The Cycle of Volunteers...

So the normal lifespan of a Peace Corps Volunteer is approximately 27 months: 3 months of training and 2 years of service. Before our group, volunteers always arrived in Azerbaijan in June. With our group the arrival changed to September. What this means is that in September, the AZ5 group of volunteers will be leaving and a new group, AZ7, will be arriving. And this is really just a long way of saying…

If you're an AZ7 who's found my blog, welcome! I had my invitation by this time last year and we’ve heard that many people have already been invited and have accepted that invitation. I know I read some volunteer blogs before I left to try and learn more about the country and the Peace Corps; real information from real volunteers instead of Peace Corps publications. We’re looking forward to meeting you this fall! If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment or send me an email!

It's Finally Time!

So that title sounds really exciting, but I thought it was worth mentioning something very mundane and kind of entertaining. I stopped wearing long underwear and started wearing sunscreen on the same day. While it’s been spring for a while now, at work we have no heat (a couple of small space heaters for the winter) and it’s a concrete building that just does not warm up quickly, even if it’s warm outside. So because of being inside I wore long underwear through the end of April (with the exception of a quick walk to the store or just being at home). The walk to and from work was sometimes a little toasty, but being warm at work made up for it. But now it’s what I would consider hot. This past weekend was in the 80’s and it’s just spring. Apparently it reaches about 40 degrees (Celsius, of course) here in the height of summer. For those of you who are Celsius challenged, that’s about 115 – 120 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot. (For anyone who doesn’t know me well, summer is my least favorite season because of the heat.) And I’ve started applying sunscreen as a part of my daily routine because I was outside this weekend just walking around town and got a little sunburned. And with walking 25 minutes to work each way, it’s definitely needed, at least for now. Maybe by July I’ll be accustomed to the sun and won’t need it. We’ll see. I’m already enough of a conversation piece for the people of town, I’d prefer to not make it worse by looking like a tomato. Stay tuned for before and after (May and September) pictures…

Ahh, the Joys of Living Alone (For the Most Part)…

So I’ve now been moved out of my host family and living on my own for three weeks. Yay! I knew I missed cooking for myself, but I didn’t quite realize how much! I can now cook for myself whatever I want whenever I want it. Well, with the constrictions of the ingredients I can get locally. So no peanut butter, chocolate chips, brown sugar, cheddar cheese or pre-packaged beef (I don’t really have the desire to buy it from the butcher and grind it myself). And if I don’t feel like eating I don’t have to explain it to anyone.

And I can also come and go as I please. No one needs to know if I’m coming home for lunch or asks me why I came home at 6:00 instead of 5:30. And while I recognize that that’s what a family does, it was just a hard adjustment to make after being on my own for so long. In my new housing I just let my landlord know if I won’t be home for the night so that she can lock the door. The house is set up so that there is a porch with three doors opening off of it: one is the kitchen, which we share (to date no problem there as their schedule is completely different than mine), one leads to my area and the other leads to her area. So while there were a few questions the first week as I learned my way around the house and she saw that I really did want to be independent, everything seems to be going smoothly now. And soon she’ll move to Moscow.

Even though I was very excited to move out of my host family’s home, I think host families are an important part of the Peace Corps. I met a number of people through them and experienced local holidays with a local family, which wouldn’t always be possible on my own. While you can experience a large part of a culture by living in it, there would definitely be parts I would’ve missed by only living independently and never with a host family. So while they are definitely not family, it was not a bad experience and I will look back on it positively, and I will continue to see them as long as I live here.

A Cash Based Society...

