Ash's Azer Adventure

My Final Blog on this Site...

2008-06-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sure not many people will read this final post on this blog, but I'm writing it anyways. Since I last wrote I have gone home to Houston to see friends and family and just got done with my first week of training in DC. There are two training update blogs on this site that I posted this week fyi. I will be here a couple of more weeks for training and will then head off to Iraq in a couple of weeks. I wanted to write a big long blog wrapping up my PC experience, but I've been insanely busy-my bad. So here are my quick final thoughts about my time in PC:
I'm sad/disappointed I didn't make it the full two years, but the new job was too cool to turn down
I honestly have no problems showering once every 4-5 days. Since I've been home I'm still having a problem getting motivated to shower and change clothes every day
Sleeping on crappy beds for almost two years really messes up your back-I got a massage the day I got home and it almost killed me because of how knotted up I was
I learned that we live WAAAAAY in excess in the States and am sure I will feel that for a long time to come and hopefully live a little more within what I know is fine for me
The people of AZ are amazingly kind, friendly and caring people and I am extremely grateful for their hospitality-they made trip unforgettable
It is scary to not drive for two years then come back and get on a highway-after two weeks I'm still not comfortable
A Butterfinger Blizzard from Dairy Queen is the best thing I've had since I came back (second place tie goes to a filet mignon steak with crab meat on top of it and lupe tortillas)
I have always thought I could move to an island or something and live the basic life for the rest of my life-now I'm almost positive, not saying I'm going to do it...yet
I had a lot of what I'll call smaller successes and no big ones (in my mind), but over all I think I had a positive impact in the PC
The main thing my time in PC did for me was show me that I want to start a career in development work because there are a lot of people/countries out there that need help and it led me to my new job
You can give all the trainings or demonstrations you want, but unless the people you are trying to help/work with honestly want them, they will never work
It's easy to find people who are willing to give grants and people who will accept/want grants, but it takes very special and determined people to work for the grants and/or work hard with the grant once they get it
I loved being a PCV, and it certainly is true that you only get out of it what you put in it-sadly part of the time I didn’t put near enough into it, but live and learn I guess
If you aren’t going to put in more than one hour a week of class and a ton of studying, you are not going to learn Russian very quickly
I actually like more fruits and veggies than I thought (although they are all still lame)
I’m pretty sure Tom and I (Tom is still improving on it) set a new world record for most road miles in old buses in a two year period in the AZ EVER
I am 100% glad and proud that I was a PCV and wouldn't trade those almost two years for anything...

Two things before you go: First, thanks for reading over the past two years-I hope I didn't bore you too much and second, my new blog's address is http://ashsworldlyadventures.blogspot.com/
and will be password protected due to my new job so you have to email me at euroash@gmail.com and I will send you an invite to view my blog. It will be the same thing, just about my next adventures in Iraq and beyond.
Good bye from this blog and a big NUSH OLUN to everyone I had to leave behind in Azerbaijan...Ashley

Best Training Week EVER

2008-06-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, so after 2 days of killer driving, we then woke up Wednesday and got to shoot 10 rounds on Beretta and 006 pistols and AK-47 and M-4 rifles. I love shooting guns, so this was a good time. We then headed back near DC for 1.5 days of emergency medical care training-how to deal with all the gross injuries no one likes, especially someone who hates blood as much as I do. Friday we had surveillance training then did afternoon exercises where we drove around between two spots (supposedly our homes and the Embassy) and had to spot people and cars along the way that were trying to ambush us. Once they made us paranoid, we all were sure about so many different people and cars that were not involved that we looked like idiots. We did three laps and they staged an ambush on the last one to show how it could have happened (a four car ambush for those keeping score at home). This week was one of the coolest weeks of training ever. I had a great time and learned a ton. I'm hanging around DC this weekend and then start cultural training Monday morning. I'm still not sure when I'm leaving, but thankfully Tiffany Bryant and her husband are being cool with a bum living in their basement...

Bye Bye Houston. Hello NYC, DC and Beyond

2008-06-23T16:55:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick update. After a quick and relaxing time in Houston I headed up to DC for the first time ever last week. I had two days of paperwork and stuff. The highlight was getting my Iraq ID and then being able to use it to walk around the Pentagon solo-even though it wasn’t that cool inside, it felt cool.
Then I took my first American train from DC to NYC Saturday morning to meet my family. We went to a Yankees game and sat out in the right field bleachers where all of the fun action is. They have a bunch of cheers and chants the entire section does throughout the game, so it was certainly entertaining. I’m glad I got to see a game there (even though the Yanks lost) before they close down the House That Ruth Built at the end of the season. We then went out to dinner with my cousin and to see Spamalot-the Monty Python musical which was really funny. I also got to see a PC friend from the group before me, Terah, to have some drinks after the show. I took off back to DC Sunday and came out to West Virginia today to start my training. Today we were at a raceway where we learned ways to drive aggressively with controlled breaking, driving backwards around 25-40 mph and whipping the car around to turn, driving from the passenger’s seat and also drifting around a wet circle course with the back tires sliding but keeping your foot on the gas which I killed! Tomorrow we practice crashing through ambushes, driving hummers and getting to see IED demonstrations. How’s that for a Monday and Tuesday?
Pics are from the NYC weekend: the fam in central park, me at Spamalot, john lennon deal, fam at the game, and scoreboard pic is when Jason Giambi gets a hit they put up “Power of the Stache” with his face and a dancing moustache…YANKS RULE!

Bye Bye PC & AZ

2008-06-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, so sorry for the long pause between blogs-I've had a lot going on and wanted to get everything in order before I sent this one. So I started looking around at jobs and doing research to figure out my life post-PC in early March. Well it turns out that the second job I applied for, I got an offer and accepted it. It was an EXTREMELY hard decision, because it meant I had to quit the PC about three months early. I had always planned on sticking it out the full two years, but I felt that this opportunity was too big to turn down.

I was offered a 366 day contract with the State Department to work at the Embassy in Iraq. I will work in the new Embassy in the International (Green) Zone in Baghdad. My title is Quick Release Fund Program Officer. Here is what that means: the Quick Release Fund (QRF) is a $30-40million fund that is set up for the local Iraqis out in the provinces. There are approximately 30 provincial teams that can apply to this fund for projects under $50,000 (from what I’ve heard so far this could include funding NGOs, building bridges or schools, or funding micro-loans). I will be the point of contact for 10-15 of those regional teams and will help coordinate their requests to the QRF, work with other managing partners to make sure everyone is working together and then monitor and evaluate the projects. I will also be responsible for helping improve the current system they have in place to manage this fund. I will work only in the International Zone-I won’t be required to go out into the provinces and will live in an apartment with one other person. I think this is a tremendous opportunity for me to help the people of Iraq and also to have an amazing experience to start my post-PC career.

My timeline has gone like this: got offered the job, then had to do a ton of medical and security clearance stuff, kept doing my PC stuff trying to wrap it up, finally got the official job offer, quit PC, did all of my exit requirements, flew back to Houston, am trying to get adjusted to USA life, getting my life organized/prepared to take off again for another year, then take off for Washington DC next week for two weeks of training and then I’m off to Iraq on the 4^th of July. Needless to say, I have had a lot on my mind and have been a tiny bit busy lately. I fully intend on having a blog over there and will post the new web site link later, along with my final thoughts on my time in the PC. I’m sorry it took so long to post this…

ashley

Camping and Growing Old

2008-05-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Happy Memorial Day!

Last weekend a small group of us went hiking and camping up north near Oguz. We camped near a little vacation place along a stream at the base of the mountains. Charlie attempted to take a group of five us on a day hike up to the top of one of the mountains, but we took the wrong ridge and didn’t even come close. We climbed up some pretty steep stuff, so on the way back down we could literally slide on the loose leaves and mud (it poured for an hour each night) which was really fun. It was a really fun weekend minus the rain (we had to buy big tarps to cover us and sleep on) and a ton of ants found our campsite and decided to hang out with us.

It was a pretty low key week in Lankaran after that. One of my buddies loaned me ‘Flight of the Conchords’ DVDs, so we watched that all week. Really funny and weird stuff. We have had sunny days with temperatures in the mid-80’s, so it has been great. A group of friends came down this past weekend for my birthday, so that was fun. We made a massive pot of Mac&Cheese from my supply from my parents for dinner Friday and grilled out beef kabobs on my bday. The weekend was filled with a lot of ladder golf and general stupidity. It was a good way to welcome my 32^nd year to town!

Now I’m just at home relaxing and trying to recover from a couple of late nights. I see a nap in my hammock in my immediate future.

In my last news I have a new addiction. Rikki George lent me the complete ‘Invader Zim’ cartoon collection. It was a Nickelodeon cartoon for three years around 2001 and is freakin hilarious. It’s basically just a bunch of yelling and screaming and I can’t stop watching it or talking like the main characters. I’m not sure if I’m going insane from being gone from the US for almost two years now, turning 31, or if its just the next step in my fun life…

Pictures are of: the gang cooking hot dogs, me, Charlie and Bethany, Charlie preparing to lead out expedition, Magda and Ina with water balloons, Ben and me cutting up the 16 pounds of meat for kabobs, Rikki George presenting me with my cake she and Bethany made, Tom and me after our cake food fight, and me, Joyce, and Bethany

SKATE OR DIE MAN!!!

2008-05-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

So in Baku down by the Caspian Sea near downtown they have some amusement rides for kids. Well about a month ago we were driving by in a taxi and saw some sort of skateboard ride. Obviously I flipped out and have been eagerly awaiting my moment of happiness when I finally got to ride it. Well fortunately last week Bethany and I had some spare time in Baku and thrashed away! While it wasn’t quite as cool as the Texas Giant, for 1 buck and being in the Peace Corps, it wasn’t too bad.

In other news:

We had our first softball weekend of the year in Barda which was tons of fun. An AZ5 got a grant so we got some free hotdogs for everyone for lunch and ended up playing about 10 games in two days. We had great weather and I was really sun burnt afterwards. A few of us stuck around for Cinco de Mayo margaritas, Ben’s famous refried beans, and kabobs.

I then spent a couple of days in Baku for some medial stuff, the skater ride, and crashed with my friends who have the indoor pool and sauna-life was good!

Then I headed up to Bethany’s village for her birthday. She had two parties thrown for her by her students, so that was fun. The high light was the first party about 20 sixth grade kids threw it and she had to cut a red ribbon to get into the house to start the party while a kid had “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky blasting! I was dying laughing the entire time because the scissors were too dull to cut the ribbon so she had to fake cut it and tear it at the same time.

My medical supplies project is 100% dead due to new regulations from the Azeri government on importing medical type supplies that the donor organization cannot meet. I was really disappointed when I found that out.

A few of us are going camping this weekend and are going to do a big day hike that is supposed to be beautiful. Hopefully I’ll have some good pics next week. For now, I hope the skateboard ride and bday pics can keep you satisfied…

Czech It Out

2008-04-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

So we had some friends from Barda (a city in the center of AZ) in town to visit this week, and we all went to a restaurant by the train station for some beers and for them to try some local food. In walks a group of eight backpackers that site down a little ways away from us, but clearly aren't speaking English, so we don't pay them much attention. After about 10 minutes of them sitting there a waiter comes over to ask me if I can translate for them. It turns out they were from the Czech Republic and spoke English. They didn't know an Azeri or Russian and didn't know where they were staying for the night. So I ordered some food for them, then offered to let them all crash on my floor (they had camping gear with them). So Tuesday night I had a slumber party with eight Czech back packers. It was funny, they all walked around in t-shirts and undies and that was it (girls and guys) while we played Uno. Not your typical Tuesday in Lankaran I can assure you.
Other that that, we played kickball at a local orphanage yesterday for a couple of hours, then helped move furniture for a new English resource center an American woman who teaches English at the local university is setting up. I'm off to Barda this weekend for our first softball weekend of the year, so definitely looking forward to that...

Wedding Time!

2008-04-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

So Tom, Tim, and I went to our last ‘big’ wedding in Lankaran two Friday’s ago. It was our friend Fuad’s wedding. He was the first local that we met that spoke English well and has helped us out a ton with finding houses, figuring out life in Lankaran, and a TON of other stuff. He has been a great friend so we were very excited about his wedding. The three of us and three other foreigners we know had a ‘table of honor’ near the door so everyone that came in got to walk by and gawk at us which made for some funny reactions. It was a night of great food, good times, and dancing. To say the entire group of us made complete asses out of ourselves is a huge understatement, but it sure was fun.

I also went to Ganja for Ben’s birthday-a quiet night of good food and Skip-Bo. Then I headed to Qazax to play soccer some PCVs and kids. Then off to Bethany’s village to visit. I got to go to four of her classes (5^th and 6^th graders) where the kids all had prepared questions in English to ask me, sang I’m a Little Tea Pot, Jingle Bells, and Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes for me. I brought my wiffle ball stuff and we let about 50 kids take batting practice once school was over. It was definitely a fun day for everyone. I had a pretty low key weekend. The Lankaran gang played ladder golf and 4-square all Saturday afternoon and then had a big queso feast to enjoy the mid 70’s and no clouds weather!

I got an email Friday that an organization in Baku has agreed to get the first of eight medical supplies shipments and manage them this year as a test. If that goes well, then they will be responsible for seven more shipments over 4-5 years. This is really good news because it will help a ton of people out in the poorer regions (and I’ve been working on this dang thing for almost a year now).

We have our first softball weekend coming up and I think we will try to throw in a little Cinco de Mayo fiesta attitude for good measure.

Enjoy the pictures of us being idiots at the wedding!

Worst Blogger Ever

2008-04-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry for my total lack of blogging lately, life has been really hectic. Here's a catch-up blog...I promise to be better from now on...
Tom's parents came to Azerbaijan again, so we took them on a country tour this time including Baku, Sheki, and Ganja. They had a good time, but I think they officially have had their fill after two visits and two weeks of time here. They took us out to great meals (I haven't eaten that much in a week since before I came here) and we tried to let them sample all of the regional dishes.
After that I basically slept and watched movies for three straight days to recover from all of the traveling.
Last week I had three really good phone conversations with organizations in America and Baku about my medical supplies project. I think I've found an organization to manage the supplies, so if we can find a company to donate a little bit of money to pay for the distribution costs, we may be able to finally do it.
We haven't found a camp site or set a date for the boys camp yet, so we are going to all have to start focusing on that sooner rather than later.
I went to a wedding of a really good friend Friday night with Tom, Tim, a local German guy, Shrilankan guy, and another American lady that teaches English at the local university. We had a 'table of honor', ate a metric ton, and danced for about three straight hours. It was a freaking blast and sadly may be my last wedding in AZ (but hopefully someone else will invite me to one this summer).
I went up to Ganja to celebrate Ben's birthday over the weekend and am now in Bethany's village. I went to four of her English classes this morning which was tons of fun. All of the kids wrote questions to ask me last week so there were prepared for the first American guy they've ever met. We are going to teach them how to play wiffle ball this afternoon.
I'll head back to Lankaran tomorrow I think and then the Lank gang is playing kickball at the local orphanage on Saturday, so that should be a lot of fun.
Ok, that should pretty much catch you all up I think. The weather has been gorgeous, but people in Lankaran are freaking out because we haven't had any rain (it rained 25 out of 30 days in April last year and it has only sprinkled twice so far). Talk to you guys next week...I promise...

My 100th Blog-that’s weird

2008-04-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

Well the spring has finally arrived! This is our second day of April and it only rained for five minutes yesterday and has been sunny the rest of the time. I just keep waiting for the clouds to move in, the rain to start and not stop for the rest of the month. Last year it rained pretty much all day 25 days in April, so I’m enjoying every ounce of sun we are getting. I did some spring cleaning last week which consisted of sweeping my house-pretty intense stuff. Tom and I are going to pile up all of my leaves and have a yard fire in the next week or so, weather permitting. This will be my first ever yard fire, so I’m pretty excited. We have some firecrackers left over from NYE to throw in for added excitement. I also put up netting on four of my windows in attempt to keep the bugs out and let some fresh air come in. The mosquitoes and ants are already out sadly-not looking forward to a summer full of them. I took my first malaria pill of the year last night, so that’s always exciting-sadly no crazy dreams. In the true spirit of ‘spring cleaning’ I decided to shave off the 15 months of hair growth on top of my head because it was just filthy and time for it to be gone. I didn’t have electric clippers so I had to use crappy scissors, then my Mach 3 razor for about an hour, sitting in my bathroom on a stool, freezing my naked butt off. It was worth it-I do love the feel of a freshly shaven head. I think I’ll keep shaving it for a while, just for fun. The locals think this hair is waaaay weirder than my long hair (which they found pretty weird), so I get a ton of looks, stares, and comments. They cut hair short here, but never bic’d completely off.

What else? A group of us went to Baku to watch some NCAA hoops games at an American bar. The owner gave us some free beers and appetizers, so that was really cool. Tom’s parents are coming back to AZ to visit (how ever crazy that may sound), so we are going to meet them in Baku this weekend again. That means we should have a batch of good American munchies. We put in requests with Tom’s dad for two Spicy Baconators from Wendy’s, so fingers crossed I’ll be eating a fresh (only 24 hours old) American burger at midnight Friday!

Other than that, not much going on. I’m trying to figure out a couple of small projects for Youth Day and Earth Day. I’m heading up to Sheki next week so Magda and I can finish our reports for our business training. We have been asked to set up another one, so we are going to have to see if we can get some money for that and how to make it better. I’m still waiting to hear on my medical supplies project-this waiting is driving me insane. Oh, I’ve started having a lot of “lasts” in AZ. Such as: two weeks ago I slept in my huge and hot PC issued sleeping bag, I’m going to buy my last huge can of cooking butter this week, I’m planning my last trip during my service (Russia in June), we just had our last holiday (Novruz), and things like that. It is kinda a weird feeling, but also a good one, to know that I’ve almost made it (21 full months and counting).

The pictures are of the trees in my back yard blooming, the netting I have to put up in all of my windows that kinda keeps bugs out, and what 15 months of hair looks like once it has been completely cut of

One Whacky Day

2008-03-21T01:57:00.000-07:00

Bethany came down to visit over the Novruz Holiday, and instead of lounging around my house all week, we decided we needed a little adventure.

Azerbaijan

is one of only a few countries that have natural gas running under the ground that causes a phenomenon known only as MUD VOLCANOES!!! (I think this is all correct) I mean how cool does that sound? We thought it sounded cool enough to go try to check them out. Sadly, as much of a push as they have going here for tourism, one of their most unique offerings isn’t documented well and you are at the mercy of the locals to find them. We found out from some friends and an AZ guide book that they have some in a little town on the train route from Lankaran to Baku.

So we packed up snacks, warm clothes, and head lamps and took the night train from Lankarn to Elet. I should have known it was going to be a fun trip when the guy at the train ticket office said he would write Baku on our train tickets and we could just tell the guy that manages our sleeping wagon we were getting off in Elet. Well we told him that, he said “I will be asleep and I don’t know what time we will get there.” THANK YOU SIR! Well thankfully a guy in our cabin said he can’t sleep on the train (another missed bad sign) and would wake us up. Well I estimated we would get there around 4:45am-ish so I set my alarm for 4:15 to be safe. I woke up a little before 4 because the non-sleeper was snoring/making really gross sounds that woke and kept me up. He got up and walked around at 4:10 when our train stopped. He didn’t come say anything, so I just stayed in bed a little longer assuming that was not our stop. I got up about 10 minutes later to use the facilities and turns out, yup, we just passed out stop. I got Bethany up and we got off at the next stop 40km away. GREAT start to the day, I know.

