tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20932307123072915702024-03-13T16:51:34.187-07:00Robbins's MuseNews concerning Joel's Peace Corps experiences.
The contents of this Website do not reflect any position or policy of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.Joel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2093230712307291570.post-91731212336443096402009-05-26T08:03:00.001-07:002009-05-26T08:03:22.872-07:00The Azerbaijani Village: Indiana in the 1950’s<br />By Joel Robbins<br /><br />Two small cars can hardly pass on a crooked, narrow Azerbaijani village cobblestone or mud street. Walls extend right to the roads. Almost every property is surrounded by a stone or a solid metal barrier. Once in a while it’s just a wire fence. Drivers have to dodge cows, goats, sheep, mules, water buffalo, walkers and donkey carts. Most of Azerbaijan, where I am serving in the Peace Corps, is open range, so there are hundreds of thousands of shepherds outside all day tending their herds and flocks wherever there is grass, not only in rangeland, but also along village and town lanes and streets.<br />When I visit a student or friend in a village, I usually knock on the solid steel double gate, then open the small door in the gate, duck and step up and enter a garden. These doors are only a little over 5 feet high and often have a one-foot threshold. Visitors may have to scrape some of nature’s old-style fertilizer off their heels before entering the yard.<br />The Real Peace Corps<br />The Peace Corps Volunteers in Sheki, where I live and work, are regularly teased by the one PCV in a village near town. Joe says, “Sheki’s not the real Peace Corps. You ought to live in the village.”<br />We don’t necessarily agree with his assessment, because there’s not one “real” Peace Corps experience. There is, though, the long-held belief from 1960s PC stories that every PCV lives in a grass hut, eats beans, goat meat and rice twice a day, never washes, sleeps on a mat on a dirt floor, and is stationed in an African nation.<br />My son Mason had similar conditions during his PC tenure in Haiti eight years ago, and some of that style of living still exists in Peace Corps, but even Joe in the village doesn’t live like that in 2009. Besides, PC is in some 120 countries, from Eastern Europe to Guatemala. These emerging countries may lack the luxuries we are used to, but they are hardly all grass-hut and beans-and-rice nations.<br />Ayten’s Village Home<br />The reason I am writing about the village is that today only one college girl showed up for my conversation club, so I asked Ayten to practice speaking by telling me in her broken English about her home. She rents a shared room with another village girl, Haddiye from Oxud Kendi, in Sheki while she is enrolled in college, but she lives in a village called Ashaga Goynuk. The name means lower blue-something, but the something (nuk, pronounced nooch) has been lost over time.<br />Ayten (half moon) is 20. All her front upper teeth are gold. Azeris drink tea all day long, usually through lumps of sugar clamped between their teeth. You normally can’t drink water out of any faucet in the country, so boiled water poured over shredded tea leaves is the Azerbaijan method of hydrating without getting sever diarrhea. The sugar means that many Azerbaijanis past 15 have caps on most of their teeth. There is nothing sophisticated about Ayten, like there is about the girls from the rayon (region) centers. I like that as a change.<br />Her sister is Maral, 15, and her brother Vusal is 19 and away on his mandatory 1-year military service. Her father, Mohlud, is 49, and her mother, Hokuma, is 35. You can do the math.<br />She describes her village home as a big, five-room house. It has a bathroom (no shower or toilet), a guest room (living room), bedroom (where they all sleep), a kitchen (where they also eat) and a corridor (a long, enclosed porch-like hall). The corridors of Sheki Rayon houses have lots of windows so the rooms mentioned above can be illuminated through windows facing the corridor. Electricity is not always dependable for lighting.<br />Garden or Orchard?<br />Azerbaijanis call their yards gardens, but we would more likely call sections of the yards orchards. Ayten bragged that one part of the family garden had pear, fig (black and white), cherry (gilas and albali), alcha, quince, apple, yellow cornel, white and red pomegranate and eight mulberry trees, white and black. There are always grape vines in Azerbaijani yards, often providing shade over a sitting bower, and the orchard has two hazelnut trees and two qoz (other nut) trees.<br />Her dad plants the trees and her mother tends the garden. I didn’t bother writing a list of vegetables their garden contains, but I remember peas, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, black carrots (really more purplish), onions, tomatoes (which she first mispronounced as pomatoes), peppers, dill, parsley, melons and eggplant.