My Journalistic Exploits

I was asked by my high school journalism teacher to write a few articles for the school newspaper about being in the Peace Corps. Being the talkative person that I am, I ended up writing two different articles, two pages each, that were cut down quite a bit to fit in the paper. In high school, I had trouble writing enough for one article every month. Now I write enough to have my own paper weekly. Nevertheless, I figured I would publish these in my blog. Some of the information is redundant to what I have posted previously, but some of it gives a little more of the nitty gritty details that encompass my day to day life here. Enjoy.

SECOND ARTICLE
When considering joining the Peace Corps, a million questions ran through my mind. Most of them centered round life in a third world country for two years. Would I have running water, electricity, or a bathroom? Would I be able to talk to my friends and family often? Would I be able to develop adequate language skills? While all of these were important questions to be asking myself, I neglected one of the most important areas of what would become my Peace Corps Experience: My job. Because while being in the Peace Corps is purely on a volunteer basis, it certainly does not equate to just hanging out for two years in another country. For many of the men and women serving across the world, this is the most difficult and serious job they have had in their lives.
There are six different sectors available to Peace Corps Volunteers. Being placed in one of them depends on an individual’s background experience, such as education, volunteer work, and job experience. The sectors include agriculture, environment, education, business development, health and HIV/AIDS, and youth development. In addition, many other initiatives such as technology development are integrated into the programs. Every country who invites Peace Corps to help is evaluated and given certain sectors to meet their needs. In Azerbaijan, there are the programs of Community and Economic Development, Youth Development, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). While I did not get my degree in teaching, I had experience as a supervisor and trainer for employees at work and I volunteered for two summer school sessions at West Fargo High School in the English as a Learned Language program (with three Valley City State University graduates!).
As a TEFL, I understand the Education Project Plan the best, but I will also give a few examples of the other sectors that are in place in the country. In the city my village is near, there are two other TEFL volunteers, one Community and Economic Development volunteer, and one Youth Development volunteer. The Community and Economic Development volunteer has written grants for some of the university students to put out a monthly regional newspaper, has taught basic computer skills to a local business, and teaches English through conversation circles to adults at two local banks. The Youth Development volunteer has two conversation circles of young adult women who meet weekly to learn and practice English, has put together two different dental hygiene clinics, and has written grants for local resource centers. Both of these young women have been in Azerbaijan for a year now and are extremely well respected in the community. They work very hard each week to continue to support their projects and think of new ideas to respond to the needs of their city.
As English teachers, we are required to teach a minimum of fifteen formal classroom hours at the schools we are assigned to. When I first read that I would only have to teach fifteen hours, I thought, “I am going to be extremely bored with all of the time I have on my hands.” At the time, I was going to school full time and working twenty-five hours a week. Being here has made me change my mind about how little I thought I would be working. While I do only teach sixteen hours a week in the classroom, I also have three formal hours of lesson planning with the counterparts I co-teach English with. I have the lesson planning I prepare at home on my own, preparation for my five different conversation clubs that meet for at least one hour after school, practicing with my students to participate in an international Writing Olympics competition, and am organizing a teacher’s conversation club. Informal work consists of assisting one of the other TEFL volunteers or the Youth Development volunteer about once a week with one of their conversation clubs, self-study of Azerbaijani language, and at night I tutor my host sister in English after her children go to bed. I also am in correspondence with a human geography class from Nebraska, write letters to family and friends back home, and attempt to update my blog regularly.
Needless to say, this job keeps me a lot busier than I ever thought it would. I would be lying to say I do not get bored though. School lasts from 8:30 to 1 p.m. every day. With clubs, it lasts until about three p.m. With dinner, lesson planning, and language, I can keep myself busy for another three or four hours or so. But the rest of the night and weekends can get really long. I have spent many hours watching multiple television series, reading a lot of books, and improving my crossword skills. This schedule is typical of a lot of Education volunteers, though. Some of my good friends in country are much busier than I am from being involved in teacher training seminars, participating in committees for Peace Corps, and organizing camps and sports leagues for youth. There are also some volunteers who do their fifteen hours a week, organize a few conversation clubs, and spend the rest of their time interacting with their Azeri host families or friends, traveling in-country, and seeing fellow volunteers. The beauty of being in the Peace Corps is the freedom to make your service what you want. While it is still a government agency with a typical bureaucratic hierarchy consisting of paperwork and chains of command and overhead, it is also a job with a mostly unstructured work environment, leaving the volunteer to personalize his/her two years in the best way possible for themselves. It also includes comprehensive medical care, accrued time off, and the ability to travel in and around your assigned country.