We hung out at the train station until the sun started coming up and hopped a cab back to our original destination, or so we thought. The taxi driver said he knew where we were MVs were and would drop us right next to the hill we had to climb 2km outside of town. This is despite the fact we told him the MVs were near the train station. We went into a roadside tea house (basically a plywood room in the middle of nowhere) to warm up, drink tea, and get ready to start hiking. Well two guys at the tea house said there were no mud volcanoes on the hill we pointed to, we needed to take a bus 8 km father away from town. So we waited for a random bus they put us on and away we went. The driver stops a few minutes later, says get out, and just points at a hill in the distance and says climb. No go left, up, right, front side, backside or anything, just climb. So we just stated walking. We saw some rocks that looked weird from a distance and had high hopes only to find nothing. Then we saw some orange flags marking something on the other side of a big dip in the side of the hill. When we got to the top of that ridge and heard barking when Bethany points to a pack of 4-5 dogs hauling ass straight at us. She asked if we should be worried, and me, being the dog lover, said “nope”. After they got closer, weren’t slowing down, were getting louder, and looking a lot bigger than I thought, I changed my mind and we started walking away from them quickly without looking at them while I tried to decide how I was going to handle a pack of dogs attacking me and getting Bethany away from it. Not a fun situation to be in I can assure you. Thankfully the dogs all stopped on the ridge and didn’t chase us any farther than that. Needless to say, after that we were a little leery of continuing our climb up, so we kinda walked away from the dogs along the same elevation of the hill. After a while, with no MVs in site, we headed for the road and caught a random mini-bus back to our original town destination.

Once we got there we asked a cop at the train station how to find the MVs close to town. He said just go down to the corner, wait for a cab, tell him MVs, and they are only 3-4km up the hill behind the train station. Of course they are! So we waited for a cab, and waited, and waited. Elet is a small town with taxi population one it seemed. We waited an hour until a guy we gave a match to for his cigarette called a cab for us. We that driver didn’t know how to get there, so he asks another guy on the side of the road who says he’s been there and just hops in to join our adventure. After taking one wrong turn and asking directions once, we finally get to the summit and MUD VOLCANOE CITY! They just bubble/gurgle/burp mud that flows down these mud/earth cone shaped hills about 15-20 feet tall. So we laughed, checked them all out, touched the mud, and took pictures for about 20 minutes, then headed down to the main road to hitch hike for buses home around 11:30ish. We did all of that before freaking 11:30 am! Top that off with jam packed bus rides home and when I get home finding out my camera didn’t work and I have no pictures to show anyone and the day was a complete success if I’ve ever seen one!

Business Trainings and BS

2008-03-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

So Magda and I finally had our business training in Lankaran last week. We got a SPA grant from USAID and PC to hire a trainer from Magdas orgs to come down to Lankaran to train some local entrepreneurs on basic business practices such as marketing, costing, finance, and inventory management. The trainer was really good. He was very engaging and definitely kept everyone’s attention. We used the business center that my organization is supposed to be managing but never uses. Magda and I served tea two times a day and we all ate lunch at a local café. The trainees all got manuals to work with and take home. The training itself was a success which was a good feeling. The BS part of it sadly involves my boss. My boss has always wanted me to do a business training, so I was glad I could finally make his wish come true. His job that he agreed to was to find the entrepreneurs for the training since he is one of the most connected people in town. He kept telling me this would be “no problem”. Well it turns out he put two other people in charge of this and didn’t do anything to help, we didn’t have as many people as I wanted so we had to make a lot of calls the first two days to fill all of the seats, and my boss didn’t come over to the training 2 minutes from our office one freakin time. All of this despite the fact he has already taken all of the credit to the head office in Baku for the training and it makes him look really good. I haven’t seen him yet, but I can’t imagine our conversation will be too happy on my end. It is pretty frustrating to finally get to do something for my host organization after 18 months of them not working with me, just to have my boss be completely uninvolved. Like I said, the training was a success-I just wish it would have been more successful in that part as well.

A couple of friends came down over the weekend to hang out and help Magda and I celebrate the completion of our project, so that was fun. The weather has been kinda warm lately-60’s. I actually went shirtless for an hour on Friday when we were playing laddergolf outside. This week will be filled with busy work wrapping up my project, some other PC stuff and errands around town. I’m going to call everyone I know today to try to find someone to come fix my freakin well motor this week-I’m tired of no running water. I guess I should go to my office and see what happens-yippie! Have a great week everybody! Pics are from the training.

Another Day in My Life

2008-02-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

I really don’t have much to type about and today was a good mix of a normal day but with some rare events, so I thought I’d give you guys a complete rundown of a “busy winter” Monday for me at site:

8:00-8:40-alarm went off, I laid completely inside of my sleeping bag trying to stay warm and reviewing Russian vocab, the milk lady walked by but I was too cold to get out of my sleeping bag to get some dairy products

8:40-10:20-made typical breakfast of 2 scrambled eggs on fresh bread with spreadable cheese, brushed my teeth, got a nalgene full of purified water, and crammed for my Russian lesson

10:25-11:15-had my Russian lesson at a local school. Funny story of the day: my teacher told me I need to listen/hear Russian more (I was having problems understanding what she was asking me) so we went down the hall and I met a tiny old Russian teacher who teaches 3^rd and 4^th grade-I am now going to go sit in on her class in the mornings when I can so I can learn Russian with 8 year olds-her exact words were “he doesn’t know Russian very well, the kids don’t know it very well, this will be fun”-I’m sure I’ll have a hilarious report on how little kids are mocking me in class and beating me up for being a teacher’s pet next week

11:30-12:45-went to my office, talked with my co-workers, read a month old Newsweek, talked about my training next week and rubbed my eyes constantly from the smoke from our wood furnace

12:45-2-ate lunch with the Lank gang-1.5 potato quesadillas and 1 goat stomach quesadilla covered in a yogurt-ish sauce for 60 cents. During lunch we debated what all of the floating things in my freshly cleaned nalgene and distilled water were-I mean it was just full of what can only be described as tiny pieces of toilet paper and I literally just used bleach and boiled water to clean it and the water was pure-couldn’t taste it though

2:30-3:30-the father or our secretary died yesterday so we went to his “death tent”-a tent in the road in front of their house where men sit, drink tea, talk a little and listen to preachers talk all day long for 7 days after the death. I just stared at the quilts that make the walls in the structure the entire time basically while going in and out of listening.

3:30-4:30-helped Jane to find a house to move into next month when the new group of PCVs is free of host family living

4:30-6:30-read

6:30-8-worked out in my living room for exercise and to generate free warmth

8-8:45-cooked and ate pasta with ketchup for dinner

9-10-wrote emails and blog and did stupid computer stuff

10-11-read and studied Russian vocab between chapters

11-11:30-internet time posting blog, sending emails, looked for jobs and looked at ESPN

12-1-read until I fall asleep

There you have it ladies and gentlemen-that was a busy and productive day in the life of Me these days. It is supposed to start snowing soon, my well is still broken, Tom finally got water working over the weekend so I’m going to have to use his shower tomorrow since I haven’t showered in about 10 days, I am going to buy supplies tomorrow for the business training, Magda will come down this weekend, and that’s about it. Enjoy your last week of February-I know I’ll be happy to get my last cold Feb in AZ over with…

Busy In Baku

2008-02-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

Well I just got back to Lankaran from being in Baku for what seems like an eternity. In reality I was only there about 5 days, but life there is so much more intense than the slow pace of life out in the regions. We got the new Rambo movie in Baku, so I had that treat on the night train back. Good old Sly just keeps killing people even though I think he’s about 129 years old. I went in early last week to help give a training to the new group of PCVs on working with their counterparts at their organizations as well as how to manage small projects while in the Peace Corps. I’ve given a training like this before but it was 2.5 days. I had to shrink it to 1 day to fit a tight schedule, but I think everything went fairly well.

Besides that we had our first ABLE (the leadership camp we do for kids) meeting to plan for this summer’s camp and I also had a good first conversation with a new organization in Baku that says (with confidence) that they can help with my medical supplies project. I have another phone meeting with them later this week and I am really hopeful that things work out with the-I haven’t heard back from the first organization we met with so my faith in them isn’t so high right now.

I also talked with a few people that work in development/aid work about options and advice for jobs once I finish with the PC. They had a lot of interesting ideas and thoughts, so I now have a lot more to think about in that part of my life.

My well motor broke a week ago and my landlord today said it will probably be another couple of weeks before it is fixed. 2008 isn’t turning out to be the year of water. I’ve got to work a ton the next 2 weeks on my business training so I hope my office and manager are cooperative and we can get everything done-it should be interesting.

The pictures are from our “High Society” Prom we had in Baku over the weekend. Thanks to Magda for making me a killer ascot! Ben and me, Magda, Ram, Ben, me, Tom, Rikki, Donny and Maria, the Lankaran Gang, and me, Tom and Carlo.

7 months left baby…that’s like half a year almost…

2008-02-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

Not much went on this past week. I officially haven’t seen my boss in over 3 weeks, so that’s fun I guess. I’m going to meet with him this week to begin planning the business training Magda and I are doing in early March.

I’m heading to Baku Tuesday night to help out with a training for the new group of PCVs and then we are having “PC Prom” Saturday night in Baku so I’ll get to see lots of my friends. Magda is currently working on part of my costume-our theme is “High Society”-which we all are clearly not. This is just basically an excuse for most of the PCVs to come to Baku on the same weekend in the middle of the winter and hang out. So I’ll be in Baku pretty much all week so warmth and cleanliness should abound!!! Oh, the motor on my well burned up earlier this week and Tom’s house still has busted pipes, so the water situation in Lankaran is still not ideal. Oh well.

I’m having a few meetings on projects in Baku next week as well-this should be my last medial supplies meeting deciding if one of these two organizations can help out or not. I’m also going to meet with a few people that work for aid/development organizations to talk about ideas for jobs/work after PC, so it should be an interesting week all around.

I just read a book called “The Killer Angels” about the Civil War-really good book.

I just went and ate dinner with Joyce’s host family for the first time, so that was fun. It’s always cool hanging out with a new Azeri family that is outgoing. Her host mom was really chatty, so we had a good time. Plus I got free warm chicken and their homemade kool-aide/fruit juice stuff-I could drink it all day every day. The only thing that sucks about getting such a good meal is you have to have the required glass of tea after dinner, so all of those delicious tastes are burned out by hot tea. I’m just not destined to like tea-there’s nothing I can do about it.

That’s about all I’ve got-short blog week. I should have some funny pictures next week from prom. I’ll leave you with this final thought and corresponding picture. So there is a cat that considers my yard part of her turf. We are cordial to each other, say hi when we pass on the way to the toilet, etc. Last week she got under my house and just made a ton of loud noises all one day. I thought maybe she was hurt or something-I looked under there and she was just sitting there alone not doing anything-who knows. Well today I heard some “different” noises from her, I look out my door and here’s what I see…

I guess everyone needs to find ways to stay warm in the winter…

C and C Baby Factories

2008-02-05T07:28:00.000-08:00

I would like to start this week off with an Azerbaijan shout out to Cole Pregler and Crew Boyd and their respective parents and grandparents! Two of my best friends, Chris Pregler and Dagen Boyd (and of course their lovely wives Jennifer and Michelle), had their first children over the past week or so and I can’t wait to meet them! Jennifer got things going with popping Cole out a whopping 5 weeks early and Michelle followed up with popping Crew out a couple of weeks early. I got an early morning wake up call Sunday morning with Crew making some funny noises to introduce himself to me half way around the world. Oddly enough, after I finally answered the phone after 3 separate calls from Dagen, I think I made the same noises in my sleep daze.

Last week was pretty standard-I’m sounding like a broken record each week I know. My friend Bethany came to visit for the weekend. Tom and I decided not to head to Baku to watch the Super Bowl due to money and me thinking the game wasn’t going to be so good. We also watched Sweeny Todd-freaking weird but good movie. We were trying to organize a joint Georgia and AZ boys camp with PCVs in Georgia this summer but I just got word things on that end aren’t going to work out so no dice sadly.

I had a horrible Russian lesson yesterday and it was a total wake up call for me that if I’m going to learn that language at least conversationally while I’m over here I need to really bust my ass. This is going to be a BIG week of review and getting my head on straight.

I just got back from Nene’s. Today is the 40^th day of her return from Mecca, so she was giving out food and invited me over for some chicken and rice. I’m stuffed and she gave me left overs to take home for tomorrow! I forgot how much I love walking into her kitchen in the winter after work. It is always the perfect temperature of warm with the wood fire, never smoky and smells delicious. This is a 180 from my kitchen that is 40 degrees, a tiny fire from my gas balloon, and the smell of pasta and ketchup. She had a bunch of visitors over to eat and celebrate her trip to Mecca over the past 40 days and showed me my old bedroom. Well she probably has about 50 huge boxes of chocolates stacked up in there. Chocolate is the preferred gift when visiting a person’s house in AZ. She told me she’s going to take them all to the store later this week and sell them to the shop owner and keep the money-which is also perfectly acceptable over here. Re-gifting is also a constant thing.

This week’s insight into my life makes me feel ridiculous. So I was skipping work this afternoon because I’m just more productive at home than in a small office with 4 people constantly yelling/talking. Well I got a call from Nene inviting me over to eat at 4, then a call from Jane saying I had a package at the post office. All of a sudden my quiet afternoon at home reading, working on Russian and doing internet stuff (like this blog) wasn’t panning out. I had an extreme sense of being “too busy” all of a sudden. How pathetic is that? I had to go eat, hang with Nene and pick up a package. That’s how slow life in the AZ is right now. Those two simple and normal things made me feel all rushed-that kills me when I think about life in America.

I’m reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book Strength to Love right now and highly recommend it to all.

Since we are in the winter hibernation period of the year, I figured pictures of me and my friends sleeping would be appropriate: me and Ina, Ram in his normal late night position, Magda, Jason & Kat in a normal group weekend setting, me and Ben at an early morning PC training during a tea break, Ben in his normal state any time of day, “fetal” Tom, me and Ben after a softball game taking an afternoon nap at Sarah’s house, Carlo and the only thing that would share a bed with him at the time and finally one of my favorite pictures of Ram after our America Day in Lankaran at one of my old houses…

SU VAR!!!!!!!!!

2008-01-28T07:26:00.000-08:00

For all of you bilingual English and Azeri people, that’s right-I’VE FINALLY GOT RUNNING WATER! The fixit guy came today, replaced two parts of pipes and then shaved a piece of wood to jam in the hole of my well motor pipe and the water is a flowing. It’s pretty dirty stuff, so I’ll be running it off and on most of the night to clean it out, then, fingers cross, tomorrow morning I’ll be taking my first shower at my house since December 30, 2007. I can’t freakin wait! I’m seriously giddy right now as I write this.

I honestly don’t know what else to write besides that to be honest with you. This past weekend I read two books, worked on trainings for new PC Volunteers I have to give in three weeks, started working on my resume for job hunting, studied a bunch of Russian and pretty much was stationary on my couch either sitting up or sleeping the entire time. It finally warmed up into the high 40’s with sun, so most of the snow/ice is gone. My landlord cleared out 3 small trees that fell due to snow and ice, so my back yard looks a little cleaner. For some reason I have it in my head that it is almost spring, even though there are still 3 days left in January. I’m sure it will freeze again tomorrow and life will go back to the normal coldness I’ve gotten used to.

Everyone is pretty much bored, grumpy and we are all passing around a cold it seems. This is the winter malaise of PC life in AZ. I’m actually doing ok with it, although I definitely struggle to get out of my sleeping back several mornings a week. I’m reading a book on President Bush and Iraq right now that is super interesting and really detailed, so that has been a challenge since I’m not big into politics or how our government works (as bad as that is of me). I also just read “Ender’s Game”-a sci-fi book from 1977 that is really good. It’s a quick and easy read, but really cool to think about. I highly recommend it.

Magda and I are officially getting our PC grant to hold a 4 day business training in Lankaran in March, so that’s exciting for us, our offices and about 30 local business people. We will be pretty busy planning that over the next 3 weeks or so.

Ok, that’s it. Sorry for the short blogs, just nothing going on of any consequence it seems. I’m going to go just stare at the water coming out of my faucet for a few hours and smile!

2 Pipes, My Well Motor Casing and a Faucet

2008-01-23T05:24:00.000-08:00

That’s all I’ve found so far that has cracked or broken completely from the 18 consecutive days of my house being a popsicle. The temps have warmed up and most of the snow and ice have melted away, but now everyone in town has busted stuff and the “workers” aren’t the speediest or most reliable folks to take on the challenge of fixing the town. I’m hoping that if temps stay above freezing I may have running water by next Wednesday-but that’s just blind hoping on my part.

