The Test of International Living

Being married, Joey and I have a built in support system since we get to share our PC service together. This we knew when we left the good old USA. However, our support system had never met the test of international living. I think one of our biggest adjustments has been actually being around each other so often. Back in America, we’d go to our own separate jobs, eat lunch at said job and then come home to quickly go to our next event or activity. We’d usually have dinner together, but not always. We were busy back home in a completely different way than we are busy now AND even though we love each other dearly, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time with each other. Sounds like a normal American marriage to me, huh?! 

Since December, when we arrived in Quba, Joey and I have spent the majority of everyday together. When we were in host families, we had our own room but now that we’re in our own house, due to space and door constraints, we can literally see each other from anywhere at anytime. We do have separate jobs during the school year, but during the summer months, we have spent nearly every waking moment together. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been completely wonderful to take our relationship to a deeper level,but there are those dreadful days when I get on Joey’s nerves (perhaps the vice versa) and we have no place to go. So, we talk it out, we work it out and we try to learn from it. Also, we remind ourselves that we signed up for this voluntarily. Some days that's comforting, some days not.

I think the nearly 5 years of marriage is working to our benefit, we know each other pretty well, we knew about these personal quirks even if they’re magnified a bit more, but all in all, it seems to be making us a better team. I can’t imagine being a newlywed trying to live a PC life and learning those things about your spouse that you adjust to or learn you can’t or don’t want to adjust to. 

We’re in this to be models of what American marriage is. Yes, we’re speaking for all you married people out there… for better or worse. We let young boys and girls know that it is ok for Joey to wash dishes. One night this sent a neighbor boy giggling to tell his mom and grandma that Joey was washing dishes! People understand that I worked in an office and can drive a car back home while Joey was the teacher. Azeri’s see us together and happy! They see us as very young and are incredibly surprised when we tell them our ages and that we’ve been married for almost 5 years and do not yet have children (more on the children topic in another post). 

So to sum things up, being married is good. Joey and I are learning more about each other than we ever thought was possible but we’re able to laugh, cry and groan through it and still like each other. We are lucky, but we are having a different type of experience, simply because we are married. More to come!

July 4th - The Caspian Sea

I'm no expert on being married, being a Peace Corps Volunteer or living in Azerbaijan but Joey and I fit into these 3 categories, so I'll/we'll attempt to write more from this perspective. This one is short and sweet, BUT be prepared for longer and not so sweet...

Background:

• Joey and I have spent more than half of our married life talking about being in the Peace Corps and making it happen.
• We've been married nearly 5 years, which makes life here in AZ easier and sometimes harder.

Here's an example of one of the many reasons why I love this man!

The kids at this camp adored Joey. Of course, what's not to love when he plays one of their national kid songs, he talks to them on their level and likes to have fun! Joey's a great role model on many levels in Azeri society. It's not too often you see a grown-up (man or woman) hanging out with kids and enjoying it. I'm a lucky lady to have married such a caring and wonderful man!

Summercamp!

Hillary and I with our awesome 5th-grade girls!

School's out for a couple of months here in Azerbaijan, so that gives us the opportunity to travel around the country and see a few more places than we normally would throughout the scheduled school year.  Recently we headed West and spent a week in a village near Yevlax, where our friend Catharine was hosting a camp for the kids in her community.  It was great to get a new experience outside of our insulated Quba daily routine.  What struck me the most was that since it's a village (just a few roads here and there, a small school, a tiny market, and a soccer field), literally EVERYONE knows who Catharine is.  Our taxi driver was trying to find out where to drop us off, so he simply rolled down his window and asked "hey, where does the American live?"  Immediately a group of young boys pointed to a house down the street.

Throughout our week there, Hillary and I were in charge of a group of nine girls in the 5th grade.  Among the nine of them, they spoke about six words of English, so it was a great stretch for our Azeri language skills.  Regardless, we had an amazing time working with these girls on concepts like teamwork, patience, and kindness.  Each day there were team sessions in the morning, and then group activities in the afternoon.  Our girls were serious about coloring our poster with our team name (Dənizin Qızları, aka The Sea Girls), and making a metric ton of friendship bracelets.  At first, the kids didn't really seem to understand how a grown man would actually sit down with them and talk and play games and make bracelets with them, but after a couple days, they really seemed to recognize that Hillary and I actually WANTED to work with them and get to know them together...  the concept of a fun, healthy marriage seemed like kind of a new idea to them.  On our last day at camp, there was a very sweaty dance party, and lots of autographs.

