5 days in baku is a good thing....

Lot’s to talk about so let’s get this blog a rollin…

1st order of business: tom and I won our usa nfl pick’em league last week. From the 3rd world with limited dial up internet access we managed to beat 11 other teams in picking the correct games last weekend. Needless to say we are extremely proud of ourselves for that one…

I just got back from 5 days in Baku which was a nice change of pace. I’m working with a group called the Eurasia Foundation. They have a lot of projects under their umbrella, but the one I’m working on has 5 youth groups (5-7 20ish year old guys and girls) throughout AZ. They have trained these kids a few times over the past 7 months and then just gave them each $2,500 to manage. The youth groups advertised around their regions, tried to find things to fix, and then accepted project proposals from other local youths. The youth group then critiqued the proposals, interviewed the candidates, and they just gave out their money 2 weeks ago to the 5 projects they picked. Examples are a book of local youth poetry, English lessons and computers for an orphanage, and an Azeri culture and history brochure about our region. Each youth group has a PC Volunteer as a mentor to help them along the way. I have a group of 7 kids (4 guys, 3 girls) that are all super bright and tons of fun to hang out with. We went to training at a resort in Baku (with the other 4 groups) and worked for 12 hours a day for 3 days. It was really long, but completely worth it and lots of fun to see how excited all of the kids were to be there and learn. The resort had an indoor pool, hot tub, ping pong table, squash courts, and a comedy channel with jay leno and conan o’brien shows on each night!!! Plus really good food-chinese, british, American etc. It was nice to live pampered for a few days.

I had a meeting with my program manager in Baku Saturday because my job was worrying me. My office of the government is basically only a reporting agency I found out last week and doesn’t have any real work for me to do. This freaked me out because I thought I needed to have an actual job. My PM told me it doesn’t “have”’ to be like that. My role is now going to be me assigned to my region. I’m free to work with any companies I can find who need/want help and also do my own projects on the side. Where the government office I’m assigned to will help is when I need to get things done. My boss is extremely well connected in the region, so when I get projects I want to do; he’s the man that can help me get them done. My PM and I am also going to meet with the head of the Economic Ministry in a week or 2 and try to get him to send me some work or let me come up to Baku a couple of times a month to sit in on meetings. I really want to work with the ministry at least some, I think it would be very interesting and a really good experience for me. My newly defined role will be challenging. I basically have to find something to keep me busy 100% on my own it seems which may be a struggle. That’s a tall order for 2 straight years. It’s nice to have work given to you sometimes ya know. Having said that, it leaves my door completely open to any and everything I want to do. It should give me the freedom to do some big/really important stuff for the people here. Instead of doing meaningless busy work in an office 20 hours a week, I can focus all of my efforts to getting grants from companies or organizations to fix schools, hospitals, etc. It will be a really challenging situation for me, but I think it will offer me the best chance to have the biggest/best impact while I’m here.

Then Friday night a bunch of people were in town for flu shots, so we all went out on the town and danced until the wee hours of the morning. Since we are all split up for 3-4 weeks in a row and live fairly boring lives in our towns/villages compared to what we were used to in the US, we just save up energy and it explodes when we all get together. The closest way I can describe it is when we were young and we would all load up into a friend’s parent’s van on the way to a birthday party or something and we were so happy we just couldn’t contain ourselves and the kid’s parents were in the front seat fuming because we wouldn’t calm down or listen to them. That’s right, I’m 29 and this is how I act when I get to meet up with my friends….being me is fun sometimes 

It’s really cooling off here and my house doesn’t stay warm for crap. I have a wood burning furnace in my room that I’m going to be firing up soon. I can’t wait!

My UTI seems to have subsided, so that’s good news for both me and the Nene’s carpet I was peeing in a bottle over.

I finally got to weigh myself for the first time in country the other day. I left the US of A at a whopping 173 lbs. (due to my insane consumption of all of Houston’s finest Mexican and fast food establishments leading up to my departure). I clocked in at 156 lbs. last week. I contribute this to my lack of totally unhealthy foods, my only eating 3 meals a day without ever having real snacks (i.e. McDonald’s ¼ pounder or bowl of queso), and the fact I haven’t worked out since I got here, so all of the limited muscle I had in the US is completely gone.

It’s the Ramadan finale holiday Monday and Tuesday, and then we are all meeting in the second largest city in AZ, Ganja for our Halloween Party Saturday night. Mom and Dad had a package brought to me with a log of Velveta, 2 bags of tortilla chips and 2 cans of Ro-Tel, so everyone is really excited for me to show up and make queso…..should be some good stories and pictures on next week’s blog….ciao America

For your viewing pleasure attached are pictures of my bedroom, kitchen, hamam-shower room, squatter, and my house from the separate hamam/laundry/squatter building 60 steps from my house door across the garden. The 2 huge satellite dishes are for Nene’s Russian TV stations she pays $50/month for…