Thankfully I had to go to Baku for some meetings and took about 6 showers in 3 days-it was GLORIOUS! Now I’m back on the no shower kick again. That’s really all I have to report this week. I got back from Baku and slept 24 out of my first 48 hours for some reason-I didn’t do much of anything in Baku, so not sure where this sudden coma came from. I should find out in a week about my trainings grant and my meeting with the organization in Baku regarding the medical supplies project went way better than expected. I now have hope that it may actually happen. I’ll be hanging out low key in Lankaran for the next few weeks, which is just fine with me. Jenny and I are planning “PC Prom” for Valentines Day weekend in Baku, so that should be fun. High Society is the theme, which should provide for some interesting outfits seeing as how we don’t shower and wear the same clothes for weeks at a time here. Have a great week everyone! Since nothing has been going on, I don’t have any pictures. So I just decided to steal some of my friend Bethany’s pics of mosques she took in Istanbul for your viewing pleasure…

17 Days and Counting…..and Stinking

2008-01-17T23:51:00.001-08:00

WARNING-You all may want to hold your breath while reading the following blog. Just for the record, it is both bad luck and bad form to plan your weekly shower for the exact day your water pipes freeze for 9+ days. That’s right, I took a shower on the 30th of December and was planning on the 6th. Well the winter blizzard hit that days, all of Azerbaijan froze-streets, pipes (Tom had a pipe and 2 faucets burst), doors, ice, everything. We got a total of about 1.5 feet of snow, but it has been butt cold every day until yesterday. I think we got into the 40’s with sun and things started to melt, but not my pipes. I’m heading to Baku on the Wednesday night train for meetings and will have a hotel room Thursday, so I’ll be taking a shower as soon as possible when I get there-20 days on stinkitude later. Just for the record, I’ve worn the same clothes all day every day once I realized I wasn’t getting clean any time soon and didn’t want to contaminate any other clothes and also, the 16th day really took a turn for the worse. I had a few friends give me a “smell test” and said I was fine, but I know yesterday I started to emit a mild and moldy stench.
Let’s see, what else is really going on….oh wait, NOTHING! That’s not really true, but the entire country seemed to be shut down last week and everything went in slow motion so as not to fall on the ice. I have my PC grants committee meeting this Friday, Ram and I are meeting with one or two organizations in Baku about our medical supplies project-this could be the make or break week for that so think happy thoughts please, I went to cut Nene’s wood yesterday and found out two 22 year old soldiers will be crashing at her place for three months, so hopefully she’ll be a little less bored. I’ve been working on making a “How To” manual for our boys camps to give future groups of PCVs, and that’s about it. I’ve been reading about two books a week so far over the winter, so I’m glad about that. I watched “No Country For Old Men” the other night. If any of you have seen it, shoot me an email to discuss-I kinda get it, but I don’t. Joyce, my site mate, has been keeping me up to date on the primaries and such-should be an interesting year of politics in America it seems. I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad I’ll miss most of it. All Azeris have read Jack London books for some reason, so I finally read a couple and really liked them. Ok, that’s about all I’ve got. I’m going to go buy a bunch of car pine tree air fresheners and rub them all over my body and clothes…

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

2008-01-09T06:14:00.000-08:00

That’s right, it’s freakin cold here. Last Saturday night around 10ish a nice little snow flurry snuck up on us. Well I woke up and it was dumping and continued to dump all day long. Then all of our water pipes froze, and the roads too. Jane and I made a killer snowman smoking a left over roman candle while joyce made a snowpuppy. So now it is Tuesday night and the pipes are still frozen, the major roads are kinda not icy and no snow for 2 days, but still snow everywhere. My house’s temperature has been dramatically fluctuating between a steamy 40-42 degrees since Saturday. Thankfully it does block the snow and wind from getting in, so I have that going for me. I basically make out with my electric heater each night it is so close to me. It actually isn’t that bad. I’m used to this temperature and know exactly which layers and how many of them I need on for certain temperatures. I sleep fully inside of my sleeping bag-head and all. The only real problem is getting out of it in the morning knowing how much colder the outside world is. This weather encourages me to go to my office more because we have wood burning heaters there that they always have rocking by the time I get there, so warmth abounds. I haven’t showered in 8 or 9 days-I literally can’t remember the last day I hosed off, but I’m fairly certain it was last year. I’ve started melting/boiling snow to wash my dishes, boil my noodles and distill for drinking water, so that’s fun. I make sure to avoid the random yellow snow patches that are near my door-getting all bundled up to wander about 40 steps in a foot of snow to pee into a hole isn’t that appealing at 10pm.

Other than that, not much to report. A Chinese Circus showed up to town yesterday, so I’m gunna go see what that’s all about tomorrow. It has been a week of writing reports-Magda and I have been writing our grant for the past few days since it is due Wednesday and I have a periodic report for PC due soon as well. We have to fill out these long reports detailing our activities, where they fit in the goals of the PC, who they help, how they help, etc. In spite of the fact that it is not hot right now, I put up a bunch of cool snow skiing pictures on my wall from a few magazines my family sent me. I never thought in my entire life I would say these words but I’m gunna freakin cook cabbage this weekend for the first time in my life. Ina made some for me a few weeks ago that wasn’t that bad with a bunch of seasoning and then either ketchup or this kinda sourcreamish stuff they have here. One parting thought in regards to me getting up at 5am to track the OU Fiesta Bowl game….I should have never gotten out of my sleeping bag…..

Pics are of our snow man, my back yard, and my frozen laundry…

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Everything Else!

2008-01-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

So I have been a blog slacker lately and I apologize. I’m going to do a two week update/inclusive blog so you guys will have something to waste time with on your 1^st days back at work after your holiday vacations.

I went to Barda the weekend before Christmas to hang out with several friends-Jason had an “All Holidays Gathering” at his house and we had a fun weekend. We realized our group of AZ4 PCVs has gotten old and lame when we looked around about 1am and most of the girls were knitting and the rest of us were playing poker while the new group was all up and still rocking away. I like to think we have matured and calmed down, but I think we are just all lazy and know how to pace ourselves. Then I headed to Sheki for actually Christmas at Magda’s. They have a semi-movie theater there with a projector on a white wall with good speakers and for $6 total we got to watch our own Polar Express movie and eat popcorn! It was a ton of funand I really like the movie. We also made good American food, played games and watched all of the typical American Christmas movies-Frosty, Rudolph and Co.

The entire country has all of this week off so it has been nice and relaxing. Due to the fairly consistent rain and mid 40’s temps it has become increasingly harder to get out of my insanely warm sleeping bag each morning. The Lankaran Gang had a NYE feast with games and then headed down to the main town square for the city firework show with music and the fountains going. We also stopped by Tom’s old host family at mid-night to say hello, then headed back to my place to set off a bunch of fire crackers. Firecrackers are kinda expensive here. For $10 Tom and I got a carton of blackcats, 4 roman candles, 1 foutain, 6 bees, 10 bottle rockets and maybe 1 or 2 other small things. I was hoping to buy a whole mess of cool stuff for $10 here. There obviously aren’t any rules against lighting them in the city. I’ve heard blackcats basically 24/7 for the past week or so from neighborhood kids. I’ll be glad when this week is over and that should be done hopefully. Today we all got our picture taken with the Azeri version of “Santa” and the “Winter Queen”. Tomorrow we are having a “Lonesome Dove” Mini-series marathon at Tom’s house. I got all of the sitemates to read my book over the past month, so they are all excited to see the movie.

Well, we have officially finished our one and only full calendar year in AZ. Only about 9 months left on the countdown. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t think/worry about post-PC life until 2008. Well that worked our great until yesterday-now I’m screwed. I’ve been reading a bunch of books and am going to start doing research about possible employment areas over the next couple of months so that once March/April hits I know where I want to focus my job search efforts. I’m also going to start planning my trip to Russia for June pretty soon, so I’m started to get excited thinking about that. I’m getting up at 5am to follow the Sooner game cast for the Fiesta Bowl. I have two boxes of cereal from US already out with my OU t-shirt and stocking cap ready for the game!

Pics are of "Happy New Year" sign, me and tom at the park for NYE, fireworks show, us lighting blackcats and the lank gang.

I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday Season! I guess I can probably say I’ll see you guys later this yearand BOOMER FREAKING SOONER!!!!

I Can’t Not Speak English Guud

2007-12-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

So I’ve known for a while now that my general English speaking skills have been diminishing since I’ve been over here. I think it comes from not speaking it near as much, trying to learn and speak in new languages, texting in short hand instead of talking on the phone and my extreme lack of American fast food. When I’m in either Azeri or Russian lessons my teachers will always try to explain things by using the technical grammatical terms like “present perfect participle” or something crazy like that. I have to then have them give me an example or two so I can figure out what in the world they are talking about. I’m absolutely clueless when it comes to that stuff it seems. It’s embarrassing…

Well I went up to Sheki over the weekend to help Jenny record the grade school English books onto CDs for teachers to use. Me, Bethany, Charlie and Jenny all took turns reading lessons and exercises into a computer all weekend. Bear in mind all three of them are English teachers over here and I’m clearly not, so they are all big on grammar and speaking/teaching correctly. An exercise comes up for me dealing with possessive plurals. I am supposed to read a sentence regarding some dogs and their house and I keep saying what comes out sounding like “the dogses houses”. They all just start dying laughing at me. I can’t figure out what the problem is, so I say it how I think it should be said a couple more times, each time coming out the same. Once they catch their breath they explain to me how I should be saying it, and I still don’t get it. Finally Bethany switched exercises with me and took over that one. I mean what the heck!?!?!? This comes a week after Tom and I were briefly talking about jobs after PC and I completely messed up some sentence regarding that subject and followed it up with “you guys hire retarded people right?” in reference to my current condition. I’m definitely going to have to re-learn the English language and how to communicate in a semi-coherent way before I leave the AZ.

In other news, I had my longest in country travel day-I turned an 8-9 hour trip to Sheki into a 20.5 hour trip, it’s cold and rainy down in Lankaran again, my loving parents hooked me up with a new iPod as an early Christmas present-just in time for that miserable trip thankfully, I’m trying to figure out plans to hang out with friends around the Christmas/NYE Holidays, a lot of the new group of Volunteers are starting to have a hard time with winter hitting, Christmas away from family and friends, having been here for 6 months, etc.-kinda weird being totally fine with it this year, and we just figure out we are basically 2/3 the way done with our time here. Kinda hard to believe that there is less than 9 months left in my AZ living. I officially have 16 more days of no stress what so ever about life after PC, then it will hit with a vengeance I’m sure-I promised myself I wouldn’t even think about it until 2008 for sanity’s sake. That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to go read a 3^rd grade English grammar book now…

Mini-blog

2007-12-11T07:35:00.000-08:00

I really don’t have much this week so I’ll keep it short and sweet for you guys.

I went to Beylagan to do some work on our boy’s camp for next spring and to help Carlo celebrate his birthday. It was a really fun and low key weekend. Carlo doesn’t’ get many visitors, so he was really excited to have some guests finally. We went to a really cool cemetery outside of town where an old profit is baried that Carlo is helping out a little bit. The owner gave us a free and delicious lamb kabob feast which was really cool

Aid funding for AZ has been basically cut in half recently for NGOs and such which is making it harder to do things here. I’m having some major problems finding a local organization that can help me manage all of these medical supplies if we get them, so that is taking up most of my time right now. I’m going to head up north to Sheki for the weekend to help Jenny record English lessons on cds so she can use a small grant to make copies and give out to teachers.

We had a Lankaran gang dinner at our newest member’s house last night. Kathy is an English teacher volunteer at the local university and she had us all over for some good grub, so that was nice.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of their first president so a lot of people will be putting flowers on his statue in our big park and people will be pretty sad all day.

That’s really all I’ve got. It is cold here, but not super cold yet. I’m living in my sleeping bag most of the time when at home, so I’m basically cocooned 24/7 when at home.

12-2-07 R.I.P. Ashley’s iPod-you were a great companion….

2007-12-03T08:12:00.000-08:00

Well it finally happened, my iPod Mini died on Sunday. It had been freezing off and on the past couple of weeks. Each time that happened I had to let the battery wear completely out, then charge it back up and us it until it froze again. This could be 5 songs or 50, I never knew. Finally Sunday when I tried to put a few new Christmas songs on it, the little guy up died. It truly is a tragedy to lose him for several reasons:

Music is one of the main things that helps me keep my already limited sanity here

Listening to local music blaring on speakers on 8 hour bus rides gets a TINY bit old

All of my music is on my external drive and I don’t want to mess with that every time I turn on my laptop and I want to listen to something

My solo spontaneous dance parties aren’t as fun without music-this is something we’ve come to love-basically I get stir crazy, crank up my music, start dancing in my home and text someone else in AZ and tell them to join in-this way I’m not a crazy person having a solo dance party, at least one other person I know is dancing with me-ish

Let’s be honest, who doesn’t just need to have Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” available at the press of a button…

In other news, to take the place of music as a sanity keeper device I have taken up a new hobby. Remember last year when we had sock puppet theater? Well my very kind sister sent me a box of supplies to make a ton of actual sock puppets and also a “Stupid Sock Creatures” creation kit. It has a book with instructions on how to make crazy little creatures/stuffed animals out of socks, two pairs of socks, buttons, thread, needles and filling. I’ve made two so far. I suck at sewing- I think the last thing I sewed was a pillow in 8^th grade home ec class with a sewing machine and teacher telling me what to do. my first attempt is a pretty poor looking fellow, but round two’s craftsmanship is top notch! I’m sure you are all laughing and thinking I’ve gone off the deep end with this one…you are probably right…

I got up at 5am on Sunday to track the OU/Mizzou game on ESPN’s website. While that is nothing like watching the game, it was still fun to know we were whipping some ass! Thanks to Tye, Darci, Clay, Dagen and Ron for keeping me company during the game. And a big Boomer Sooner to the BCS-what a joke….

I found out last week there is a really really good chance my medical supplies project is going to go through next fall and I’m going to figure out how to manage several hundred thousand dollars worth of medical supplies getting here, being distributed to the right hospitals and making sure they are getting used. If this happens, I’m going to be busy as all get out. Keep you fingers crossed, this could be a really good deal for the small clinics in the villages so I’m hoping it actually happens.

We gave a training to some college students today on interview skills. My program manager is coming on Wednesday for his yearly check up. He’s a great guy, so I am always glad I get to spend some one on one time with him. I had a tough Russian lesson today and walked out feeling like an idiot. I’ve got to put a TON more effort into it.

This week’s pictures are of the mini-Christmas trees Jane made me, tom and joyce, my two new sock creatures, the mountains after their first snow and Tom and I at a local school on Saturday for an English Fair-the sign has my favorite Azeri saying “Nush Olsun” which means “Bon apatite” basically…

Winter Is Coming-Save Yourself!!!

2007-11-27T07:11:00.000-08:00

I woke up today and it was 46 degrees in my room-WINTER RULZ!!! In America I never thought 46 was that cold, but man, it sure is cold here for some reason. I wore a freaking stocking cap around today…I can’t explain it. I gave in and went to long underwear under the pants last Thursday which was a bad realization. Thankfully I live as far south as possible so it is warmer here than most places (I have friends that have been in long undies mode for a month already). I don’t have a wood burning mini-fireplace in my room this year-just an electric heater, sleeping bag and a ton of blankets. I have placed my bed (a folded out recliner type chair), couch, coffee table, and voltage regulator for computer and phone charging all in the corner of a room so that I don’t have to get up much and the heater can keep all of the “important” parts of my house as warm as possible.

Let’s see, not much to talk about this week so I won’t waste your time. Tom and I just got home from going to a tea house and playing a board game similar to backgammon. I also hit the bazaar today and loaded up on 2 kilos of pasta, 1 kilo of rice, spices, 10 eggs, 2 red peppers, 2 green peppers, 5 garlic, a jar of tomato paste, 2 kilos of potatoes and 1 kilo of onions for about 9 bucks I think. I’m having a very low key week of reading and Russian studying after a long holiday weekend of movie watching. I finished season 3 of Lost-such a frustrating show I almost wanted to punch my computer. They need to end it soon, for all of our sakes. We have grants that you can get from the PC locally for about $3,000 so I’m trying to figure out a good project to use at least one of those on in the spring. We are also trying to plan another boy’s camp similar to the one in August, but in Georgia with the Georgian PCVs and their kids. We want to do a yearly rotational camp between the two countries.

That’s about it on my end. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. I will be up early in the morning Sunday to hit refresh every 10 seconds during the Big 12 Championship Game…BOOMER SOONER KIDS….

Pics are left over from Thanksgiving in Baku-me, ben and ram, me and tom kissing pumpkin pie off of bethany, tom and charlie and then me with our makeup still on after the show….

Introducing Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne!!!

2007-11-19T06:30:00.000-08:00

And I mean it was ridiculous!!! Tom and I came up with the idea to dress up as Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne and perform a few songs for our Annual Turkey Day Talent Show performance back in April I think. We did a “VH1 Story Tellers” session where we talked about songs and being idiots, then played the first parts of six songs total. Tom’s really good at guitar and I suck, so he helped me learn how to play two of my three songs. We got some help from my sister and Tiffany Bryant with our costumes and a fellow PCV Karen was in charge of our beautification process. She did a great job. Sadly Tom and I aren’t much to look at. Oddly enough a ton of people told Tom he looked hot as a girl. I only got two compliments between a bunch of disgust, so I guess my aspirations of becoming a drag queen are shot-I’m strangely ok with that. We will try to get a video clip or two up on youtube some time for you guys to watch. Talent is not a word I’d use to describe our performance, but general merriment was had by all I hope. People definitely didn’t hold back laughing at us the entire time. We followed some pretty talented people singing, playing guitar and violin, so we had to mix it up a little. My stomach was a mess leading up to the performance because we CHOWED DOWN on some amazing food and I was pretty damn nervous for some reason. Once again this year our director and the second in command at the embassy provided us with a delicious spread of turkeys and all of the fixings. Each PCV was in charge of bringing a side dish or desert so Tom, Ben, Carlo and I made about 10 pounds of mashed potatoes as our contribution. We stayed with the same amazing American host family as last year, so we spent all day Saturday relaxing in their indoor pool and sauna!!! All of our friends went out for a long night of dancing at the meal and talent show and we were treated to a huge pancake, eggs and bacon breakfast Sunday morning. The entire weekend was simply FREAKING AWESOME!!!! Thanks to everyone who was a part of it.

I’m now back to Lankaran and going into hibernation mode for a couple of months. After all of my travels it is time to shut it down. I don’t plan on going anywhere near Baku for a month or two and will be at site pretty much non-stop except for a probably Christmas get together at someone’s house. I think the Lank Crew will make some good eats this Thursday night and will be movie watching bums all weekend for our version of Thanksgiving AZ. Mom mailed me pumpkin pie ingredients, so we will be chowin on that for sure.

My Russian lessons are back in full swing-I learned how to conjugate verbs today. I’m starting to write some proposals for a few training projects for the spring, so we will see what happens. I’m going to be spending the next couple of weeks figuring out my last 10 months here so hopefully I can figure out some good stuff.

I’m not talking about the OU game…

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! I hope you guys all have a great week and enjoy all of the delicious food. I could use some Turducken leftovers covered in gravy right now…

And it went “wee wee wee, all the way home!!!”

2007-11-15T07:55:00.001-08:00

This blog is dedicated to my friends Carlo and Rob for their pig roast last weekend in Ganja. Top notch gentlemen, top notch. We had a great weekend of playing softball in beautiful fall weather and followed it up with roasting a 45 pound pig on a metal ladder for a feast fit for crazy PCVs! Everyone ate more than their weight limit of pork, potatoes and fixins and there was still meat to spare. It was definitely one of the better weekends I’ve had here so far.
This week has been pretty low key around Lankaran. My office has been pretty empty and everything around town is definitely slowing down for the winter. I am going to house sit for Nene some in December. She’s going on a month long bus tour of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and somewhere else I think. How freaking cool is that?
We are going to have our Turkey Day Feast this weekend thanks to our Director and Embassy folks. Tom, Carlo, Ben and I are responsible for making about 10 pounds of mashed potatoes-we figured that was the safest side dish for 4 idiots to be in charge of. We are staying with the same amazing American host family as last year so we will be living the high life in their pool and sauna all afternoon leading up to and following the party. Tom and I have been in full talent show preparation mode all week. We are going to attempt to top the Bon Jovi performance last year. It’s gunna be hard, but I think if we can pull off what we are trying for, it should be the dumbest thing of all time!
That’s about all I’ve got right now. After this weekend, I’ll be done with my insane travel schedule I’ve had over the past months and will be ready to buckle down for my last 10 months. Tom informed me that we are in the single digits of months left in our service (not that he’s counting), so that was a real wake up call for me to get my butt in gear! Here’s some pics from the roast: the pig, tom getting the first taste, me in my pig roast outfit (sarong) with the potatoes, me, Carlo and Tor, the “pig” lights, Carlo and I doing out best Chris Cross impersonations-JUMP JUMP, the Lank gang, and finally me, Jane and Magda with our weekend “pig tails”…that’s right, my nasty hair is coming back in full force!!!!

