A Trip to Tblisi in Pictures

 

Glimpses of Familiarity

Just when I feel like home couldn’t be any further away, I’ll catch a glimpse of familiarity. The other night I was watching an Azeri news channel with Kaklik. Between news stories about protests in northeastern Azerbaijan and preparations for Eurovision in Baku, the youtube video of Mishka the husky howling ‘I love you’ played, her familiar half-human half-k9 I love youuuu ringing through my kitchen. Kaklik started laughing and repeating ‘I love you’ over and over again, as it’s one of the only English phrases she recognizes. All of a sudden, I was back at home, sitting on the couch, watching Emily come through the back door eliciting homecoming I love you howls from Panda. 

Another time, as I was conversing over Novruz dinner about pop culture with my 20-something year old host siblings, who were home for the holiday, Kaklik chimed in to announce the recent news that the American singer, Rihanna died. One of my host sisters almost dropped her fork as her eyes bulged dramatically. The other’s eyebrows furrowed while my host brother immediately jumped in with a “Mamaaa that was Whitney Houston!” and continued on about how incredibly different the two are. Standing corrected, Kaklik abashedly pushed her food around her plate with a slight smile. “Oh,” she conceded, as all three kids rolled their eyes and shook their heads in my direction. And again, I was right back at home, sitting over dinner with my family, or watching the news, or in the car on the way home from church. There was dad talking about the Fall out Boys, the origin of the Kings of Lee-on, or how he led his co-workers in the electric glide at the company Christmas party. Before he can finish his sentence, the jury’s all over the mistakes: me, as condescending as the next overachieving 17-year old, nit-picking every detail while Emily’s sitting beside me, disgusted, but thankful he didn’t say it in front of her friends. I don’t think there are many universal truths about families, but it’s interesting—the means by which my understanding of family seems to find me. And lucky for me, through these channels, home doesn’t seem quite so far away.    

  

Valentine's Week

Regardless of how I ever chose to observe certain secular holidays in the U.S. (i.e. MLK Day, President’s Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day), in Azerbaijan, these holidays make great topics for English conversation clubs with automatic segues to cultural exchange. For Valentine’s Day last week, I decided to use the theme for both of my student conversation clubs. Valentine’s Day is recognized in Azerbaijan as “Lover’s Day,” and I realized that my school-day version of Valentine’s Day, where all the kids wear red and bring valentines and candy for each other may be a bit out of touch with some of the current notions surrounding the holiday here. I decided to spin the theme so we learned about compliments. I taught new words like “kind, pretty, beautiful, interesting, generous, honest, friendly, patient” and told my students that Valentine’s Day is a good opportunity to give compliments to people we care about, like our family and friends. At the end of the day, I handed out a pink index card and had the students write a valentine (in English of course!) to one of their family members. The stipulation was that each valentine had to include a compliment and the line, Happy Valentine’s Day! As I was proof-reading through their notes, I made a last-minute addition that beautiful is an adjective that describes women, while we use handsome to describe men. I also gave my students the task of translating their valentines when they give their cards to the respective recipients to make sure they’re understood properly. One of my students wrote to her older brother who is currently in the middle Azerbaijan’s compulsory military service for young men. She wrote that he is a “kind and handsome boy,” decorated the card with red and purple hearts, and even included an “I love you” before she signed her name! As we were leaving, she asked me if it’s okay if she waits to give it to him next year when he’s home for Valentine’s Day.

The older group, which happen to be all girls, completed this valentine card task rather quickly, so I passed out extra index cards and gave them the opportunity to write to their friends, too. I ended up receiving a valentine from one of my 9^th graders that read:

Dear Annie!

You are a honest person!!!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It’s always nice to know your students have such a keen eye for character, isn’t it?

On Friday, the final day of my Valentine’s Week, I was teaching articles a, an and the (which, for the record, was a coincidence and had no relation to the valentine I received from my student) to a 7^th grade class. Because the Azeri language lacks articles, it’s a rather difficult topic for my counterparts to teach and for students to understand. So I had presented most of the material for this lesson, and I could tell my counterpart was hanging on my every word to make sure the examples she wanted to present would be accurate. After I had given a series of example sentences, my counterpart jumped in and gave the example: He is a beautiful boy. She immediately shot an approval-seeking glance my direction, and as I was endorsing her sentence with a slight nod of my head, I heard “handsome,” come from one of my conversation club students sitting in the front row. “He is a handsome boy.”

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.

My street to the right. 

My street to the left. 

An activity for my 7th grade class. Thank you, Aunt Judy!

