three times. We did that at work after eating a Novruz dinner on Tuesday (I’ve had four Novruz dinners so far this week). The fire the guys at work built was made from office trash. That’s something we have a lot of – the garbage hasn’t been picked up since January, so there’s plenty of it for hosting bonfires whenever we want. It was a pretty big fire and the guys jumped over it three times when it was chest high. I waited until it was about knee high before jumping over it. My clothes aren’t flammable or anything; I just wanted to be on the safe side. I never want to do anything stupid that would make me have to go to an Azeri hospital. Someone told me that when you jump over the fire you’re supposed to say something special and all the cares and worries of the previous year go away. Well, the Azeri folks I work with didn’t say anything when they jumped, so I didn’t either. But I did let a few wishes flit through my mind. I’ll have to use the Internet Club to check my email and update my blog this week. Our office is closed for Novruz until a week from Monday and I haven’t seen my email since Thursday, so it’s getting backed up. The Internet Club I’ve been going to gets more difficult to visit all the time. It’s a bunch of guys smoking cigarettes, playing online poker, and watching Internet porn. And, as I mentioned a couple of months ago, kissing and hugging each other whenever they meet (and then some). This week I’m going to try a new Internet Club that’s closer to my home. All of its computer monitors face the window to the busy street outside. That must minimize the poker and porn, so it might be a bit more comfortable for me. One of these days I’ll let you know how it is. (Update - I visited that Internet Club and they wouldn't let me use one of the computers that faces the window and door - they would only let me use one that costs twice as much and sits behind a set of curtains, away from public view. I insisted on using the less expensive, visible computers, but they were adamant. So I left and will not return.)I get a lot more email from Peace Corps than I ever anticipated, and a lot less from the States. When I used to send my blog entries via email, I received a lot more email. Lately I’ve been getting so little from the States, I’m sending the Novruz blogs via email and putting them up on my blog. At the same time I post the Novruz blogs, I’ll also be posting my blogs for The Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, which are all in the same week. I've been traveling around Azerbaijan so much this week I haven’t had any time to log on the Internet to post anything, so I’m putting all three holidays up at the same time. It’s a lot of stuff to read, and not everyone will read all of it. Take your time. And if you have anything questions or responses of any kind, be sure to send me an email.

In the first quarter of 2010 I have had six weeks off from work. I've worked during most of that vacation time, but most people don't. The Azeri people might not get a lot done with this much vacation, but sure does look like a pretty nice way to live life. Novruz is the big holiday of the year. It’s the one everyone is waiting for. Endless food, gifts, relaxation, fireworks, and even kids at the door looking for candy and treats. Novruz means “new day” in Persian (that’s the same as Iranian, but they say "Persian" to be politically correct and to avoid offending Westerners). The Azeri language is really Turkish, but all Islamic languages seem to have a lot of Persian in them. Some words here are the same as ones I learned in Malaysia and Indonesia a long, long time ago, like sabah (tomorrow) and the days of the week. Although Iran is not a favorite nationality of most Americans, their history and culture are always fascinating.Novruz is a holiday that’s over 3000 years old. It celebrates Spring and the Equinox, signifying a New Year. They also celebrate the New Year in January, but this is a different thing and a much bigger deal.Celebrations start four weeks before the equinox, and every Tuesday night leading up to the equinox there's a heck of a lot going on. Bonfires, huge dinners, gift-giving, firecrackers and stuff like that. In some places, on the Tuesday night just before the equinox, the festival is even bigger than it is on the equinox. I didn’t see much of that - the area it's really practiced in is about 50 or 60 miles from me. That probably doesn't sound far, but it takes about three hours to get there from here, down muddy, windy, foggy mountain roads covered with horrible drivers. And on the holiday I’m sure some of them are drunk. I already spent many hours going to villages and to Baku this week, and that's enough of those roads for me for awhile.Also, the temperature dropped on Wednesday night and the supersonic winds blew down through the Caucasus, bringing back winter weather just in time for spring. Wednesday night was very cold – my clean, wet clothing was frozen solid outside on the line. I washed them Saturday March 13 and it rained all week, so they were still soaking wet and turned to ice. Yesterday and today, March 19-20, it was sunnier so I took them down because I desperately needed clothes. They were still a bit wet, but dry enough that putting them under the gas stove finished the job in an hour or two. The gas stove is the thing in the living room that heats water for tea and Basira uses for cooking, but its big job is to heat the house. Well, we want it to do those things anyway. It does its job until the city turns off the gas, which they do every night and on weekdays. With no heat, I could see my breath in my bedroom Wednesday night. And again on Thursday night. Then on Friday morning I woke up to four inches of snow on the ground on top of ice from all the rain we had all week. My clothes were ice covered with snow.Today (Sat) we had some sun, so a lot of it melted, but it’s 7pm now, so it’s getting dark and pretty cold, and unfortunately I have to go use the tualet… so I’ll let you know just how cold it is out there when I return…Well, that took about 15 minutes. I put on a hat, down vest, and scarf, and another pair of socks, then I went outside, put on my shoes, and went to the hole-in-the-ground tualet. All of that was just a few minutes. When I was done I went back to the area by the front door, took off my shoes, and went inside, and when I stopped at the stove to warm my hands and feet I decided to pour some tea to really warm myself up. But there was no hot water. So I got my water bottle and went to the filter out on the porch to get some water I could boil. But the filter was empty. So I went back outside, put on my shoes, went to the well, reeled up a bucket of water, brought it upstairs, took off my shoes, went inside, poured the water into the filter, and took the bucket back outside. While I was reeling up the water, Basira had tilted the filter contraption on its side and got enough filtered water out of it for me to make some tea. That water is now starting to boil and I’ll have my tea (and warm hands) in a couple of minutes. And the water I just put into the filter will be filtered by tomorrow.Here’s the water filter – the Peace Corps supplies all of us with one of these. You pour water into the top, and two chalk cylinders (“candles”) filter the water by gravity into the bottom. Next to it is a jar of Russian mayonnaise:One of the biggest hassles here is dealing with shoes. I can see the point of not wanting to take shoes that you walk around in outside and wear them inside, but the whole point is lost when I take off my shoes, then walk through chicken poop in my socks to get back inside the house. Here’s the setup: the stairway we use to go into the house has a landing where you take off your shoes. Most houses have that. From the landing to the door where you enter the house is a carpet that you walk on in your socks, and it’s meant to be kept clean. At our house (and most houses I’ve seen here) there are chickens. Basira frequently lets them out of their coop so they can run around, build up some muscle, and have some fun in the yard. She even lets them go out into the streets so they can eat grasses and stuff out on the road... and she closes the gate behind them so they roam alone. Somehow they know to stay away from cars, and they never, ever run away – not even Horace, the huge rooster with the big mouth that wakes me up every morning at 4:30. They always come home. But when they’re in the yard with no food and we’re inside, the chickens come up the stairway, past all the removed shoes, and up the clean carpet to the front door where they hang out and squawk until someone comes outside. They’re often there for hours, and sometimes they’re out there all night. But when they’re hanging out there, they poop all over the carpet, right in front of the door where we enter the house in our socks. So the bottoms of our socks have smushed chicken poop all over them.I try to be careful and step around the poop, but not everyone is. Most people don’t even know it’s there – its color blends in with the red, gray, and beige striped carpet, so they step right in it. I can see the foot-poop smushes all over the place. So people are bringing in all sorts of bacteria and digested crud. Maybe even Avian Flu, which is prevalent in this part of the world. So – really – what’s the point of taking off the shoes? Socks end up inside shoes, inside other socks, and even in our sheets when it’s cold out. Shoes aren’t so ubiquitous. When we wear them inside, they tend to stay on the floor. I think we should take the shoes off right at the door, or just inside the door – places where the chickens never go before they’re plucked and cooked. That’s been bugging me for months, and it feels good to finally tell someone about it.Now my water is boiled and it’s time to go make my tea ….Okay, all done. My hands are warm now from holding the tea cup. While I was up I also got my favorite wool socks from under the stove – they’re warm and dry now after a week of being wet and frozen.My priorities keep shifting. A hot cup of tea is more valuable to me than it has ever been, since I live without heat most of the time and without running water all of the time. Also, I can’t drink caffeine, so the tea I drink has to come from the States and I’m very careful about how I handle it. I use one tea bag for at least three cups of tea. Three friends have helped me maintain my stash of caffeine-free tea while I’ve been here – Sallie, the friend with the fantastic Jockey clothing business I told you about on The Ides of March (smatlack@nc.rr.com), Suzanne, my financial guru in Raleigh, and Elmir, my PCorps Program Manager, who brought me some when he returned from his US vacation in January. Sallie and Suzanne have been incredibly helpful in keeping me stocked with things I need.For Christmas my mom sent me caffeine-free tea, too. She also send me some things I didn’t know I needed - particularly the down jacket. It’s perfect for those trips to the tualet in January (and February, and today). It’s short, so it doesn’t get splashed on by tualet excrement, it has pockets for toilet paper, it's quick and easy to put on in the middle of the night, and it is super-warm.Everyone gives me zip-lock bags, too, which are endlessly useful. Basira is used to using them now, too. She usually leaves food out on a counter on the porch in winter. Sometimes she covers food with plastic shopping bags (like the ones in US grocery stores), but not always, and there are always flies and other creatures around – even in sub-zero temps. So I started putting that food into zip-lock bags, and she’s gotten used to them. Luckily, I have dozens of them. They’re pretty valuable here.Drinkable water is probably the most valuable thing I have, and luckily it’s not expensive. A two-liter bottle (about a half a gallon) is 50 qepik (about 40 cents). But is it ever heavy! I carried a couple of two liter bottles of good water home from the bazaar yesterday - that's a couple of miles - and my hand that held the plastic bag that carried the bottles was in intense pain by the time I got home. (I shoulda taken my cloth bag.) Our well water is undrinkable – it has to be filtered and boiled before using. That’s not hard, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know that can take a lot of time – like an entire day. So I try to keep store-bought Caucasus Mountain water on hand for when I don’t keep the water filter filled.Dishes are washed in the portable sink outdoors, which has to be filled with well water before using it, and it only holds about a gallon. Nope, dishes are not washed with drinkable water. The main alternative is to do what Basira does most often, and that is to not wash them at all. She wipes dishes and silverware with a somewhat clean cloth... it's the same one she uses to wipe crud off the tables, counter top, stove, hands. I've never seen it washed. Bathing is a real chore. It takes a couple of hours to prepare to take a hot bucket bath at home, what with reeling about six or seven gallons of water up from the well and heating a few gallons of it on a gas stove. Basira says it’s easy, but I think she’s nuts. Her idea of easy is totally different from mine. To her, using an ATM is difficult, so I do it for her (she has to use the ATM to receive her government check - like Social Security). To me, prepping a bucket bath is hard, so she does it for me.I take most of my bucket baths at work. Water is special there, too, but at least the water comes from faucets and is heated by a water heater. The water pressure is so low it’s meaningless without a bucket. With a bucket bath I can pour enough water on myself to feel wet and get my hair really wet. There's a shower there - a hand-held thing -but I can hold it over my head for 5 minutes without feeling very wet and never getting my hair fully wet. So I use a bucket at work, too. The bucket fills up slowly, but a few buckets get me wet and the bucket can keep filling while I’m doing other things, like scrubbing my itchy scalp. I do miss high pressure showers, but the one thing I miss more than anything is having a hot bubble bath when I’m cold. One of these days I’m going to check into a Baku hotel just so I can have a bubble bath. Spring starts tomorrow, so I probably won’t need it until next winter.A couple of Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) visited me today. One is working down in Lankaran – that’s a relatively big city in southern Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, down by Iran. She’s from New York and has gained so much weight since she arrived in October, she has to buy new clothing. I eat a lot here – I mean a real lot – and I don’t gain weight. And I eat stuff I never ate in the States, like carbohydrates beyond anything I’ve eaten since I was a kid. I get less exercise than I’ve had in over 10 years, and I’m 30 years older than she is, so my metabolism has to be slower. Here’s a picture of Jessica, Basira, and Mariel (she lives in Samaxi) today:So we talked about why she’s gaining and I’m not. One person said it’s because all of the food I eat is organic. But I ate lots of organic food in the States, too, and never, ever ate fast food or junk food. After some bantering, we narrowed it down to the energy I expend staying warm. The problem is that her home always has heat. Her bedroom even has a stove and the gas is always available there. At my home the gas is shut off more than half the time. And even when we have gas, it’s never really warm in here. There’s one tiny stove in the house, in the living room. It’s like a wood-burning stove, but it has a gas hose going into it. That’s it. Oh, and there’s a stove downstairs in the hemam – that’s the place where people take bucket baths – it’s far away from where we are and its stove is only turned on when someone is bathing in there.Here’s the corner of the hemam where all the water and soaps sit. One of the white buckets is full of hot water (very hot – right off the stove), and the other has cold water right out of the well (very cold). The huge metal teapot thing has more hot water and the silver thing on the table has a mixture of hot and cold. I add hot water and cold water to that to get the temperature I want.The blue plastic pan is what I use to dump water on myself.