Recovery and America Day Barda

2007-11-07T00:24:00.000-08:00

Last week was fully dedicated to operation “Ashley Recovery”. I got all of my stuff moved into my new house and basically crashed every night at 8pm and slept till 9am. My body and mind completely shut down after going to America, having 4 days in baku for training and playing, having friends in town working on projects, the Halloween Party and then moving. My dog Lyka also completely flipped out and went into heat. She ran away from Tom’s house about 25 times over the weekend, was scaring the crap out of the neighbors and was snapping at people she knew. My new landlord would not allow dogs and no way would any local take her, so I had to take Lyka to a village and set her free. She was a dog from the streets of AZ and she decided that’s the life she wanted to go back to. It made me really depressed for a couple of days to let her go, but I’m sure she is much happier with life now. There was just no way anyone could control her any more. That will be my last attempt at a pet in AZ…unless I can find a good donkey to hang out with.

About 12 of us headed to Barda on Saturday for Ina’s Halloween Carnival/America Day for the kids at her school. She did a really good job. A ton of kids dressed up, all the PCVs dressed up, we had a haunted house, bobbing for apples, ghost stories, trivia and mask making. She had a ton of teachers also participating which was nice to see. After that the teachers surprised us with a delicious meal and my favorite fall treat-pumpkin rice-DELICIOUS!

This week has been pretty low key. Tom and I are starting to get geared up for our Thanksgiving Dinner performance so lots of practice will be going on the next 10 days. We are headed to Ganja this weekend to play softball and have a pig roast-if Carlo can pull it off. There isn’t much pork over here, so the idea of an actual pig roast is really exciting!

Attached are pics from our Halloween Party for your enjoymet: Ron Burgandy and Brian Fantana from Anchorman, the Lankaran crew-us, and the Chaquita Banana and Land 'o Lakes Ladies, the Jolly Green Giant, Bethany the Witch with Kat the Kat, our Herbal Escence Girl, school girls and our very own Baltica Girl!!!

Happy Halloween and stuff!!!

2007-11-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

Well, everyone survived “A Very Barani Halloween” in Lankaran. We had about 40 PCVs all make the trek down to lankaran for a party Saturday night. Thanks to all of the parents who sent candy and decorations to make it a little more festive! It was a fun, rainy and tiring weekend of crazy costumes and a little American fun! We had everything from a Transformer to a taco to a beer bottle to the Jolly Green Giant and Snow Pea. We made costumes mandatory to add to the fun. I’ll have a bunch of pictures to post next week. Thankfully Tom’s neighbors were super cool and didn’t give us any problems. One actually brought over a cd of Azeri music for us to play and one wanted to send their 14 year old son over with his keyboard to play for us for a while. We respectfully declined.
In other news my landlords showed up and demanded that I pay them 3 times as much rent as I was paying since they got a new expensive apartment in Baku. Obviously that was going to happen so I had to get yet another house (that’s 3 in 7 months for those of you keeping score at home). This place is a lot more normal, is in the center of town again thankfully and has a huge yard with a ton of fruit trees. Sadly no more washing machine, but hey, I’m in the PC. I never should have had one in the first place.
The weather has turned cool and rainy-true Lankaran fall/winter weather. We don’t really have a distinct fall season here, it kinda just goes from summer to winter.
After my crazy month of America, Baku trainings, friends in town and the party, it is now time to settle down a little bit and get back into PCV/Azeri life. It feels good to slow down again and get re-focused on my life here. I may actually be getting some work soon through my office, so that is potentially exciting. I am going to start my Russian lessons up again, it is dark here by 5:30ish again, so here come the long cold nights of reading in bed, etc. I went to chop wood for my Nene last night and when I came in she was in bed with an IV in her arm and a nurse watching her. From what I could understand it is just a vitamin cocktail of sorts and that she is ok, just needed a little pick me up so to speak. It was fun to chop wood again, although my back is killing me.
I am headed to Barda Saturday to help Ina with an American Day for her school children, so that will be fun. We are all dressing up in Halloween costumes and telling ghost stories!!!
Oh, last thing. There were threats on the American Embassy (supposedly 10 targets in Baku) on Monday. The American and British Embassies as well as PC Office and major foreign oil companies shut down Monday and Tuesday just in case. I guess a soldier stole some grenades, guns and rifles from his base, gave them to some angry people who were planning on using them. You can look up articles on the internet that will explain it better. Everything seems to have been taken care of with no American casualties of any kind, so we are all thankful for that. I never felt scared or concerned, so please don’t be for me-everything is ok. It was definitely a weird feeling, but such I life over here. I’m just it is over.

The pictures are of my new house, the bedroom, living room-2, kitchen, shower, path to my outhouse/my yard, and the best part of all made possible by William Clay Campbell, my garage with hammock!!! The last pictures is of all 33 remaining AZ4s at our mid service training in baku 2 weeks ago. I mean we are idtiots!!!
Have a great week everyone!

America and Back....a PCV's Tale

2007-10-23T03:41:00.000-07:00

So I officially made it to

America

and back to Lankaran all in one piece! I’ll give you all a quick run down of my whirlwind Tour de

USA

and then let you know what’s up next for me over in the AZ.

The flight over wasn’t so bad except when I got to Chicago O’Hare I had all of my toiletries confiscated by security due to newer and more strict flight regulations, then I dropped my ticket/boarding pass walking down the hallway and no one returned so I missed my flight and had to pay $343 to get from Chicago to Houston. Needless to say that wasn’t the “welcome home moment” I was looking for. I was planning on having dinner with my family and two friends. Well when I got home my sister had invited about 25 or so friends over for fajitas from my favorite Mexican place and margaritas. I think my face went completely blank when I walked in the door. I had no clue what to do or say to anyone. After about 30 minutes or so I finally started coming back around and had a great time. Thank you Alison for organizing the party and thanks to all of you for coming out to casa de hunziker. I had a great time watching OU beat UT (OU went 2-0 while I was at home so that was awesome!). I then went to OKC to play golf with Chris and Dagen and talk about their up coming baby boys, Dallas to see a bunch of OU, UT and Dallas friends, meet Jenny’s new twins, and meet Clay’s new boy (I just missed the birth of James Campbell by a few days so welcome to the world my man!), then off to Portland for Andy’s wedding. Congrats Andy and Sharon. It was great to see you both and your families and be a part of your special day. I hope you had a great time in Fiji! While in Portland I ate a maple bar donut with two strips of bacon on it and a captain crunch glazed donut at Voodoo Donuts-FREAKING AMAZING! I ate at all of my favorite places while I was over there, but didn’t gain that much weight. I only slept a total of 6 hours in the first 3 nights of being back and my stomach was not cooperating with me at all. It was great to be back, but the trip was just so crazy that I felt like I got to see a ton of people, but not for near long enough. For those of you I did see, thanks for meeting up and for those of you I couldn’t see, I’ll see you guys next September-ish.

I got back to AZ for our Mid Service Conference. All 33 remaining AZ4’s were in Baku for trainings and medical check ups. I went to the dentist (thankfully a nice “American Dentist” office) and also got to poop in a cup! Talk about a nice welcome back to AZ. I need to stop traveling I guess. Coming back and hanging out with all of my friends was a good way to ease back into AZ life and I wasn’t angry or depressed about coming back at all. I was kinda excited. Some people have had a really hard time coming back to a PC assignment after going home and seeing family and friends which is completely understandable. I have a few friends here that aren’t going back to the US for that very reason, so I’m glad I didn’t have any problems with it. Some of us played softball against the Embassy last Saturday, which was really fun. We scored 3 runs in the 9^th for the win, so we are all pretty happy about having bragging rights.

I’m now back in Lankaran and trying to recover from the long 2.5 week hiatus. I have a mild cold and am tired all of the time. The weather has finally turned cool and rainy this week-highs in low to mid 70’s and about 60 at night. We basically got a few extra weeks of good weather since it is supposed to be like this all of October. Tom and I are having a Halloween Party this weekend so we are going to be preparing for that all week. Costumes are mandatory, so it should be fun times. Then a bunch of us are going to a soccer game in Lankaran with a bunch of kids on Sunday, so it should be a really good weekend. I will now be in AZ until May or June when I plan on going to Russia for a week or so. This means that it is time for me to buckle down and make the most of my last 11 months here and try to be as productive as possible. I should pick Russian lessons back up next week, keep working on my medical supplies project, the bridge project seems to be dying due to lack of community effort sadly but I’ll keep trying with them, and I need to get some other projects a rockin. I hope you all have a great week! I’ll send out Halloween Pics next week!

Pictures are of: Me, Hailey, Brooke, Brett, Ali and Reagan and then me Hailey, Spencer and Ford watching the OU/TX game, me and Ali, Jenny’s daughter Mackenzie, Jenny’s new twins Parker and Preston, my donut order, my family at Andy’s wedding, and me with Andy, Staci and Rusty before the wedding.

We Are The Champions. . . .AGAIN!!!

2007-10-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

In another stellar performance, Tom and I ended up the fantasy baseball season at #1 and #2 respectively. I’d like to make fun of Tom’s friends, but I love that they let us beat them each sporting season! Sadly we have started off our football title defense a bit slow, but I’m sure we will be on top at the end, yet again. . .

I couldn’t be more sad about the ou game. . . .the ou/tx game better be good next weekend, and by good, I mean we better kill them. . . .

If I told yo that the lankaran kids ate anything besides a mini-mikshake and fresh bread dipped in ranch dressing the entire day Sunday, I’d be lying. . . .

In the last week my lap top’s ‘o’, ‘u’, ‘l’, nine and ‘.’ keys have all died-typing like that sucks. . . .

I wanted to send a quick shout out to jane’s mom and Shannon-I hear they are blog watchers trying to find pictures of jane, so I’m sure they read this one also-wecome. . . .

I won’t be writing while I’m in America-I’ll be eating. I thought I’d give you all a quick peak at my “to eat” list for my trip home:

lupe tortilla fajitas

Whataburger a1 burger hopefully

wendy's baconator

chick-fil-a chicken minis

sonic cherry limeade slushy and tots

bloody mary

crab

shrimp dip

fudruckers

chuys creamy jalapeno sauce

johnny's theta burger-okc

Budweiser heavy

monte queso and swirl-okc

maple bar bacon donuts Portland

taco bell everything

hash brown casserole

and that’s just in the first weekend!

I fly out this Friday, and will be hitting houston later that night ready to eat a ton and see everyone!! Have a great week!

Bloggin Just To Blog

2007-09-25T03:19:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot to report this week, but figured I would still give you guys a quick update. The pictures are of the new Lank Gang-Jane-pink shirt and Joyce-white shirt hanging out at Tom’s pace and in the back of a mini bus going to Baku. The other one is me Ina and Vy in Baku Friday night.

Life in Lankaran is good. The weather is starting to cool off. Our favorite little café opened back up again since school just started-we get mashed potatoes inside a folded over tortilla (like a quesadilla), fried then you put on some spice and a bunch of yogurt-DELICIOUS and it only costs 50 cents to get you full. All of the schools started up last week so there are tons of kids out and about everywhere. My boss has me and another guy working on a series of trainings throughout our region. We are writing the project plan now, but my confidence level that this will actually get funded and happen is pretty low. Hopefully we can pull it off somehow. My boss should start his month long vacation soon which oddly enough will be the exact time I’m coming to the US-nice timing! We went to Baku last weekend to meet/hang out with our friends and all of the new PCVs. We had a blast! The new group is really fun. It was weird playing the Baku tourguide instead of always having someone else show us where we are going. I took my camera to take a bunch of pictures and left it in Tom’s backpack all weekend so nothing good to share sadly. I’m getting more and more excited to watch the OU/TX game with each passing week OU keeps killing people. Man I hope they can keep that up while I’m home. This is the last week of fantasy baseball-Tom’s in 1^st and I’m in 3^rd. We are hoping to be the top 2 to continue our dominance from AZ! People are starting to get things lined up for Halloween and Thanksgiving parties over here, so those will both be something fun to look forward to in the coming months. We are going to try to take a big group of boys and girls to see the local professional soccer team play at the end of October. Girls never go so we are going to have some of our female PCV friends come down to go with us to make the local, younger girls feel less self conscious about going-they are all very excited. My bridge project keeps dragging along. I’m hoping to have a meeting about it before I leave next week. That’s about all I’ve got. My Russian lessons have been slowed up due to me being gone and school starting, so I need to get those back on track ASAP. Have a great week everyone! I’ll see some of you guys in about 10 days or so...

One Year Down, One Year To Go….as it were

2007-09-17T02:00:00.001-07:00

So I thought that I would dedicate this week’s blog to my general thoughts/feelings/observations on everything I’ve experienced over the past year. The pictures are just some of my favorites from over here. These thoughts are pretty random and just off the top of my head so I hope you enjoy!

What I liked:

The people, the food, getting to hang out with all of my fellow volunteers every day during training, chopping wood and lighting a fire in my room every day after work, my first host family’s café, Nene’s insanity, AZ4’s giggle fit affliction, dancing all night in Baku, nachos and beers on the patio at Tequila Junction, pumpkin rice, cooking for myself, all of the kids saying “hello” and “what’s your name”, ABLE Camp, our conversation club with the kids, and our America Days, reading a lot of books during the cold winter nights, walking everywhere I go, everyone trading all of our cheap dvds we all buy, Turkish music videos, both of my sites have been fantastic, writing this blog each week, making big Mexican feasts with my friends, our Program Managers really do try to help us in any way they can, my trips to Georgia, Egypt and Budapest, when my family (and other PCV’s families and friends) visited, when packages from America arrived, Novruz Holiday, all of the people that I at least say hi to every day when I see them in town, shopping for foods at the bazaar, walking down a road next to a cow, or chicken, or duck, or goose, random funny texts from my friends, Dalga Days 1 and 2, going to weddings, that our group gets along so well, my new acceptance of most fruits, the challenge of adapting to a new culture and way of life, and realizing that a lot of what we think about/worry about in our lives in America really isn’t so important in other parts of the world.

What I didn’t like:

The long bus rides from Lankaran to anywhere in the country, egg plant, Nene’s serving of cold fish for breakfast, roosters outside of my window, TAXI DRIVERS, non stop tea drinking-I just don’t like the taste, when Volunteers had their service cut short (for personal or PC reasons), filling out our extremely long quarterly reports, finding houses to rent, eating the same few things all of the time, people always walking around with their cell phones blasting music, all of the local permission you need to get in order to so a very basic project, stepping into a ditch of sludge, eating heart and lung, not hanging out with friends and family back home, when the electricity goes off when all you want to do is watch a movie on your laptop, not being able to watch OU football, how hard it is to travel and see the different regions in AZ due to our strict travel policies, talking to several friends that are going through a rough time and complaining about it a bunch can really wear you down too, trying to buy a ticket at the train station or getting a package from the post office (those basically both mean the lack of lines or order in those types of situations), when it rains for weeks at a time and your pants every day are covered in mud up to your knees, hand washing clothes, rubbing my arm and a ton of dead skin rubbing off, sitting in my hot office with nothing to do, kids puking on bus rides, Lankaran’s mosquitoes, and when I mess up my Azeri really bad or just can’t understand what a person is trying to tell me.

General Thoughts:

My first year here went pretty well I think. I’ve actually been here about 14.5 months, but I don’t count the first 2.5 months of training. After I finally realized my job wasn’t ever going to give me any work and started working on my own projects, my Volunteer life started to really pick up. I am very hopeful that the next year will be full of projects (small or large) that I feel will really help the people here/make some sort of positive impact. It is frustrating when you find a project you know would be great for you community but the motivation for the locals to do it just isn’t there. As a PCV in AZ you won’t really have any “big impact” through big projects, it is a lot more of a day to day, smaller impact type of experience. It’s amazing how good a random piece of food from America that I barely used to eat can make me feel when I’m having a bad day. After one year I am DEFINITELY glad I joined the PC and am proud of what we are doing over here and all over the world. I really think it is a great organization/concept and think it will definitely have a very positive affect on the rest of my life.

What I’m looking forward to in the next year:

AZ5 officially swore in last week as Volunteers and I had the chance to meet a lot of them during their training. Myself and the rest of AZ4 are definitely excited to hang out with them for the next year. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving weekends, our mid service and close of service conferences (so we can all hang out in baku together) coming up. Getting my bridge and medical supplies projects actually going, using what I’ve learned in my first year to make my second year much more productive, getting better at Russian, come January I will start thinking about what I’ll do with my life after PC is over (I think I’d go insane if I started to worry about that now), ABLE Camp next year, Novruz Holiday, and all of the little things that will fill in my last 365 days with happiness and interesting experiences.

ABLE Camp

2007-09-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

Well, the 2^nd Annual ABLE (Azeri Boys Leadership Experience) Camp was a success. We had 9 PCVs, 36 campers, 5 junior counselors, 5 Azeri counterparts from six different towns/villages all go up to a “resort” type place in the mountains near Qebele in northern

Azer

baijan. We were just a few miles from the listening station that GWB wanted to use with Russia for a missile defense base-I could see if from my room’s window. We had daily sessions on leadership, teamwork, community project design and management, and responsibility to name a few. We played American football, baseball, went on hikes, had bonfires (with Smoores), had team work challenge courses, Tom taught them to sing the same Bon Jovi song we sang at Thanksgiving last year, tie died t-shirts and had a disco. We had guest speakers come give presentations on American school exchange programs as well as someone from the US Embassy spoke about leadership and the camping experience. I took Lyka with us since I had no one to take care of her for a week and I also thought she would be fun out in the woods. Turns out I was WRONG! Azeris in general are scared crapless of dogs, so the kids would freak out when she would run around and jump on them (not one of her better characteristics Terah let her keep throughout her early days that I haven’t fixed yet). I had to tie her up to a tree way up in the forest all day and night so you couldn’t hear her constant barking 24/7. I’d go take her on walks and feed her a few times a day, but other than that she had to sit out there solo and bark her brains out for no reason. That was the last trip I think I’ll be taking Lyka on until I can get her in some way calm around people. She is really going to be a test to my patience for the next year. Speaking of next year, later this week will be our one year anniversary at site and the mid way point of our service. The kids had a blast and so did all of us old guys! It was by far one of my best experiences so far in the PC, and I can’t wait to do the camp again next summer before I leave AZ.

I went straight from camp to Baku to hang out for a day and then off to my first host family’s house for two nights. We had a big dinner on Monday night with about 15 trainees and my self at my old café with my favorite fried chicken and French fries meal. It was really fun to go back and see the old host family. They have an AZ5 staying with them now, Tom, so I crashed with him both nights. Our host mom kept getting our names wrong and would hit her head every time-it was pretty funny. I gave a presentation on Monday to all of the new volunteers about the grant committee I’m on. It was fun to finally meet the entire new group and get to actually hang out with them. They all basically new me already because every one of them I talked to had read my blog every week before coming to AZ. I can’t believe they knew there was someone like me here and still decided to come. They swear in as volunteers tomorrow so we are excited to have about 50 PCVs around to hang out with. Jane and Joyce will move to Lankaran on Thursday-just in time for Jane to go to the first day of school Saturday.

I’m going to leave you all with a bunch of pictures from camp today and a short blog. I’ll have a pretty long one next week talking about our 1 year anniversary.