<br />A Taste of Farm Life<br />Also in the walled-in garden is an outhouse (squat toilet), a chicken coop, a small barn with haymow under a gable roof, and a garage for the green motorcycle with sidecar. They don’t own a car. Few villagers own cars. There is also a tendir in the yard. A tendir is an enormous round brick oven for baking bread. A fire is built in the middle, the dough is prepared sticky, then it is slapped onto the inside of the oven wall to bake. The yard also has an old house in it that is small and no longer used.<br />They own one bull and two cows (for milk), two calves, ten hens, one rooster and a dog named Rex, pronounced reches. The entire walled-in area is about 70 by 90 meters.<br />Ashaga Goynuk (pronounced Aah-shah-ga Joy-nooch) has five food stores, a fruit shop, a clothing store, a computer store, a butcher shop and a furniture store. Food stores tend to be tiny, with a little bit of everything, from needles to noodles and shoe polish to nail polish. Every village has a shadlik saray (wedding palace), but many summer weddings are outside and everyone in the village attends.<br />Stepping Back into Rural Indiana<br />I have not been to Ashaga Goynuk, but I have been to other mountain villages, such as Bash Kungut, Bash Zeyzedt, Illisu and a village outside of Gebela. Ashaga Goynuk sounds typical.<br />Villages have not had natural gas (wood heat only by tiny metal six-siders) since Soviet times, shopping is limited, and culture is found in gatherings in gardens, wedding palaces and chayxanas (tea houses), but chayxanas are only for men. Sheki is a great place to live with its open bazaar for shopping, a few many Azeri and Turkish restaurants, natural gas (although irregular), and other amenities, but I wouldn’t mind living in a village and experiencing the “real” Peace Corps.<br />Actually, the villages remind me of Arcadia, Indiana, where I grew up in the 1950s. Our farm neighbors at that time still had outside toilets, our shower was in the open in our basement, and on our ten acres we had two apple trees, two pear trees and one cherry tree. There was a currant bush and a grapevine. We had chickens, ducks, cats, dogs, a pony, pea foul and plenty of room for sheep. The garden was a half acre of a little of everything—melons, sweet corn, green onions, tomatoes, peas, beans, strawberries and other fresh fruits and vegetables. The eight acres of tillable land sometimes was planted in tomatoes or sweet corn by the local cannery. It was a pretty good life then--a little like an Azerbaijani village today.Joel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2093230712307291570.post-57351112871455683592007-10-18T22:07:00.000-07:002007-10-18T22:11:36.130-07:00OctoberHow Is my Life Different in Azerbaijan<br /><br />Friends and family members say they are fascinated about differences between life in the USA and my life in AZ. For one thing, USA is ABS in AZ. Other things I can think of are:<br /><br />Most Peace Corps volunteers wash their clothes by hand. I did in Sumgait, but in Sheki I have what the PC’s call an R2D2. It is a simple washing machine that is about twice as big as a humidifier. I then rinse and wring out my clothes by hand and hang them on a line to dry.<br /><br />Most home and public toilets are of the pit variety. You have to pay for most toilets that are public. Toilets are seldom inside the house.<br /><br />I’m probably under 190, whereas in American I ranged from about 210 to 240 during the last 15 years. I don’t snack, and when I do it is more often to gain calories than for pleasure. Although I probably walked 800 miles a year at home, I am walking uphill more here, so the walks are more vigorous. Scales are rare as far as I can tell. There is not an obese student at my college of more than a thousand.<br /><br />Friday I met a couple who had been missionaries in Sri Lanka, then joined foreign service and are now in AZ’s American Embassy in Baku for three years. Their 14-year-old daughter goes to an international school there and will go to a boarding school in the Indian Himalayas next year. I meet people who live very different existences than those at home.<br /><br />Speaking of embassies, I have met and shaken hands with two ambassadors to Azerbaijan. One was the American Ambassador at the Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony, and the other was Norway’s Ambassador, who was in Sheki, where I live now, attending two openings of humanitarian projects. That’s not something I would probably ever do in Indiana.<br /><br />I don’t have a car, so I either use public transportation or walk from my room in a house on the side of a mountain to town or school.<br /><br />My food consists of the following:<br />Breakfast: Flat bread, salty goat cheese, butter and tea.<br />Lunch: a mutton or chicken soup with potatoes, garbanzo beans and carrots; dolma (grape leaves or cabbage leaves wrapped around rice and meat); a pasta soup; or a bowl of green beans with a little meat. All meals are served with abundant amounts of bread and tea. Grapes have been in season, so I also have had grapes at some meals.