Here’s the stove inside the hemam – this is taken from the door and the buckets are off to the right, out of view:

My clothes and towel hang on the door:My bedroom rarely has heat; usually its door to the living room is kept closed to save money (as I mentioned in an earlier blog, the door to the outside is kept open all the time, but the doors inside are kept shut to save money… go figure that one out for me please). Today, because of the holiday, the door to my room is open, so warm air can come in from the living room and it’s pretty warm in there. But when I brought the PCV who is gaining weight in there today she thought it was very cold. At night my room is freezing, but the area on my sheets where my body stays is very warm – I even take off some of my socks in the middle of the night (on nights like these I start off wearing two or three pair). All of that heat is generated by me. I don’t move around much at night because the area outside my body space is so cold. According to the news the outside, temperature has been just under freezing for the last few nights (-3C), so it’s probably in the high 30’s inside; maybe mid-40’s. Well, it looks like I've gotten used to it.When I did the laundry outside last Saturday, I wore a short-sleeved t-shirt and it felt warm outside to me. Getting wet when I was elbow-deep in the water didn’t make me cold at all. Later I found out it was around 55 degrees that day. So, the PCV who is gaining weight and I decided that I must burn off the calories keeping myself warm. In the future I’ll skip the diets and fancy low-cal foods! I’ll just live in a cold climate and save myself a lot of money, save the planet a lot of energy and burn thousands of calories by turning down the heat.Oh – awhile back I promised you a picture of my “automatic washing machine” – the contraption that I wash my clothes in. It’s totally manual; it’s ringers don’t work and I have to swish the clothing inside it around by hand, but it does help me get the job done. My hands are aging fast, though. Tide detergent isn’t meant for human skin.

Here’s that picture I promised you:And here’s the washing setup outside – the clean clothes sit in water in the blue plastic bin while they wait to be rinsed. You can see the well in the back; the white buckets are used to carry water from the well’s bucket:

And my laundry on the line, about three hours later:And here’s Mariel and Basira with a bowl full of chicken pluckings (probably Horace), which are used to fill pillows. Mariel lives in Samaxi, too, so she and Basira know each other well... until next time (tomorrow)...

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.

I spent the 15th and 16th of March in a small village called Bozavand in the Agsu rayon. As usual, I was there for a community gathering where the AzRIP people held their community project mobilization and training sessions. Like all other towns, Bozavand needs many things – probably everything AzRIP can help them with. And, as is always the case in that situation, the main road through the village is the most important project because it impacts everything immediately. Most people clearly see that schools impact everything in the long run, but even the schools require roads immediately because it and provides a way for building materials to get in when they build new schools or improve existing ones.The roads are not only for cars, trucks, and marshutkas; they’re used even more by pedestrians, horses, cows, sheep, donkeys, and anything else with legs. In these mountain villages there is nowhere to walk without roads, and the current roads are so full of mud trenches, they’re nearly useless. So far, all of the roads in all of the villages I’ve been in are mud. On a rainy day (common in winter and spring) people are up to their ankles – sometimes knees – in mud just trying to get to and from a market or school. Cars are going down those roads, too, and they don’t pay much heed to the pedestrians. It’s a dangerous mess. That mud is on all of my clothing, and it’s not that easy to get out of anything made of cotton or wool. It’s impossible to get out of blue jeans with the tools available to me here. And my long, black wool coat is ready for the nearest garbage dump. Luckily, the slacks I brought with me are very easy to clean – they’re made of a fantastic fabric that doesn’t stain, wrinkle, fade, or change in any way, no matter what I do to it. And it’s soft, not plastic-ish, and it looks nice – the fabric and the design. I bought it from a friend who sells clothing from Jockey. It is perfect stuff for traveling or for living or working in harsh environments (check it out at her web site http://www.myjockeyp2p.com/salliematlack or smatlack@nc.rr.com). When the roads are improved through AzRIP, they aren’t paved or black-topped. Pavement isn’t sustainable. That’s a Washington Word for the ability of the people who stay to maintain it themselves. Self-sustainable. These villagers don’t have the tools, the skills, or the money to repair pavement, so its improvements fall apart when the people who constructed it leave. Kinda like what happened to them when the Soviets left.Instead of paving the roads, the mud is widened and leveled, and improved by mixing it with gravel, then covered and packed down with a tough, solid layer of high-quality gravel. That’s sustainable. And because all members of the community contribute money to the project (totaling 10% of the cost, which is thousands of $$ and a heck of a lot of money to them), and because they put most of the labor that goes into rebuilding the roads, they tend to take better care of them. That’s sustainability.Not all of the roads in a village can be fixed; that’s too expensive. Usually just the main road that runs through it. And AzRIP can’t improve the roads outside the village boundaries, so not all of the villagers' road problems are solved. As soon as they get outside the town, the roads fall under the jurisdiction of the rayon, which is under the national government, and it’ll be a long, long time before they get around to fixing those. But just the main road in town is enough for most of their immediate needs.Right now the big government is spending billions of $$ building an ultra-modern 21st century, Star-Trek-planet-like city in Baku. Many people aren’t happy with what’s happening. Their 2000+-year-old history is being obscured (hopefully it won’t all be torn down). The planned buildings are beyond anything I’ve seen on earth; many of the buildings have architecture that I’ve only seen in futuristic movies. They’re building dozens and dozens of buildings along the coast of the Caspian and across the city. The pictures and diagrams are so impressive they’re frightening; mainly because I know the condition of the rest of the country. Online I saw a satellite photo of an enormous building shaped like the current president’s initials: ie. Nobody is certain that his initials are the intent, but it sure looks like it. Hopefully they’re being built to meet earthquake standards, because Azerbaijan is due for one. The last serious one was in 2000, and it was in Baku. That could really change the government’s plans for stardom.Last night I redrew a map of the Azeri government structure for a guy I met from Washington (to be written in the next blog entry, for St. Patrick’s Day). It’s a map that was given out during Peace Corps training, but I only had a paper copy of it so I redrew it in Visio. Now I can do what I want with its file structure. I thought you might be interested in seeing it, too, so here it is:(Remember you can make images bigger by double-clicking them, or by scrolling the ball on your mouse while holding down the [Ctrl] button.)If you look closely, you’ll see that the President is directly over everything. They make an attempt to hide his authority over the judicial system, but it’s there via the Ministry of Justice. And most Azeri people I have talked to don’t see that there’s anything wrong with it. I don’t prod them for their views or anything; I’ve been instructed to stay away from confrontations about politics, religion, culture, and all obvious problem-causers. But these people do like to talk and ask probing questions, so I listen and usually respond to questions with questions, or with basic facts. A couple of days ago Basira asked me about American presidents. She likes Obama, and she liked Clinton, Carter, and Kennedy. She thought Reagan was OK, but couldn’t stand either of the Bushes (particularly George Jr.) or Nixon. Then she said about Kennedy – “didn’t he have brothers?” I said yes, three, and that they were all dead. Then she said “Yes, the Mafia.” Apparently they’re told that John and/or Bobby Kennedy were killed by the Mafia. Kind of interesting. I said “No” ("yox" in Azeri) and then stopped translating what she said after that. They do study American history in their schools, so one of these days I’ll have to ask someone what they’re taught. Or I’ll find a 25-year-old history book and an American who knows Russian, then ask them what it says.(A quick aside: It’s very easy to turn off the language translator in my head - it’s just my brain’s relaxed state. Translating is exhausting! Just 20 minutes of translating spoken Azeri language is exhausting! Written language isn't so hard on me.)Between life with the Soviets and the dictatorships they’ve been under since then, most of the Azeri people have little-to-no notion of how things could be different. It’s really not that much different everywhere else – most people I've ever met are happiest when they don't have to deal with change. But the people here are shown glimpses of where things are headed, through television from Japan, Europe, and the US. I don't know if that makes it harder or easier to change, but it does make it different. Some of the concepts the AzRIP people bestow on the villagers during mobilization and training are so obvious to me it’s hard to see that people don’t see them. It’s like stepping back in time - centuries. The concepts are even new to the AzRIP people I’m working with, but they know the value of the new ideas… things like the advantages of taking out loans and repaying them over time, of putting gathered money in investments and taking it out over time when needed, and even of voting via closed ballots instead of raising hands (to be discussed in more detail in my St. Patrick’s Day blog entry). They’re also not used to having normal things available to them – appliances, furniture, etc. All of it is available to people who can afford it today, but that hasn’t always been the case. Being able to go to a store to buy things – anything – is a relatively new concept. There are open markets all over the place where people go to haggle, buy, and trade. But real stores, like department stores, are a new and popular novelty. And compared to what we’re used to in the States, they’re not much. The only products where there they are given choices are what the things that come from America via Russia - things like shampoos, makeup, and toiletries. There’s a big department store near me; a chain called Univermaq. It’s like a cross between K-Mart, Hudson Belk, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Recently I looked for a raincoat there, and the coats ranged in price from about $40 to over $5000. The Univermaq in Samaxi is bigger than most. It’s three stories high, and half of one story is only make-ups and toiletries for women – like Hudson Belk, Dillards, Marshall Fields, etc. Except you can get things like Panteen or Head and Shoulders shampoos, or Colgate toothpaste there, as well as the pricey “designer” make-ups you see in glitzy American department stores (or their Russian equivalents).Recently I spent two days looking for a raincoat in Samaxi, Sumgayit and Baku, and gave up. I found some in Sumgayit, but nothing I wanted to buy. Admittedly, I shopped in American stores online and didn’t find anything I liked there, either, so it’s not just Baku – it’s the current worldwide fashion I don't like. It rains a lot here, and all I want is a long, black raincoat with a hood. I looked in L.L. Bean, Land’s End, and all the major department stores, and they all have the same short-short un-hooded coats I saw in the Baku. A long coat made of fabric that I can wipe mud off of is a necessity. So is a hood; I’m always carrying my purse, my computer, and a bag full of Azeri-English dictionaries and other notebooks, so I don’t have a hand available to hang onto an umbrella.And I'm always walking.A backpack sounds like part of the solution, but it isn’t acceptable here – not for a woman my age who wants to blend into the community. I already offend them with my boots. The women here, all ages, wear dressy black leather boots, with heels. Often spiked heels. And they’re walking in mud and navigating torn up rocks and huge potholes, puddles, and cars while they walk in those things. I’m wearing very comfortable, flat brown suede boots with rough soles that get me through the mud, rocks, hills, snow and other ground crud safely. Every day when I’m walking to/from work, the markets, the Internet café, or wherever, someone looks at my shoes and then up at my face and gives me a look that’s either pity or disgust. Usually it’s a young girl or an elderly woman.But every now and then I see a woman who looks at my shoes, then up at my face and smiles. Not laughing at me – a genuine smile that says she’s happy that I’m wearing comfy, useful shoes. Sometimes I even see envy there, but that’s pretty rare. Usually it’s women in their 30’s, 40’s and maybe 50’s; sometimes older. The younger ones don’t waver from the norm (not yet, anyway), and the oldest ones seem to be stuck in the past somewhere. Most of them look pretty unhappy.When people find out what I’m doing here I don’t get so much negative judgment. There are some women I see every day on my way to work who are always friendly – some even stop and talk. They weren’t like that when they first saw me, but they're getting used to me. And no doubt they've been talking about me, because they’re all very close and they're all very nice to me now. I’m sure Basira and her relatives have told them I’m an American who is here for free, who likes their country, and is only here to help - not to take. When I visit the small villages, the women learn right away that I’m from “America” (they don’t know the acronym “USA”) and that I’m trying to help, so I get only smiles. Lots of women want to take me off somewhere and sit me down for tea, treats and conversation. Usually I take them up on their offers.Recently, in a town called Qesende (pronounced Geshenda), I let some women and a couple of their 20-something sons take me off to the back room of a city meeting house for tea and cakes while my AzRIP colleagues continued their community training in the main hall. As soon as I sat down, I pulled out my digital audio recorder, turned it on, and placed it on the table in front of us for all to see. Then I sat there while they commented on what was going on out in front. I have no idea what they said - they have a different accent and they speak too fast - but they had a great time talking to me, talking about the community, and talking about AzRIP. And I caught it all on digital “tape.” After about an hour, one of the young guys asked me if that thing on the table was my cell phone. And I told him it’s a recorder. That shocked him a bit and I could see him flush a little and his eyes roll up and sideways back into his memory to figure out if he said anything incriminating. Then I saw a little bit of relief go across his face. Anyway, the audio file is now in my computer, waiting for my Azeri skills to improve so I can understand what they said. Every day I understand more.Here’s the young guy who asked me if the digital recorder was my phone (he insisted that we take this photo so I show it to people in America: And here’s his community, inside the community hall – they’re voting for projects to work on:

Here are the people outside voting by ballot for people to head the projects:

Here are some women voting:

Qesende is in a beautiful rayon called Ismayili. It’s in an area of the Caucasus that has enormous, snowy mountains surrounded by green pastures. It looks like the Alps in “The Sound of Music,” and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ismayili is where the movie was filmed. I’ve been through there several times now and it’s usually foggy, so I don’t get to see much. But this time the sky was clear and I could see a lot. Likely I’ll go back to some other villages there. It’s only about 40 miles away from where I live, but it takes about two hours to get there because of the thick fog, the winding mountain highway (a narrow two-lane), and the lousy mud-and-pothole roads when you get off the main road.Here are a few photos of Qesende and Ismayili:

One of the biggest issues with getting a community project going is mobilization – that’s getting the village people to the meeting house to take part in all of the voting on project priorities, project leader elections, etc. Whenever I’ve been there, on the second day more people show up than on the first day, and it is partly because I’m there. I’m a novelty. The people who are there the first day go home and tell their friends and family that there’s an American there, and they all want to see it. Most of them have never seen a Westerner of any flavor before, but an American is an immediate icon. They really pull out the red carpet and treat me like a movie star. I don’t know why, but they’re respectful and friendly about it, so I let them do it.After our first day in Qesende an older woman died, so the second day started off with less than half the people as the first day. After a couple of hours, the people who went to her funeral showed up. And eventually there were more people than on the first day.Funerals last a long time here (weeks), but the body is buried right away. No dilly-dallying over things like body prep and paying respects. The body is put into the ground or cremated immediately. The cemeteries I’ve seen in these 1000 year old villages are pretty small and I see funeral urns in markets all over the place (in one near me they’re sitting on the shelf right between the flip-flops and the potatoes), so I think they cremate a lot of them. Sounds like a good idea, particularly for health reasons. There are a lot of diseases here and the Azeri post-WWII baby boom generation has been in their local life expectancy years for about a decade. Their sons, many now in their 40s, are starting their heart attacks (rarely the daughters). So there are lots of funerals here, and lots and lots of people with bad health. Even the Americans.(Warning! This section might not be so good to show to people you want to entice to join the Peace Corps. But it’s the reality of life in most of the world…) So far this year, two PCVs have been forced to return to the States for medical reasons. One was the oldest Volunteer in the entire Peace Corps – Elaine. She is 80-ish and had a stroke. Last month someone found her unconscious in her home in Ganja. They rushed her to a hospital in Baku (rush = about 8 hours) and she is okay, but one mild stroke often leads to another more serious one, so they sent her back to the States. Another woman, Andrea in her 30’s in Mingechevir, is going home next week. She has a dead bone in her foot. I don’t know how it happened, but it sounds awful and awfully dangerous (maybe leading to gangrene?). Apparently they don’t have the facilities to treat it here, so she’s going home after Novruz. (You’ll read more about Novruz soon.)Most volunteers have had something go wrong with their health. I’ve been sick constantly since my third week here; since mid-October. I’ve had four colds, maybe five, but before coming here I hadn’t had one in over five years - maybe as long as 10 years. It feels like I’ve had one constant cold for five months, and it fluctuates between bad, not so bad, and not bad at all, then it suddenly gets really bad again. I’ve had an ear infection since mid-January and an intestinal parasite that needs to be dealt with. Today I have an infection in my eye and in my mouth, but neither looks like a big deal. Just the total number of things going wrong makes everything seem like a far bigger deal than any one ailment alone.The worst thing yet is a prescription that was filled for me here. I was given a bad generic drug in mid-March. About 18 hours after I took the fake stuff, my head went berserk. I’ll spare you the details of what it did to me; it’s enough to say that it was a scary situation. And it was extremely dangerous. After about 7 or 8 hours my head settled down enough that I was able to realize what had happened to me and I called the Peace Corps’ emergency medical line, waking someone up (it was 6am). She told me to come to the office in Baku. Yeah, right. Here I am with a head gone wild, and she wants me to hike all the way to the Avtovagsal (bus station, about two miles), get on a marshutka, wait an hour or two until it leaves, arrive at the Baku Avtovagsal two hours later, get on another bus into Baku, get off at the right place (the busiest intersection in the city), cross through the intersection, and walk down the street to the PCorps HQ. The trip is only 60 miles, but it takes about four hours of high stress activity surrounded by people who only speak Azerbaijani and Russian. Before getting off the phone with the med person, she told me that due to paperwork in Washington it could take six weeks to get the right drug – not good for my stress level. She said the non-generic version is also a possibility, but it costs $1000/month in Azerbaijan. She said the PCorps would get it for me if necessary, but I know that their budget is very tight and that would be a severe blow to any plans for improvement they might have. We needed to talk, live an in person, and they needed to evaluate my health, so I grabbed my coat, passport, and purse and went to Baku to see what we could do.I left Samaxi at about 7am and arrived at the Peace Corps offices in Baku at 11 without any serious problems. I even slept part of the way – a good thing with the thick fog, the mountain roads, and a wild marshutka driver at the wheel. I was sitting at the front of the marshutka to help keep me from throwing up (lots of people do on the Samaxi-Baku road trip, due to the winding mountain roads), and the stress of seeing his driving could have set my brain off again. When I got to the Peace Corps offices and talked to the medical folks, we discovered that the US generic version of the drug is from Mylan Pharmaceuticals (a good generic company) and that the bad generic is from Cobalt Pharmaceuticals in Canada – the bad drug itself came from their operations in Boynton Beach, Florida. But that's just what it says on the label. There's no telling where it really came from.To my incredible luck, the Peace Corps medical people had only ordered the generic from Cobalt once. All other stock of the drug they had on hand was the generic from Mylan. They gave what I needed to stay healthy, so I was incredibly lucky. Some of them even said that Allah was watching over me that day.So, for those of you buying generic prescriptions, I highly recommend you keep an eye on the manufacturer and watch for changes. The manufacturer’s name is on the side of the prescription label – if you can’t find it, a doctor or pharmacist can show you where it is.My health situation might sound bad, but I’ve really been very lucky. My immune system should be ready to take on any cold virus roaming around this country soon, so the last cold I ever plan to have here is clearing up now. I’ll get rid of the intestinal parasite in a couple of weeks (after Novruz, at the equinox), and I will feel wonderful again for the rest of my life. That's my plan.AzRIP invited me to move with them this summer, and offered to pay for it. They're moving to a place called Balakan. It’s about 400km northwest of Baku, on the border of Georgia. That’s about eight to ten hours from Baku by train (no way I’d consider taking a marshutka). I’ll tell you about that some other holiday.