The pictures are of: tom with a bear in a cage at a road side tea house on the way, the mountains where the camp was, me and Rasheed presenting, the big gang on a hike, the lankaran guys and Charlie on the hike, me, Jason and some kids, the rug game, the lava walk, the spider walk, me with Charlie and a jr. counselor, my fellow AZ4s and our tie died shirts, Tom with the Bon Jovi singing group, kids tie dying, kids making the hemp necklaces I taught them to make, mike with some egg drop contestants, the disco, the entire group at a learning session, me presenting to them about community work, me, Carlo and Tom at football, the kids with the Deputy Ambassador, the bon fire, me and Tom in the paddle boat, and finally us doing some hard night work in our room.

Here’s Lyka!

2007-08-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

Last week was a fairly low key week. The only real excitement was when our two new site mates, Jane and Joyce, came down to Lankaran for their first visit. We prepared a huge Mexican feast with chicken quesadillas, queso and margaritas! We all ate way too much, but enjoyed every freaking bite. Jane will be teaching English at School #10 and Joyce is a Youth Development Volunteer. It will certainly be fun to have a couple of new Americans to hang out with. Tom, Tim and I all gave presentations on volunteerism, time management and how to give a good presentation to about 20 high school and college kids Friday morning, so that was fun. This week I will be in full preparation mode for our boys leadership camp. It starts on September 3^rd, so everything needs to get all taken care of this week. We will have about 36 high school guys, plus some return guys from last year as councilors, azeri counterparts and several guest speakers all joining us for the week. I’m getting excited-it should be a really fun time.

Since I don’t have too much to talk about I figured I would just give you some pictures of Lyka. We are getting along a lot better now, so she is becoming less of a pain in my butt. She stays outside pretty much all day, when we walk she always go straight for the shaded areas to walk in, she LOVES bread, and has waaaay too much energy….

Oh yea, there is also a new picture from Budapest that Rikki George sent me-it sums up out time there pretty well I think. The two really blond people are our irish friends we hung out with a ton.

Budapest and Back Again...

2007-08-21T05:42:00.001-07:00

So Ram, Rikki George, Carlo, Jenny, Brendan and Ressa all met up in Budapest for the 15^th Sziget Music Festival on Obudai Island in the middle of the Danube River. We camped out on the island every night and had an amazing time! A little info about the festival before I give you the complete week’s run down. There were over 250 foreign artists from 44 countries, 200 programs per day and 400-500,000 visitors. Here’s a break dow of each days events as well as my take on the concerts I saw:

Tuesday: We got in and had to take a bus, metro and two different trams to get to the island, and then had to wait in line for about 1.5 hours to get our wrist bands and get onto the festival grounds. Brendan and Ressa got their in the morning and set up our camp site in the trees about 20 meters from the river. They put up 2 of our tents and a huge tarp covering most of our area. They did a great job and we were lucky they got there early, because when I got there, the place was packed! We had Germans, Brits, Irish, Aussies, French, and who knows what other nationalities camping around us. We went and saw Locomotiv GT that night-an older and very popular Hungarian rock band-think Rolling Stones of Hungary I guess. They were a ton of fun to watch and the crowd loved them. We toured the grounds and then hung out on the beach with a ton of hippie bongo players and fire dancers (the people that have the two chains with fire balls on the end and swing them all over the place). It was a really cool start to a long week of weird experiences and fun!

Wednesday: Carlo and I started off the day with a Danube swim and then the group checked out new parts of the island. We found the showering facilities, best spots for food and all of the main stages we wanted to visit. We hung out on the lawn by the World Music Stage in the early evening and saw some really cool performances before we saw Manu Chao that night. He was awesome! Very high energy, fun punk/dance music-the audience LOVED him. Only bad part was when he announced that “ the biggest terrorist in the world is George Bush”. Anti-American sentiment will be a semi-constant theme throughout this blog sadly.

Thursday: The day was pretty tame after a late night of walking around the island and meeting people after the music was over and knowing this night would be a big one. We slept in, ate a bunch, took my one and only on site shower-the lines were insanely long and the water was insanely cold (way worse than the Danube), but the actual crate shower facilities were really nice. We saw The Good, the Bad and the Queen and the Chemical Brothers that night. The GBQ (British pop music) was ok, but not as good as everyone was building them up to be. We got about ¾ the way into the crowd for The Chemical Brothers (electronic dance music). They were unbelievable. They played some of their old classics as well as some of the better songs off of their new cd and their light show was the coolest show of that kind I have ever seen. The crowd was totally into it and people were dancing like crazy. The only bad part was when they had this “scary clown” guy on the light show singing part of a song-think the clown doll from Stephen King’s It scary. I met up with two really hot Hungarian chicks at the show and went out dancing with them well into the night (the festival had three late night dance tents as well as a late night kareoke, cheesy 80’s music, and heavy metal tents every night). I thought the night was going great until they just started making out and said they were going back to their camp site-OUCH! Ha ha ha! Oh well, it was a great time.

Friday: Well today started off really weird. Around 7 am some drunk British dude stumbles into our camp, pulls out a lighter and starts babbling about how he’s going to light our American flag on fire. Needless to say there were enough of us telling him to chill out and leave that he finally took off. Carlo, Rikki George and I all went in the human bubble car wash for our shower today. It was a blast. About 10 people all get in at once and just have a big bubble fight while getting clean at the same time. We had some goofy guy who kept going up to the girls asking if he could wash them and they wash him in really broken English. It was hilarious because he was just goofing around, but was actually serious I think. After that it started raining off an on for the rest of the day. We saw Gogol Bordello (a crazy American band) that afternoon and they were hilarious. They sing a song called “Start Wearing Purple” that is pretty funny and their lead singer has a wicked moustache, wears a head band with tight leather pants and just goes crazy the entire show. Good times had by all. As much fun as they were, they were just a warm up for PINK! (this is where you can make fun of me all you want) Jenny and I got up to center stage about 8^th row and had a blast. She’s is FREAKING HOT! No question. She put on a great, high energy show and as cheesy as it sounds, had a blast. Of course being the idiot she is, she sang her song bashing GW, so that wasn’t fun to hear from another American with all of the other people there already thinking it.

Saturday: We all woke up to a soaked island. It rained all night and the place was a muddy mess. Half of the beach was gone because the river went up and the walk ways and area in front of the main stage were just mud puddles. We went to the Luminarium to start the wet day off. It is this huge inflatable structure with colorful tunnels and places to lie down with ambient music playing so you can just chill out and relax. We sat in there and just hung out for a solid 30 minutes and loved every second of it. When we got back to our camp site there was a big commotion on the beach so we went to check it out. The police had a small section taped off and we could see a rusted piece of metal in the center. Well it turns out some one was snorkeling or something in the river and they found an old WWII land mine, so they had to have the Hungarian military come in and dispose of it-so that was fun. After that Carlo and I went for a walk and ended up with a group of people taking some African dancing lesson for about 30 minutes, which was completely goofy but totally fun. We watched The Rakes (UK rock band) that were only ok, The Hives (Swedish rock band) which have the most pompous lead singer I’ve ever heard (he referred to himself and the band in the 3^rd person the entire time and was simply hilarious-an example is “Two years ago some baby Hives wrote a song about some big Hives, and now the big Hives will play that song for you and rock your asses off! Yell for the Hives to rock your asses off and they will!!!!”), and we finished the night of with Nine Inch Nails. They aren’t exactly my favorite band, but they put on a decent show, played their most popular stuff, but played a lot of slow stuff, so it never got as crazy/out of control as I thought it was going to get. Ram and I were bored and wide awake at our camp site around 3am and decided to go on for a walk in the rain. Well we found tons of people still up, dancing and partying in the rain, so we joined them for some fun and soaked rain dancing for about and hour and had a great freaking time.

Sunday: Today we went into Budapest for the afternoon. I’d like to say it was to see the city, but is was more for a combo KFC and Pizza Hut lunch bonanza! Man that was delicious. We went to the Terror Museum (talks about all of the times Hungary has been taken over and has some graphic videos and an old torture dungeon in the basement), which was done really well, but really depressing. After that we sat out in a nice and calm park for a while before heading back to the festival. I made the comment how nice it was to walk in a city for over 30 minutes without hearing one car horn-simply blissful. I headed back to see Sinead O’Connor (only a few came with me) because I figured why not. I really like her voice and thankfully she played “Nothing Compares To You”, so I guess my life is now complete ;). After Sinead was a band called Faithless (UK techno dance) that was really, really good. Not quite as good as Chemical Brothers, but close. I really liked them. The lead singer from the Cure was supposed to sing with them but didn’t show I guess.

Monday: Our last day was filled with packing, ladder golf, getting in our last drops of good food, crafts and some decent music. It started off really weird because the British guy who wanted to burn our flag earlier in the week came by and apologized. I guess he had a British flag in the crowd, some guy punched him, and he realized he had been a jerk to us, so he came back and we talked for quite a while. It made us feel pretty good I must say (and bad for hating that guy so much before). Thanks Thomas, you’re an all right guy! A few of us got free massages, we made some cool pictures, a few made clay pots and wicker baskets, etc. We were late so we onl saw two songs of “!!!” (crazy American band). They were great, but I’m sad I missed their entire set. We finished our festival music with Tool (American rock band) and they weren’t very good at all. Their light show was just their old videos and the lead singer just sang with his back to the crowd most of the time, so we didn’t go out with the best performance, but that’s ok. We walked around well into the morning saying goodbye to our new friends, seeing everything for the last time, watching a ton of fire dancers (Rikki George got hit with a fire ball because she wasn’t paying attention-she’s completely fine, it barely touched her).

Tuesday: I got up at 7am to catch my flight and a new guy walks by and starts going off on our flag one last time. Thankfully all of our neighbors told him to shut up because we were cool and he took off. As I was walking out there were tons of people still up, buying beers and dancing on top of trash dumpsters-it was insane and a great last memory of the festival. My flight home was miserable with a long layover. I got back to Baku at 3am and had to give a training for other Volunteers about project design for three straight days. Somehow I still had just enough energy to make it through ok.

Some random things:

I ate about 2-3 “New York” or “American” hot dogs a day with combos of mayo, ketchup, jalapenos, relish, crunchy onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and BBQ sauce…

I also ate delicious gyros, mini-donuts, goulash, pizza (one with pickles and canadian bacon-oddly enough really good), these cinnamon roll type things, a burger, langos (bread disc with garlic butter, sour creme and grated cheese on top!, lots of sausage, and plenty of local beers…

They had “pissoirs” next to the portolets all over the place. Basically a stand up toilet for 3 men to use which cut down on lines and messes a ton-picture included…

There were sooooo may people with insane dredlocks, I was loving it. I met one guy with 7 years worth down to his butt…

I love hippie chicks-it is official and wonderful…

There were cigarette stands all over (they have like 7 kinds of the same brand of cigs over there like “Extra Flavor”) and at all hours of the day every stand had two INSANELY HOT CHICKS working it. I’ve never wanted to be a smoker, but I mean that’s just not fair ;)

We saw several men and women (sadly way more men than women) playing in the mud naked…

We saw a really cool French street theater group perform…

You could buy Jack and Cokes in bucket form from the Jack Daniels tent. If you bought some Jack Daniels you got a Jack Dollar you could gamble with. Well I showed up the first night we went there in my cowboy hat wtih a Jack Daniels belt buckle on and played poker. They announced to the entire crowd a Texan was playing poker-it was HILARIOUS! I also won enough for all of us to get t-shirts and stuff!!!

They had a ropes course/zip line, roller dance, bungey jump, and sling shot you could do…

We hung out with people from Hungary, Britian, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Brussels, and France (and i’m sure many more places)…

This festival was run as well as it could have been. The day after rain they had trucks out dumping sand and sucking up water, every morning the portolets were cleaned with new toilet paper put in, the grounds were cleaned each morning, the staff was really cool and helpful, there were so many cool and free things to do that you never felt like you cold get it all in, they had a ton of great music that we got to see and a ton we missed, and the people were great overall. I couldn’t have been more happy with my experience!!!

Quick local notes:

Lyka and I are back living together and slowly getting used to each other. Hopefully I can get her trained good enough so I don’t want to kill her every day pretty soon. She’s getting better…slowly…

Our two new site mates Jane (English teacher) and Joyce (Youth Development) are coming to visit us this week before they officially move down next month so we are very excited to have some new Americans around. We will be of course making a huge Mexican Feast this week in their honor (and because any time one person shows up we use it as an excuse to make queso).

We are getting all geared up for our boys leadership camp the first week of September.

It is hot and humid here, but nothing like Texas from what I hear.

I just bought my tickets back to America tonight, so you all better get ready!

The Dog Days of Summer

2007-07-30T21:18:00.000-07:00

Well it is officially freaking hot here. I sweat 100% of the time, and usually it is more than just a little. I walked to work Friday morning at 8:30 and my entire shirt was soaked-not much fun.

Last week was pretty tame. I had a meeting in Baku for my small grants committee on Tuesday and there were a few other friends in town for other reasons, so we had a good couple of days. One tragic discovery was that our favorite pizza place has started using a lesser quality cheese-very disappointing. I came back to Lankaran for a few days of work-I’m trying to help my office build a website for our region with a lot of information and pictures about the 6 cities in the region they are responsible for. I also got to meet the new second in command at the head Ministry of Economics.

A group of us went to Mingechivir this weekend for a last get together with some of our AZ3 friends out in the regions. AZ3 Tom has an ex-pat buddy in Mingechivir that bought us a ton of hotdogs, chicken drums, pork, hamburger meet, etc. We ate like kings all day-it was fantastic! His house is on the river that goes through town from a large fresh water quarry. Needless to say we all jumped in several times even though it was bone chilling cold.

I got Lyka from Terah this weekend also. I now have my first solo dog ever. She rode on the bus very well the entire ride back and no Azeris gave me crap about brining her. Most people here are either scared of dogs or just don’t like them. Very few local families have a dog as a pet. They are usually just stray dogs everywhere that people treat horribly, so when they see an American with a dog on a leash and a bag of dog food they paid for, people tend to be quite confused. She’s almost a year old we think and tons of fun, although she is kinda freaking out about being at my house with me. She just sat in the room and growled at me for a couple of minutes, so hopefully she will calm down soon and adjust to her new home. If not I may have to ship her to America and let Terah have her back!

In some very exciting news, my sister Alison has put up the video of me and Tom’s Thanksgiving talent show performance from last year. It is certainly good for one or two dumb laughs, so I hope you enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E4TKAzXwcQ

This week I’m going to just work on getting Lyka settled in, work on that website and another presentation I’m giving in August, and then we are all heading into Baku on Friday for the last weekend AZ3 will be in Azerbaijan. Most of them fly out this coming Sunday or Monday, so we will go play one last time with them. Then on next Tuesday a group of nine of us is flying to Budapest to go to a week long music festival. There will be approximately half a million people there, several hundred bands from all over the world, tons of crazy things, tons of good food, fashion shows, and movie screenings all on islands in the middle of the Danube River. We are camping out on the grounds all week, so I’m getting really excited! It should be a really fun and laid back vacation and a chance to let my inner PC hippie self really shine. I’m sure I’ll have tons of pictures and stories for everyone when I get back from my trip…

Lazy Summer Days

2007-07-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot to report from last week so this will be a short blog of just recent random thoughts.

The weather is back up to high heat and a constant glaze of sweat is upon us 24/7.
I put up netting on all of my windows to keep the mosquitoes out and so that I can have a breeze through my house. Well didn't work so well so I'm covered in bites and now officially sleep in a mosquitoe net at night.
I am back in summer nap mode where I sleep for 1-2 hours each late afternoon to avoid the heat. I feel like a lazy bum, but my body is just always worn out.
I have been asked to help write a grant for a small village to get a new bridge to their crop fields put in so I'm really excited about that opportunity but feel a little pressure to do a good job because they really need the bridge.
My hair is getting back to crazy go everywhere length. I can't wait to see what it will look like 1 year from now.
OU got its 2005 football season erased because of players taking bribes-top notch stuff baby!
I found out the hard way that if i don't draw water from my well every other day at least a little, my pump system gets messed up and I can't draw water until the neighbor comes and fixes it-not fun.
This will be a big weekend-a friend is having a big crawfish party, I'm getting his kabob grill after the party because he's heading home for good and I'm getting my puppy Lyka this weekend as well. Needless to say my life will change quite a bit with a 6 month old puppy around.
The AZ3 gang only has 10 days left in AZ, so it is weird to hear them all talking about going back to the main land and having a normal life again. We are all meeting up in Baku their last weekend in country, so that should be nothing short of a nice time on the town.
Our favorite pizza shop in Baku started using crappy cheese, so there's one less good meal in town.
I'm heading to a week long music festival in Budapest in two weeks, so I'm starting to get super pumped for that.
I counted the other day and as of right now while I'm gone I know I will miss a minimum of 8 good freinds' weddings and 5 births and I'm only half way done. You guys need to quit growing up and becoming adults. Speaking of....
I'm heading back to the US in October for a week to be in Andy Macklin's wedding, so everyone get ready to play!

Shake, Rattle and Roll

2007-07-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

So last Monday I was at my office. All of a sudden around 11:30ish it sounded like a bunch of grenades were going off on the first floor of my building. We realized that it wasn’t bombs, just a FREAKING EARTHQUAKE! I tried to decide if I should haul ass down the stairs and out the building or just stay in the doorway. My coworker came in freaking out, so we just got in the doorway and tried to calm her down. After the bomb noises my 4 story old soviet cinder block office building felt like a wave pool for 20-30 seconds. It turns out northern

Iran

/southern AZ has a big fault line coming through them. It was officially a 5.1 on the Richter Scale.

In other crazy happenings, my plumb tree’s fruits ripened and I ate my first plumb. It turns out if they are sour, I really like them. I have eaten a big bowl of plumbs every day this week. My body doesn’t know what to do with all of these damn fruits I keep putting in it!

Last week was pretty low key. It was 95 degrees every day last week, so summer is officially here. We played wiffle ball at our conversation club-the kids loved it. We now have an easy cop out for days when we are too lazy to plan activities for them.

The AZ5 group got to AZ about three weeks ago and we had three guys come down to Lankaran to visit us this weekend. It is just a chance for them to get out of the villages they are living in for training and to get to see how PCVs live in the regions. We’ve taken them all over town and made some really good meals. Having guests come down is always a good excuse to make a big Mexican meal with chicken quesadillas and salsa!

This week should be fairly status quo. The AZ5 guys are leaving in the morning, we have a wedding Tuesday night and that is it for the week. I am going to give a presentation to a bunch of kids about leadership in a couple of weeks, so I have to start working on that. I am also going to help a local village write a grant request to put a new bridge into their town, so I’ll be working on that a bunch. I’m getting excited-I’ll get my dog (Lyka) in less than two weeks!!!

My New Pad

2007-07-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

This blog has been a long time coming. I have been traveling and super busy, so the pictures of the new house have had to wait. I looked for almost six weeks and only came up with two options. One was not a good place and the land lord wanted to keep his clothes in one room and come back any and every time he wanted to change clothes. Needless to say, after my last land lord experience, I was not interested in that at all. A PC person came down to check out both options and thankfully approved the better one. It is about 30 minutes from work (a big difference from the 5 minutes my old house was), but has buses that go by all the time. It is right next to the big bus station when you get to town.