Being a TEFL volunteer means a lot more to me, though, than just a fifteen hour work week. My goal here is not simply to show up to a classroom and teach children English. In fact, that is probably one of the lower items on my priority list. Our main goals in Azerbaijan are skill transfers to our counterparts, introducing interactive teaching methods, providing life skill lessons, and encouraging creative thinking among the students (proving to be an amazing challenge in a post-Soviet country). Some days it feels like it would be way easier to do the lesson planning, visual aids, and homework exercises myself, but the reality is my counterpart would never learn on her own if I did all the work. After two months, I am finally getting my seventh grade students to answer questions I pose. Whether in English or Azerbaijani, the fear of being wrong inhibited them from saying anything at all. And some days all I really want to do is climb back into bed after my lessons are over instead of going to conversation clubs. But after spending ten minutes with children who think tic-tac-toe is the greatest game ever invented (even if they have to use irregular verbs to win an X or an O) makes a lot of the work seem worthwhile.
Every day here is a new adventure, a new page in my saga of Azerbaijan. This month, my program manager (my TEFL boss) came to my school to watch one of my lessons. During the lesson, I was walking around the room to ensure the children were pretending to pay attention, and as I circled around the back of the room, three floorboards gave out under me. But because I was staring at the floor in shock, I failed to notice the bookshelf whose legs had been relying on those same floorboards come crashing down on me. Thankfully the bookshelf was empty. I hurt way more of my pride than myself. In that moment, I thought, “I am definitely not in North Dakota.” But the fact of the matter is America has run down schools with inadequate resources, too. It has littering problems, problems with its economy, and inadequacy among genders. Sometimes the differences between the issues of Azerbaijan and America are great and leave me shocked, but a lot of times, they are really similar and that can be extremely humbling.
I feel grateful for being placed in such an interesting country. Working as a TEFL volunteer has been a great experience so far. The proudest achievements I have up until now include: Having my children repeat “Shh” on command to quiet the room, having my counterpart not be late to any lesson because the other teachers are having a tea break, getting the majority of children to raise their hand when I ask a question and not having them scream “TEACHER” at me while they are waving their hand in the air, and just last week my ninth grade class can now answer “How are you?” without any Azerbaijani translation. While they may seem like small achievements, they are the kinds of things that make me smile, even if bookshelves are falling on my head.


FIRST ARTICLE
“All I want to do is go to bed. I’m not sure I have been this sick in a couple of years and training is draining me. I wonder when my family will want to go back to our house.” Little did I know, when having this conversation with a fellow Peace Corps Trainee Joan, the most interesting part of my night had just began. Joan lived in the same apartment building as I did during our three months of training before becoming official Peace Corps Volunteers. Her host family and mine were relatives and after long days of school, I found myself eating multiple second suppers while our family was over there “guesting.” Almost immediately after uttering those words, in walks my 17 year old host sister, and Joan’s 18 year old host sister, showing us their red, welt ridden backs. Naturally, both of us were really scared and unfortunately, had a massive language barrier preventing us from knowing what was going on. So through a couple of pantomimes and a dictionary, what came across was, “Jars, fire, illness, and the Devil.” Well between that and my debilitating head and sinus cold, I felt like I was in a parallel universe. Needless to say, that was the moment I define as when culture shock hit me.
Culture shock comes at different points in multiple forms for most volunteers in the Peace Corps. Sometimes it comes in phases over months and sometimes it is an abrupt experience, like the first time you witness the act of “cupping.” (I have now had this done and quite enjoy it.) The best part of that entire experience though, was having the ability to immediately call another volunteer friend at midnight to tell him what had just happened. And that’s one of the best parts about being in the Peace Corps in 2011. It’s not the same isolating, thousands of miles of separation kind of experience it once was for volunteers. Of course, not every volunteer has the same experience and Peace Corps Africa is a lot different than Peace Corps Azerbaijan, but for the most part, technology has done wonders for those men and women across the world.