(front). A present for me from one of my students. The top says 'Happy Family!' And from left to right it's Dad, Emily, me and Mom.

(back).

Xoş Gəlmişsiniz (welcome!) 2012!

2012 marks the first full calendar year I will spend abroad. Looking back on 2011 seems to distort my perception of time. Was it really only 3 months of that year that I spent in Azerbaijan? Was writing my senior thesis, graduating from college, and driving the 4,000+ mile road trip with my mom all that was packed into the other 9 months? And did that Hawaii trip really happen all the way back in 2010? These events seem to be compartmentalized into bubbles, all floating in a space continuum, connected by a steady stream of places, relationships, schedules, expectations and commitments. Arriving in Azerbaijan flipped all of this on its head. Suddenly, normal lost its meaning. The 3 months I’ve spent in Azerbaijan seem much, much longer because I’ve been re-establishing that everyday “normal” in a time when the familiar one seems so far away. Thus, I think next year, looking back on 2012, after having spent an entire calendar year in Azerbaijan, will be an interesting indication of perspective.  

I brought in this new year with a group of my fellow PCVs, who all came together from our respective regions to gather in Baku. New Years (yeni il) is a big holiday in Azerbaijan, and Baku hosts the country’s biggest celebration. [I won’t get into it, but I suggest a wiki or google search of Şaxta Baba, and you may gain a better understanding of yeni il in Azerbaijan. It’s basically Az’s big winter holiday with borrowed Russian cultural traditions]. After three days in the capital and a visit to my first host family in Masazir, a group of TEFLs, who all got to enjoy winter break—5 days off from school, went up to Quba, a sleepy yet picturesque mountain town in the first finger of Azerbaijan, to visit our CED friend Corina. There, we got a tour of the carpet factory where she works and saw authentic Azerbaijani carpet weaving in action. We also walked around town and self-toured a Jewish settlement called the Red Town (Qirmizi Qeseba), created by exiled Jews after WWII. Today, the Red Town is part of Quba but separated from the rest of the town by the river. The following day, we took a day trip up to Qusar, a town even higher in the mountains to visit another CED PCV who has lived there for 3 years. Sidenote: Qusar is 95% populated by the Lezgis, a minority group in Azerbaijan. They speak Lezgi, a language 100% different from Azeri. Lucky for the PCV who lives there, they understand Azerbaijani but communicate primarily in Lezgi. It was awesome to see not only this diversity in Azerbaijan, but also how well the PCV there had integrated and been successful in his work.

My yeni il gift from my counterpart! 

Park Bulvar, Baku

Maiden Tower in Içeri Şəhər, Baku

Quba

A park in Quba

A mosque in Quba

Corina's office at the carpet factory. 

A carpet in the works.

The carpet factory's backyard, naturally.

Quba with foggy mountains.

Shout-out!

The chess school in Quba.

Bridge to the Red Town.

Red Town.

The Greater Caucasus.

On the bus, leaving Quba.

Now, I’m back at site and real work begins on Monday. I’m working with three English teachers at my school, and I’ll be teaching 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10^th grade classes. That sounds like crazy talk, I know, but the purpose is to try to equip the teachers with new, interactive teaching methods. My interactions with the students is really secondary to the relationship I’ll have working with the teachers. After school, since I am the village’s token native-English speaker, I’ll hold conversation clubs with both teachers and students to give the interested people more practice and help with the basics. These are pretty fun because they attract people who really want to be there and are willing to put in a little extra effort to learn. Unlike teaching in the classroom, I have total autonomy over the topics and grammar points, so I can target both what I know needs work and what people seem interested in. I’m hoping that in these months ahead, a few more doors regarding sports and recreation especially for girls open up in my village.

I have good feelings about 2012. It will certainly not be the most comfortable, familiar or predictable year I’ll see in my lifetime. However, I anticipate a great amount of learning and (inshallah!) growth in all facets of my life. I wish the same to you!

New Address!

PCV, Annie Pease
Tovuz, Azerbaijan 6000
051-535-79-72

Christmas Eve American Football [Pictures]

These pictures are from the Christmas Eve American football game, Team America vs. Team Azerbaijan, in Mingechevir, Az. These kids are a group of college age students who the PCVs in Mingechevir work with. 60 minutes. 2 hand touch. We didn't play with downs, just four chances to score per run. And while the football they're used to is played with their feet, these kids picked up on the rules quickly and were fantastic. Lots of fun for all of us.

Team America.

Fans for Team Azerbaijan.

Both teams post-game.