Before you see the pictures, I want to say that this house is way nicer than I was looking for, it was simply the only real option I could find. I have 2 bed rooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, big yard, garage and outside area. I have a realish shower, still have a squatter, a nice refrigerator and also a clothes washing machine. I was fine with hand washing my clothes, but having a machine is insanely nice. My mom did 5 loads while she was visiting, so she was happy I got it. The land lady moved to Russia to be with her husband for the summer and will come back to Lenkeran in September. She will then decide if she wants me to stay or if she wants her old house back. I really hope she lets me keep it. I don’t want to have to move/look for a house again. It is not fun in any way at all. Enjoy all of the pics of bathroom/water tower/outside cooking area, front door, me playing ladder golf in the drive way, yard/garden with plumbs, pears, and peaches, my room, spare room, and two of the kitchen.

Last night Tom and I went to Farana’s (my Azeri tutor) Aunt’s wedding in Lenkeran. We had a blast. You have to sit through 3 hours of blaring Azeri music, toasts and tons of food before you finally get to go out and dance with everyone, but it is worth the wait. Farana’s family is pretty laid back/fun loving, so women and men all danced together for quite a bit of it. The pictures are of me, Tom, Farana, her brother, my counter part Nenebaju, and a cousin, one of the 4 TV’s showing the wedding videos the 2 camera man were filming real time, our table of food, the wedding cake pushed in on a cart (it was basically 6 or 8 little cakes), and me, Tom and Farana with the bridge and groom-notice no smiles except for the dumb Americans!

Oh, I wanted to show you the list of the DVD purchasing day Tom and I had in Baku on the 4^th of July: the new Die Hard, new Fantastic 4, Smoking Aces, Miami Vice, Tenacious D, Predator, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Knocked Up, and TRANSFORMERS!!!! Transformers is freaking awesome-even though our bootleg dvd copy sucks. It was the greatest dvd purchasing day of all time I think!!!

I’m a travelin man…

2007-07-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

So my sister Alison came back to Lenkeran with Tom and me for a few days to check out where I live. We did the same tour I took Mom and Dad on. During the summer nights here the main park fills up with all of the locals who come out because the weather is much cooler at night, and also to see our new, super cool musical fountains! We took Alison down there to check it out after we ate some Lanvangi and played a ton of Yahtzee. She only stayed for 2 days, so it was a short time, but she had to press on to Vienna…probably a smart choice ;)

I recovered from traveling and tour guiding all that weekend and then took off for Mingechevir for a couple of days to talk with AZ3 Tom about some projects he has done. Ming was the first city that I visited during my training, so it was good to finally go back. Besides work, I got to practice with the Ming softball team, eat some good kabob and take some money off of the local PCVs playing poker.

After that I headed to Ganja for the rest of the week. Myself and a couple of other PCVs had meetings about getting medical equipment and supplies donate to AZ. This is hopefully going to be a big scale project for me to work on the rest of my time here. Hopefully we can find enough donors and get a good enough system down for delivery, training and implementation that we can really help out the under funded hospitals out in the regions. I also got to practice with the Ganja softball team and help Ben move into his new apartment some.

On Saturday and Sunday we had our last softball tournament of the summer. It is just too freaking hot to travel and play sports during the day. There is never any chance to cool off since most places don’t have A/C. I’m horrible at softball for some reason, but finally started hitting the ball decently on Sunday. I finally hit a home run after screwing up on a couple of fielding plays, so I got to gloat a little bit.

We headed to Baku Tuesday for a 4^th of July although we had it on the 3^rd) Party at the American Embassy. For 2 hours they had burgers, hot dogs, chips, and Miller Genuine Draft bottles! I had to control myself to make sure I didn’t eat myself sick. It was a great party and fun to hang around a large group of Americans on “American soil” for a while.

Now, after all of my travels and visitors, I am back in Lenkeran and glad. It will feel good to go shopping for food, hanging out with local friends and living the slow life again. My boss wants me to make an internet site for Lenkeran and the other five regions our office serves, so I’ll be working on that as well as busting my buns on my big projects.

Oh yea, one last thing. A big WELCOME TO AZERBAIJAN to AZ5! The new trainees got here last Wednesday and all moved to their training host families last weekend. My old host family got another volunteer. I told him that he will get the best food out of anyone since he has the café to eat at every day. Sadly the PC is not letting many of us go meet the trainees until they are sworn in as PCVs. Our group got to interact a lot with the other Volunteers and that was one of the best parts of training. Tom, Tim and I will each get a few trainees down to Lenkeran for a three day site visit in a couple of weeks, so that should be fun.

Happy Belated 4^th of July Everyone!!!!

Egyptian Travels

2007-06-21T07:34:00.001-07:00

A few quick disclaimers: we saw so many things and tried so soak in as much as humanly possible on this trip. If I mess up some stats, names or anything like that, please forgive me-it certainly won’t be on purpose but I’m sure it will happen several times. I am going to try to put in pictures in the paragraphs that correspond to what I’m talking about but the won't fit. They will at least be in chronological order. I only have about 1/3 of the pictures taken so far, so I’m missing a ton. I’ll put up a bunch more in a few weeks once we get all of the pictures from America sent to us. Oh yea, and this blog with will be long since we were there for 10 days…enjoy at your own pace…

The Egyptian travels have been completed officially! Rachel and I flew out of AZ the same day that Candice and Joy were going home for good, so we had a good last night in AZ with them. We had a long lay over in Istanbul, so Rachel and I took the tram in and got to walk through town a little bit. Sadly we both packed out cameras in our checked luggage so we don’t have any pictures-we are idiots! We saw some amazing mosques-the Blue Mosque is unbelievable. If you are bored, just pull up some pictures of it on the internet. We took off to Cario and got into town around 2am and crashed in our uber comfortable hotel beds-thank you Ron! The first day in town we hit the big bazaar for some shopping and heckling by the locals. I got offered 2,000,000 camels for Rachel, one guy said he would kill his wife if he could have her, and I got several comments on me having 3 wives. This was all weird since I was with Rachel (a friend), my mom and sister. The shop owners all know a little English and say some crazy stuff which makes it fun. We hit a FREAKIN CHILI’S and I ate myself sick. I couldn’t move for about 5 hours-it was both miserable and horrible.

Tom, his friend Jackie, and his parents got to the hotel about 3am from Chicago wide awake and bearing a bottle of Patron Tequila. Well we had to start the vacation off right, so we took a few shots, had a few bites of Chicago deep dish pizza and hit the hotel casino for a while. We then woke up bright and early to hit the Egyptian Museum. It is basically a huge building with tons and tons of ancient Egyptian artifacts in it. It isn’t very nice or organized, and is just overwhelming. You could spend all day there. We were hot and hungry so we went to Johnny Carino’s and got one of every appetizer and milkshakes for a late lunch. We then with and saw the famous Dina belly dance with an Egyptian band at the Intercontinental Hotel. We had dinner there before the show and it was basically the same as a fancy Azeri dinner with the additions of cocktail shrimp, pita bread and tons of humus. I would like to make a side note here that I am against the chickpea in every aspect FYI. I just don’t get the attraction to it what so ever. Dinner started at 10:30 and Dina came on around 12:30 after a horrible lip syncing bad performed. We had stage side seats (me up front obviously) and the place was pretty empty. Dina put on a really good dance show for about an hour with 4 costume changes, so tribal dancers, some local flute type instrument player, a good singer/MC, and a really good band (this one drum guy made the most intense faces at Dina the entire time which was hilarious). The highlight of the show was sadly not when I got up and danced with her-it was never offered. To pay me back for that she danced up right in front of me and put her hands on the outsides of her breasts and shook them right at me. Picture a huge smiling Ashley at this moment.

The next morning we got up and toured the Giza Pyramids. These things were massive. We went inside one of them. It actually wasn’t that special besides the difficult climb up and down, and the fact that you were inside a pyramid with over 2,000,000 bricks over your head. We had a hilarious tour guide that spoke kinda like Yoda and who’s tag lines were “are you happy”, “welcome back”, and “look, look”. He made the hot and odd trip well worth it. We walked around the outsides of the other pyramids (3 big ones and 9 smaller ones for the Pharaohs’ kids as well as small graveyards for the workers who built them). We went over and checked out the Sphinx after that which was really cool. It is a weird feeling being around things of that size, age and historical significance. After those were finished we showered up at the hotel, rented a van to haul all 9 of us and our luggage to Mt. Saini (about 7 hour ride to the southern part of the peninsula). Of course on the way out of Cairo we had to stop and grab a “Party Bucket” from KFC for the road trip. That Colonel sure could cook some mean chicken…

We got to Mt. Siani around midnight and they let us begin our climb at 2am. We were feeling frisky and decided to tackle the 3,750 Steps of Repentance. This is the path that Moses took up when God gave him the Ten Commandments. I think we were a little overzealous because it was a pretty hard climb up, especially in the dark. It felt really good to complete it and the sunrise was gorgeous. There is a little Greek Orthodox Church at the top that had a little service going on that was really cool. After the long hike up we all decided to take the easier camel path back down. We then went to St. Catherine’s Monastery and walked around. There we got to see the Burning Bush that God spoke to Moses from. It was hanging off the building which surprised me. For some reason I had always had it in my head that it was a little bush on the ground. From Mt. Siani we drove about 2 hours to Sharm el-Shaik which is on the southern tip of the peninsula and is a beach/resort town on the Red Sea. Our 3pm turbo ferry boat ride was canceled so and the next boat out was at 3am that night. We got a hotel room for a day and spent a relaxing day on the beach, in the pool and hitting a couple of local bars (Madga, one was a pirate themed bar but lacking in actual pirates sadly).

We all loaded up and took the turbo ferry across the Red Sea and then had to hook onto a bus convoy to get to Luxor. In southern Egypt they want you, when traveling between cities, to join a bus convoy with police in trucks in the front and back with machine guns as well as having a “security” guy in your van/bus with his own gun. We went through a ton of police road stations where you would see officials with guns as well as locals with their own machine guns walking around. It was less than 150 miles away from where we hit land, but we had to stop 4 times to pick up more buses for the convoy. I’m not sure if they do this actually for needed security or just to “make you feel safe”. That afternoon we toured Luxor Temple and the Luxor Museum. This museum was much nicer and more organized that the big one in Cairo. It had two mummies (one of Ramses I) that were about 3,000 years old I think. You could see their heads, faces, hands and feet. Ron didn’t enjoy that part too much. They had some amazing statues they had excavated around Luxor. Luxor Temple is in the middle of the town and really interesting. We went at night when they had flood lights on everything, so it gave it an added cool factor. There is a road of small sphinxes that used to stretch 2.5 kilometers to Karnak temple, but now only goes for about 50 sphinxes on each side. The picture of Tom and me posing like Sphinxes on a couple of empty podiums. We decided after such a full day we deserved a treat so we went to Pizza hut and loaded up on some wonderful pizza pies and Mountain Dew.

We finally gave in and got a tour guide to take us to the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens and to see the Colossi of Memnon. The Valley of the Kings is in the desert and just has a ton of doorways in the hills that lead down to layers and layers of temples. I can’t remember exactly how many there are, but I think it is in the 60’s (I’m too lazy to look it up right now). We went down inside 3 tombs (1 big, 1 medium, and 1 small sized one). We saw Ramses I’s, but Tutankhamun’s was closed for restoration. The network of tunnels and tombs is amazing. Ramese II’s tomb connects underground to a tomb for his sons. He had around 100 freaking sons (another 100 daughters), but they can only find tombs for 50 of them so far. I mean, take that Wilt Chamberlin and Shawn Kemp. We then headed over to Valley of the Queens which is much smaller, contains Nefertari’s tomb (off limits), and is much smaller/less complex that the Valley of the Kings. After that we stopped by the Colossi of Memnon to take some pictures of the two massive statues. It is hard to believe that they had to dig to find statues that massive. That led to an hour long camel ride around the west bank at sunset and a delicious Italian dinner at our hotel. The kids finished the night off with some beers at an Irish Pub and some dancing.

The Kniolas and Jackie took off the next morning to head back to Cairo for a day and then back home. We hit the Karnak Temple which was basically the Luxor Temple on steroids. This place was MASSIVE! The height and size of the pillars and statues was amazing. I could have walked around their the entire day if it wasn’t so hot (it wasn’t even that bad actually, the sun just beats you down after a while). We had a low key night with McDonald’s and horrible American movies on TV.

We decided to join another bus convoy and set off to visit Abydos which has the Temple of Seti I. Inside they have a wall that shows the history of all of the Pharaohs and their Gods. We then went to the Temple of Hathor at Dendara. Hathor is the goddess of joy, dance, and love. She is linked to Aphrodite sometimes. It is one of the only temples with a roof still in tact. By then we were kinda templed out and probably didn’t give it the time or concentration such an amazing place deserved. We hit the pool for a little bit and then took a night train back to Cairo.

Our last day in Egypt consisted of me, Tom and Ron having a Father’s Day round of golf next to the Pyramids of Giza (very cool to do but a crappy golf course), lots of pool time, and SPORTS CENTER followed by early Sunday U.S. Open golf-that was sooo good to watch even though I was dead tired and kept nodding off. We all flew out after mid-night and headed back our separate ways. Ali joined me, Tom and Rachel going back to AZ while mom and dad headed back home to America.

This trip was incredible if you couldn’t tell by the blog. We all had a blast and it was so cool to see such amazing architecture, carvings and history. It’s not every day you get to see one of the original wonders of the world. Thank you so much to Mom and Dad and Mike and Terry Kniola for putting up with all of us and for helping us fun such an amazing trip-we REALLY appreciate it and I am very grateful. Jackie and Ali, I’m glad you guys could catch a glimpse into me, Tom and Rachel’s world as PC Volunteers and hope you ladies had fun tagging around with three idiots such as ourselves. You can also check out Jackie's pictures on Snapfish at
http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=304171182108643828/l=249096971/g=5750783/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB . Now I’m off to dream of Dina and her…ummm…belly…

Egypt Short Blogs

2007-06-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

We made it back from Egypt all safe and sound. It was an amazing trip! My sister is hanging out in Lenkeran for a couple of days, so we will be on tour mode and then I will go into major recovery mode for the weekend. This week I’m going to put a short Top Ten style blog and will write a massive Egypt blog to post next week. Pictures will come slowly and in spurts.

Sites Visited

Giza Pyramids

Egyptian Museum

Cairo Bazar

Mt. Siani

Sharm el-Shaik/Red Sea beach

Luxor Temple

Luxor Museum

Valley of the Kings

Valley of the Queens

Colossi of Memnon

Karnak Temple

Coolest Things

Real Mummies

Mt. Siani sunrise

Giza Pyramids while playing golf

McDonald’s Delivery

The most famous belly dancer in Cairo shook her boobs at me and winked

High 80’s weather almost the entire time even though it was summer

Luxor Temple

The crazy things locals said in English to us. The best one was a man offered me 2,000,000 camels for Rachel. I accepted but he didn’t pay up so we moved on.

The Burning Bush

Massive statues at the Colossi of Memnon

Transportation Used

Car

Plane

Huge Turbo Ferry

Small Nile Boat

Bus

Night train

Horse buggy

Tram

and my favorite…

Camels

Foods Consumed

Chili’s-oh man, chili cheese fries, bacon cheddar bbq burger, cajun chicken sandwich

McDonald’s Quarter Pounder Meal 3 times-they offer double meat on all burgers which I obviously accepted

McDonald’s McArabia Chicken and Beef-two patties, lettuce, tomato, in a pita with gyro type sauce

KFC 1 time-we all got a huge bucket of chicken for our road trip to Mt. Siani

Pizza Hut-Pepperoni pizza, meat crazy pizza, cheesy garlic bread

Fettuccini Alfredo with chicken

Johnny Carrino’s-we got one of every appetizer and went nutz topped off with milk shakes

Mexican at some decent place in Instanbul

Mountain Dew-I downed 4-5 cans over the trip and loved every last drop

Twinky-one place had twinkies in a fridge-that was so good in 105 degree heat

Egypt Baby Egypt!!!

2007-06-11T03:14:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let you all know, everyone made it safely to Egypt! I ate at a Chili's, seen the pyramids, the sphinx, egyptian museum, and a fantastic belly dancer! We are off to climb Mt. Siani tonight and then on to Luxor for a few days!!!! I'll post a mega trip post next week...

Ron and Becky Rock Azerbaijan!

2007-06-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well pretty much all of my friends came into Baku Friday for meetings, a big Baku weekend, to meet my parents, or all of the above. I had to start my weekend off having a meeting with Charlie and Carlo trying to get our boys leadership camp planned out and rolling for late August. We still have a ton of things that need to be taken care of, but I have confidence that it will all work out in the end. We ate some delicious pizza Friday night and then headed out for a typical night of hanging with the gang and dancing our butts off!

Mom and Dad flew in from London around 4am and then I met them at the hotel around 9:00 when I woke up. They treated a group of us to some good American food lunches and then Rikki George and I took them on the typical Baku tour for a few hours. It was pretty hot and none of us had gotten much sleep the night before, so we all took naps before the real fun began. We met up with some of the gang and Erin’s parents who were also visiting for some beers late in the afternoon and then Mom and Dad bought us tons of nachos, chicken nuggets and beers for about 25 of us. Thankfully we hit happy hour, so the damage to my dad’s bank account was minimal. We then took them to a few “hot spots” in Baku for them to get a taste of the night life. Ron and Becky got major cool points for going out with that big of a group of us and dancing like crazy with us until at least 3am! No one ever accused my folks of not liking to have a little fun every now and then.

Sunday we went to my first host family’s café and were treated to my favorite Azeri meal-fried chicken and French fries. My dad was not happy when my host father pulled out a bottle of vodka for toasts after the previous nights sampling. We ate a ton of food and it was fun to see everyone interacting. After that we hopped a taxi down to Lenkeran and just bummed around all night.

Monday morning we headed up into some hills just outside of Lenkeran for a scenic drive with my Azeri tutor. I took Mom and Dad to my favorite quick lunch spot-think mashed potato quesadillas basically. We put yogurt on them, but they didn’t seem to like that addition. We started to take the normal Lenkeran town tour, but for the first time in 6 weeks it started raining. This forced us to head home for a lazy afternoon. Mom and Dad helped me move all of my things into my new house and then we went out to the nicest dinner in town. They enjoyed every part but the goat liver (which none of us like).

Today we took the Lenkeran city tour-hotel, train station, places they make fresh bread and chickens, had some tea, and then met the people at my office and tom’s office. Topping off the big day in Lenkeran we hit the hottest of hot spots-Nene’s House!!! She cooked a massive meal with Lenkeran’s famous Chicken Levangi as the main course. Mom and Dad both really liked all of the food that Nene prepared, but they didn’t eat near as much as I did. Nene joked with them all through dinner and then showed them her photo albums for a while. We had a good time and the translating all week has gone a lot better than I thought it would. Heck, maybe I am learning this language a little.

Tomorrow we will take it easy, let them try a little more Azeri food, then I’ll put them on a train to Baku and off to London for a quick stop and then on to Cairo. Ali is in Rome right now and Tom and his family are getting ready to leave America soon. We will all meet up in Cario on Saturday for 10 days of blistering heat, sand for miles, the enticing smell of camel dung, and BELLY DANCERS 24/7!!!! Have a great couple of weeks everyone. I won’t put up another blog until I get back on the 18^th or 19^th, assuming I don’t melt into the desert…

Pictures this week are of: the family by the Eternal Flame in Baku, a big 1^st host family picture, my host brother Hafiz and our moms, three pictures from our trip the mountains next to Lenkeran, and finally Ron, Becky and Nene.

