Pease On Earth: Azerbaijan is cold.

We were warned during training that the first few months at site are cold. It’s a rough time to begin service as the winter months are difficult. Just make it to Novruz everyone says. Novruz, Azerbaijan’s biggest holiday, falls at the end of March and is a celebration of new life: the turning of winter into spring. I suppose I gave this warning as much consideration as I gave all of the disappointed scoldings [ie: “Annie, where is your jacket!?”] I received from my dad every year come November. In winter, Azerbaijan is cold. And not the kind of cold where the worst part of the trip is the first ten minutes you spend in the car waiting for your heat to kick in. It’s a no insulation, the walls in this building are merely conducting the cold from the ice clinging to the outside of the building, kind of cold. The kind of cold where you can’t tell whether or not you’re burning your fingers on the stove because they’re numb. The I can’t draw a straight line across the blackboard because I can’t feel the chalk between my fingers kind of cold. I walk around everyday wearing at least three layers of pants and three to four shirts to stay warm. It’s not abnormal for me to wear my scarf and hat all day until I’m in my bed and the two thick comforters I’m lying under have trapped enough body heat to keep me warm. And I wait to get in bed until I know for sure I don’t need to do anything else before falling asleep because I know that once I am under my covers, it will take a nuclear attack (or, in a similar vein, my alarm clock waking me up for school the next day) for me to get out. Last Sunday, I hung up my hand-washed clothes on our clothesline to dry. Today, 6 days later, they are still frozen to the line. I thought Mother Nature needed a laugh. And maybe Kəklik, my host mom, too.

Despite this Georgia girl’s instinct to stay huddled near the heater until it’s warm enough to wear t-shirts outside, I’ve been in the process of establishing a semi-regular schedule. I began writing this post with the intention of describing a normal day for me and found that task to be an incredibly inaccurate portrayal of my life at site so far. Hence, the beginning about the cold weather because that seems to be the only day-to-day constant. During the week, I’ve been spending my days at school co-teaching English classes and conducting conversation clubs after school. My schedule evolved after I finished observations and actually began teaching. Now, I’m working with all 6 English teachers, and I’m teaching two 6^th grade classes, two 7^th grade classes, an 8^th grade class and a 9^th grade class. I have conversation clubs after school 4 days per week: 2 days for teachers and 2 days for students.

On Monday afternoons, I have conversation club for 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade students. So far, there’s been a huge turnout for this group. I’ve had up to 30 students show up, which is radically different from the 12-14 student classes that I teach during the school day with another English teacher. This group is very enthusiastic and a lot of fun to teach. Because of the language barrier (albeit an ever shrinking language barrier from both sides), I have to demonstrate and charade through most of the activities at least once. We’ve covered topics like numbers, time, family, hobbies and animals. However, their favorite topic so far was learning the ABC song. And no matter how many times I sang the song to the tune as every literate person in America knows it, these students somehow managed to slightly alter the intonation of certain letters and created their own ABC tune. However, I’m learning to choose my battles, and the last battle worth fighting right now would be standing in front of a group of 30 middle schoolers in an attempt to alter their ABC tune. I take what I can get. Following the ABC’s, I did a special lesson on the vowels, which for them, are particularly difficult letters. I wrote “vowels: A E I O U” across the board and taught them each letter to the tune of Who Let the Dogs Out. While pointing at the letter A on the board, I sang “Who let the A out?” And the students responded “a, a, a, a.” Point to letter E, “Who let the E out?” “e, e, e, e”…so on an so forth. Apparently both songs, although pitchy and slightly off beat, were catchy because the next day at school, two of my 6^th graders asked if we could do the ABC songs during our lesson. If you had seen them ask so sweetly, trying so hard to ask in English, you wouldn’t have been able to say no either. My counterpart thinks I’ve lost my mind.