Happy Ides of March...

Winter has finally hit! About two weeks ago we got some snow across the whole country, and it has caused problems for lots of people. It’s nothing like what hit the US this year, but for a place like this - with no way to deal with it - things really stop. And nobody minds much. (Side note: believe it or not, everyone in Azerbaijan is talking about how Washington DC is buried in snow! And I don’t mean the Peace Corps workers – it’s the locals, and it's on the Baku news here every night.)My office, just three blocks away, was closed all of last week and all of this week. The folks I work with live a few hours away and can’t get here, and without them there’s nothing to do. So the office is closed. Plus, because they’re not here they didn’t pay their satellite bill, so there’s no phone or Internet.(Update - a couple of guys I work with showed up and paid the satellite bill around the 17th, so I'm posting this blog entry from the office on the 19th.)That’s great for me – this has given me the time to catch up on lots and lots of things that have been nagging at me since December. Last week I finished a couple of books, did some shopping, fixed a broken CD player, recharged my AA and AAA batteries, fixed a couple more things, got some much-needed exercise, did my laundry, and met with my Peace Corps boss – all very productive. I’m one of the few PCVs that has been busy with "real" work ever since I arrived and really needed the free time to get my personal act together.This week I’m going to spend my time getting to know Samaxi better. One of the other PCVs who lives here, Emma, is going to hike around the town with me so week can find out more about the businesses they have here and learn about the area. She’s been here for over a year already, so she has the language skills and knows her way around the town well. I can learn a lot from her. Things are changing in Samaxi and we’re going to find out all we can about it. Tourism looks like it’s coming, so we’re going to do some research. We’re both looking for side projects to help the community, plus I'm looking for projects to work on in case AzRIP moves - in November they told me they might move up north in a year. If I want to stay here, I'll need to find something to do (i.e. find a job, just in case).First… this will surprise you....it sure surprised me! After our snow two weeks ago, the main roads in Şamaxı were plowed! And gravel was put down for traction! Incredible!! Then it snowed again a couple of days ago, and they did it again!! Thanks to the plowing, the roads were clear the next day. We’re not talking about real snow plows like you see in Chicago and NY, but more like what you see in Raleigh – pickup trucks or dump trucks with plows bolted onto the front. It works.Not many towns in Azerbaijan are so lucky. In fact, I don’t know of a single one. According to the news, some roads not far from here have collapsed and slid down into the mountains, making travel impossible. That's why my colleagues from Barda can’t get here. In fact, another PCV is coming to visit me next week, and the roads are out are between my rayon and hers, so she might not make it. Okay – back to tourism in Şamaxı. In summer, tourism by folks from Baku is pretty big here. Baku is hot and humid in summer and all of that combined with its lousy air (the worst on the planet) makes it unendurable. Kind of like Raleigh when the air quality is at its worst and they tell people to stay inside with the AC on, multiplied by 1000. People tell me it's like that all summer in Baku. People who can afford to come to Şamaxı come here as often as they can, so there are many second homes here. I hear lots of rich kids live here all summer, so moms probably do, too. I also hear that Şamaxı summers have perfect temperatures and clean, fresh air. There are places in the mountains that are more beautiful than this, but this is a lot closer to Baku than they are. And it might be cooler - we're on a plateau, so the town sits at a higher altitude than the mountain towns with more to do, like Şeki. Maybe history brings people here, too. There’s an old, totally run-down hotel in Şamaxı that they started refurbishing two weeks ago. They didn’t stop working while it snowed, so somebody is darned serious about getting it done. Plus, there are some brand new trolley cars sitting in one area downtown, and city maintenance seems to be better these days – like snow plowing and garbage pickup (which isn’t great, but better than most of the country). And there’s a “Ministry of Tourism and Culture” building that isn’t used, but is kept in very good shape. So we’re going to go have a look at all of this during our walk, plus find anything else we can find about the economic future of Şamaxı.Some of us have wondered if anyone has considered snow skiing in Azerbaijan. I don’t think there is any, and it sure would take some serious money to get it started, but getting more people with money over this way through tourism might make someone think about it.Also, as far as I know, all of the tourism in this town comes from Baku; that’s where most of the money is. But if they could bring it down from Russia they could bring in a whole lot more. A lot of us have talked about how Azerbaijan wants to be part of the EU some day, and to do that they definitely need another big source of income (besides oil, which they'll run out of soon) and lots of small and medium ones, too. Tourism could work. Şamaxı was once the USSR’s biggest source of good wine. There were vineyards everywhere until Gorbachev got frustrated with the severe alcoholism of the Soviets and turned all the wineries into grape juice factories. As you can probably guess, those went under. That was 20 years ago and most of the people who know how to handle vineyards are gone, but a few are still here. So that’s another direction they could take.There are lots of college students here, too. I haven’t found all the schools, but I know they’re pretty small. Şamaxı is also known for its historic artists – especially writers – so developing the schools could be another direction.In other words, there’s a lot of potential here. It might not work until the standard practices of bribery and corruption are cleaned up, but I really think that will happen some day. It has to if they want to be a part of the EU. And it will be interesting to watch from the US in the future.With all their oil, I wonder why they turn off our gas so often. For the last few days my bedroom has been so cold I can see my breath because the city turns off the gas all day on weekdays and all night every night. On weekdays it’s on from about 8 to 10am, then again from about 6 to 9pm. That doesn’t matter when I’m in the office all day – their gas isn’t usually cut off – but for folks who are home all day it can get pretty uncomfortable. At home we have gas for heat for only, what, about 5 hours a day? And sometimes none at all. Yesterday the pressure was so low the living room never heated up before it was shut off again. I slept in two long-sleeved t-shirts, a sweatshirt, heavy-duty long underwear, heavy slacks, ultra-heavy socks, heavy socks over my ultra-heavy socks, gloves, a skiing hat, and a scarf. Under a -20 sleeping bag. I wasn’t cold, but wearing all that stuff to bed means I have to do laundry a lot more often than I want to. So I just keep reminding myself that spring is in six weeks. Spring arrives with some kind of fantastic cultural celebration called Novruz, plus more days off from work to relax and catch up on things again. If it stays this cold I might break down and buy an electric heater – usually when the gas is out, the electricity is on. But not always.And I gotta tell you that going outside to the hole-in-the-ground-tualet in below zero temps at 1:00am is an unforgettable experience. Everyone should spend a winter living like this. People have been doing it for how long? Hundreds of thousands of years? Hey, if they can do it (and if I can do it) so can you. It’s 9pm and below freezing now - I have to go and will let you know what it was like… but first I need to go put on my hat, down vest, scarf, and extra socks, then stuff some TP into my pocket…. (shoes are never, ever worn indoors, so they aren't put on until I'm outside)… … Well, now that wasn’t so bad. The ground was icy and slippery between the steps and the tualet and it is very, very cold outside, but it was quick and easy. When I came back in I had to stop at the stove to restore feeling to my feet, but when I did that I watched the weather and it says it’s supposed to be 8C around here tomorrow, which will melt all this stuff. (For you non-metric folks, that’s the low 40’s.)Suddenly I’m hungry again. I get hungry a lot these days, so keeping my body warm must use a heck of a lot of energy. I looked it up on the Web a few days ago, and it said something about 200 Kcal for every 10 degrees lower the outside temp is. But it didn’t say how much time that covers, so I don’t have any idea what it really takes. (If you know, let me know!) All I know is that my body talks to me by craving food - any kind of food - all the time. It’s making me go through apples, oranges, walnuts, and protein bars quicker than ever these days. (…about a week later…)Now spring has hit! It’s the second week the office has been closed and the weather has been like April. In the 50s, lots of rain, some sunshine. And I picked the right day to do my laundry – the only day it was sunny and windy enough for everything to be washed and dried on the same day. That’s an Azerbaijan first for me!!I did over three weeks worth of laundry, which is a heck of a lot of clothing when you wear three layers all day and all night every day for two of those weeks. A few weeks ago, Basira bought me an “automatic washing machine.” That’s what she calls it, anyway. And that’s what she told my Peace Corps manager she got for me (my response when he told me that was “well, sort of”). I took pictures of it while I was taking a break from doing my laundry, but accidentally deleted them. I'll take more and put them up on the blog some other time. What that “automatic washer” is, is an upright metal tub that holds three buckets of water. The tub has an electric fan in the back of it that swishes the water around in circles that are parallel to its back wall (like a built-in wall fan), but most of the clothes movement and scrubbing comes from me and my arms. Above the tub is a set of power roller wringers – like on the old washing machines. I was really, really anxious to use those because my arms aren’t strong enough to wring out three weeks worth of winter clothing, but alas, the wringer rollers on the automatic washing machine don’t work. Doing my laundry with this automatic washer was a better workout than I’ve ever had at any gym. It entailed reeling up more than 12 buckets of water from the well – each bucket alone a serious effort. Two buckets of water were heated on the stove upstairs, which entails lugging both buckets of water upstairs, heating it for an hour, then lugging it back down again to the yard outside and dumping it into the "automatic washing machine." All of the washing is done outside because there is no place indoors to drain the water. Emptying the water out of the tub after a wash or a rinse means unscrewing the plug from a hole in the bottom of the tub and letting it pour out. That's easy.There were four loads of laundry and I used the same water for all of them, losing and adding about one bucket of water with each load, so I needed to refill the tub each time I put in more clothing. During this process, I have two metal buckets to work with, so I’m going back and forth between the well and the washing machine the entire time. The workout actually feels good.So washing my clothes in the "automatic washing machine" isn't very automatic. The fan helps, but only when the tub has just a few pieces of clothing in it. It is a lot better than the hand washing I’d done at Basira’s before because I didn’t have to squat over a tub on the ground to wash and rinse. Being almost upright is a heck of a lot more comfortable when washing for a couple of hours. Then, when a piece of clothing looked clean enough to come out, I’d wring out the water and throw it in an empty plastic tub on the ground where it waited to be rinsed. Once all of the clothes were done, I’d repeat the process using “clean” (water right out of the ground full of all sorts of creepy crawly crud) rinse water, and when I pulled each piece from that, I’d wring it and hang it on the clothes line. My arms feel stronger than they’ve ever felt in my life. This whole laundry process might sound awful, but I really felt great when it was done – from the exercise and the sense of accomplishment. And because I was lucky enough to have the one warm, sunny, and windy day in weeks, all of my clothing was dry by 5pm (I started at 10am, washed everything and hung it on the line by noon, and all of it was dry by 5). That night it poured rain outside, and all of my clothing was clean, dry, folded and put away. Unlike last time, when my clothing was rained on for nearly a week, then frozen and melted again before I brought it in and dried it by the stove.The only thing that has me wondering is the cleanliness of the water. This stuff I reel up from the ground is nothing like the spring water you buy in bottles at the grocery store. This is water straight out of the ground underneath a town that’s been lived in for 2000 years. I don’t know what’s in it, but it sure ain’t clean. I can see lots stuff – moss, sticks, pieces of leaves, squiggly stuff, etc. And I know what's really in ground water from looking into a microscope during many college biology and botany classes. It’s absolutely loaded with multi-colored stuff spinning, swimming. hopping, twirling, multiplying… you name it. But my clothes smell good and look clean and I haven’t broken out in any rashes, so maybe it’s not too bad.I’ve also been bathing in that water lately. The four college guys who live downstairs were gone for semester break for three weeks, so I got to see and use this house’s hemam (bathroom). And, wow! It’s a classic! It is the one room that does have a drain to the outdoors, and it’s only for bucket baths. But even if it were for laundry, I'd rather do my laundry outside where I'm closer to the chickens, the well, and the clothes lines. The hemam here is a lot like the one in the house in Corat that I lived in from Oct to Dec, except it's bigger, has more light, is better heated, and has no stone bench. And its plumbing doesn’t work. It’s a room that's about 6ft x 10ft, made of stone and has a tile floor. It’s pretty filthy – strong spider webs in every corner and who-knows-what growing on that aged tile. But it also has a gas stove in it to keep me warm, which is very nice. And I could see that the tile floor was once beautiful. It has a big old water heater lying sideways on the floor, and pieces for a faucet and pipes sitting in the window sill and in a corner, so somebody intended to hook it up one day. But it looks like that was a long time ago.The tools I use to take my bath with are an enormous metal bucket sitting about two feet off the ground. It's on an oven rack that's on top of a small, rusty, upside-down barrel. It holds three buckets of water, and when my bucket bath starts, it's full of heated well water that’s a mixture of super-hot water that was heated on the stove upstairs and cold water right out of the ground. On the floor next to the huge bucket are the two regular buckets (like metal ones you'd see on a farm) I used to do my laundry. One is full of heated water from upstairs and the other has cold water from the ground – those are used to adjust the temperature and for additional water. I use all of it. In the huge, metal bucket is a plastic sauce pan that I use to dump water on myself. That’s the setup. Plus, of course, my soap, shampoo, etc., sitting on the oven rack beside the huge bucket. When the room is warm enough (which it usually is), a bucket bath is really easy to get used to. I’ve been using the hemam for the last few weeks, and for the first time since I was a kid my hair doesn’t need conditioner. I don’t like to think about what’s making my hair feel so good; I’ll just enjoy it. And my scalp recently stopped itching. It’s been itching ever since I arrived in Azerbaijan, but the hemam has ended that.I’m about to have another hemam bucket bath in about an hour, and it’ll probably be my last one until the students go away on break again. They returned from semester break yesterday, but they'll be out during lunch today so I plan to sneak in to use it again with Basira standing guard. Usually Basira and I are at the office when the students are at school or on vacation, and we can’t do the bucket baths at home on office days (we can’t get away long enough - it takes a couple of hours with all the water hauling and heating), so it’ll probably be a long time before I can get into the home hemam again. But I’ll have something to look forward to. I can’t use the hemam when the male students are here because it’s in their section of Basira's house and apparently they can’t handle having a naked woman in their midst. It’s not like they see anything; it’s just that the image is too much for them. A couple of weeks ago two of them came home when I was in the hemam and one of them was so totally embarrassed by my coming out of there (I was fully dressed!) he couldn’t look at me. But that gets into another huge, complicated topic that I’m still trying to understand and will write about some other time.Now need to prep for my hemam – gather up the towels, clean clothes, soaps, and any other stuff I’ll need.Ask me questions! I always have a lot to talk about, but don’t always know where to start. And I don’t know how boring all of this might be to folks who are buried in megatons of snow, sitting in front of their televisions watching the Olympics…. oh, and thank you to all of you who told me about the Azerbaijan team’s flashy clothing at the opening ceremony. I didn’t see the ceremony, but another PCV put a photo of the team in Facebook for all to look at. Those were very cute outfits they were wearing, but not anything like what they wear here. The only clothing color they truly wear is black.Oh, and we do get the Olympics on the local TV here, but all I’ve seen so far is a minute or two of tennis in late afternoon (very early morning, US time). Watching tennis doesn’t hold my attention for more than a minute or two, so maybe I'll watch more when they get into ice skating, gymnastics, or skiing at 2am in Vancouver….Hope you had a good Valentine's Day!

