Family Away From Family

We're 'jumping for joy' that we got to be together

Last week seemed was filled with the monotony of making plans and waiting, this week was filled with those events that heralded the end of service.  I guested on Monday and Thursday with families who have welcomed us Americans into their lives and hearts and I benefited from a couple days off from school due to an early Gurban Bayram, a Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son in loyalty to God.

But what made this week significant was our final North Finger get together, the first event celebrating COS that I have been looking forward to for months.  I feel incredible lucky to be placed in the site I was placed for a variety of reasons; wonderful counterparts, a great school, a (relatively) progressive city.  But the largest reason was due to the other Americans that were placed here with me.

We had a large number of PCVs from my class of volunteers come up here, and the eleven of us (plus 2 more AZ9s) have really become quite a family.  Whereas many other areas of Azerbaijan will find volunteers in petty drama or getting together blackout drinking fests, the North Finger crew has established a reputation for being totally awesome because we all simply like each other.

We've celebrated our holidays together, hosting massive Christmas feasts and 4th of July celebrations.  We planned our camps together and played each other's baseball teams.  We've held potlucks and even have gotten together every Sunday to do yoga together.  Our area was extremely close with one another and really exemplified what it is like to have a family away from family.

The North Finger is isolated from the rest of the country, due to the Greater Caucuses, we have to go through Baku to go anywhere else, which means we're always 2 hours further away.  But we really made a community for ourselves here.  I always felt a twinge of pride when I would hear from other volunteers how envious they were of us in the North Finger.  We didn't just hang out together, we really really liked hanging out with each other.

So this past Saturday we began to say our goodbyes.  We had one last massive pot-luck featuring a beautiful Azerbaijani-flag colored red velvet cake.  Joey and Hillary from nearby Guba planned a hilarious version of the Newlywed game, where we were paired up with our site-spouses.  Lannea handed out a mix cd that was compiled by each of us choosing a track.  It may sound a little dorky, but its pretty typical of the North Finger and exactly why I loved living here so so much.

On Sunday, we all went down to the stadium to play the last game of baseball against the Khachmaz Maximum, this time with amazing shirts provided by Kelsey's sorority.  The Americans got creamed, and everyone was impressed with how much the Khachmaz Maximum had improved.  Me? I was just so happy that I had so many friends nearby willing to field a team.

Glendene, Lannea, and Kelsey; Michael, Corina, Hillary and Joey; Mercedes, Dai, JM, Kiersten, and Saneou-my service was made so much better by your involvement in it.

2 Years of Posts, Part 3: Serving Oneself While Serving Others

You really have to choose your own path for service.

This is the third installment of my reflection of two years of posts, check out my first reflection HERE and the second one HERE.

Sometimes Service Means Sleeping In, posted October 30th 2011

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.

During my two years of Peace Corps Service, I've had two big 'ah-ha'  moments regarding the nature of this 2 year service commitment.  The first one, lucky for me, was during Pre Service Training, when a volunteer shared her rule that she would only work as much as her community member were was willing to.

Her perspective was that we are here to supplement what can be done, and if we do something by ourselves, without any community member involvement, there would be no lasting benefit.  There must be effort from participating community members, whether through learning or executing other aspects of the project, in every project

This was a blessing to hear early on in service and it is this that really focused me on doing projects that had a sustainable component to it rather than a simple one-off event.  My second 'ah-ha' moment is the other side of the first lesson's coin when I realized, on a cold October morning, that the idea of 'my service' was actually speaking to an ownership of my entire experience here.

More than just choosing what I was interested in and avoiding blindly doing what others told me to do, 'my service' meant that I was the ultimate authority on what needed to be done.  'My service' was my own and controlled and grown and fed by me, and it would be me who determined what was right or necessary or most important each day of my service.  

It wasn't 'bad service' to take an extra day off on the last day of an illness, nor was it 'bad service' to decline a guesting invitation in favor of a skype date with America.  At various times over these two years these two decisions were made and it would have benefited no one; not me, not my friends, not my community, if I had guilted myself into choosing another route.

This perspective has also helped me understand volunteerism in a different way.  Often volunteerism conjures up settings of disaster areas, refugee camps, or soup kitchens.  These are areas where service is needing and thankfully there are many awesome people doing many amazing things here.

But for me personally, well, I don't get excited about that form of service.  I want to continue volunteering once I am settled in America again, but I want to volunteer in settings like art museums, libraries, and radio stations.  Service is also needed here and it is here where I know I will be most satisfied by 'my service' and thus do my best work.

Waiting to Prepare

Before you can build it, you've got to have all the important tools and pieces.

The weeks continue on.  I'm acutely aware of the fact that most of my emails probably come off as redundant.  Similar to the 'its so cold' broken record in January and February there really is very little happening now, other than waiting to prepare to leave Azerbaijan.

And that's the rub.  I'm four weeks out, but still not near enough to prepare to leave Azerbaijan; its just a matter of waiting, waiting for only two remaining weeks or ten remaining days before beginning the process of actually packing up.  Though there is enough desire to go home to fill an entire year, there really isn't more than a week's worth of work to do in order to be fully ready to leave the country.

Admittedly, this is only true from an extremely selfish perspective-there is still a lot of guesting to do.  Its especially important to do these last few guestings before a PCV leaves because, no matter what you've done in your service, if you fail to say goodbye appropriate your two years of work vanish and your simple thought of as rude.  But its not too much of a hassle, usually its with good food and established friends.