<br />Supper: Whatever I had for lunch.<br /><br />My language skills are still developing, so I use a combination of sign language, Azeri and English. I usually get what I want, but it is difficult to get definitive information. When I ask a question in any language, I repeat it several times. I often get several conflicting answers. Then I must continue to ask until I feel relatively sure about one.<br /><br />For example, there is a movie theater near me. Shows are all at 5 o’clock or so most days. They are Indian (Bollywood), Turkish or Russian. That means they are dubbed or have subtitles. I met some of my students and a teacher counterpart at the theater one night and was told it was in English by one student and Russian by another. Finally I was told it was in Russian but had English subtitles. Continued questioning revealed that it was really in Turkish without subtitles. I bought some popcorn, which I hadn’t been able to get for three weeks--I snacked on popcorn about 4 nights a week in American--and told my students I would see them the next day in class.<br /><br />While I am typing this at 7:25 p.m., the mosque nearest me is broadcasting the last call to prayer of the day. I think there are five a day, and one is about 7 a.m. The voices are beautiful and float across the valley between the mountains that shelter Sheki on three sides.<br /><br />Men don’t look or speak to women on the street unless they are relatives or good friends. Girls and boys don’t walk together. Girls don’t even look at boys. The boys look at the girls, though.<br /><br />I drink five or six mugs or cups of very hot tea a day during meals, during breaks between classes and with friends. I have not had iced tea here, which was something I drank several times a day in the summer at home.<br /><br />I text-message on my Peace Corps cell phone all the time, because I can’t afford to make calls on my 5-dollar-a-day living allowance. My cell is prepay. I have learned to love T9 message writing. Letters and post cards are about a dollar a piece to send home, so I use the Internet and my Blog instead. I can send tons of emails for fifty cents.<br /><br />I have no idea most of the time what is going on in the rest of the world. My family has a satellite disk and it gets BBC World in English, but I don’t watch it very often. While I am eating my family usually has on a Turkish soap opera.<br /><br />I don’t go to church because there aren’t any Christian churches in town, so six Peace Corps Volunteers and I get together for a Christian book club and dinner one night a week at a restaurant.<br /><br />I have no morning classes and my afternoon schedule bounces all over the place. I teach about 16 hours a week and start about 1:20 and end at 6:10 on my longest days. I conduct three conversation clubs for students who want to practice their English but don’t have me as a teacher. Clubs run for one hour once a week now, but might expand to two times a week once I get settled. My earliest club meets at 11:45 in the morning. I also give lessons to my host’s son and daughter, who are in their twenties. I will be getting an Azeri tutor for myself in a week or two.<br /><br />I have also been participating in an Azeri/American softball team. Team is a euphemism for different people showing up on different days on an old stadium field with a softball, bat and gloves. This sporting activity reminds me of when I coached T-Ball in Milford. During one practice I thought my host’s 21-year-old son was going to feed our only softball to one of three cows grazing on the field. The cow seemed more interested in the bright yellow ball than the Azeris. (I just finished supper and another call to prayer is echoing down the valley form a mosque higher up the mountain. It is 9 p.m., so ignore my early comment about calls to prayer.) Getting back to softball, we had to hold up practice for a few minutes one day because a shepherd was herding his flock of sheep across centerfield. Another time an Azeri child grabbed one of the bats and was hitting fly balls with it, only he was using a soccer ball. I went with the “team” to play in a tournament one Sunday and spent 6 hours round trip on a marshrutka getting to Barda and 45 minutes playing softball.<br /><br />It has not rained at my house since I have been here. I think in rained downtown one day. On my preparatory visit several weeks before moving here, there was a cloud burst in Sheki that tore up some of the open rain sewers and eroded streets.<br /><br />The streets by my house are cobblestone and very picturesque. Walking on ithem is almost ankle twisting in my thick-soled Sketchers, but Azeri women walk it in fragile heels with no trouble. The stonework and brickwork all over AZ is interesting and made to last hundreds of years. In the towns where I have visited, houses and yards (orchards) are walled in with solid blocks. They have gates they can open to let their car in, if they own one, and these solid metal gates have a door build into them.