Village Living

Host family—I live with a 63 year old math teacher, who has three children that all live in Baku. Her husband passed away 5 years ago. She does not speak English, so our communication is contingent upon my top notch Azerbaijani. Most of the time, this works for us. She is very patient, and I can easily read her facial expressions that indicate when I say something that doesn’t make sense. We keep two dictionaries on the kitchen table: Az-->English and English-->Az. Both are being put to good use. 

Living space—My room is on the second floor (the main floor) of a huge village house that used to be inhabited by a family of 5. My host mom lives downstairs, in what used to be, the house’s basement. The downstairs now contains the house’s functional kitchen as well as my host's bathroom and bedroom. She and I spend a lot of time together mainly surrounding meals and/or tea downstairs in the kitchen. I feel like I’m living in super gashang apartment B above apartment A, but I have to go outside to use the bathroom, and apartment A has the kitchen.

Social sphere—I have an automatic in with the teachers and students at school. My main counterpart lives three houses down, and she’s invited me to come and go from her home as if it were my own. She regularly tutors students after school, so almost every time I go there, I have a chance to talk with kids and get to know them a little bit better outside of the school environment. 

Language—While I still have a long way to go in becoming proficient in Azerbaijani, it’s nice to enter a community knowing how to same some things. I can respond comfortably to simple phrases and greetings. I can express things like where I’m going, what I’m doing and time in basic Azerbaijani. I can also talk about my family and the types of food I like to eat in Azerbaijan which seems to go a long way with people I’m meeting for the first time… or the fifth.

A clear job description—as a teacher, it’s nice to not have to go into explaining what “Peace Corps Trainee” means when people ask me what I’m doing in Azerbaijan. I always mention Peace Corps, but usually after I say I am here as an English teacher, people are satisfied with that. For the truly curious person, I’ll go into a further explanation of Peace Corps’ work and say that I’m one of about 100 PCVs in Azerbaijan, my job is to mainly work with teachers, and I have responsibilities outside of school too. Thanks to the work of an Az7 in another Tovuz village, many people in Ashagi Ayibli have heard about Peace Corps before, and they’re super stoked about a native speaker working with English students and teachers in their village.

Family ties—it would be an exaggeration (albeit a very small exaggeration) to say that everyone in my village is related. However, I believe that the idea of the 8 degrees of separation could easily be reduced down to 1 here. Whenever someone speaks of a person I don’t know, they always seem to come to be identified as “my brother’s wife’s cousin’s son’s sister-in-law’s grandmother’s nephew’s etc…” The village is very interconnected.

Landscape—most of the houses in my village are big and beautiful. Literally. The metal roofs and gates have intricate, colorful designs. Many houses have gardens. Did I mention we have turkeys in our backyard? While the village itself is flat, the western border of Ashagi Ayibli is the Lesser Caucasus. I can see mountains from my front gate!   

Merry Christmas to you all! Lots of love and warm thoughts your way from Ashagi Ayibli : )