The Funeral:
I was invited to attend the funeral of the husband of my counterpart’s friend earlier this week.

When someone dies Azeri men erect a mourning tent (for men only) outside the home. The tent covers the width of the street and the inside is obstructed from view by carpets and/or tarps. Being a woman, I have never been or seen the inside of one of these tents, though I sometimes hear the talk or chants of the men inside.

Unlike in the states, you can wear any color to a funeral except for red (or as my counterpart said, you can wear red, but people will talk about you). There is no body to view (at least I didn’t see one) and the ceremony is always held in the relative’s home. After the initial period of mourning, they return to mourn 40 days and then a year after the death. I have not yet experienced these later ceremonies.

Sensitive now to the fact that events such as “guesting” and weddings can take upwards of 5 hours or more, and it being evening, I was careful to tell my counterpart that I would like to be home at 9 p.m., my new bedtime. She laughed and said, “No, we will only be 10 minutes”.

She explained that the “Molla”, the leader of the ceremony speaks at intervals and at the end of the interval she says, “Fatihə” and you are able to leave. If you don’t leave at this time, you must stay until the next interval. She said we would only be staying for one interval.

She went on to explain that most funeral festivities occur in the morning, when all of the crying is done. This is because it is “unlucky” to cry in the evening. Therefore, by the time we arrived most people were dried out and returning home.

I was lead into the house and up the stairs into a small, warm room where about 15 women, mostly middle-aged and older, heads covered, sat legs out (legs and feet covered with sheets, you cannot show your feet) or legs and feet tucked under them on the floor. I took my seat near my counterpart and near the door (the room was full). Sevda quietly whispered to me who the “” was and almost immediately the chanting began. I don’t know what they were saying, but it sounded beautiful. The women began slowly to tap their right legs with their hands and chant along.

After feeling down for the past week, this experience, ironically a funeral, helped to lift my spirits and gave me perspective into my experience in the Peace Corps. As I sat there becoming exceedingly entranced by the chanting, warmth and persistent rising pain in my legs and knees (it’s difficult for me to sit on the floor because of my hip), I realized how unique an experience being in the Peace Corps really is.

True to her word, about 10 minutes later Sevda and I rose, said our goodbyes and walked back to my house.

Many people travel to and through exotic places. They see the sites you must see, they bargain with the locals and at the end of a week or two they return feeling like they’ve “been there”. I never before realized how untrue it is.

This was highlighted a few weeks ago while staying at a hostel in Baku. We met some English travelers who were passing through as the end of an Eastern European holiday. They were surprised that Peace Corps was in Azerbaijan because Baku, though not as impressive a place as Paris or London, is developing very quickly and is pretty comfortable.

As we departed a fellow PCV said to me, “Can you imagine coming to Azerbaijan and only seeing Baku; returning thinking that Baku reflected the country?” Because the truth is Baku, though very much Azeri, does not accurately reflect the state of this nation. You have to go to the regions, meet the local people, not the ex-pats or oil tycoons, to really get an idea about the people and the land. Even two years is not enough.

And we are only just beginning to get a taste of this. I can’t imagine another circumstance in which an individual who is not a doctor, anthropologist or of a similar profession could get to know a country in the same way as in the Peace Corps. And even then, foreigners very rarely live at the “local level” or stay months with host families, perhaps because both are really hard and require the person to be at least a little bit crazy.

I remember a professor in my introductory anthropology course in college saying, “If you want to know about a culture, get yourself invited to a wedding, funeral or birthday party, that’s where the culture is.” And though I would have never imagined it at the time, here I am, almost a decade later, more than 6000 miles away from my home, sitting on the living room floor of a house in mourning, but not as an anthropologist, as a Peace Corps volunteer.