GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLL!

That’s right, Tom and I finally got to go see a football (soccer) game in Lenkeran on Tuesday night in the new stadium-the grass cost $1,000,000 according to locals. The place seats about 14,000 people and has a jumbotron. Not bad for a town that doesn’t have gas or consistent electricity to most of the houses right? Lenkeron’s team was playing Sumgyit (the major town next to my old village Jeryanbatan), so it was a battle of my two AZ homes. It was a fairly entertaining game even though Lenkeran is #2 and Sumgyit is at the bottom of the league. Tom and I went with his little host brother and people from his office. We yelled, screamed and cheered on the local team and at the end of the game the score was Lenkeran 3 and Sumgyit 1!!!

We had a really nice week in Lenkeran last week. During the days it was sunny, not much wind and almost hit 70 degrees a few times. That means that Tom and I threw the baseball in front of my house an hour at lunch and an hour after work each day. This has become a new favorite tradition of ours when it is nice out because tons of people walk on my street, so this gives us a chance to be seen out in the community by a lot of people and also an immediate conversation starter. Little kids will just come over and watch us throw for the entire hour. Some of them will be brave and accept our invitations to toss the ball a few times, but most just want to watch. We also get a lot of older men that want to talk about it, so it is a great way to spend some time when it is nice outside.

My busy streak is turning into a busy life it seems. Last week I had to write a full grant proposal for an ABLE leadership camp for Azeri boys about 15 volunteers are hoping to hold this summer. They held the first camp last year, so we are hoping to get funding/support do re-create it and invite about 50 kids to attend. Writing a grant proposal for the PC is quite an undertaking, so I was busy with it quite a bit over the weekend.

On top of that Tom and I have officially scheduled an “America Day” for Lenkeran on May 5^th. We are going to get about 80 kids to spend the afternoon with a group of Volunteers. We will talk to them about Memorial Day and 4^th of July for 30 minutes and then talk to them about how Americans usually take summer vacations and travel to see other parts of our country. This is not common in AZ-most people have never left their home town/village (except to go to Baku), so we are going to encourage the kids to try to visit one new place this summer. We are going to show a slide show of American hot spots as well as places in AZ that we have traveled. After that, we are going to attempt to teach/play baseball for a couple of hours. This should be a really cool way to spend a day and get to hang out with a bunch of local youths. That doesn’t sound like much of a production, but to give you all an idea about how things work here, I’ll give you a sample of what I had to do today to get this activity cleared. Keep in mind that this is for kids, after school, during their free time, for about 4 hours on a weekend day just hanging out with some PC Volunteers. Today I talked with my boss about America Day and asked him to help me find a field to play baseball in. He called the Executive Power Youth, Sport and Tourism Department for Lenkeran, I had to go meet with them, they told me to plan the cultural sessions and they would find me a field and that they would be joining us that day because it is their jurisdiction, then they called the Mayor (the head of Lenkeran) to get permission for this event, once he says yes they will call my boss, I will have to set up a meeting with the Head of Educational Services in Lenkeran, go talk with him and get this permission, he will call the principals of each school we are inviting kids from to give them permission, that permission will be passed down to the teachers, who will then sign the kids up. I already have talked to several groups of kids and teachers that all want to be a part of this, but I have to go through this long chain of command so that kids can hang out with us Saturday afternoon on their free time. This is just a microcosm of how things run in each city/town/village in AZ. I’m not saying it is a bad system. It just makes doing even the smallest, most innocent things around here very difficult to do.

That leads me to my orphanage project. I want to say a special thank you to all of my friends and family that expressed a desire to help out my project. It really means a lot to me and I’m looking forward to getting this playground built for the orphans. Hopefully I can get that done by the end of April, just before America Day and the ABLE Summer Camp. I officially got my tickets to fly to Cairo and meet my family on June 8^th, so I’ll be ready for a little cool (only 130-140 degrees) vacation after all 3 of these projects get finished.

What else….oh yea, the lady I am renting my house from still has not moved out and it is driving me INSANE!!! She is really nice, but she’s just a needy old lady that talks a ton and at a million miles an hour. She has been waiting for workers to come fix my squatter issue and an electric problem-then she says she will leave me in peace. There used to be a small store attached to the side of my house that she wants to turn into a small office at some point. They are tearing down buildings across the street from my house to make the park even bigger, so there are tons of bricks over there. Tom and I were deep into a Saturday afternoon Monopoly marathon when I hear her yelling at me for help. I go out my front door to see this…

That’s right, a dump truck of bricks, wood and junk. Now I have this massive pile in my yard and am waiting for workers to come move all of it so one day she can use it to make an office. I’m not saying she isn’t smart, I’m just saying she’s still here and keeps making my house worse. My patience is definitely getting tried right now with that. Oh yea, on top of that, yesterday she is in the yard yelling in hysterics. I go outside and she has a shovel and is wailing away at the yard, screaming and crying. I run over and ask her what it is, she just keeps freaking out and holds her hands making a ball the size of a bowling ball-I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THAT COULD BE-especially since the grass is about 3 inches tall. I yell at her to get out of the way, ask if it is a snake, she says no, so I grab the shovel and look around. What horrible thing could cause a woman to freak out this bad you may ask…A FREAKING TOAD! No joke, a fat toad was in the grass. She told me to kill it, I yelled no and for her to go inside and then escorted my little visitor out the gate into the ditch along the street. Good times had by all. I may get Nene to come over here and use some of her muscle to get the lady out of my new place…

Pictures are of: the football stadium, the jumbotron, an action shot of the game, Tom and his little host brother Ulvi up in the seats, the dump truck, Tom giving the truck the “Azeri Hand Jive”, and the truck’s dump.