Today I was supposed to go back to Mollaisaqli, but when I got into the SUV to go I was immediately covered with soaking, wet mud. My coat, purse, shoes, and the bag I was carrying (full of Azeri-English dictionaries, camera, etc.) were drenched. So I got out and told them to go without me. It was okay - I was going to go to a town I've been to before and would have seen the same training session I saw in Kenoba, so it was no big loss. And now I can catch up on my writing for AzRIP Baku and post the photos of Basira's house... (btw - I'm only expected to work 20 hours per week here, but I work closer to 60, so it's kosher for me to take some time to catch up on personal stuff, too.)

Here's the outside of her house. All those vines in the air are grapes. Basira, Kamala, Telli, and I live on the second floor and the four college students live downstairs. To the left of the house is the metal entrance to her property. The street sides of everyone's properties are surrounded by stone walls with heavy metal doors where people and cars can come and go. Most stone walls have something sharp on top of them - like broken glass standing up - for added protection.

... And this is outside her metal entrance, onto Naşimi Küçəsi (Nashimi Street), named after a famous poet. The streets in Samaxi that do have names (many of them don't) are mostly named after writers and scientists. This town was once loaded with famous, influential people. Long time ago.

Most streets in Azerbaijan that I've seen look just like this - stone walls with metal gates, and that's about it.

At the end of this street is the town center. Basira's entrance is on the right. Her garbage can is the barrel in the center foreground. Trash is picked up about once a month. (Update... make that once a month during election time. Then it stops.)

This is looking the opposite direction on Naşimi Kuçəsi:

Basira's house is on the bottom right corner of a "T" intersection. The next photo looks down the T street that ends at Naşimi Kuç. The building I work in is at the end of this street (not visible here):

This is back inside her property looking at her house from her vegetable garden.



Her well is in the foreground, with a bathtub behind it. Many people have bathtubs near their wells. They aren't used for baths, though. I've only seen them used for cleaning shoes and other muddy stuff. Her veggie garden is at the bottom of the photo.

My room is in this corner on the second floor. I have the window on the left of the corner and the two windows to the right of the corner. The upstairs porch functions a lot like a kitchen, but the real kitchen is that little brick room downstairs, below and in front of my room.

Here's the inside of the real kitchen:

Here's Basira at the well...

This is where the chickens live. Originally, it must have been the hemam - the shower room. I figured that out by process of elimination. Nothing else could have been it. (Update: the hemam is down in the students' part of the house... this has always been a chicken coop.)

When I arrived Basira had 10 toyuks (chickens). Now she's down to two roosters and will buy a bunch more chicks in spring to last her through the year.

Here's the portable sink I told you about. Lots of people have these, though most I've seen are in better shape. They keep them outside so guests and family can wash their hands after using the toilet and before going inside for a meal. Basira's is used for washing dishes, brushing teeth, and washing hands after using the toilet.

My hair gets tangled in all those grape vines when I brush my teeth here. But this contraption is usually empty (of water), so this time of year I usually brush my teeth in my room with bottled water.

The toilet cave is behind the porta-sink.



And here's the entrance to the toilet:

Here's another couple of shots of the well, bathtub, veggie garden, etc. The next-door neighbor's house is in the back of this shot (I'll tell you more about them sometime)...

And you can see the Jeep in Basira's yard in this shot:



And a picture of her metal gate - the porta-sink and toilet are to the left, and the steps to her front door are to the right:

Here are the front steps:

Here's Basira's 10-year-old granddaughter in the living room, wearing a Santa Claus mask that I gave her.. And this is her w/out the mask: And with again:

And a couple of photos of Basira making baklava in the living room:



And another one of the red rooster:

And that's about it. When I take more photos inside her place, I'll put them up. And when all the grapes, pomegranates, etc. are blooming and the chicks arrive, I'll take more pics outside.

If there's something in particular you want to see, let me know....

Görüşərik! (See ya later!)

Yesterday I ended up going to Kendoba (means "Rural Hamlet") in the Ağsu rayon and today I went to Mollaisaqli in the Ismayili rayon. That covers a lot of ground. Mountainous ground. Lots of beautiful mountainous ground.

I went to Kendoba with a trainer named Fizuli and a driver named Seymur. Fizuli did the last training step - Environment and Procurement Training, something I talked a little about in another blog. We left at about 10am and got back to the office at about 4pm, and nearly four hours of that was spent on the road looking out the SUV windows at clouds. They tell me it's fog, but it's not. We were in clouds. On the way back the clouds had moved a bit - then I could see the mountains around us more clearly, and the fluffy white clouds were below their peaks and below us. I wish I could have gotten a picture, but the roads and shock absorbers are too rough for that.

The most amazing thing I saw yesterday was two left-handed men. Both are on the village's Community Project Committee, and I got a photo.... the guys on the far left and far right are both left-handed.

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I'm not sure if I've talked about the issues of being left-handed in this part of the world before, but it's not particularly welcome in a Muslim culture. In Azerbaijan people always notice that I'm left-handed, but luckily it doesn't seem to bother them.

Before I arrived I was worried that I'd have to eat with my right hand, but I never have. In other countries it seriously bothers people, and in other countries I've forced myself to be right-handed. (That's pretty tough to do with chopsticks.) The local people I've talked about this to in Azerbaijan don't even know that it's an Islamic thing - that's how little they know about their religion. So I've told a couple of people about it. One was offended that there could be any prejudice like that in their culture or anyone else's.

