No Holds Barred

One week without a fan during the hottest part of the year in August really brings out the bear in me. And I do not mean the cute cuddly kind that we buy for our children. I mean the mama-bear-defending-her-little-cubs-in-an-outrage kind of bear. See, it is not just being uncomfortable at night without a fan and sweaty at all times of the day, but it means that I am not really sleeping well either and the heat makes me not want to eat too much.


What happened to my fan? Well, simply, it broke. There are two kinds of fans you can buy in Azerbaijan. One is a twelve manat model, cheap and plastic. The other is 24 manat model, heavy-duty, industrial sized, and aluminum. Now, some (my sister) would attest to the fact that I can be cheap at times. But in my defense, I am technically “working for free.” Now, we get money to pay rent and have a cell phone and buy food, but money for a fan is not worked into our allowance. And let me tell you all, the allowance is a heavily debated topic every year. But, I’m getting off topic. My point being, I bought the cheaper of the two kinds and it came around to kick me in the butt. So here I am, in 40 degree Celsius weather, drinking at least three liters of water each day to make up for my sweat loss.


And I have been thinking a lot lately about my blog. I write about once a month, less than I wish, but I have come to realize that if I were to have only read my blog and known nothing else about Peace Corps and Azerbaijan, I would think this place and organization is all unicorns and rainbows and fairy dust. There is a lot of dust, but it isn’t sprinkled by fairies. I have noticed that every time I say something even slightly negative about the country, I follow it up with something nice, or an excuse, or anything really to negate that I just had less than great feelings and thoughts about this place I have come to call home. It reminds of a manager giving out constructive criticism at work and following it up with a strength so you walk away with your head still held high.


So I wanted to tell you a few things that really just plain tick me off here. They aren’t the big things. I could go on for hours and hours about the bribery system here, or the school system, or child-rearing, or lack of critical thinking… the list could and does go on. But I’m just going to give you a glimpse into what I have come to realize I just cannot be flexible about. They are things that I thought over time I would get used to, or that at least they wouldn’t bug me as much. But they just do not feel any different than the first day I noticed them.



EATING HABITS
Besides for eating at a table here and (usually) three times a day, sitting down for a meal here is really different. At a normal dinner, lunch or evening meal, talking is discouraged. But unlike America, it is encouraged to eat as comfortably as possible, which means, with your mouth open, slurping, elbows up, usually hands (there are NEVER knives), and soaking up food with bread. If you do talk, it is okay to talk with food in your mouth, smacking as you chew, etc. It is also not rude to reach over people and so there is usually an arm or an elbow across you looking for bread or a glass. Eating from the communal salad bowl with your fingers is par for the course. Again, I feel the need here to follow this up with an excuse or explanation. But I’m not going to this time. I’ve ate at what feels like a hundred different Azeri homes, in both formal and non-formal situations, and I’ve yet to be at a place that did not have at least two or three aspects of this list (which is not even complete). It drives me bonkers. There have been times where I felt like I could not finish my meal because of hearing and seeing the person and the food in their mouth in front of me. Dramatic? Yes. But it just can get so incredibly overwhelming. (Also, it is fly season in Azerbaijan and we eat outside and there are at least 20 flies on the table, food, and person at all times. Remember, one fly always feels like five are actually around. We have at least 20).

LOUDNESS
Things just seem louder here. People listen to the television on almost the highest volume it can be turned to and music is always at full blast whether it is a young teen’s cellphone on the street or blasting in your ears at a wedding. Also, at least in our house, no one ever, EVER, walks to another room or up the stairs or into the yard to relay a message or tell someone to come to dinner or give them a cellphone. They always, ALWAYS, yell. And yell. And yell. Until somebody, whoever gets fed up with listening to the calling of the person’s name, responds. And then if that person was not the actual target, and just the first one to respond, they go out and call for the right person until they respond. But above all, when people get into arguments here, they yell. Scream at each other really. In a way that you just do not see in America and it makes me really uncomfortable. I have seen it among teachers in the hallway at school (we would consider this highly inappropriate), taxi drivers, policeman, my family members, children, everyone. In your face, screaming, on the verge of hitting someone. And then it is just over. And, again, not only do I severely dislike the noisiness of this all, it also makes me really uncomfortable.

NON-DESCRIPTIVENESS
I used to think it was just a language thing that made people appear to not be describing things very well. But I do not think it is. I think it is just cultural, because Azerbaijani’s have the words in their language to explain better than they do, and often they just do not. Almost all directions are given with a general region, maybe a nearby “name your landmark here.” It could be within four blocks of that, north, east, south, or west, but you would not know which way. Another example would be when people tell you they want you to talk about America, or teach them about computers, or describe the foreign education system. Where to begin, really? I think this is a hard category for me to even put into words, which I think makes it a bit ironic. But it is like when I ask where a pan is and my host mom says the kitchen. If I could say, Thanks Captain Obvious, I would, but I don’t know that, yet. I asked my host cousin, who is the village to city taxi driver, where I could get my fan fixed and he told me in town. Really? I must not have known that before I started loading my fan into your trunk to be taken into town, thank you for the information. I ask my post-grad university students what they want to do with their next two, five, ten years. Usually their responses are, work, or get out of Azerbaijan. But when I say,” Where will you work?, How will you find a job?, What work do you want?, Do you have a C.V. (resume)?”, they just shrug their shoulders and say, work.

COLD
This category could be as big of a rant as the education system, but I’ll try to use some brevity here. In a nut shell, cold is evil, the devil, it makes you sick, and it comes in many, many forms. In one hundred degree heat, everybody must wear socks, because your stomach will hurt if you do not, from the cold. Even at stores, the refridgerators are only turned on between May and September and ice-cream doesn’t appear until June. You cannot have wet hair, it must be dried immediately. No cold milk, water, juice, wine, etc. Always socks. Wrap your stomach at night. Always a hat from November until March at all times. If you get ill at all, it is from the cold, in some form, whether you remember you encountered it or not. If the temperature is under 35 degrees Celsius, that is reason enough. It doesn’t matter if you have the flu, chicken pox, a headache, gas pains, dyptheria, whatever, it is from the cold. As I type this, the daughter-in-law at our house will have a baby in the next week. Because of a threat to the baby’s health from cold, she is not allowed to sleep in the one room (hers) that has an air conditioner. At night she sleeps outside, and during the day she moans and groans from being in pain and being overheated. Sometimes I can understand why people say what they do. But most of the time, it just is not true. And I feel like I have turned a little crazy in my need to defend this point. But I’m not wearing socks in the summer and that is not why my stomach hurts. I truly believe, if people were as diligent about germs and bacteria as they are about avoiding anything that has to do with the cold, there would be Significantly less illness in this country. Significantly less.


These are just a few of the small pet peeves to large campaigns I have concerned myself with while being here. Now, I will say this, remember that I have been without a fan, good sleep, and an adequate diet in the last week. You can take this post with a grain of salt if you would like. Or, embrace that I am feeling comfortable to finally not gloss over every aspect of this experience. Because I know, when I get back to America, I am going to have the coldest can of Diet Pepsi I can find and relish in the fact that no one will harp in my ear, “That’s cold, don’t drink it, you’re going to be ill.”