Of Course We Have Environmental Education!

The textbooks we're forced to use are pretty poor. They are exclusively in English, which make it difficult for someone who doesn't speak English to use. Activities have no connection to the actual information taught in our lesson. Passages are immensely boring and of little or no bearing to an Azerbaijani student. Phrases like 'project work,' 'now review,' or 'ask yourself' are used in a way that a normal student could not possibly be excepted to understand. In general, the textbooks seem like they were written by someone who understood what a textbook looked like, but had no clue as to what the actual goal of a textbook is (ie: to teach).

This week's challenge with the textbook is the unit many of our classes are in-environmental awareness and protection. The difficulty would be there if we were trying to teach this in the student's own language; most concepts, like 'reduce,' 'reuse,' 'recycle,' etc, don't have direct translation and Azerbaijan itself has been wrestling with the aftermath of being a site of brutal soviet industrial waste. Though a beautiful country with a large variety of ecological types, there is very real environmental destruction that has occurred.

In our book is a tip sheet of 8 simple things kids can do to save the environment, featuring all those feel-good tips we're used to. However, sorting your cans, glass, and paper doesn't have the same type of practicality when you are in a country with no recycling program. The class nodded their heads approvingly when I drew a little map of a river from Xachmaz flowing to Baki with bags of trash in it (because where else will you throw your bags of trash but the river?). I told them that people in Baki are drinking poisoned water because of our trash. No response. Thankfully some mouths dropped when I completed the map, drawing a river from Guba to Xachmaz, with bags of trash in. 'We're drinking poisoned water from Guba'. Whoa!-out of sight is not necessarily out of existence.

Its a combination of many things. The fact that the textbooks are trying to be textbooks for English children instead of Azerbaijani children. The fact that, historically speaking, we are in one of the most polluted areas in the world. The fact that the Not-In-My-Backyard is taken to an extreme, in that you can do anything you want to any place as long as it is not your walled in yard. But also, the fact that critical thinking is such an underdeveloped skill here that the connection is never made between the river you dump your trash into and the water you drink from the sam river.

Its frustrating on so many levels. As a teacher trying to teach English, as a community development worker trying to teach critical thinking, as a person working with individuals rather than state mechanism, and even as a (oh no-not this word) world citizen grossed out by the fact that people would rather throw their bag of trash on the ground rather than walk the extra 50 feet to a dumpster. But its beyond a lack of personal agency, these people are living in a state which does not provide the necessary means to deal with trash. Azerbaijan has a desire to become a high income tourist destination, a Switzerland of the Caucuses. If it ever hopes to attract serious Western tourist money it will have to clean its image up first. And this time, I'm not speaking in a metaphorical sense.