When we arrived at the meeting in Kendoba only five people were present – not even half the group - and after waiting about 1/2 hour, we started with 11 people. Eventually two more straggled in – one when we were half done – and the total was 13. Eleven men; two women. Schedules aren't taken very seriously in this part of the world.

The last guy to arrive fell through the floor a few feet to the left of me. Yes, it's an old building. Very old. My guess is it could have been 200 years old, but it's hard to be sure since the materials they use to build buildings in those villages today are the same things they used many hundreds of years ago. Mud bricks, something to glue them together with, and wood for the window and door frames. Plus glass for the windows in the outsidewalls and above all of the inside doors. (More developed towns, like Sumgayit, Ganja, and Baku, use synthetic doors and windows these days.)

Clearly the electricity was put in long after the building was built. In the room we met in, the wiring came in through the top of the window, which was lowered about an inch. Permanently open. With the heat on. A “T” was made in the wire where it came in, then a light switch and an outlet were wired about six inches away from the T. That's right where rain can come through the gap in the upper window. Luckily the wire was coated, but being near that 220V outlet during a rainstorm could be pretty scary.

Another T in the wire ran up the wall above the window, then across the ceiling to the middle of the room where a single, clear light bulb was hanging. It shut on and off on its own while we held our meeting, so power outages are the same in Kendoba as they are everywhere else. I really thought they’d be worse way out there in the true boonies, but I was wrong.

BTW - here's something that's been gnawing at me for a couple of months... people here rarely shut the front door, even when it's freezing outside. At work and at home, whenever I'm near the front door I shut it. Windows are usually broken, too, and there's no such thing as insulation. Walk by any window or door - even if it's shut - and you feel a breeze. This is something I just don't understand. They complain about the price of the gas they use to heat their homes and it's obvious that it all goes out the front door (among other places). I'll just keep shutting the door when I go by it, and maybe the habit will catch on.

I saw a marshutka in Kendobar that was an old, old bus. Like from the 1950’s. Not a big one – a small one, but a lot bigger than a van. Fizuli told me it goes to and from Ağsu. It was good to see they have a way to get to a big village from there, and from Agsu they can make their way to many places. It could take awhile to get anywhere, but at least they can do it. With a car they could get to Baku in about three hours. On marshutkas it would probably take all day.

The marshutka was blue and green, with the paint peeling off all over. It looked a lot like an old hippie van - something you'd see by Haight-Asbury in the '60s. Many, many things are blue and green here. And even more things are blue, green, and red. For instance, the walls of the room we met in were blue, green, and red (well, it was sort of a light coral pink color – not exactly red). No, the blue-green-red combo isn’t pretty, but those are the colors of the Azerbaijani flag and these people are serious about their patriotism. The flag is made up of three thick, horizontal stripes that are blue, red, and green. The blue stripe at the top signifies the Turkish influence, red in the middle shows the Communist influence, and the green stripe at the bottom is for the Muslim influence. And it has a crescent and 8-pointed star in the middle, in the center of the red stripe, also signifying Islam.

Flag of Azerbaijan

Wikipedia says that the red strip signifies “Europeanization,” but I think the Communists had a much, much – extremely much – bigger influence on where the country is today. Plus, it is more definitely identified as “red” than Europe is. Hopefully Europe will have a bigger influence on where Azerbaijan is going, but that’s quite a way off into the future.

And today I went to Mollaisaqli. That's a village in Ismayili rayon, which is one of the most beautiful rayons in Azerbaijan (or anywhere on this planet). Today I went with Kamala's son, Bahktiyar, to the high school where he taught the Community Project Committee how to draw up their AzRIP proposal. He explained things like what credit is, what a beneficiary is, etc. This group of people is middle-aged, and they didn't know what those things are. Wish I could have understood all of their questions, and it was obvious they were entranced by these concepts. I have photos of the people...

The big problem that needs fixing in this town is potable water. They don't have any. I saw one tiny lake in the tiny town, and the water was filthy. Here's the little lake:

You'd think a spot like that surrounded by mountains would have streams, but I walked all around the village and didn't see one there. The problem is so bad, it's too expensive for AzRIP to help them fix it, so they have appealed to the national government in Baku for help. I was told that they've been promised a solution, but will keep my eye on it to see what happens. A town that tiny could easily be forgotten.

The people there had never seen an American before, so I was an immediate hit. Two of the men at the meeting wanted to marry me - they're 56 and 59 years old and seem like nice guys, but I suspect they aren't my type.

I met some high school students there, too. I even helped get them into some trouble, and they looked like they appreciated it. It was minor - I was out in their hallway taking pictures of the countryside through the windows, and opened a few of the windows to get a better shot. The handles were right there in my face, so I couldn't ignore them. Well, the kids saw me hanging out the windows, and after I walked back into the classroom where the meeting was held, about five of them opened windows and started sitting in them and yelling at friends from them. It was such a big deal to them, it sure looked like they'd never done that before. Never tempted by those window handles. Eventually some guy came by and ran them all off and shut the windows. That's the guy walking toward them in this photo...

The school is new. Very new, for Azerbaijan. But the rooms don't look like it. This is the classroom where physics and chemistry are taught. The periodic table isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's a different shape and is in Russian (you can't see it because it's behind me in this shot).

PCV friends who are teachers here tell me all the time about the lack of lateral thinking in the kids here. If something isn't directly pointed out to them, they can't see it. And they tell me that they rarely ever hear the kids (or anyone) ask "why." I hear people say "why" pretty often from a couple of the folks I work with at AzRIP, but not nearly as often as I normally hear it in the US. I ask it all the time, partly as habit and partly because I'm hoping my behavior will be contagious.

After the meeting, Bahktiyar and I walked up the road where the driver was going to pick us up. It was on a mountain, and the view was great. I don't thing the photos do it justice, but they're not bad... these are of the village and the countryside, then of the car coming to pick us up...









It's about time for dinner. I eat lunch and dinner at the office Monday through Thursday. Today I wish it was my shower day today... I could really use one. But there are too many men in the office today (Wednesday). On Thursday afternoon they all leave at around 2 or 3pm to head back to their home town in Barda for the weekend, so that's when I have my shower. And Sundays. Twice a week. But only if the gas is on so we can make hot water.

On Saturday I'm going to a local wedding (they call a wedding a "toy"). Should be good stuff. Too bad I won't be able to have a shower the day I go, but my guess is that nobody else at the toy will have one either. And for sure nobody cares.

I'll upload pics of Basira's house soon. Maybe tomorrow.

Have you ever seen the movie "Groundhog Day"? I've seen it at least 20 times. Somehow it kept me sane when I was stressed out from life in pharmaceutical management. Eventually I summed up the energy I needed to quit - a terrifying experience due to those mega-tight golden handcuffs - and my work life has been far better ever since.

People have asked me about TV shows, cars, and a few other facts of Azeri life. TV... Baku has a TV and film industry, but most of what I see is from other countries. We didn't have a television set until two weeks ago, and the one we got only gives us one station clearly enough to both see and hear a program at the same time. It shows nighttime soap operas from Japan, Italy, Spain, and India, and they are all overdubbed in Azeri. They don't turn off the sound from the original version, but they turn it way down and talk on top of it. Sometimes they turn it up again, like during a lot of laughing and other loud wordless noises, but not very often. They show a lot of movies from US and India. The last US flicks I saw were "The Departed" and a Buster Keaton movie from about 100 years ago. I see ads for movies released in the last year, but they usually start at 10pm and I’m never awake to watch them.

Cars... there are several Chevrolets running around Şamaxı and one Chrysler that I've seen. No Fords. And like most foreign cities there are many more Mercedes than you'd ever expect to see. Plus a lot of Volkswagons (nice ones) and a couple of BMWs. And a few Hyundais, Mitsubishis, and Kias.

Surprisingly, I've seen no Toyotas or Hondas at all; I thought they were everywhere (oops, I have to add this two days later while editing: I saw a Toyota Land Cruiser and my first Ford pickup).

There is one car that way outnumbers all the others. Even if you add all the other ones together it still outnumbers them. They are - literally - everywhere. It's a little box-shaped thing made by a company called a Lada and it's made in Russia. Nearly all taxis are Ladas and most passenger cars are from Lada. It must be cheap, but it also must keep running forever because there are old ones all over this country and I never see them broken down or stuck. I've seen a few Mercedes broken down and stuck (in mud and in ice), but never the Lada.

All the cars in my field of view here are Ladas:

The weather here is unpredictable. So far we've had real winter for one week - last week. Now it's around 50 degrees during the day and above freezing at night. One thing that's really strange about the weather here year round is that usually it's colder in the afternoon than it is in the morning. For a long time the backward weather messed up what I chose to wear for the day, and I'd be freezing in the afternoon. It seems to have stopped this week, but I suspect it'll come back. What I do now is carry so many layers that it doesn't matter what I wear as long as I carry a bag to put all the extra clothing in when I don't need it.

Right now I'm sitting at work with nothing to do. For the last three weeks I was swamped, but now there's nothing. I was supposed to go out to a small village for another community training and mobilization meeting, but four other trainers and engineers plus the driver needed to go in one car, so I didn't fit. They tell me there might be another place I can go to today with a mobilizer who has a meeting alone, but I haven't gotten the final word. So I keep busy by working on my blog. I'll probably go through some Azeri/English flash cards on my computer, too. See if I can pick up a few more words.

I've forgotten more words than I can remember. If I don't use them soon and use them more than a couple of times, I don't remember them. Young folks tell me they have the same problem, so this isn't an age thing. It has more to do with the kind of memory we have. Remembering a word for more than a few days (or few minutes) has more to do with moving it from short-term memory to long-term. Most people need to do that. But learning a word at all has more to do with visual, aural, and kinesthetic memories. There's also a logical type of memory - linking something into a logical stream of information helps.

My memory is definitely visual and kinesthetic, which use logical. Hearing a word doesn't help me. If I don't see it and write/speak it, I don't usually remember it. People with aural memories have a much easier time with languages, but very few people have that trait. There are a few PCVs who have picked up Azerbaijani easily, so they may have aural memory. Or something else that's rare. (If you know more about this, let me know - I'm all eyes!)

I just learned that today, at noon (3am EST), I'm going to a village called Kendobar in Ağsu Rayon to watch their environment and procurement training - this is the last step in the process AzRIP takes with a community. That is, it's the last step before the project actually starts. The mobilizer will explain to the community what they need to know about protecting the environment and how to purchase the project from the government - getting the grant is a stepwise process. They get bits of it each time they finish a step in the project, then they get full ownership. I'll be doing something that should help me learn a few useful words and maybe even remember them.

If the power stays on, my next posting will be in a few minutes and it will be pictures of my current home. The power has gone off a couple of times already this morning, so keep your fingers crossed...

