Earlier, in winter, I was struggling with the idea of friendship in Azerbaijan. I had definitely made some great friends amongst the Americans here but felt as if there was this invisible wall between me and Azeris. These friendships always seemed a little distant, there was always this feeling that whenever I was socializing with Azeri friends there was a little bit of Peace Corps work going on.
And then, after feeling frustrated that I hadn't yet made any true friends amongst Azeris, I suddenly came to an 'Aha' moment; this wall was entirely of my own creation. I remember laughingly telling myself that, like it or not, so and so people are my friends. Real friends, not some sort of half way there, cross-cultural image of a friend. I just needed to deal with the fact that I actually have some friends in Azerbaijan.
It was a weird thing to realize, it should be so easy to recognize the people you consider friends. But in Peace Corps, so much of my everyday speaking, working, and living is tinged with an element of work, even if just providing a worthwhile representation of America. By constantly looking at people as employees, colleagues, or students, even if only slightly, I was unfairly preventing them from just being a person wanted to be around.
This was a bit ethnocentric, a bit too much of a 'what I can benevolently grant to this unfortunate culture' storyline going on here, and I'm glad I came to this sudden, if obvious, insight. There is a really good lesson for me here: to determine a friendship based on the person to person interaction rather than whether the context of the friendship is familiar to me. Yeah, maybe we don't go out to concerts and drink beer together, but that doesn't mean the friendship is any less real, its just simply in different locations with different activities.
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