<br /><br />Street signs are nonexistent or hard to find. Most Azeri drivers I have been with start out to their destination even when they don’t know where it is. They have no problem stopping and asking directions though. They will stop a half dozen times, because streets aren’t straight and there are many dead ends. A lot of waving and pointing and continued questioning accompanies the direction giving, so I wonder if directions are accurate. I try not to ask directions when two people are present, because you will often receive conflicting info.<br /><br />Being late is a national custom. I have yet to attend any activity—and I have attended over a hundred here—that I can remember that started on time. Even the Peace Corps swearing in ceremony started late. Since being only five minutes early is late to me, I have spent a chunk of time waiting.<br /><br />Not seeing women drive, sitting at outside cafes, drinking alcoholic beverages in publish, buying alcohol and shaking hands with men is difficult to get used to. Women cook at home and serve food, but men cook and serve in restaurants and al fresco cafes.<br /><br />Living in “a fishbowl” is also hard to get used to. I pay for room and board, and hosts feel very responsible for their PC “guests.” So I have to let them know where I am going and when, whether I am eating out, about what time I will be home, etc. The people in the neighborhood know everyone and everything about everyone, including me, immediately. I run into shopkeepers in town that say in Azeri, “You’re a teacher at the teachers’ college.” Teachers I meet in town from one of the 20 or so schools in Sheki will tell me about a lesson I taught in one of my classes. Students have said they love to tell their friends and family members about me. Young neighbor children yell in English, “Hello. What’s your name?” When I walk over to them and say, “Hi. How are you? What’s your name?” they don’t know what to say. Their English skills reached their limit with “Hello. What’s your name?” So I say in Azeri, “Salam aleykim. Nejesen? Senin Adin nadir?” Then I repeat it in English: “Hi. How are you? What’s your name?” I follow that with: “Menim adim Joeldir, ve men Amerikaliyem.” That means: my name is Joel and I am an American. Then if they start speaking in Azeri, I’m the one that has to demonstrate my limited language ability.<br /><br />I write journals everyday, but they are mostly rambling, because I have so many experiences that are unique to me every day that it is hard to organize my thoughts in any other way than chronological. I feel like I’m writing a James Joyce novel full of stream-of-consciousness passages.Joel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2093230712307291570.post-83449718945861623772007-08-22T10:34:00.000-07:002007-08-22T10:35:02.228-07:00Training Update and Site AssignmentSara spoke with Joel last week. Joel said that his training interview went well and he was on track to graduate from training. He also said that he received his site assignment -- Sheki or Seki or Saki. Here is a link to some info:<a href="http://www.world66.com/europe/azerbaijan/saki">http://www.world66.com/europe/azerbaijan/saki</a><br /><br />He sounded very happy about the assignment and other currently serving Peace Corps Volunteers commented on how lucky he was to be assigned to Sheki.<br /><br />MasonJoel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2093230712307291570.post-24317513934347914612007-08-16T10:38:00.000-07:002007-08-22T10:39:28.206-07:00Update from AZWell, I’ve been in training for several weeks now, and I am tired of sessions, meeting, etc. The hardest thing is learning the language. Classes are four hours a day six days a week. The afternoons are spent in culture sessions, washing clothes, eating, answering email, napping, study groups, etc.It has been hot most of the time. We were at the Olympic Center in Guba, but now are in a settlement in Sumgayit, a large city. My house is kind of like an Italian villa, only in town. All properties are completely walled in with orchards in the courtyards. I live up stairs and downstairs my family has a store, which is handy. When I have study group at my place, Rovshan, my host, does a good business in peach, apricot and kola drinks.The five members of my group offer me fruit from their orchard trees. These include fresh figs, apricots, plums and a couple of mystery fruits. All are good. I went to the market and bought a melon that was the color of a pumpkin. My hostess served it for lunch. The story here is that melon and honey eaten together will kill you.Speaking of lunch, food is good. I have had a ton of dishes I’ve never eaten at all. Every meal has tomatoes and cucumbers and flat bread. Meat at meals is scarce, and then it is chicken or mutton. The lamb chops in the al fresco cafes are small but excellent. Dolma is a favorite that means stuffed vegetable, egg plant, tomato or pepper.Transportation is cheap, about 30 cents to go downtown in a marsrutka, kind