Man Down!!!

Well, we made it basically seven months (we missed it by 1 day) before we had our first PCV leave our group on their own accord. One of my dear friends Kasey decided that the Land of Plenty was calling her and the Land of Azeri wasn’t a good a good life choice for her right now. She had been flip flopping for a while and I thought I had her convinced to stay on several occasions, but in the end America won out. Kasey, being the wonderful person she is, in her first email from America told us all that she was going to go for a run (something girls here aren’t that free to do), eat a delicious salad (not here) and take a bath in a whirlpool jet bath tub (maybe 1 notch up from my bucket)….as you can imagine my email response back to her was that of well wishes and not of her choking on a crouton.

Kasey didn’t have a great school assignment and her kids were miserable to her and it just wore her down over 7 months. I really think it is a lot harder over here for the English teachers generally speaking. A lot of the CED (business) Volunteers have decent offices and work with a good staff where as the TEFL (teachers) are placed in old schools and are at the mercy of elementary school kids that speak a foreign language. To me personally, I just think that could potentially be a much harder situation over the long haul-although they get the entire summer off-sadly not much to do here anyways in the summer though.

Well spring weather has hit Lenkeran which means RAIN! It has rained at least half of every day the past week and will supposedly continue for the entire month. They don’t say we are sub tropic for nothing. I’ll trade one month of rain for all of the delicious fruits and veggies we get down here. What is great about all of this rain is when you try to wash you clothes. Yesterday I did my first hand washing since my training days in Jeyranbatan-it was just as fun as I remembered it. At least the temperatures weren’t in the 100’s, so not a lot of sweating. One thing that was great was that the water from my well that day was about as brown as I’ve seen it, so I was cleaning my clothes with brown water-I can picture my mom cringing now. Well I hung them all up to dry and then it rained for the rest of the day. This means 2 things: 1-maybe they will be a little more clean with pure rain water and 2-I won’t get to wear this huge load of clothes for many days (if at any time during April). This weather pattern could really put a restriction on my clothing options for April (not that I really had any to start with).

I caught a pretty exciting stomach bug at 4am Thursday morning. I will spare you all the details, but just know that stomach problems and outside squatter toilets when it is dark and cold is not the way you want to spend much of your life. For about five hours each of the last three days my stomach literally sounded like you were pouring out two liters of Coke and holding the bottle straight up and down-it was insane! I feel much better today thankfully. I was going to go visit a friend yesterday, but decided risking that stomach on a 4 hour bus ride with no rest stops available was a bad life choice. We made a big spaghetti sauce and garlic bread last night for my first official meal back and it was delicious.

My playground project is officially under way. I ordered two combination soccer/basketball goals on Friday. I am going to order all of the other supplies on Monday, but I will be at the mercy of the weather as to when it all gets done. This means I will be spending the majority of my time at the orphanage the next couple of weeks supervising and hanging out with the kids, so I’m really excited about that. Hopefully I can catch a break at the end of this week/early next week with the weather because I would like to have it all done before the last weekend in April.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yea, I had my first conversation club last week. There were three female volunteers here before we arrived and they were all English teachers. When we got here some of their former students asked us if we would continue their English conversation clubs (just sitting around with kids and helping them practice speaking). I kinda put it off at first since everything was still new, I had not idea what my job would be like, my Azeri sucked, etc. Well I decided around December that I would start one up and tried to get it ready to go for the start of the spring semester. Well it took a month and half to get permission from the Ministry of Education in Baku and the local branch to finally connect with the PC to say it was ok for me to do this. Then it I was really busy for a couple of weeks, then we had the long holiday, then the kids couldn’t agree on a day and time that I could do (they wanted the weekends, but that’s the time I’m gone from site when I leave so bad idea). FINALLY we met on Thursday and had a blast. Ten kids approximately 15 years old (boys and girls) showed up and we chatted for an hour. Tom came as well and will be helping me out with it. We just spent the first session introducing each other and letting them ask us questions-we have no clue what we are doing. I had a BLAST! The kids were great and I think we can have a lot of fun with them. They already asked if we can do this all summer and next school year too, so it looks like this will be a constant meeting every week for the rest of my service, which is good for me. Working with kids who are eager to learn is a lot better than with adults who just say they want to learn but don’t mean it.

In other news, Tom finally got a house and it is freaking awesome. It is about 3 times as big as mine, it has a full on queen sized canopy bed with matching armoire, two night stands and a divinity thing in the main room and a second bedroom. He has gas, a garage, a shower with electric/gas combo water heater and a tiled dinosaur mural on the wall of his outside washing area. It’s retarded in the best way possible. He lives on the other side about town, about 20 minutes away from me in the ritzy part of town. It’s a sweet set up, but I still really like my little house, so I’m not too jealous. I did hear a rumor that one Volunteer has a freaking pool in her house and is paying $30 less than me a month…WHAT IS THAT ALL ABOUT???? That’s great, but not exactly the PC experience ya know…

Good bye Kasey-We All Already Miss You-I Hope You Don’t Choke on a Delicious Taco Bell Taco or T-Bone Steak!!!

Pictures seen this week are of: my two favorite Kasey “The Quitter” Pruett pics, Lenkeran Fire Station, a new Memorial Park in Lenkeran for Azeris lost in battle (written in both Azeri and English oddly enough), the view from the penthouse sweet (nice room) at the hotel Tom’s parents stayed in, and the outside and inside of an old prison in town that Stalin was believed to have been held captive in at one point. They are currently updating the prison, so we had to break in to check it out.