How Old Are You Again?

I've always known I didn't look particularly old, but I've never thought that I looked especially young.  Obviously this can change a bit-I look younger clean shaven than when I'm sporting my beard; in college I looked much younger with shorter hair than longer.  But never in the US did I encounter the type of abject shock over my age that I get here on a weekly basis.

For example, my softball team didn't know how to take it when they learned I was 28.  Most of them just had mouth's agape, but some insisted I misspoke and meant to say 18 instead of 28 or 'iki' (two) instead of 'sekkiz' (eight).  Some even tried to bargain with me on the number asking for me to shave just a couple years off the age.

Or, in my high school some of the 11th formers have gotten a little casual with me, even going so far to slap me on the back.  This is shockingly inappropriate in an Azeri school situation and I was able to deal with it but it wasn't enough for my counterpart who railed against the class a few days later.  They were incredulous over the fact I was a teacher and insisted they meant no disrespect, they just wanted to hang out with the exchange student from America.

Worse still from camp this summer.  Another volunteer and I were speaking with one of the mothers of a camper.  She casually asked if I were the volunteer's son.  After getting over her shock and suppressing a throat grabbing instinct she was able to take a little relish in the mother's speechlessness of being informed that I was actually older than her.

I don't know why this culture especially finds me so young, but some of these instances so outrageously misplace my age that it can't be anything but amusing.

Sometimes Service Means Sleeping In

A couple posts ago I mentioned how I was sick.  It turns out I was really sick and had a stomach virus that kept me in bed for the full week.  I'm not one to get sick often or strongly, so this was a bit of surprise.  In retrospect it was also extremely beneficial to my mental health as it allowed me to reset to square one and put a true pause on all the activities, events, and obligations going on around me.

In the US I would resist putting my life on hold until it was blindingly obvious I needed to take a break; and that break would be true and sincere, me reveling in the fact I was sick and wasn't accountable for anything.  Here though, there are always feelings of guilt that accompany removing yourself.  I'm trying to model behaviors and suddenly I'm the one canceling on them.  I worked so hard to get these people to come to a club or meeting and now I'm the one ditching out.  I work against every negative stereotype you can think of, as it apparently relates to Americans here, and with one uncontrollable illness I vindicate half the community' private assumptions.  Yes these are a little extreme but no one thinks too clearly in fever dreams.

So around Thursday I texted my friend Jenny to get her perspective on my situation.  I was feeling a bit better but not 100% and certainly not to a point of proactively wanting to place myself in a school of Azeri children.  Basically, I needed a bit of PCV to PCV confirmation that a) I am not a bad volunteer and b) hell yeah stay in bed.  Jenny certainly said both of those things (I mean, thats the whole reason I texted her) but she also chided me to remember that this is my service, not theirs.

I had heard this type of reminder from volunteers before.   Each time I related to it from a perspective of accomplishment and activity, I can make this service what I want it to be.  My service doesn't just have to be about teaching kids it can also be about teaching adults.  I can move beyond the school and into the ministry.  These were really helpful thoughts to have; it expanded my view of what Peace Corps service could be like and helped me craft a goal of service based around my desires and thoughts as opposed to Peace Corps Azerbaijan's job description.

But this time the idea of this being my service resonated on a different level, on a self-interested level.  I am here in Azerbaijan to help people and to encourage skills transfer so they can help themselves, but the service I do is mine.  This is something I have undertaken to accomplish and share, not a promise for delivered results or a contract of commitment between me and my community.

Service, in any context, is always so 'other' focused, that to drop this focus for a moment can feel selfish and hypocritical, but service, to distinguish itself from slavery or employment, must contain personal joy and commitment in it.  Otherwise, it would be more akin to self-indentured servitude.  Ideally the results of my service will be owned by my community, but the service itself, well that's mine and, when it comes down to the final moments, it is controlled by me.  And if I see that a change needs to take place in it to make me feel happier, healthier, or more productive, then that is a choice I have the privilege to make.

This doesn't mean I plan on running contrarian to everything in my school, just that it helps me to realize that when it comes to situations of balancing my health and happiness against feelings of obligation and guilt, I have luxury to allow health and happiness to always win.  For some people this means leaving their community and returning to their US life.  My community is lucky enough that, for me, it only meant staying in bed an extra day or two.

Hip-Hop From The Land of Fire: H.O.S.T. - Mǝni Gaytar

Monday my internet stopped working (until today) which gave me no opportunity to hunt up tracks on the artist that I was planning on checking out.  So, in an effort to just get a track up this week, I'm going to post one of my favorite H.O.S.T. tracks, Mǝni Gaytar.  It means 'Give myself back,' but if you take the secondary meaning of the verb you get the hilarious title 'Beat me off'.  Anyways, it doesn't mean that and the track is good.

