October 2-11
I’ve been a month at site and what do I have to show for it? Quite a lot, I think. I’ve met many people over the past month and I now have two conversation clubs in full swing. Each club meets twice a week for one hour. I also decided to create a third club for “everyone else” which will meet once a week. This means that 5 days a week I have conversation clubs. The third club solves my previous problem of having to say no to so many. However, people still insist they should be in the other clubs (which are for people who already know English and theoretically should be 15-24 year olds, though somehow older ones snuck in). I don’t have a plan for the third club yet, I don’t plan the way I used to, but I’m not too worried about it.

I’m now spending time in two centers and am going to try to add a third in the near future. The more exposure the better. Right now is all about making myself seen. This is not really a problem as I am pretty conspicuous (though my father told me the other day I looked Russian). Interesting.

I’m still waiting to feel the “Azeri timeframe” Supposedly Azeri’s move slower and spend most of their time taking it easy. Like many things I’ve “heard” I am waiting to see it. My counterpart works longer and harder than anyone I’ve met. And I’m always running from one place to another. Though I don’t have a typical “job” I’m always busy.

I’ve barely had a chance to study my Azeri and I’ve had some complications with my tutor. She’s an Azerbaijani language teacher who speaks no English. It makes clarification nearly impossible. After the first lesson I went home and looked up all the words and realized that she was teaching me about first person, second person, etc. I actually know all of these things, so I was pretty disappointed. The same thing happened again with tenses. I showed my counterpart the lessons she was giving me and she said that the stuff she was teaching me was hard for Azeri’s to understand. At least then I didn’t feel so stupid (did I mention that she laughs at me when I don’t understand something???) It’s pretty horrifying, but hopefully soon it will be fixed.

There have been some interesting political issues with the town as well. As no foreigners, especially American’s, live here the powers that be don’t quite know what to do with us. I met the police chief and he was like, “what am I supposed to do?” so he gave me his phone number and then had to call someone to see what I needed to do next. The same thing happened with the town executive body (excom). He called a meeting with my sitemate and I to tell us that his door was open and how much he loved America and the work we were doing, etc. etc. Good news for me, I suppose.

This morning my counterpart told me that the excom came to the library to say that perhaps I didn’t like the toilet (I’ve never actually seen this toilet, I didn’t know the library had one – I’ve been using the one next door – which is pretty bad. My counterpart said that ours was too bad to show me - yikes!) He is now issuing a repair. My counterpart shook my hand and thanked me for coming to her center. Now to me, this is truly outrageous and illustrates…I don’t even know what it illustrates. I don’t know whether to be elated or outraged. Later that day she said he issued repairs for all of the local libraries (I don’t think this had anything to do with me). My status here is so confusing…

The good news is that perhaps in the future I won’t have to deal with (this particular) humiliation every day; using someone else’s bathroom listening to their laughter because it serves me right to drink so much water (and I don’t drink nearly enough water).
And of course everyone else will have the opportunity to appreciate this as well.

Well, they do say that they want the Peace Corps Volunteers to leave behind something sustainable…