We also had the chance to spend time with fellow Volunteers from other regions of Azerbaijan.  We're up in the "first finger" of the country, somewhat isolated from everything else because of a mountain range.  (In order for us to travel  anywhere, we must first get to the capital city of Baku, and then take a connecting bus.)  It was wonderful to check in with my friends from training, as well as other Volunteers who are on their second and third years in-country.  We operated as a team, planning our sessions daily, and working to throw together lunches and dinners.  At night, we rotated through a shower schedule, and enjoyed time at a picnic table outside talking about our lives at home and abroad, our conversations punctuated by cool breeze and occasional lightning storms. 

Next week we're heading to Zaqatala for an arts camp -- who's ready for guitar sing-alongs and some improv games?

Giving orders like a champ!

Our girls presenting about having patience. 
They did a skit about being a rude customer at the bazar!

Hand-making decorations for the end-of-camp party

PCVs going crazy during the dance portion of the party

A sweet young girl with her favorite PCV, Hillary!

  

This kid was awesome!  He jumped and giggled the whole time,
and insisted on getting a picture with me, even though I was tremendously sweaty.

Late-night chats with Katie, Irene, Julie, and Oruj

The adventures of Jackie

About a month ago I was walking around the corner to my house and was distracted by some boys that usually come to my English club and they had not attended in the past few week. As I was asking how they were doing, I did not have my eyes on the path. I could feel the earth shake, the deep sounds of thumping, which all happened very fast, to then realize I was about to be trampled by a fast moving, huge cow.

In fact, I was not trampled. I apparently, have some very quick moves when I'm about to get run over by cows and the boys got some good laughs out of the situation. I quickly recovered and was able to safely enter my home without a scratch.

From my memory, I had never seen this cow before. We had only been in our house for about a month and the weather was still cold. Now, I realize this cow belongs to our next door neighbor family and since we have nicer weather and things like grass have greened up, I see her almost every day. Since 'the incident', I realize Jackie does not move that fast, so it makes me wonder about the day in question. Perhaps I was in the way of her grassy patch she'd been eying and she was getting there with some fierce speed or I remembered the speed of her humungous head nearing my face with a little more drama???

I do watch out when I turn the corner to see if she's coming but other than that I don't believe there is any other sustained psychological trama. To manage our relationship, Joey and I have affectionately named her Jackie. Every night when she is corralled into the gate, her voice loudly ecos over the wall as we eat our dinner and here's a bit of our typical conversation with her:

"Hello, Jackie"," Of course it was a good day"
"Good Night, Jackie",
"For goodness sakes, Jackie, enough"
"We said , Good Night"

We've found that having fake conversations are better than ones in person because people think we're crazy when we stop and talk to her on the road. Nobody, except us, seems to get a kick out of having a cow right outside the door.

Perspective for today

It is good I washed clothes and took a shower yesterday because today, for the moment/hours, there is no gas. That may sounds simple enough to accomplish those two tasks, however it is a bit of an ordeal to do either since it takes many hours to heat our hamam (Az word), klonka (Russian word) or water heater (English word) and washing clothes out of a bucket is a back-breaking job and who wouldn't delay that as long as possible?! In the photo you'll see two blue buckets for washing clothes, green for flushing. You can also see the big fire heating up in the corner. We do also have a shower head, but didn't make the photo.

For example, yesterday was a beautiful day, actually acting like Spring. Choices needed to be made, maximize the gas on such a day or do half of the laundry and go to the bazar for the week. Two loads in and nearing 2:00 the clouds began to roll in and the temperature dropped. Good choice to finish out the laundry and postpone the bazar.

As you can see, drying clothes might take a long time (ie: still soaking wet this morning) so while drying my now clean towel by the pech (our central stove), we multi-tasked by making tea, drying the towel and making pizza dough rise! Our lives are simple but A-OK.

By the way, our landlord just knocked and told me I could turn the gas back on since he was working on something 1) I understood him! 2) I can't see my breath yet so we're in better shape than last week when this happened!

Springtime in Quba

So our last significant snowfall hasn't been since March, but the month of April still managed to be quite cold. We've had some beautiful sunny days that give us hope of a warm and prosperous Spring, but sadly they don't outweigh the cold and dreary days.... YET. We're now living in our new home and really getting into the swing of our work here. We're slowyly figuring things out every day, but some things are starting to come into focus a bit better these days.