H.O.S.T. - Mǝni Gaytar ('Give Myself Back')

 Meni Qaytar by joshehr

Finally-Nothing to Do

This month has seen two teacher trainings, two softball tournaments, and one site visit, which basically means that for all of October there hasn't been a single weekend I've had off.  The exhausting week spent teaching is never recovered from on the weekends.  And, even though all of these are things I enjoy, compressing them into the span of one month was unnecessary and destructive.

So, right now I'm sitting in my bed, where I've spent the majority of the past 24 hours, wrapped in warm pajama pants and listening to nice relaxing music.  I'm sick and have canceled everything in my life for the next 2 days and hope  it won't extend much beyond that.  For anyone wondering, having the flu in a foreign country is about as good as having it anywhere else, which is not very.

Admittedly I'm not too surprised by it, in the month of October life has been a very busy and I'm sure that this is my body's way of taking over and declaring an emergency state of rest.  I remember how I would get over particularly long stretches of work at Apple and this month has been longer than any of those.  But the main difference with this is that its easier to convince yourself that you have, in fact, been taking breaks when you've really been working all the time.

Peace Corps really is a 24/7 job and you have to fight to keep yourself from being overtaxed.  Especially with TEFL volunteers it can be easy to stretch yourself; in order to stay motivated in the classroom, I involve myself in other activities I am actually internally motivated to work on. It often happens that the work we must do (teaching in the classrooms) and the work we are passionate about (activities outside of the classrooms) end up taking up all of our time.  And while its good to keep busy, its better to stay healthy.  So I'm excited for November, which I'm looking forward to as a much more relaxed pace.

Me And My Bed Need Some Alone Time

Its been a long time (relatively) since I've actually written something here, one of my longest stretches.  Currently on my lengthy post-it note to-do list there's a line item that says 'write something (anything)'.  Simply overcoming the inertia of not writing is something worth crossing off.

In the past two weeks I've continued on at school.  There's no mistaking the fact that school is work.  Some of my classes are outstanding, some are brutal, but it is just the reason that justifies me being here.  Its the other things, like softball tournaments, teacher trainings, new volunteer site visits, etc that make life exhausting.

Luckily its not exhausting in a bad way-everything happening is good and I'm happy about what I'm doing, but its exhausting nonetheless.  I fall into bed earlier and earlier and snooze later and later.  I keep thinking the next weekend will be easier, but the next weekend is a teacher training in Goychay, or our last Softball Tournament, or Halloween Party.  But the weekend after that…I am so sleeping in.

Hip-Hop from the Land of Fire: AiD ft. Timon - Wussup

This installment of Hip-Hop from the Land of Fire features AiD, of the H.O.S.T. family and Timon, who is an Azeri rapper in France.  This was released a bit earlier this year.

AiD ft. Timon - Wussup (meaning, surprise surprise, What's up)
 AiD ft. Timon - Wussup by joshehr

Hip-Hop from the Land of Fire: Caspian Dreamers - Baku State of Mind

Alright, these aren't Azeri rappers, but they are in Azerbaijan and they are rapping.  This awesome vid was made by two current PCVs giving a rapid fire tour of Azerbaijan's capital, Baku.  Both the lyrics and their manic footage is pretty impressive and it I think you'll enjoy it.

Caspian Dreamers - Baku State of Mind

Why Earthquakes Don't Work

New post up at Teaching for Leaders on the benefits of gradual learning.  Check it out.

Teaching for Leaders - Why Earthquakes Don't Work

Ways to Avoid Strangling A Child

I woke up on Sunday expecting one of the worst days of service.  Not worst in a my plumbing broke and landlady and neighbors beneath are yelling at me sort of way.  Or worst in a cold and dark February morning, making my 45 minute walk to school through a city wide 3" semi-frozen puddle sort of way.  No, this was the sort of worst that involves 10 teenage boys, a cramped, uncomfortable minibus with an unnecessarily loud stereo, and 9 hours of driving in one day to play three hours of baseball.

Waking up at 5am, my adrenaline started to dip right around the time we walked out the door to catch our 6am hired bus.  Normally when people wake up super early to travel there is a hope of passing out once you've settled into your seat.  Normally people aren't sitting for 5 hours on a minibus, which have been meticulously designed to avoid any sort of lower back support.

But the rewards of escape were too much to avoid.  I willed myself to ignore the cross conversation, shouted in each ear by two coaches enough concerned about carsickness to ask me to take the middle, but not enough to nurse themselves in any sort of silent discomfort.  Between the a solid world of consciousness and a liquid world of dreamland bliss, my sleep was an unfilling jello.

Azeris like their music loud, because its not worth listening to unless it causes damage to your ears.  The shouted conversations weren't just over the roar of the road, but over the piercing Turkish techno, Azeri mugam, and traditional folk songs.  Soon, cheers erupted from the children.  We learned this was due to the driver having one of their favorite songs to shout at the top of their lungs.  And we learned that it was a favorite drinking song, celebrating being blackout drunk.  Towards the end of the trip we also learned the chorus as the song was cumulatively played 10% of our travel time.  For the last the couple hours I ignored all questions directed towards me, silently fantasizing about ways to bring about an end to this that would involve flames, and crying, and broken radios.