of minibus, to the open market and department and grocery stores. They are crowed, though. I have a cell phone, laptop, IPod and radio, so I’m not roughing it yet. This weekend I’m heading into the interior to visit a PCV, but again I’m going to a city, so things may not be too different. Most trainees will end up in small towns where amenities are difficult to come by, but I will probably be in a bigger town or small city because I will be working in a college.I like to walk to the beach in the morning to see the sun over the Caspian Sea . Sumgayit is on a large bay, and we can see Baku in the distance. There is a derelict ship stranded on a jetty that’s fun to look at.Language is difficult because of fricatives, umlauts, extra letters in the alphabet and sounds we never make in English. Wish me luck. Mene paltar almaq lazimdir means I clothing to buy need. I am an American is: men amerikaliyam. The be verb is a suffix.I have about three months of language and culture, then a test and then, if I make it, I get sworn in as a PC Volunteer.Although Sumgayit was once a modern city, it has come under disrepair after its independence in 1991 because of losing Russia as a market. It is the fastest growing economy in the world now, so in a decade or so it will be back where it was. It still has lots of oil and gas.Things different:· Chickens in my yard.· Tiny cars except for the Mercedes.· Gold front teeth are a fashion statement for men and women.· No toilet paper. They use a version of the French bide method, either a pitcher of water or a long sink sprayer hose near the toilet. Wash instead of wipe. Probably cleaner but not what I am used to.· Sheep occasionally graze along the side streets· Unmarried girls seldom walk alone. Engage, date then marry. Women dress more modestly. Men are in public places with other men while women are seen more around home, the market or with husbands on the street.· Only men swim in the Caspian where I have seen a beach. I guess in Baku they are more liberal and women can swim.· I have not seen a woman drive.· I have my water boiled and then PC has me run it through a filtering system that looks like a 60-cup coffee urn, spigot and all. Our water out of the faucet is clear, but I talked to a PCV from a town and I guess there is slug in her water.· Drinking is looked down on, and women can’t smoke or drink in public. I don’t see many people smoking at all, but there are cigarette butts everywhere.· There is no regular trash pick up so the streets are littered and there are piles of garbage anywhere they can put it out of the way and kind of out of sight. People just drop litter anywhere, out car windows, out of store fronts, etc.· It is a shame, because this is a beautiful city on a beautiful coastline. They are working on the problem.· Houses are made to last, meaning solid, not hollow, block construction.· Many manhole covers are missing. The holes make interesting obstacles for cars, walkers and marsrutkas. Some are on sidewalks, so walking at night requires knowledge of area or a flashlighg.· All men wear slacks and nice shirts, even if they are carpenters. Dark pants, light shirt, well pressed, etc. no matter what they are doing. No t-shirts, shorts and sneakers on grown man, and very few on children.· Despite that there is TV, people like to be outside, kids play outside, but the Internet cafes have video games, which are drawing some kids inside more.· Most houses do not have A/C.· Most books are in Russian.· Few house markers and street signs.· I have an automatic voltage regular that I plug things into.· All cell phones are prepay, and since I am on a limited PC income, about four dollars a day, not including room and board, I have to text rather than call. Otherwise I will use up all my contours, credits, and not be available to PC staff, trainees and volunteers. Cells are for security. I use money to get to town part of the time, and part of the time I just walk. Can’t spend too much on transportation, then I won’t have money for a soyuq piva, cold beer, or dondurma, ice cream, once in a while.· Took a long hike up a mountain to a castle ruins this past weekend.Thanks for the emails, but I probably won’t be answering all of them. The Internet cafes are cheap, about 20 qipik, 25 cents an hour, but they feel like saunas, the connections are painfully slow, and I have to walk 20 minute one way in the heat to get to a good one. And the net slows as people enter.Sorry about the condition of the journals. Mason put them on by mistake, and they are just random jottings I do during breaks, late at night, etc., so the errors are many. I'll try to rewrite some for public view.Take care and I miss you all.Joel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.com99tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2093230712307291570.post-86392970326895985592007-06-25T16:54:00.001-07:002007-06-25T16:54:56.602-07:00Joel Robbins, 63 and countinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15773582446950432357noreply@blogger.com0