So how did I find myself halfway across the world in a country I had never heard of until I committed to a twenty-seven month agreement? The short answer of course is I joined the Peace Corps. But really the process started long before I submitted my application. I felt really antsy about finishing college, but I could not explain why. I knew it was partly because nothing really sounded appealing to me. A lot of people get jobs, a lot of people go to grad school, and a lot of people found some other alternative to suit their needs. My problem was I knew I wanted to be in the latter category, but did not know what that would entail. About my junior year, my sister had told me to look into it because she thought it would be something I would enjoy and being young makes mobility a lot easier. Well, whether I like to admit it or not, she is usually right. I ended up reading a lot of volunteer’s blogs online and went to a few Returned Peace Corps Volunteer events at the Moorhead Public Library. Even now, I think that answering the question of ‘Why did you join the Peace Corps?’ is one of the hardest questions I get asked. And I know I am not alone in thinking that. My usual answer is, ‘Why not?’. And while this life trajectory would not be everyone’s choice, it certainly is possible for more than just the recent college graduate. In my group, called the AZ 8’s (Azerbaijan’s eighth group of volunteers), we have 62 volunteers ranging from ages 22 to 70 years old. Some people are out of college, some people are in the middle of careers, in the middle of changing careers, finishing careers, etc. For some, this has been a dream for a lot of their lives, and with the economy, it was a last resort for finding work for others. No matter the case, sixty-two of us came here to be Community and Economic Development volunteers, Teaching English as a Foreign Language volunteers, or Youth Development volunteers. I am a TEFL volunteer which consists of fifteen to twenty hours of formal classroom hours each week and approximately ten hours of English conversation clubs with the children after school each week.
I did not know much about Azerbaijan before I came to the country. I had a relatively fast application process for joining the Peace Corps and was informed of my placement country exactly six weeks to my departure date. Before that I only knew I would either be in Eastern Europe or Asia. The beauty of Azerbaijan is it is placed exactly between the two. Usually, the separation of the two continents is determined by the Caucasus Mountain Range. That landmark finds its end running right through the heartland of this eclectic country, which has a relative size to that of the state of Maine. Azerbaijan’s neighbors include Russia to the North, Iran to the South, Armenia to the East, and the Caspian Sea to the West. It was once the major route for the North and East to meet the Silk Road into Asia, has roots in the Ottoman Empire as its language is a Turkish dialect, and was considered part of the Persian Empire before becoming under the rule of the Soviets during the USSR. Now twenty years in its independence, Azerbaijan is starting to find its footing in the world. During the Persian rule, Azerbaijan used both the Latin and Arabic alphabets, declared the Latin alphabet for the Nation’s two year independence from 1918 to 1920, was forced to switch to the Cyrillic alphabet for the USSR, and is now back to the Latin alphabet since gaining independence again in 1991.
Being here during this period is interesting every day. There is still a heavy lean toward traditional Azeri culture, yet the younger generation is pushing new ground for themselves. There is also a huge influence from the Soviet period that will not be removed any time soon. Even buying products at the bazar can be frustrating as a lot of labels are written in Russian, or if they are in Azeri, they are still in the Cyrillic alphabet. Yet, every year people are excited to establish their identity for Azerbaijan. My current host family has a last name ending in ‘Ov’ (Ova for a woman). However, for naming the grandchildren, they dropped the traditional Russian endings and added the Azerbaijani ending of ‘Li,’ which is not gender specific. There is still plenty of nostalgia for the Soviet system. Many of the infrastructure and basic needs of citizens were running smoothly in those times. Currently, the village I live in does not have a supply of gas. After the USSR fell, a depression hit the country and many people found themselves going to extremes to feed their families. Unfortunately it meant that in many rural parts, gas pipes were cut up and sold off on the black market. Stories of the same sort are told throughout the nation. There has been a lot of good that has come out of Azerbaijan’s independence though. They have become a major supplier of oil to both the Western and Eastern hemispheres, are starting to make a name for themselves in tourism activity in the Caucasus’, and most importantly, are coming together as their own nation. I feel extremely lucky to be placed in a country with such a rich history, and also one going through multiple changes in a short amount of time. Even though my culture shock experience was overwhelming at the time, these past five months have been a great start to my two year service.