And we finally got to Kurdimir.  And despite my best effort my mood wasn't able to stay sour standing in the luxury of full posture in the sunshine.  Friends showed the appropriate amount of incredulousness that we actually drove all the way from Khachmaz.  And our kids magically transformed from maniacs to really fun kids, simply by removing the presence of a cramped van.

And they played well.  Our catcher finally had his first out at home plate, and our pitcher's glove hand had a painful badge of honor from two insane line drives he caught.  Consistently our infield would make double plays and our outfield finally started using their cutoff man, allowing us to make more outs and give less bases due to errors.  I never thought I'd see the day where when the Khachmaz Maximum (their chosen name) would field better than hit, but they did.  We won a couple games in the tournament and for the game we did lose, we never had to invoke the mercy rule to end an inning.  I was really proud of them.

And I was a little wiser for the road.  After the first two spins of Hallana Hallana, I laid down the rule: only once an hour.  When I busted out Sonic Racing on the iPad and iPod Touch it bought us an hour of almost pure silence.  By the time we entered into Xachmaz region, we well all in a pretty good mood and shouting along to Hallana Hallana at the top of our lungs.

For good volunteers, these are the days that make service worth it.  For normal volunteers, these are the days that remind us how necessary it is for there to be a law against strangling children.  For me it was both.

Hip-Hop from the Land of Fire: Klana Plan - Yelle Yelle

Next up in my weekly Azeri Rap series is da Clan with the Plan.  No, not Wu-Tang (for that you'll have to look to H.O.S.T.), Klana Plan.

Klana Plana - Yelle Yelle (which translates roughly to an mc telling the audience 'Get Up! Get Up!')

 Klana Plan - Yelle Yelle by joshehr

Two Strategies to Always Come Out Victorious

There are two things I've always found comfort in, and they work in tandem with one another.  One is my confidence in my own capacity, whether its school, work, or, as it is, starting life in a new country.  No matter how difficult the class or job or adjustment I'm experiencing, I know I'm not going to simply fail.  I'll admit, there's a bit of hubris here, but I've never thought I couldn't do at least a C- job on something.  I may have no clue or even know what I'm doing, but I'm pretty sure I can eventually work it out.

The second thing is that the days keep moving, whether I like it or not.  Its a bit fatalist, but when I'm stressed its comforting to know that whatever thing it is I'm so dreading will eventually pass, whether I want it to or not.  And when combined with the above mentality it means that not only will I eventually find myself on the days after the stressor, but I'll also probably also have successfully navigated my way through it.

Self-confidence and knowledge that tomorrow comes, whether you like it or not.  Two really useful perspectives to view difficult times through.

How to become an expert in 4 days

For those who are especially fascinated by my posts, you may have found yourself going through inexplicable withdrawal symptoms last week.  I'll save you the trouble of pondering why: it was because I didn't write.  Sorry, it won't happen again (note: it will happen again).

The reason for this is I was welcoming the new trainees to Azerbaijan.  Peace Corps looked at my experience and realized that I would be a perfect person to hold welcome signs, teach how to work Azerbaijani air-conditioners, and give detailed presentations on the nuances of the squat toilet.  So I, and three other volunteers, headed down to Baku last weekend to help bleary eyed Americans from the airport to their temporary hotel home, before departing for their first home family.

Welcome Week is great and helping with it is highly sought after amongst volunteers.  You're the first to scope out the trainees and get to be the incredibly cool people who have magically survived a first year in this strange and scary new world.  They don't yet know that your language isn't actually that great and they certainly haven't yet heard your primal scream of frustration during your service.  You're just some happy dude who isn't jetlagged and makes good conversation.  Thus, you're the person they want to talk to most.

I remember being in awe of our Welcome Week members.  They were so casual about the fact that they were living in this country that was so foreign and dirty and loud.  It was validation that through all the bs we might be going through, it was feasible that we could one day approach normalcy.  And now, here I am giving the ins and out of alcohol etiquette and community development work as if I have all the answers.  Which to them, of course, I do.  I guess this is the true path to becoming an expert; its not about achieving a certain level of experience, rather its finding a group of people with a certain lack of experience.  In four days I was transformed from typical volunteer to super, knowledgable, volunteer-god.

But now I'm back at site and back to status as a normal moderately knowledgable volunteer.  Once school began things went a little quiet, the sound of students returning to their studies.  There was one big highlight though, we had our first Teacher Training in Khachmaz and it was a huge success.  30 teachers showed up and we used a new lesson plan that seemed to be very well received by teachers.  At the end of the training we asked what techniques they planned on using and teachers named numerous different activities we demoed.  Inshallah this will serve as a model for future trainings we'll be putting together in Khachmaz.