So these waiting weeks have seen a lot of guesting being scheduled, to make sure i hit everyone.  To Lannea's counterpart's house, to my methodologist's, to a welcoming family we've had contact with.  Final dinners with fellow volunteers, and time schedule in Baku to catch up with friends who have moved to the capital.  There's actually a lot to do in the next four weeks.

It feels good to get rid of a shirt that never truly got clean enough from hand washing or the shoes that have multiple holes in them.  It doesn't feel as good to say goodbye to the Azeri who provided the space for my first conversation club or my friend only a few months before his wedding.  And though it doesn't feel as cathartic, it is certainly more important.

2 Years of Posts, Part 2: Sometimes The World Should Be Black And White

This is the 'Hard Questions' Seat

Reflecting on two years of writing in Azerbaijan continues with a post from the early summer of 2011.  It related the story of a fight my sitemate Glendene got into with a person who was assaulting one of the gypsy children that beg in Khachmaz.

Hard Questions, posted June 8th 2011

This event slapped me in the face with the big difference between saying and doing and the really messy grey in between. I'm a pacifist but can I recognize, and do I have the courage to rise above, the line that separates this from compliance. I consider myself a cultural relativist but I certainly wouldn't want to become a nihilist through laziness of thought and action.

I vividly remember this day and how extreme every one was feeling.  I still laugh at how cluelessly I ambled into the restaurant within 5 minutes of this happening and was nearly pounced on in the effort to relate what had just happened.

More than an observation about Azerbaijan, this was an observation about myself: Could I depend upon myself to do the right thing if it didn't immediately affect me?  I've never really encountered a situation like that before; I'd like to think that when the time comes I will.

Leaving With A Legacy

Just a quick picture before we go

Well, its over.  Service might as well be finished because I can now check off the most significant project I've worked on during my two years here.  Kelly and my Teacher Training Project completed the last training, we've held a meeting with those who may be taking it further, and we're writing up the final report tomorrow.  No more workshops, no more posing with teachers hold certificates, no more receipts to fill out for reimbursement.

This was our big project, our 'tent pole' project as we'd call it.  This was the project of our Peace Corps service (or at least of mine).  Building upon the previous training project we had done, we delivered workshops that trained teachers in Azerbaijan to deliver their own trainings to teachers in their own schools.  Instead of Kelly and I spending our time traveling all over Azerbaijan, we equipped the best teachers throughout the country to hold their own trainings.

I'll admit, it was a gamble.  On paper it sounds good.  'Sustainability,' 'job development,' 'train the trainer'-these are pretty attractive phrases to use in grants.  However, actually getting results in a foreign culture is a completely different matter.  But, results are in and they're pretty good.  From our first two workshops, ten training sessions were held, reaching over 200 teachers.  From the remaining three trainings (which all occurred in the last week), we expect another 8 trainings to be held from those, only increasing the reach of this project.

I've been told that one's legacy doesn't refer as much to what one did, but by what is still being done after one has left.  The motivation for this grant was that Kelly and I wanted to get this information out to teachers in a way that didn't depend on Americans.  Sustainability would only come if Azerbaijanis were responsible for their own development.  I'm really excited to be leaving this project in the shape its in.  Our contribution may be over, but the project is only just beginning.

2 Years of Posts, Part 1: A Love/Hate Relationship

I only have a month left in my service, which means I've been in country for over two years.  And in those two years, I've written 239 blog posts.  Thats a lot of writing about one's service in country.

I've been looking back over what I've written as I look for some closure to a two year chapter of life.  There's some pretty bad writing in there, but there's also some pretty good posts as well.  As I wrap up my two years, I thought it would be fun to post selections from some of my favorite posts written and give a little commentary on them now that I have a year or so of perspective.  I've picked 5 posts and I'll post one a week.

A is for Azerbaijan, B is for Baseball

A is for Azerbaijan, B is for Baseball, posted June 9th, 2011

We approached the field like every sports movie ever made featuring a rag-tag group of kids. And just like every first game played in those movies, we got slaughtered. I mentioned that our team only had about half the rules down. Baseball is an incredibly complicated game and our team just had begun to understand where shortstop stands and which base they'll throw to; we had to save concepts like tagging the base after a fly out or force outs for game two preparation.

In this post I described the very first tournament (and game) for the Khachmaz Maximum.  Baseball was definitely a project I was roped into.  But as time passed I found myself enjoying it more and more.  As a teacher it was rare for me to interact with children in a fun way; a teacher is not played with, a teacher is respected.

Throughout my service I would oscillate between loving and hating baseball.  I knew that I 'enjoyed' it, but it was also a ceaseless pain.  Baseball was the equivalent of a toddler, of course you love it-but that doesn't stop you from wanting to throttle it.  Curiously, my love for baseball depended on how it fit into my day, the more time I had to dread practice the more it annoyed me.  Once practice was switched to 9:30 in the morning, I loved it.

Despite my feelings of love or hate in service, after service I'll remember baseball fondly.  Its an activity that will be easy to talk about with Americans.  What could sound more 'Peace Corps' than teaching kids to play baseball?  Just this week, we received team shirts from Kelsey's sorority; real baseball shirts with Khachmaz Maximum emblazoned on the front, they look amazing and will be an amazing souvenir to take home with me.