Well, you didn't cross your fingers quick enough, because it's now seven hours later. The power went out and I went to Kendobar. During our drive (1.5 hr each way) I saw a broken down Lada, so - I was wrong - they don't run forever.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Okay - here are some photos of the home I stayed at in Corat (pronounced Jorat) during training. It belongs to Mehpara and her two teenage kids, Nigar and Iosef. The blue doors are the front doors, and my room was behind the windows to the right. The living room was behind the windows to the left. The table outside the windows is where they cleaned and cut fruits and veggies:

This is the living room, seen from standing in the doorway to my room. It has a TV set, a VCR and a table. That's all. This is where they have meals, see guests, watch TV, etc. There's one table just to the right of the door where I was standing - that's where I ate (they sat on the floor in the middle of the room) and where the teenage girl studied:

This is the table I ate at. The picture is taken from beside the TV set:



Here's my room, taken from the doorway:

My room, taken from by the bed:



This is my desk, between the two photos above - the tall silver thing is the water filter the PCorps gives each of us:

Here's the the yard outside the house - those are pomegranate trees:

Here's the entrance to the shower/laundry room. The well where I brushed my teeth is in the foreground:

Here's the toilet. From the photo above, it's to the left of the well. The only thing in there that you can't see is a hose. The "toilet" is the hole in the floor in the middle of the picture.

Here's the entrance to the kitchen. It's to the left of the front of the house:

Inside the kitchen:

The gas stove in the kitchen (two burners worked; the oven didn't):

And the refrigerator. It worked:

And here's the entrance to her yard. The pomegranate trees are to the right, the toilet is just beyond the trees, the shower/laundry room is to the right behind the trees, and the front door to the house is behind me:

I have a bunch more pictures, but nothing really different. No people - I took these one day when only the daughter was home. She was taking her weekly shower, so I couldn't get a shot of the inside of that room. It's a stone cave with a faucet, a stone bench along one wall and a couple of buckets. That's all.

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

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! 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

(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

(This was originally emailed on Thanksgiving 2009)

Here’s something interesting... the word “almaq” means “buy,” “receive,” and “get” – there’s no difference between those terms. So communism lives on in their language. I’ve never heard a local use the term “communism” here, in English or in Azeri. They call it “collectivism.” That’s a better way of saying how it affected them.

The organization I'll be working with is Azerbaijan Rural Investment Project. From what I can see so far, it was created by the Azeri government to help repair and develop the areas that have little access to government money. After 20 years of no Soviet/Russian support, things have fallen apart horribly everywhere. Most schools are freezing and have bathrooms you wouldn’t want to step into (I spend over 8 hours a day in those schools) and the hospitals, roads, and sewage systems throughout the country need work. Lots of people miss the Soviets because they kept the schools, roads, power, mail systems, and all infrastructure working. The current government doesn’t do that. There are billions of $$$ coming into the country from oil, but it’s not making its way to the people. The Peace Corps and many other international groups strive to help the organizations and people that can't get the money, so I was surprised to learn that the organization I’ll be helping is supported by the government (but funded by the World Bank). It’ll be interesting to see just what they do and how they do it. I’ve probably mentioned how big bribing is here. It’s standard practice. From what I hear, most – but not all - college diplomas are bought from real schools. And I hear that the police are kind of like gangsters.

The Peace Corps’ Azeri office has a very sharp guy running its Security section, and he’s on call 24/7 to help if anyone tries to take advantage of us. No matter who it is… government officials, police, neighbors, or even kids. A couple of weeks ago a few women trainees were being harassed (just verbally) by a bunch of guys who were about 18 years old. The guys were following them down a street saying - in English - what they wanted to do to them (you can guess - to them, all young Western women are whores). That’s pretty common behavior here. One of the women got fed up with the nuisance, so she called the Peace Corps security guy on her cell phone and then handed the phone to one of the young jerks. The kid took the phone and listened, and as soon as he hung up he was backing off from the women apologizing profusely in English and Azeri. I have no idea what the security guy said to the kid, but I’ve heard he can and will do just about anything for us. That’s a good feeling, especially since I’ve also heard that the Muslim extremists are out there. They probably have been for awhile; since Azerbaijan’s split from Russia in 1991 it has been trying to find its identity. Most Azeris consider themselves European, but the EU hasn’t accepted them. They do not see themselves as Mid-Eastern or Russian. What they’re closest to culturally is Turkey, and that’s probably their closest friend. Even their languages are about the same – nothing like Farsi or Arabic. Once I really learn to speak Azerbaijani I’ll actually be able to talk to Turks, too.

The people here are not religious, but their culture is definitely Muslim – much more so than many of them know. So, while searching for their post-Soviet identity, many Azeris are turning to religion. Even the family I’m staying with is. The 15-year-old girl spends hours properly donning her shawl garb to pray. I’m not sure how often she does it – I’m not usually home during the day – but I think it’s just once a day. And the Call to Prayer that comes (live!) five times a day from huge loudspeakers on the town mosque has gotten louder lately. And this week it started coming from two sources; one of them is a lot closer to where I live. So it looks and sounds like they’re becoming more Muslim. Most of the people here seem to want to lean toward Euro-American culture, but I probably get a biased view. The Azeris always like to be nice and tend to tell people only what they think they want to hear. Some of my Peace Corps trainee buddies are moving close to the Iranian border next month and it’ll be interesting to find out what they see and hear, particularly once their language skills improve. I hope to take a trip down there – I hear there are wild herds of camels running about down south. That would be something to see.

There’s a big Muslim holiday this week. It starts on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving (no, I don’t get Thanksgiving Day off), and is called Qurban Bayrami, which means “Sacrifice Holiday.” It’s about an Old Testament story that has something to do with a guy (was it Abraham?) who is supposed to sacrifice a sheep, but couldn’t get one and offered his son instead. So God gave him a sheep. Or something like that... I'm not well versed in Biblical history. Anyway, Muslim families celebrate the event by sacrificing a sheep and handing sections of it to their poorer neighbors. The family I’m staying with sure can’t afford a sheep, so we’ll see what happens here. Their relatives next door can afford it – they have a huge house and a Mercedes – so maybe they’ll do the sacrifice and bring us some meat. I sure wouldn’t mind some mutton, but let’s hope they keep the keep the slaughtering next door.

I don’t know if I’m going to pass the official language test, but nobody is ever booted out of the Peace Corps for failing. I think the only way you can get booted from the Peace Corps is to do something illegal. Once you're accepted by passing all the tests, investigations, and evaluations needed to get sent somewhere for training, you’re in - unless you decide you want to get out (it’s not like the military; we can leave whenever we want). I take the final language test on Dec 2 and am supposed to make Intermediate-level Azeri speech – yes, intermediate after just 8 weeks of classes. This week I learned that volunteers who don’t make it get four months to reach their goal. They give us an allowance for language tutors and I’ve already started looking for one by contacting other volunteers in my new town. My boss (the Peace Corps one, not the AzRIP one) said I’m gonna need it. My job is going to take me to lots of places where nobody speaks anything but Azeri or Russian. He gave me the email address of the woman who just left the position I’ll be entering, so I contacted her. She might be able to connect me with a good tutor and tell me more about the place I’ll be working.

Well, the power went out again so I’d better shut down and thank Allah for my laptop’s backup battery. I write my emails on my computer at home in Word, then put them on my flash drive and copy/paste them into Gmail when I can make it to the Internet Club. Every time I do that the flash drive picks up lots of viruses, but Norton 360 is protecting me well. I carry my laptop to the Club as often as I can to update its protection. So now I’ll shut down and try to study the language without my computer…. yaxshi yol!

Next day… Over the past week the power has been on barely 50%. Shutdowns are frequent. Lately it’s been due to wind. They don’t think it’s at all strange to walk in wind so strong that you have to struggle to force yourself through it. We’re talking hurricane-force winds, and they’re normal. When I was walking into the wind trying to get home a few days ago, all I could think of was Dorothy when she was trying so hard to get home in the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. I’ve been through lots of tornadoes and hurricanes and have never felt any wind like I’ve felt in here. Not much rain, and no storms. Just wind. So now I know one reason why there’s nothing sitting out in yards and on streets – no trash cans, flower pots, nothing. The only thing that hit me while I was walking through it was continuous salt and sand from the sea.

Last week I watched a woman have a heart attack. For real. Right here at home. And there’s nothing that could be done. It was about 11pm – I think it was Wednesday night – and they woke me up to see if I had any medicines to help. They knew I have a big First Aid case full of pills and stuff that the Peace Corps gives each of us, but it’s not like the Corps makes plans to treat heart failure. Far from it. If my heart was in that bad of shape they would have found out during the dozens of medical tests I had to take to become a volunteer and wouldn’t have let me in. Anyway… the family woke me up, and to make them happy I pulled out the First Aid kit, sat down at a table across from the woman who was having the heart attack, and thumbed through the meds. At the time I didn’t know what was wrong with the woman (“Bibi” is what they call her – that means the “aunt from the male side of the family”), but she was making a horrific noise while she sweat then shivered and sweat then shivered over and over again. She kept passing out on and off, too. Once she passed out long enough that I thought she was dead. There were six of us in the room – Bibi, her sister (don’t know her name), Mehpara (whose house I’m staying in), Mehpara’s two teenagers (Nigar and Iosef), and me. Her sister fanned her, Mehpara and I watched her, Nigar went back and forth between the soccer game on TV and the heart attack, and Iosef barely looked up from the soccer. Apparently this isn’t an unusual event. And there was nobody to call. There is a phone number for emergencies, like for ambulances and fire departments, but nobody trusts them. Very few doctors in Azerbaijan are what we would call doctors. They’re basically people who decide they’ll be doctors one day and put a sign out that says they are. They probably buy their certification (read: bribe) and have some sort of training, like home remedies and superstitions handed down from the family, but people tend to trust their own family training more than what the “doctors” offer them. And I have to admit that the time-tested family remedies may be more reliable. I considered calling the Peace Corps’ main doctor, Dr. Fuad (we have three doctors, also not "real" by American definition, to take care of us 24/7), but he’s in Baku and by the time he’d arrive she’d either be dead or the heart attack would be over and she’d survive. Plus, Peace Corps volunteers are supposed to stay out of stuff, and this sure looked like it could be stuff.

Well, she didn't die, and the next day I talked to Fuad and he told me that staying out of it was the right thing to do. I have to admit it was interesting to watch her. Now if I ever write fiction I’ll know what to write if a character is having heart failure or dying.