The biggest development here is that at the beginning of April, we moved into independent housing. This means that we now live in a small duplex-style home with our

landlords, an older couple whose children are in Baku. Mom's a teacher at the school next to my office, and dad's a beekeeper (he was all gussied up in his beekeeping outfit smoking out the bees this afternoon!). We've had an absolute BLAST cooking our own meals and getting creative with local ingredients. The great news is that we're back online, with semi-high speed internet access. (All it took was a couple trips across town, and a sad interaction with some awful salespeople that left Joey close to tears.)

Now that we have internet access, I will rekindle this dusty old blog with some pix and stories about Novruz. We are by no means experts on the event, but as first-time observers and participants,enjoy!

We celebrated the entry into Spring with our first Azerbaijani Novruz celebration. Preparation for the holiday mainly includes cleaning the home from top to bottom, and even our teenage host brothers pitched in for about fifteen minutes each. Otherwise,

there's a lot of cooking traditional dishes and baking a huge amount of pastries, and then eating everything for 3 days straight. There's very little going to the bakery to buy these items, which I would be more accustomed to do back home, yet there is immense pride in the complexity of the food and the pastries. Many people invited us to their homes to celebrate with food, as this holiday is focused around nature and the beginnings of tilling of soil, planting seeds and hoping that the earth will begin to turn green. We felt very welcomed. To encourage the seasons to change, there is also green wheat that is grown in anticipation.

Here's a picture of our Xalcha, which has 7 candles, fruit, nuts, candies, decorated eggs and some pastries in it. It's the traditional platter of goodies found in most Azeri homes during Novruz. (We were surprised to see PAAS-esque Easter egg wrappers too. My special egg was Minnie Mouse.) Did you know there are competitive egg-battles here? It goes like this -- each person takes a decorated egg, and two people slam the eggs together, and whichever one cracks first is the loser. The winner then takes the loser's egg. (But what will you do with a cracked egg?) Joey won a couple of times against a neighboring 7-year-old.

In preparation of the holiday, the young boys build bonfires, called tongal, and you can jump over it (literally jump through or over it) at least 3 times in order to leave the previous worries of last year behind and have a fresh start with Spring's fresh start.

{to the left is our host brother Emin, the tongal master}

I jumped seven times since my host brother said that the extra 4 jumps would make the year extra good! It was really interesting to see the entire street lined with bonfires, with the mountains in the background as the last signs of daylight turned into glowing orange along our road.

To finish out our stay at our host family home, host dad and his friend threw together a quick BBQ. Here in Azerbaijan, anything grilled is known as "kebab." While it is technically POSSIBLE for chicken to be grilled and served, the

real kebab is lamb. Now, our experiences with lamb and sheep meat here have been pretty awful... in Fall, there's a Muslim holiday that centers around slaughtering a sheep, and our home was filled with the stank of boiled sheep for days! (Even worse was the fact that our family insisted on serving up the organs first -- a delicacy known as jizbiz. YIKES!)

But kebab is a whole different story. Tender chunks of lamb are seasoned and put onto metal rods as the wooden chips start to smoke. (Fan the fire with an old piece of cardboard for maximum effectiveness.) When the chips are hot enough, the meat is set down just an inch or so above the fire, so it cooks quickly. Joey took over the grill for a

moment, and flipped the kebabs with expert ease. When the meat was ready, dinner was served for the entire family, and the nice place settings were used. It was a great ending to our time with our host family, and we even made toasts to our life and work in Azerbaijan.

Next up: our death-defying trip to the ancient village of Xinaliq! Stay tuned!

have no fear

We are still alive and well. With the end of winter and all the Novruz festivities, along with less than ideal internet abilities, we have not posted in quite a while. Since we have off from work this week due to the holiday, we will be doing some traveling, moving on April 1st to our own home and with any luck we will have more frequent internet (and the keyboard might not randomly switch to a Russian keyboard - just spent the last 2 minutes figuring out how to get it back to English.) Needless to say, we've been quite busy saying goodbну (did it again!) to winter. 

When we have more time, I'll be sure to post about Novruz and the massive amount of food we've eaten and the fires we've jumped over. I think there are quite a few of these traditions Ощун(Joey) and I would like to bring home.

Since this keyboard is making me nuts, that's it for now. More interesting stories and events to come.

We love and miss you all at home.