Here in Azerbaijan, things like debit cards haven’t really caught on. I have a debit card that I use at the ATM when I need money (the Peace Corps deposits our monthly living allowance in a local bank account) but there’s nowhere else that I can use it, with the exception of maybe a few places in Baku. Everyone just uses cash. I use cash to pay my rent, buy food at the store, buy a train ticket, buy more time for my cell phone, etc. But the strange thing is that even though we are in a cash based society, many, many Azerbaijanis have had to learn to use the ATM. All government positions – teachers, doctors, transportation workers, pensioners, etc. – are paid via direct deposit into accounts, and they access that money via an ATM card. The banking system here is still fairly new (rebuilt after becoming independent in 1991) and many people don’t put their full trust in it. What that means is that most of the time when people get paid, they withdraw everything and operate in cash only. The worst time to go to the ATM is at the end of the month when the pensioners get paid. The crowd is insane! And there is no such thing as a line; it’s just a clump of people gathered around the ATM.

Normally there’s no wait, but for those couple of days there can easily be 20 or 30 people waiting to use the ATM. And sometimes you’ll get there and an elderly person will give you their card and tell you their pin number because they don’t know how to use the ATM. I once waited behind someone who helped four others with their transactions. The hard part of transitioning to a cash based society is that I actually have to plan ahead for what purchases I’ll be making to ensure that I have enough money before I go to the store. Coming from a place where I usually had just enough cash to grab food at a drive-thru because I would use my debit card for everything else, it’s quite an adjustment.

You're Not Scared To Live Alone?

In Azerbaijan the Peace Corps requires Volunteers to live with host families for the first four months after they move to their permanent site. The Peace Corps finds host families for us during training and they work with our counterpart organization to find host families for us at our permanent site. Then we’re pretty much on our own. We either have the option of staying with our host family (renegotiating our cost and what they provide for us, which not many people do) or finding a place in town to rent. I knew from the beginning that I would want to live on my own. There’s nothing wrong with my host family and it hasn’t been the bad experience that some people have had (or an exceptionally wonderful experience either) but it’s just hard to be living with someone else after having lived alone for so long, especially when they don’t understand your language. When everything else I do is in a foreign language it’ll be nice to have a little sanctuary of my own, a place where I don’t have to be “the American,” I can just be myself.

Most Volunteers have to go out searching and talk to everyone they can. But my Director (the Director of the organization I’m placed at) is AMAZING and told me that he would take care of it. And he does know more people in town than I do, which definitely helps. So a couple of weeks ago we went and looked at a house; it’s actually where the Volunteer before me at my organization lived. It was a hit! I’ll have two bedrooms – one of which can serve as a living room – and a kitchen. And the basic facilities, of course. The owner is moving to Moscow at the end of May, which is very common here in Azerbaijan. It’s estimated that almost 2 million Azerbaijanis live and work in Russia, and since Azerbaijan has a population of only about 8 million people, that’s a pretty big percentage. So I’m moving in on April 11th and will technically just be renting a room and sharing the kitchen until she leaves, and then I’ll have the place to myself. And my favorite part is that there’s a porch, which will be especially nice during the hot, hot summer that we’ll have here. I’m so excited to be living on my own, and especially to be cooking on my own. Part of the host family agreement is that they provide food for us and while I haven’t had to cook anything with my host family, it’s not exactly what (or when) I would be eating if I could cook for myself. Mmm, spaghetti and omelets and cold beverages…

People seem surprised that I want to live on my own. The norm is to go immediately from your parent’s home to your husband’s home – and sometimes when young couples get married they even live with one set of parents for awhile. Whenever I mention it to someone they ask if I’m afraid to live on my own and seem surprised that I’m not (even though I haven’t heard one bit about crime in the four months that I’ve lived in Ucar, so I’m not sure where the perception of fear comes from). But telling my host family was no big surprise. I had mentioned it to them periodically since I moved in that I wanted to live on my own. But they definitely tried to change my mind. The public services (water, gas, electricity, etc.) can vary from one area of town to another and they definitely went on and on about how great theirs are. But I’d gladly have gas or electricity a little less regularly and be on my own. And the best news is last: while the house is not exactly on the same street where I live now, there’s a back entrance only two doors down from my current house, which makes for easy moving! The countdown is on!