Becoming old ain’t so bad…

2007-05-29T04:31:00.001-07:00

Well, I guess turning 30 is just like any other birthday, it just sounds a lot older than 29. Maybe I don’t feel that much different since I still act like I’m 16. What ever it is, I’m officially cool with being 30 so BRING IT ON!

I hung out with Tom in Lenkeran for a mini Ashley birthday/Tom going to America party (read we made queso, cocktails, and played games all night) on Wednesday. On Thursday I headed up to Sheki (north central AZ) to help Magda with a marketing project for her company. My program manager Elmir was in town, so he treated us to a nice birthday dinner, which was really fun. Sheki has a really nice hotel that serves American food, so I had 2 cheeseburgers with fries and 2 caesar salads over the weekend. I do miss a good salad being over here. Then on Saturday, a couple of us headed up to some mountains near Sheki to hike and camp for the night. The weather was perfect all weekend! We hiked for about 3 hours each way and found some really cool water falls up in the hills. It was by far one of the best weekends I’ve had in country so far!

What else? Lenkeran is becoming hotter and more humid with each passing day-not excited for the summer what so ever! I am starting to remember how miserable last summer was and am not looking forward to the sequel. Sadly I missed the Lenkeran soccer game yesterday. We are officially the AZ Champions! I am hoping that is a good omen for OU football this year!

This week I will be spending a ton of time trying to plan our trip to Egypt, so that should keep me busy. Alison is off trekking through Europe right now and Ron and Becky will get into Baku Saturday morning. They are in for a bit of a shock I think. Rumor has it most of the PCVs are all coming into Baku this weekend to play and meet them. I hope they survive Saturday night!

I hope you all had a fantastic Memorial Day!

Pictures this week are of: the hills/mountains we hiked in, the cow that decided to visit our camp site, madga dumping rocks out of her boots, the river we followed to the water falls, the water falls, Charlie cooking our toasted meat and cheese sandwich, and the perfect night sky looking up from my sleeping bag.

IT’S FREAKING FINISHED!!!!!

2007-05-22T01:54:00.000-07:00

I mean what a relief. I worked for 11 straight hours with Tom and two workers (and all of the orphans for the last couple of hours) to finally finish my freaking playground! We cut about 100 square meter sections of grass, loaded them on a huge dump truck, then unloaded and put them on the playground. We got all of the sod put down at 8pm and realized we still needed 4 square meters of grass. My body is going through complete shock having worked all day since it normally does nothing athletic besides walking around town or throwing a baseball with Tom for an hour. I’ve been shaking for hours and had several dizzy spells-I’m not joking. I have 3 massive hand blisters and am filthy, but it is done, so I am happy as can be. The pictures on today’s blog will be of the progression of the playground that only took 2 months to complete. It feels good to have that and America Day all wrapped up. They both ended up successes, but I sure did learn a lot about how things work here while working on these projects. Hopefully I can learn from that and avoid some of the pitfalls I found in my future projects.

Last week was really low key. It was my boss’ birthday, so I didn’t see him at all last week. That means I spent very little time at work. I read a bunch, started working out for the first time since last September, and relaxed. Now that the projects are done, I will be spending this week planning the Egypt trip, reading a ton, and looking for a new house. My land lady told me she is not moving out and her son is going to move in with her. That means that I am not happy and leaving as soon as I can find a new place. Renting homes and living alone are just two things that they don’t comprehend well here. I think she never planned on leaving and thought I would just let her stay there after I saw how nice she was. WRONG! I am going to head up to Sheki to help Magda with a marketing project on Thursday (should be my first hot all day bus ride of 2007-can’t wait!) and Friday. I think we will go hiking in the mountains around Sheki during the weekend, so I’m really excited about that. It should be a nice and relaxed way to spend my bday. Tom takes off for America on Friday, so we are cooking a Mexican feast for his office and a couple of other friends on Tuesday night. We will see if they like enchiladas as much as they liked lasagna.

Well Ron and Becky will be here a week from Friday, so that is exciting. I sent them a wish list that includes ladder golf, a 9 iron and some golf balls and other miscellaneous fun things! Alison takes off this week for a tour de Europe that will end meeting us in Cairo and then coming back to AZ with me for a few days. It will be fun to show the family my new home country and to see their reactions at my current life style. I’ve always been the odd ball of the family, so this should just further enforce that in their minds…

Happy Memorial Day Everybody!!!!

Barda Baseball

2007-05-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

This week started off pretty slow. I had to recover from the America Day week for a couple of days. Tom, Carlo and I went to a natural hot water spring in Lenkeran to replenish our bodies and souls-man it felt great. There are several springs like that around Lenkeran so I’ll be hitting that place up a ton this coming winter. We painted the goals and put the nets on the basketball hoops and soccer goals on Tuesday. That was all that got done on my playground because this past week was full of Azeri holidays. We had a black holiday on Tuesday that was the anniversary of a town in AZ being taken over from their neighboring country, Victory Day on Wednesday, then Heydar Aliyev’s (the former President) birthday anniversary on Thursday. I hope to finish the grass on the playground this week so I can finally get my project over with and fill out all of the paperwork for PC and Disney.

This past weekend a group of Volunteers all headed to a town called Barda that is in the middle of AZ. Volunteers in four towns have been organizing softball teams in their towns with Azeri youths. They had a mini-tournament on Saturday and Tom and I got to play on the Sheki team due to their lack of Volunteers in their town. I am not known for my softball skills, but we had a blast! The Volunteers that organized the teams and the weekend did a great job. They had a great turn out of kids to play as well as locals to watch the games. We then had a massive Americans only game on Sunday that was a blast! My body was completely worn down after that game. It was really sunny and kinda hot out Sunday and my body just isn’t used to physical activity. It is freaking pathetic. One major surprise of the weekend was when we showed up Friday night in Barda, Mary had made a huge dinner for us including MEAT LOAF!!! Man, I love me some meat loaf and Mary did a great job! As if that wasn’t enough, Carol then whipped out a huge pan of apple cobbler and five tubs of Azeri ice cream. I mean I was stuffed beyond my limits but it was sooo worth it…

Other things that are going on:

The weather has been great so I have been sleeping outside most nights-it feels great

Ron and Becky get here in less than three weeks

I’m starting to plan the big Egypt trip for us

I had my first hot bus ride of the year this past weekend-man I’m not ready for the blazing hot summer yet

And last but not least, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY MOM! That also goes for all of my friends who are apparently baby factories!!!!

Sorry for the lack of pictures this week, I am slacking. This is myself and Carlo fixing up the goals and nets last week.

More America Day Pics

2007-05-09T03:11:00.000-07:00

Ok guys, here are some more pictures from America Day. They are the kids in my room, me presenting our american slide, another room pic, breandan teaching a girl how to hold the bat, tom pitching to the one line of kids, two group pics just before the last of the gang left, and finally the cardboard batting tee tom and i made for ben (talked about in following blog). My blog about it plus more pictures follows this set of pics…ash

America Day Var!!!!

2007-05-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

I mean, what a freaking week in Lenkeran! I don’t even know where to begin…

First of all, everyone around town kept telling us that May 1^st would be amazing weather. This was hard to believe since it rained approximately 28 out of 30 days in April at least a few hours each day. Amazingly enough, it was freaking gorgeous on May 1^st. Mid 70’s and not a cloud in the sky. One cue, all of the stores in town brought out coolers with tons of ice cream in them! It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen as far as weather prediction accuracy. Maybe the Houston weather guys should call the Azeris and ask them the next day forecast-they couldn’t be more wrong than those guys, even from half way around the world.

I had to call the Mayor’s Office 6-15 times a day every day of the week bugging them about the permission we needed for America Day. It drove me nutz! They sent a letter to the Baku Mayor’s Office to ask permission for out little day for some reason. Finally on Thursday I call my guy and he says “Of course there is not a problem. Why would you ever think that?” Oddly enough I had to call him three more times that day to get the guy two power levels below him to call the directors of each school to pass the permission along. We went to two of our three schools Friday morning to invite the kids for Saturday’s event.

On Friday most of the crew that was invited (we asked 20 PCVs to come help us manage our expected hoard) showed up to Lenkeran. We had a nice and relaxing evening where we showed some people around town and everyone got their first chance to sample Lenkeran’s Famouse Lavangi (the rotisserie chicken with stuffing). Everyone was more than impressed-our reputation for AZ’s best food is still in tact thankfully.

Saturday morning we took some more people on a tour of the “hot spots” in town and then we made a surprise visit to Nene’s house. She was really surprised (she knew they were in town but I didn’t tell her we were stopping by). She was mad at me for not warning so she could have cooked for us all. I told her that may have put her in the hospital, so most people just drank some local tea (not me, don’t worry). Then we headed back to my house to put the finishing touches on our skits, picture presentations and logistics for America Day taken care of.

We got to School 4 in time to set up the food for the kids, the props, computer projector, etc. A little after 2:00 there were three parades of approximately 35 kids apiece flooding to the school. We had the Deputy Mayor say a few words to kick the day off (he’s hilarious and made me “coax” him into talking-the oh, well, I guess if you really want me to I can say a few words, but it really isn’t necessary, beg me some more and maybe it’ll happen routine). We then split the kids in half-50 kids out back to the play area and 50 kids into the conference room. Out back Tom and half of the PCVs did skits about Memorial Day and 4^th of July. They had some really funny stuff to help the kids follow along with what they were saying. We had some people talking in English (it is America Day after all) and people translating for some of the kids. I didn’t see this, but apparently at one point when they were talking about the Boston Tea Party, Tom dumped out a few packets of tea on the ground and stomped on them. The kids’ faces were those of complete shock for a few minutes, and then they kinda decided to laugh. Like I’ve said time and time again, people drink tea here 24/7 and they couldn’t comprehend why someone would do such a thing as to waste any of it. Yet another funny lesson learned in AZ! My room we had talked and answered questions about summer vacations in America, showed a slide show of American hot spots and then an Azeri hot spot slide show. We encouraged the kids to take a trip to somewhere in AZ they have never been before. Most people here do not travel outside of their towns (except Baku trips), so this is a big deal to encourage we think.

After that was over was when the pure insanity took over. We had two representatives from the local Ministry of Youth and Sports go with us on a 25 minute walk through the center of town with 20 PCVs and 100 kids to a big sports field. Two friends brought down softball equipment from their towns and we set up two areas to show kids how to hit softballs and one area where they could play catch. 99% of the kids had never played baseball (most of them had never even seen it), so it was a lot of fun to watch them go after it. The girls here are great and wanted to play just as much as the boys. No one was happy when we finally called it quits around 6pm, but a great time was had by all! Tom and I got really lucky because America Day went about as smoothly as we could have wished for and local kids, local leaders and the PCVs all had a freakin awesome time!

After that was all done we treated out guests from out of town to a Cinco de Mayo 100 count chicken soft taco feast including a HUGE bucket of queso and four bags of Tostitos tortilla chips from America. Needless to say we all stuffed ourselves silly. This wasn’t near the spread the Embassy had for us for Turkey Day, but it was pretty freaking good for a couple of PCVs. A special shout out to the Hunzikers and Kniolas for the two insane gift boxes for all of us that included sombreros, decorations, maracas, Mexican spices, Velveeta, chips, and other amazing times. Your praises were sung highly throughout the night! Having an outdoor feast with a bunch of our friends was the perfect way to top off a huge local success for Tom and I in Lenkeran! A special thank you to the PC Staff and all of the PCVs that helped out with America Day! Everyone in Lenkeran had a freakin blast!

All of our friends really liked Lenkeran and you could feel the jealousy seeping from their skin as we had perfect weather and not a bad little town to live in as well! We also celebrated Terah’s 26^th birthday this past weekend. She brought down Lyka for me to finally meet. For those of you that haven’t heard, I have been offered to take over puppy patrol when Terah splits for America in August when she’s done (she’s an AZ3), so Lykya and I did some major bonding over the weekend. Tom and I also presented Ben with his belated b’day gift-a home made cardboard tee ball set due to Ben’s inability to hit a waffle ball in any way, shape or form. Thankfully he takes us constantly reminding him of this fact quite well.

This week will be a big week of recovery from an intense last week. In AZ this week they have a black holiday today, Victory Day tomorrow (I’m told is the anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR) and the birthday anniversary of the first AZ President on Thursday. We are off to take part in a softball tournament in Barda this weekend. PCVs from Ganja, Mingechiavier, Sheki and Barda have put together softball teams in their towns and we are going to have a tournament. There aren’t enough Americans in Sheki to make a balance on the team, so Charlie invited Tom and me to play on their team. American sports two weekends in a row should be amazing! I only have a few pictures from the weekend today, but hope to put an additional post up this week full of them.

Pictures seen this week are of: kids coming to the school, me explaining what will happen at America Day, Ram talking to the kids, Tom Maria and Rikki George acting out their play, the American Flag we showed the kids, Brendan and Maria signing autographs for the kids (this went all for all of us the entire day and is completely funny/ridiculous), Rob teaching a kid how to hold the bat, two kids watching the action, and lastly one local youth with a monster swing, just not much of the ball!

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

2007-04-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

That has been going through my head for the past week constantly. Let me explain:

My playground isn’t finished yet, but I think I can finish it tomorrow

Getting all of the needed permission for America Day has not officially been given it seems, but I think I can get it done tomorrow

I haven’t completely kicked my land lady out of my house, but I think I can kiss her goodbye tomorrow

I can be excited about turning 30…no wait, I’m positive that’s not going to happen

So my boss helped me out a ton last week and got my playground all taken care of except for the asphalt-this was a HUGE surprise to me and I was extremely grateful. So I showed up and talked to the new director at the orphanage and she said “I don’t like it. It is too small and our kids can’t play on asphalt.” I have no clue what my faced looked like in response to that, but it couldn’t have been a happy face. I explained that I only had money for that size and that we all agreed on asphalt. She held her ground and said she wanted grass instead. So I went back to talk with my boss about the logistics of expanding the area and switching to grass. He made some calls and we could go from 7meters by 12 meters to 12 by 20 with the amount of money that had been donated. So all day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I have been at the orphanage with workers tearing apart what they already did, making it bigger, putting in two huge trucks of dirt, etc. It has been fun working outside during the day and getting messy. I don’t do much physical labor/exercise here (that will change once it gets nice out), so I’m freaking sore all over. The sod will come tomorrow (we paid some guys to literally just dig up 12x20 grass from a random field for us and deliver it. I love this place). We had rain off and on all last week, so that kept things going slow. It is looking really good (although the kids have to play basketball on grass now). Every time a new person comes and looks at the play area they either make a comment on how it is the wrong size, it should be asphalt not grass, or something else. Everyone here has an opinion on everything even if they have no clue what is going on-it drives me insane!!!! But, in the end, this will look good, be big, and will be done this week-all major things in my mind. I made the director promise to me that they would take care of the new field and told her if I come back next year and it is over grown or messed up we are going to have some big problems. I think she understood my seriousness on this matter, so I’m hopeful she will follow through with her promise.

T minus 6 days until America Day Lenkeran is upon us! I thought I had all of the permission we needed from the long list of big wigs in Lenkeran. I called one of them the other day and he told me he never got a permission letter (he told me he didn’t need one 3 weeks ago). So I had to write a request letter to the Mayor asking him to send a permission letter to the head of education so he would call the schools to give them permission to let the kids come hang out with us for a couple of hours on a Saturday after class is finished. AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Simple things are just made way too complicated here and it is a frustration that most of the local people seem to feel constantly. It really makes it hard to do good/productive things in AZ. I am extremely hopefully I can get all of this permission business taken care of tomorrow so Tom and I can focus on planning everything out for America Day on Saturday. I would like to say a quick thank you to Tom’s parents as well as Ron and Becky for the two insane packages they sent us with queso ingredients, tortilla chips, Cinco de Mayo party decorations, etc. You guys are all AWESOME! Our friends will freak out once they get down here and see all of the post America Day munchies we are going to have!

Over the past week I have asked my land lady every single day if she is leaving at the end of the month and she has said yes each time. After I get done writing this blog I’m going to go giver he May’s rent money and make sure she is leaving tomorrow. I can’t tell you how ready I am for her to freaking be gone!

Tom, Tim and I had dinner with the Embassy’s publicity manager as well as a government worker from D.C. last night in Lenkeran. It is always fun to have American visitors, especially when they buy us a good dinner! We hung out with them for about 4 hours at the hotel and had a great time. They gave us a bunch of pictures and books about America for us to hand out at America Day, so that was really cool of them.

I am currently reading a book a former PCV wrote about her service living in Africa about 8 years ago. It is really interesting to read how much different her situation/service is than mine. The differences about living in an African village vs. a city in AZ, being a health worker dealing with AIDS and malnutrition vs. working with Community Economic Development, the things she ate, her daily routine, etc. It makes me wonder how I would have handled/how my life right now would be different in another PC assignment like the middle of no where Africa.

Well that’s all I’ve got this week. I’m sure I’ll have a ton of pictures and stories next week about the completion of the playground, America Day, my landlady leaving, etc.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

This week’s pictures in order are of: the orphanage, the playground size/set up we tore apart, us tearing it apart, the guys putting in the combo basketball/soccer goal, the new bigger size, one of the dirt dump trucks, and last but not least, the color of the water that comes out of my faucets before I distill it.

Rain, rain, go away….

2007-04-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

As you can guess, the rainy season is still in full swing. I’m actually fine with rainy weather and am glad we are getting all of it so that everything will be green soon. I may however blame the rain as the reason for any potential bad attitudes relating to my last month of my “Rocking 20’s” as I’ve heard it called. Where the rain is hurting me most (besides all of my pants needing to be hand washed constantly) is in my completion of my playground. As of Friday morning, the only thing I had accomplished was getting the combination soccer/basketball goals welded and the wood cut for the backboards. I hadn’t been able to get anything done with the ground where we are putting the asphalt. I have been gone for 5 days (nice timing hu?), so I’m hopeful when I go to work tomorrow my boss will give me some good news about some weekend progress! Today it is super windy and rainy, but hopefully it won’t last all week. My house doesn’t sound so solid when the wind blows hard, so that adds some excitement to my life.

I took off to Barda last Friday to help a PCV with a local trash pick up for kids and her town. We had a handful of PCVs come in to help Sarah’s project and about 25-30 kids help out. We all had rubber gloves and trash bags and picked up litter for about 1.5 hours. Some Azeri people stopped us and asked what we were doing and then why Americans were doing it. We told them it was good for the environment and that no one else was doing it in AZ, so thought we should do it. Most of them got the point and were happy about it. The kids were all in good spirits and had a good time with a good lesson learned. I really enjoy getting to visit new towns and helping out other Volunteers with their projects-even something as simple as a trash pick up. It gives us time to hang out together, but more importantly allows us to have a positive impact in AZ in other areas besides only working on things in our towns. We crashed at Sarah’s amazing house-she wins the award for coolest set up I’ve seen-she has a huge open outside area fully equipped with gymnastic rings and a FREAKING POOL! I’m not even joking on this. She has a 5 foot high, 8 foot wide and 30 foot long cement water container. I now know where I’ll be spending my free weekends this summer!

