So Where To For The Next Two Years...

So on Wednesday the CED and Youth Development Trainees gathered for our site announcements at a local school. Of course, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to get us settled down after finding out our sites, we had some stuff to do first. We broke up into our program areas and talked about expectations and concerns. These will then be shared with our counterparts at the conference we have on Friday. At this conference we’ll be meeting our counterparts for the first time, learning more about the organization we’re partnered with, coordinating our site visits, etc.

The actual announcement: the program managers for CED and YD essentially listed off the cities one by one and who would be going where. Each person would go up front, mark their spot on the map of Azerbaijan and get their packet of information about their city/organization. And since they went by city you would also find out if another volunteer is going to be in the same city (except for TEFL volunteers – their site announcements aren’t until the end of next week because of how their schedule fell). And I had an idea of the city from my site placement interview, so as soon as that name was called I was ready. And it turned out to be correct – nothing was definite as of the interview.

I will be going to Ucar (pronounced Ujar), which is pretty much right in the center of the country. It’s about 230 kilometers west of Baku and the area has about 75,000 people. I will be working with “Akinchi – UA” which is an Agribusiness Service Center. It’s new (established in 2007) and their main objective is to help farmers increase productivity in all areas of agro-business and to support development of farming by providing chargeable advises and other services.

Here’s what my information sheet says my scope of work will be:
- Create connections and establish relationships with different international organizations.
- Inform local farmers about farming in other countries. Provide them with updated and modern information on international farming.
- Preparation of business plans.
- Support farmers and founders of the “Akinchi” in learning English language and computer.
- Support development and strengthening of the organization.
- Help with preparation and implementation of projects.
- Help to improve Finance, Advice Services, Management and other activities in the organization.
- Conduct marketing trainings.
- Help with design and implementation of micro-projects for the communities.

Exciting, right? There are already two volunteers in Ucar (TEFL, they arrived in 2007) and no other CED or YD volunteer will be sent to Ucar this year. As I mentioned, we’ll find out the TEFL sites at the end of next week, so there could be another volunteer or two headed the same way. We’ll see! It’s exciting to finally know where we’re ending up, how close we’re going to be to people that we’ve become friends with, have an idea of the industry that we’re in so we can learn job specific vocabulary, and on and on. I’ve already heard how wonderful the organization that I’m going to is from multiple PC staff members, current volunteers, trainees who went to Ucar on their site visit, etc. So it gets a little hot in the summer (over 100 degrees daily for a stretch). I’ll live through the heat and have an amazing experience in my new home – Ucar, Azerbaijan!