Proudest Moment

One of my proudest moments from my service in Azerbaijan came this past August. My sitemate, Matt, and I had organized the students in the city to participate in the Writing Olympics competition. For copywriting purposes, I think the name was officially changed to Write On! Writing competition or something, but I prefer its original title. It was originally put together by Peace Corps Volunteers in the surrounding countries of Azerbaijan, but has now expanded to over twelve participating countries. Students from grades sixth to eleventh, university students, and a professional’s category are proposed a question that they must write a response to in the given sixty minutes. The responses are then judged on the creativity of the answers and are only docked for grammatical errors if the essay itself is unable to be understood.

Our students from the city were a byproduct of the two volunteers in our city the year before we came to Goychay. They had established a small group of young adults for a regular conversation club in intermediate to advanced English and we had the luck to be able to inherit them. These kids are really great. One thing really wonderful is that there are about four young women who come to club who, without the previous young women volunteers establishing a relationship with them, wouldn’t have been able to come to my male sitemate’s conversation club. These clubs are the only reason they leave their houses’ without their families twice a week and to be able to continue that for four years has been really beneficial for them.

Leading up to the day of the competition, Matt had worked a lot with them on creatively thinking, writing, and defending different sides of an argument. When the hour came to write the essays, a few kids complained saying, “But we’ve already talked about this twice before!” Of the seven who submitted essays, we had four of our students place for Azerbaijan. Goychay took first place 11th form, third place 11th form, first place University (freshman) category, and first place professional’s category. Even more exciting, all the first place winners are then entered automatically for the international competition, and among twelve countries, our University student, Husniyye, won first place internationally!

Miss Husniyye is a beautiful, smart young woman. She is a success story on her own, but always says she wouldn’t be the person she is today if she hadn’t met Peace Corps volunteers when she was younger. Seeing her and our other students accept their certificates at an awards ceremony in Baku was one of the proudest moments I have had here. I will admit I shed a tear or two. It is not always the case that you see the profound affects you have on lives while serving. I’m fortunate to be able to see the differences the Peace Corps volunteers before me have made and take comfort knowing I will hopefully have done the same by the time I leave.