Pease On Earth: They call it 'sabah'

Tomorrow (sabah), the Az9s are headed to Gobustan National Park to see the ancient rock carvings called petroglyphs (which PC staff says are older than the Egyptian pyramids but not to quote them on that because they don't know where that information comes from, but that's what the Azeris say so as it goes..) and more importantly, we get to hike up to the notorious mud volcanoes! Pictures to come. I'm very excited. Tomorrow also marks the two week anniversary of my not too terrible (or too terribly surprising) knee tweak that happened mid-pick up soccer game with the neighborhood kids. After several days of rest immediately after the injury, I've made good progress in recovery over the past couple of weeks. There's still a little bit of swelling left, but with an ace wrap and ibuprofen, it's manageable. I'm hoping that in another two weeks or so, (inshallah!) I'll be back to my early morning runs. Unfortunately, soccer will probably have to take a backseat for a while longer. Apparently Azerbaijani pick-up on the rocky, uneven vacant plots of dirt between houses isn't the best place to avoid knee injuries. On the flip-side, it is certainly a good place to make friends with all types of people--young and old, neighbors and strangers, boys and oh wait...I'll be working on that. And finally, tomorrow marks the first month of completed service in Azerbaijan! 1 month down. 26 to go.

So a couple of the highlights in recent weeks have been (1) practicum: our first opportunity to teach Azeri students in an English class and (2) a PCV site visit: our first opportunity to venture out into the rayons to see a current PCV (an Az8) working their PC magic out at site. I had the opportunity to teach a fifth form (grade) class. I think the kids were more excited to have an American in their classroom than they were to learn the grammatical difference between him and her. An interesting part of the Azeri language is that there is no distinction between the 3rd person pronouns him and her. So this grammar point is one of the first thing Azeri students learn in their English classrooms. We approached the ambiguous he/she distinction by drawing stick figures on the chalkboard and then having students practice oral dialogues about their classmates. It was actually pretty fun, and now I'm looking forward to having my own group of students and counterparts to get to know and work with consistently. Most of the kids, especially the young ones, seem to have so much energy and enthusiasm for learning. In short-hand, and with what I've experienced so far, it seems like channeling this energy most effectively by working with the existing resources and infrastructure in place will really be the task at hand once I'm at site.

My PCV site visit was to an Az8, Caroline, out in Kichili village in the Shemkir region in northwest Azerbaijan. It was about a six hour trip from Baku to Ganja, AZ's second largest city, and then another hour out to Kichili. The trip overall was really fun because I got to travel with my friends (other Az9s going out to the same region) and meet other PCVs who work and live near Ganja and Shemkir. I learned a lot by observing Caroline, a fellow TEFL, teaching classes at her village's school, leading a conversation club after school, and carrying out secondary projects in Ganja. Because we've been in training for what our service will be like after PST, it was cool to actually see the type of work we'll be doing actually happening.

We often times feel like we're in a "PST bubble" because we're being trained and told lots of things--many of which are hard to conceptualize because working and living in Azerbaijan is so different from what we've experienced in America. In a classroom, we learn from others' experiences while being molded by Peace Corps' model for development. The more I think about it, this bubble is probably the most deliberate part of the madness of PST. The method, if you will. The barrier between trainee and volunteer. However, both practicum and the site visits were the first opportunities to experience first-hand what certain aspects of life at work and at home will be like as a PCV in Azerbaijan. It was refreshing and exhilarating for us kinesthetic learners.

I've been having a lot of fun with my host family. They really appreciate my attempts at speaking Azeri with them, and they always try to help me with my language homework. One time, I was studying phrases for buying produce, and before I knew it, my living room had turned into a bazaar (an outdoor market) with my ata selling apples and my ana helping me bargain for a better price. Today, I whipped out an Azeri saying I learned on my site visit to Shemkir. It goes "yavash yavash pendir lavash" which literally means: slowly, slowly cheese and bread. So in context, we were eating dinner and I told my family I'm frustrated because my Azerbaijani is bad, but yavash yavash pendir lavash. They were in stitches. Ata and my host-brother watch a lot of Turkish CNN and they try to let me know what's going on in international news. I can actually understand some of what they say because of the similar sounding English and Azeri words that relate to world news. After an extremely general conversation today about ETA's denunciation of violence, ata told me that I should run for president.

Our card-game guide. I taught my host family how to play BS. For obvious reasons, I told them the game was called liar. You can imagine how hard it was to say yalanci (like yall-awn-chuh) instead of BS when I wanted to call a bluff.

Nar. Pomegranate is in season right now, and it is amazing--not just because it comes from our garden but because it tastes delicious.

It is culturally olmaz (not allowed) to throw bread away. You must put any uneaten piece of bread in a place where either the birds will eat it or someone can pick it up to feed their farm animals.