The next day Nigar told me it was a heart attack. I can’t be sure that’s what it was, but whatever it was looked serious enough to pass for one. She’s a very smart girl. So is her mother. Both were top students in the school down the street, but Mehpara couldn’t afford college or anything else, so she got married. Nigar wants to be an English teacher, which is a valuable occupation here – women can get into it and they’re sure to get jobs. Learning English is very, very big here. She’s pretty good and hopefully she’ll make it. She knows her verb conjugations better than lots of Americans I know, but she needs a lot more vocabulary and practice. Kinda like me with her language. She helps me with Azeri daily and doesn’t expect me to help her with English – that’s part of the contract they have with the PCorps.

They’re paid pretty well to keep me here. Roughly $150/month to feed me and give me a place to sleep. That’s a lot of money here. Going out for a really good meal costs about $2-4; a cheap meal is about 20-40 cents. A bottle of the best water costs 20 cents, a bus ride costs 20 cents, a cab ride across town costs about $2. The only thing I’ve found to be expensive is bananas; they’re about 50 cents each. When I eat out, lunch usually costs me about $1.

And real estate isn’t cheap. Houses cost about the same here as they do in Raleigh, and with an average income of about $5000 (Raleigh is around $40,000), that’s a fortune to these folks. In Baku, real estate prices are comparable to London and New York and they’re continuously building more and more huge condos downtown. If you can ignore the disgusting air, it’s a beautiful city. It's very European and looks like a cross between Zurich, Paris, and Istanbul. The buildings look like Zurich with a little bit of Turkish trim, and the shops and sights look like all three. In a few years it will be a real planetary landmark – construction is going on everywhere and the pictures I’ve seen of what's to come are amazing. People who have been here a couple of years have told me that the recent development of areas around Baku, like Sumgayit, are incredible. It’s obvious that the huge houses are new and some of the schools are new, and there’s some new infrastructure, too – buses, power, etc. But most are not government run. Buses are privately owned; each driver owns his own. I’m not sure about power. Things are changing fast, but the most serious problems aren’t visible. I’m just beginning to learn about them, so you’ll read about them later.

Heart failure is the most common cause of death here and people have it when they’re very young. Mehpara’s husband died of a heart attack just a few years ago; he was in his early 40’s. The way people eat here, it’s no surprise. Most live on sugar, starch, and fat, with an occasional veggie or bit of protein tossed in. I expected to see a lot more smoking here and it’s nice to see so little of it. Cigarettes are cheap, but no women smoke. And I haven’t seen many men smoke. With their diet maybe all the smokers are dead.

Mehpara gives me protein every day in two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, but I had to struggle to get it ... Dr. Fuad was a huge help. But I still don’t get enough protein to make me feel right, so I’m looking forward to moving. In my normal American diet, I ate less bread in a year than I eat in a week here. And I ate more protein in a day than I get in a week here. I'm certain I’d know a heck of a lot more of the Azeri language today if the bread in my diet had been replaced with protein.

So there are lots of fat people here. Azeri women and men are absolutely beautiful in their 20’s. In their 30’s they look like a fat 40, and at 50 they look about 70. They rarely live to 70, so I can’t tell you what they look like at that age. But all of that is changing and I look forward to seeing what things will be like here in a couple of years.

Cancer is big here, too. The Soviets built factories all over the place and dumped the waste everywhere – the rivers, land, sea, air… absolutely everything was loaded with cancer-causing crud until the Russians left in the 1990s. And where there were no factories there were farms loaded with pesticides. Most people don’t know what the crud does to them, don’t know it’s there, and don't care. Few are interested in learning, so they do nothing about it. One of the things the Peace Corps does is to help educate the young folks (and anyone else who wants to learn) about the environment so they learn to care and are motivated to act.

The people here are very bright and they will learn, but the way they were taught to learn in the Soviet era hasn’t gone away yet. In school nearly everything is rote memorized and they don’t learn how to think beyond what’s right in front of them. Historically, Azerbaijan has had lots of brilliant thinkers – poets, scientists, philosophers, etc., and those ways of thinking are respected and admired here, but I don’t think they know that it can be learned and spread. Hopefully they’ll tend more in that direction while looking for the new Azeri identity and not gravitate toward Mr. bin Laden and his buddies.

Well, this has gotten way too long again, so I’ll cut it off. The Peace Corps is closed for Thanksgiving, but all of us trainees will be in Azeri language classes that day.

Happy Thanksgiving,Julie

(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

Sorry, but I've decided not to post to the blog for now. It's for security reasons. My stories will come by email, at least until I can protect my blog better.

If you don't receive my email that means you're probably not on my email distribution list, so contact me and let me know (and also give my your address).

Thanks!

Well, we made it! We left Philadelphia at 7am EST on Wednesday and arrived in Azerbaijan at 8pm Thursday night, local time. It's 9 hours later here, so that's only a little over a day. Already I've spoken my first Azeri words, received my first Azeri phone call, and had my first Azeri breakfast. I've already had two Azeri showers, too, and will take advantage of the luxury as often as I can as long as we're in this hotel (until Monday). My room (shared with Melissa West) has the cool showers like I had in my first bedroom in Singapore - it's just a spout coming out of a tiled wall with a drain in the floor of the bathroom - no step up, down or other sort of border indicating where it starts and stops. It does have a shower curtain that tucks behind the toilet tank when it's not in use, but you don't really need to use it. Just about everything gets wet no matter what you do.

Getting my overly-over-weight luggage here was a real challenge. I deserve an award for lugging the most luggage of anyone in our group of roughly 60 PCorps volunteers. Luftansa (NY to AZ) was kind to me; barely charged me anything. USAir (Raleigh to Philly) charged me $200. Still, it was a heck of a lot cheaper than trying to buy or ship the stuff here. Hauling it was another story, but I frequently had help from lots of kind 20-something guys along the way.

But, time to step back. The last several weeks have been overwhelming. I finished selling all of my furniture and most of my belongings, closed on my townhouse, went to Brevard (NC mountains) to say good-bye to my mom and pack away the last of the stuff I'm keeping, and spent a little over four days in a five-diamond hotel/spa in Cary, NC, getting massaged, sauna-ed, manicured, and fed the best food of my life while saying good-bye to friends. The massages really paid off... my muscles don't hurt after transporting tons of luggage thousands of miles. If you ever get the chance, check out The Umstead. Awesome experience.

Azerbaijan's Hotel Neapoli is very nice, too. Not quite the same caliber - different sorts altogether - but it's decor is far more exotic. Lots of Persian rugs and some impressive palatial trimmings. The room I share with Melissa has a bedroom, bathroom, and living room with a TV and a dining table set with three-course china settings. I keep getting lost whenever I try to find the lobby or any other part of the hotel (like the Internet room where I'm sitting now), but I meet interesting people when wandering around lost.

So far, the coolest thing I've seen is the snow-covered, sun-setting Caucasus Mountains when we were flying over the Baltic Sea, over Georgia, and into Azerbaijan. They're huge! And the view was so incredible I started waking up people sitting all around me on the plane. Luckily most of them were grateful; one even thanked me later. My camera wasn't available, but several other folks got some good pictures that we'll share via the Web sometime soon.

Well, my laptop is running out of power fast - my outlet adaptor is in a suitcase that went off to storage. Surely someone will lend me one if I'm desperate, but for now I'll go easy on the electricity.

Julie First-day-in-Azerland

Finally I have a minute to sit back and work on this blog. I've been planning it for months, and the time has really flown. Now I'm running out of time.

For over a year I've been hoping, then preparing, to be a Peace Corps volunteer. It started in June 2008 when I received a postcard from the Peace Corps telling me they were holding a seminar in downtown Raleigh to recruit volunteers who are over 50. The seminar did it - that was what I needed. It was just what I was looking for.

The entry process started in July 2008 with applications, interviews, and essays, then four months of health exams - in total, nine months of effort. In March 2009 they sent me the final invitation to Azerbaijan as a Community Economic Development Advisor.

Once the invitation arrived, things really started hopping! In April my townhouse went on the market and I started cleaning out every square inch of my place... selling or donating 40 years of accumulated stuff (yes, I've had some of this stuff since high school) (no I'm not getting rid of everything) (almost everything).

I also started learning to speak Azerbaijani - real neural-aerobics. My head hasn't absorbed this much new info since college.

Everything has gone pretty smoothly (so far) and in one month I'll finally be out of here, leaving it all behind. I'll be on my way to Baku, part of a group of 62 volunteers -- Azerbaijan's seventh group of PCVs.

Azerbaijan is an independent country in the Caucusus mountains of Eurasia. It is bordered by Russia to the north, Georgia and Armenia to the west, Iran to the south, and the Caspian Sea to the east.

It has been an independent country twice in its history: from 1918-1920 after the Russian Revolution, and from1991 to the present, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Azerbaijan is now a Republic with a constitution adopted in 1995. It is secular, and a majority of its people are of Turkish decent and Shi 'ite Muslim.

The language spoken is Azerbaijani, a Turkic language primarily spoken in Azerbaijan and northern Iran. It is very similar to Turkish -- so similar I've been told that Turks and Azeris can speak freely across their languages. Azerbaijani was heavily influenced by Persian in the Middle Ages and by Russian in the 20th century when Russian was the principal language of Azerbaijan. Today Russian is the second language and English is spreading fast.

Azerbaijani has had five alphabets over the years: three Roman-based, one Cyrillic (like Russian), and one Arabic, a couple of centuries ago. The current alphabet is Roman-based, has 32 characters, and two-thirds of them are identical to ours.

This was one of the first countries with an oil economy, which started in the mid-1800's. Its accessible oil was depleted in the 1900's, with an impact on the economy. Now, with new technology, access to large reserves of oil is again possible.

Azerbaijan's economy has grown tremendously over the last few years mainly due to oil exports, but the non-energy sector also had high growth in 2008 from construction, banking, and real estate. Baku is growing and modernizing. The current global economic problems with the drop in oil prices have caused the problems we've seen everywhere, particularly in the local banks.

Oil exports are increasing now. A consortium of Western oil companies built a pipeline from Baku to a port on the Mediterranean Sea in Turkey, which will pump 1.2 million barrels a day from an offshore field in the Caspian Sea and transport it to Europe.

Azerbaijan shares all the challenges of former Soviet republics as they make the transition to a market economy, but its considerable energy resources are a tremendous help. The capital, Baku, is making progress on economic reform, and old, outdated economic structures are being replaced.

Other national issues currently being dealt with include improvement in the non-energy sectors (which the Peace Corps is helping with) and the continuing conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Two good places to find out more about Azerbaijan are Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan and The World Factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/aj.html.

Have any questions or comments? Let me know...