After our clean up we headed to Ganja to help celebrate Ben and Maria’s birthdays! We had a really good group of friends there and had a great time. It is fun going to Ganja because it feels like city living, but not as big as Baku. We ate well, played games, and had a pretty good birthday celebration for them. Charlie got Ben the lower half of a goat’s leg for $1 as his b’day present-life over here is swell…

I took off for Baku on Sunday because on Monday I had my first ever Small Projects Assistance (SPA) Committee meeting. I had to review two grant applications written by other PCVs (I didn’t get to vote on the one for the boy’s camp I wrote), and then our committee of 5 discussed and voted on each project. It was a really good experience and I’m glad to be on that particular committee, both short term and long term. Being in Baku solo isn’t too much fun though. I dined on nachos and chicken sandwiches solo both days which is delicious, but not too entertaining. I basically used my time there to get a bunch of little PC things taken care of and to recharge my batteries for the coming two weeks.

The next 11 days will be by far the busiest days of my time here to date. This week I have to try to do everything within my power to finish my playground for the orphanage-come on good weather-including buying supplies, managing the install of everything, setting up the opening day play time, etc., plan and hold my conversation club, get permission for all of the kids we are inviting to America Day, start to really organize it, and have dinner with a couple of people visiting Lenkeran from the Embassy. I’m really hoping it will be a good week and I won’t have too many bumps in the road, although I’m expecting at least a few solid dips.

Today’s pictures are courtesy of Magda and are from the weekend Tom’s parents came to town-only a few weeks late on getting them from Mags. We have: Tom, Me, Joy and

Kasey in a cab; Magda, Tom, Me, Kasey and Rachel Azeri style picture; Rikki George, Me, Kasey, and Magda; Me, Tom and Magda; and finally the entire gang. Incase you were curious, yes, I was in fact sporting a super sweet moustache that weekend…

Man Down!!!

2007-04-15T04:52:00.000-07:00

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.

GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLL!

2007-04-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

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.

The Kniolas Survived The AZ!

2007-04-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, please note that I have not sat still for the past 2.5 weeks, so sadly I did not put up a blog last week. Sorry kids. To make up for it I am posting 2 new ones right now, so read this one and scroll down to the next new one about the Novruz Holiday.

So Mike and Terry Kniola came to visit Tom last weekend. Several of us came into town Friday for a training on youth exercise programs and then we met up with the Kniolas around 5ish (they got in at 6:30am and had been bumming around Baku all day). We met up with them at the hotel (where they graciously got us a room) and then headed out to dinner with the usual suspects. We took them to eat nachos, chicken nuggets and cold beers. Somehow they stayed out with us until midnightish, and then they split up when we headed to the dance clubs. Keep in mind we are a fairly intense group to be around since we never get to see each other and basically save up all of our energy until we meet up in Baku and then we just explode (figuratively speaking). The next day Tom and I took the Kniolas on a Baku tour of all of the hot spots and then we all had a good nap time. Saturday night we all went out to a good Georgian restaurant for dinner and then we let the Kniolas go crash (jet lag caught up) and we went out on the town. The next day we headed back to Lenkeran after Tom and I showed them the McDonald’s burger/chicken sub sandwich combo for lunch.

The Kniolas stayed in the Gala Hotel (4 stars!) and had an awesome room! It didn’t feel like you were in AZ at all. They gave Tom some presents (Patron, 15 boxes of Mac&Cheese, and waffle ball stuff), so it felt like Christmas all over again. We immediately made Mac&Cheese for dinner and then all crashed. Monday was a holiday still, so we took them for an all day tour around Lenkeran. They seemed to enjoy it and said it was pretty much what they expected. We hit the bazaar, Caspian Sea saucer to make it cool faster as well as how to put a sugar cube in your mouth while you drink the scalding hot tea. That night we all went to eat at Tom’s house with his host family. I think Tom’s dad was a little caught off guard when Tom’s dad gave him the traditional hand shake and cheek kiss. Tom’s mom ate with us which was cool since that never typically happens. They made us a spread of all the typical Azeri food (especially rice and chicken lavangi-the Lenkeran specialty) and we got stuffed! After that we headed back to their hotel room and play, football stadium, river, parks, etc. Tom and I took his dad to a Tea House to see what it is like to be a man in AZ and to let /evening we went to the big event, NENE’S 70^TH BIRTHDAY! We were going to get to slaughter a sheep and cook out for it, but due to the bad weather we went to a really nice restaurant with the entire family. Nene’s son from Moscow came in to surprise her and her kids and grand kids from Baku all came down as well. There were about 20 or so of us for a massive meal, some dancing, more eating, more dancing, cake, dancing, etc. Nene stood up at the beginning of the deal and gave a toast, and then told us we all had to chant “Nene, Nene, Nene” when she was him drink some more traditional tea in its most common setting. We taught him how to pour hot some tea into youred Yahtzee for a few hours until we were all ready to crash. The next day we did some more touring (it was a cold rainy day sadly and we didn’t get to take them up into the mountains). They hit Tom’s office and bought some souvenirs during the day. That afternoondone and clap. She then had every single person there give her a toast-she literally called out peoples’ names when she was ready for them to praise her. Tom’s parents both got called out by Nene for the toasting and were completely caught off guard I think. It was pretty funny and they were really good sports about the whole thing. Tom's mom didn't seem too excited about it, so I made sure to include a picture of her toasting on this blog so it will be immortalized-sorry Mrs. Kniola! It was good for them to see how a big Azeri family/party goes and to see how people interact (husbands, wives, kids, etc.). They then had to leave early to go to another dinner with Tom’s co-workers. They had to head back to Baku to catch an early flight out on Wednesday, so we basically jammed as much Lenkeran/Azeri culture down their throats as we could in two days. I’m sure it was an overload, but I hope they enjoyed their trip. It was fun to have them here and we were all very thankful for their generosity they showed us all weekend. Yaxsi Yol Kniolas!!!

I had a 3 day training in Baku on project design and management. It was a really good workshop and I’m glad I went. I took a local Azeri friend from Lenkeran to the workshop and hopefully he and I can work together on some projects in the future. I got home yesterday and am dead tired. I feel like I’ve been going non-stop for the past 2 weeks or so. This week Tom and I are going to start planning our America Day in Lenkeran for May. I’m also going to start traveling around my region all of April trying to get ideas for projects to get going.

On a down note, I got my grant from Disney, but then I found out 2 weeks ago that due to the insane inflation going on in AZ right now, the prices for everything have doubled. That means I have to find another $500 somewhere. I posted a “Partnership Grant Request” on the Peace Corps website. You can put a description of a project up on there and then individuals or companies can make donations to specific projects. Hopefully someone will see it and fund it so I can get the project going. I’m glad I started off with a small scale project first, so I can see all of the problems that I will be encountering over here doing things. There are no contracts and their sense of professionalism/business sense is completely different that in America, so I really have to manage my expectations and plan for potential future problems in all of my projects.

The pictures are of: us at the Georgian restaurant, family pic at Tom’s house, the men at Tom’s house, us in the big park reading a paper from Woodstock, IL (they wanted this picture becaus

e in Woodstock it is tradition for locals to take a newspaper with them on trips and take pictures reading it in weird places, then they put that picture in the newspaper), us at Nene’s house pre-party, Nene addressing the crowd, oldest daughter toasting Nene, Tom’s mom toasting her, the delicious food we ate (a skillet with French fries, meat, tomatoes, onions, eggplant, tortillas, and tons of grease with hot coals under it to keep it hot), Nene dancing, a group picture, us all eating, the grandkids and one more big group picture.

My First Novruz Holiday Experience….

2007-04-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

So in Muslim countries they have the Novruz Holiday in March. It marks the beginning of the New Year. The entire country takes the entire week off-so basically spring break AZ style. They start growing little plates or dishes of tall green grass (some sort of sprouts) a few weeks before the holiday week. There is a build up of activities a few weeks before the main week, but I didn’t see anyone really observing it. The green grass is decorative and everyone has some in their houses and offices. The women do a lot of spring cleaning and an insane amount of baking. They make all sorts of pastries, candies, and baklava. Tuesday is the big day where the family has a massive feast (think Thanksgiving). In the Muslim religion the number 7 is big, so they have 7 major dishes on the table. I was invited to several places for the big feast, but could only go to two of them. I went to my tutor Farana’s house and then to my boss’ house. Coordinating my holiday was a mess because my boss told me to come to his house but none of them speak English. Farana’s family invited me to their house also. I asked if I could go to both houses for a couple of hours, but they would never say yes or no. After several explanations and many sets of phone calls everything was straightened out and everyone was happy. I went to Farana’s house and had dinner with her brother and parents. Her dad was funny. It was the first time I had met him and he was really nervous about having me there and he wanted everything to be perfect. They put 7 little piles of hay in the yard, light them on fire, and then you run/jump through them. It symbolizes you leaving all of the bad things of the past year behind you and you having a fresh start to the new year. The flames were HUGE and we still ran through them. We sat down to a massive meal of rice, chicken, fish, pastries, and several other Azeri dishes that I can’t really explain. We each lit a candle and made a wish and whoever’s candle burns the fastest has their wish come true-I lost. They died eggs and we had an egg cracking competition. You hold your egg in your hand and someone hits the top of it with the top of their egg-I lost again to Farana and her father. After a wonderful meal, Farana and I headed over to my boss’ house. They have a tradition of throwing hats at doors and you get candy or money so we threw our hats at a couple of doors on the way. At my boss’ house we sat down to a ton of pastries, fruits, nuts and tea. My boss brought out an old photo album and then he talked about Russia and Azerbaijan for 2 straight hours. It was really interesting to hear his views, but I felt bad for Farana. My boss loves to talk a ton and you could tell she wasn’t enjoying the conversation too much, so I felt bad for dragging her along with me.

The next day Tom and I met Nene at 7:30am to head to the river. This is strictly a Lenkeran tradition. The entire town goes to the river early in the morning on that Wednesday carrying these small identical red clay water pitchers. You wash your hands and your face in the river and fill up your pitcher. When you get home you sprinkle some of the water on your door, in your yard and in each room of your house for a “cleansing”. I filled up a plastic water bottle for my new house. What was great about it was looking at the dirty brown water we were using to “cleanse” everything. After a nice nap and some laziness, Tom and I went back to Nene’s and had dinner with her, her grand daughter Fazile and two of her friends. Fazile lives in Baku, is 19, speaks really good English, and is really fun. She’s a city girl and doesn’t like it too much out in the regions. It is funny to see Nene with young girls and the hierarchy. She gets to boss them around and they have to do all of the dishes and small house work. Nene was really tired, so she crashed and Tom and I hung out talking with the girls about music, movies and America for a long time. It is extremely evident that they have grown up in the big city because their views are much more modern, so that made it really fun to talk with them.

I thought about going to visit some friends in the country during the week since we didn’t have any work, but I’m so glad I stayed in Lenkeran. I had such a good time Novruz week. Everyone was extremely nice that week, saying hi and smiling constantly. Plus I ate so much good food, it was great! I’ll make sure I’m in town that week next year for sure….

The pictures seen were of: Novruz grass at Nene’s house, the fire piles we jumped over at Farana’s house, me with Farana and her mother and then with her brother, Tom and Nene heading to the river, Nene filling her pitcher, Me, Tom and Nene’s candles, some of the pastries, and finally of all of the people heading to the river at 8 am.

Home Sweet Home!!!

2007-03-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

Well I officially moved into my new house on Wednesday morning! Thankfully a PC staff was in town that day, so he could drive all of my junk to my new pad. I only came over here with 3 big bags (not that big of a deal really), but since then I have received 3 big boxes of books from the family as well as some American food treats I got a huge sleeping bag, water filter, med kit, and tons of other papers and things from the PC. Oddly enough, I will probably not bring much if any of this stuff back to the

when I head home (I plan on burning all of my clothes before I take off).

My house is small and includes the following: bedroom with 3 twin beds, a china cabinet and a decent sized table, a hallway type area that has a couch, small table, book shelf, armoire, and sink (this is the room you walk into when you come in the front door), then a kitchen with a counter/table, cabinet, sink, and small gas balloon for cooking. My house does not have gas but has pretty good electricity since it is right next to the main park and mayor’s office. I have a big yard area, but it is mostly cement. I have about 10 or so little fruit trees, my own water well, and a small porch. My bathroom is outside about 20 steps from my front door and has a squatter toilet. Next to it is a small room with a huge bucket under a faucet next to a wood burning furnace deal. I will be taking bucket baths for the next few months (although my land lady mentioned she may put in a shower type apparatus at some point if I pay her each month). There is an “electrical prong” deal that I can plug in and put in the bucket of water to heat it up. I’ll be attempting my first shower sometime Tuesday, so I’ll let you all know how it goes.

My land lady is in the other side of the house (which is completely blocked off from my side) currently, but will be going back to live in Baku later this week. I pay $100 AZN a month (about $115 US), and this is the cheapest decent place I could find. Tom and I shared a “freedom beer” the night I moved in and it tasted FANTASTIC! It is going to take some adjusting and trial and error as far as shopping and cooking for myself. I have a refrigerator but haven’t plugged it in yet to see how well it works. My diet will probably consist mostly of pasta, rice, eggs, bread, cheese, fruits and veggies and some occasional meat. I’m still unpacking my stuff and it is just starting to hit me how life on my own is going to be, but I’m really excited. I’ll have to go to the bazaar a ton to buy my food and deal with the people there and shop owners on a very consistent basis, so I’m excited about that local interaction. Having to plan what I’m going to eat and having to go to the bazaar and buy stuff every couple of days will be annoying probably, but it will be good for me.

I have only stayed in my house two nights so far because we had out second “America Day” in Aghjabedi this weekend. About 10 Volunteers came to Rikki George, Kasey, Ressa, and Candice’s home town on Friday and Saturday to talk to some kids about living in the States. We had a Valentine’s Day room where we talked about this history of it the holiday and then we all made Valentines Cards. After some tea and cookies we had a St. Patrick’s Day room where some Volunteers acted out the story of St. Patrick and then had the kids do a scavenger hunt to get the “pot of gold” at the end. Everything went really well and it seemed like the kids had a good time. Candice and some other guys made some really good chicken chili Friday night which was worth the trip in and of itself.

This week in AZ is “Novruz” which marks the beginning of spring as well as what they consider the unofficial beginning of the year. There will be a lot of good food to eat and some fun traditions such as: jumping over fire which symbolizes letting go of your bad experiences of the past year/starting fresh for the new year, going down to the river and getting some water to splash around your yard and wash your hands and face with (this is a Lenkeran thing), they grow plates of grass (actually sprout type deals) in their houses and then plant them in their yards, the kids toss their hats at houses and get them filled with candy (kinda like Halloween), and most importantly everyone has entire week off!!! I’m heading to my boss’ house for the first time for the main nights feast, so I’m excited about that.

This week I will be getting adjusted to my new surroundings (I have to buy a few items for my house but not much), participating in Novruz as much as possible, going to a training given by Right To Play in Baku on Friday which is also when the Kniolas (Tom’s parents) are getting to AZ! We are going to hang out with them in Baku for the weekend and then bring them back to Lenkeran on Sunday just in time for Nene’s 70^th b’day celebration. Rumor has it that Tom and I are going to get to slaughter the goat for Nene’s party, so there is a hint of excitement in the air…

Ode to Nene

2007-03-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

Well, this has officially been my last week/weekend living with Nene. I can move out on Wednesday at 12:01am (I actually may wait until 9 or 10am though). I just did my last two huge loads of laundry so I can put off hand washing stuff for as long as possible. I’ve been extremely lucky in my service so far that I’ve had two amazing host families. It has made my stay in AZ much easier and a lot more fun. Several of my friends have had not so good situations, had to change families a few times, and it has made their time here a lot more stressful that it needs to be. All week Nene has been giving me the semi-guilt trip. Here is a sampling of what she’s told me this past week: she will call me when she’s making a good meal so I can come eat “good food”, I can come eat every breakfast and dinner if I want, Tom can take my place and move in, she wants another Volunteer if one comes down here, my family should still stay here when they come visit, I can’t take care of myself because I’m a baby, she’s asked me how/what I’m going to cook for myself about 50 times, etc. She will miss me and I’ll miss her, but I’m only moving 5-10 minutes away and I’m sure I’ll be over here at least once a week (and a lot more once she starts trying to teach me Russian in a few months). Plus, the week of the 20^th of March is a big holiday week so I’ll visit a lot and then she turns 70 on the 27^th, so we are going to have a big party for her!

Last week I heard some good news that I am going to get my first little grant to build a safe playing area for a local orphanage for disabled kids with the help of kids from two local schools, so that is exciting. Tom and I are starting to plan an America Day in Lenkeran for May (we are going to one in Agjahbedi this weekend that Rikki George and Kasey planned). I am also starting to work on ideas for larger scale projects with my co-workers and boss, so there is a lot more interaction in our office, which is nice.

Here is a poem I wrote a couple of months ago for our PCAZ news letter that a few Volunteers send out every few months:

Ode to Nene

By Ashley R. Seuss

I have only one Azeri Nene, yes I do.

I have only one Azeri Nene, how about you?

She’s 70 years old, but acts like a youth.

She’s 70 years old, but it doesn’t seem like the truth.

She calls me “baby”, maybe I am.

She calls me “baby”, because she can.

I live with my Nene, and that is all.

I live with my Nene, and she is a ball!

She names our chickens, yes she does.

She names our chickens, just because.

She burnt our hamam, believe me she did.

She burnt our hamam, and laughed like a kid.

She watches US movies, with me every day.

She watches US movies, and says “Wow” and “Hey”.

I live with my Nene, and that is all.

I live with my Nene, and she is a ball!

When she dances to music, she likes to get down.

When she dances to music, it looks like the doll version of James Brown.

She likes McDonald’s and Kool-Aide, you better believe.

She likes McDonald’s and Kool-Aide, and I taught her to say “Geeeeeze”.

When she speaks English, she sounds like E.T..

When she speaks English, I laugh uncontrollably.

I live with my Nene, and that is all.

I live with my Nene, and she is a ball!

She cooks the same meal, for three meals in a row.

She cooks the same meal, and won’t let me say no.

She had a sleep over, with Rikki, Rachel, and Kasey.

She had a sleep over, tucked them each in and said “good night baby”.

She is the best Nene, that there ever was.

She is the best Nene, and I love her just because.

I live with my Nene, and that is all.

I live with my Nene, and she is a ball!

The pictures are of: the flowers Tom and I bought her for International Women’s day (March 8^th-the entire country has work off for this day), Nene’s room (she has bunk beds-not seen), 2 single beds pushed together, one “sleeper couch” an armoire, wall furnace, and small chest of drawers), a storage room under our house, all of the jars of pickled eggplant, pickled tomatoes, pickles, pickled peppers, etc. and jars of natural fruit juices (of course with tons of sugar added so it is like natural Kool-Aide), a bed under the house with tons of basketballs, soccer balls, skate boards, and other random spots stuff, and a Russian music cassette tape I found in her kitchen cabinet-a complete surprise because unlike me, Azeris don’t like hot chicks in bikinis really, so her Russian living style is showing through here, and of course Nene.