Chicken Fajitas on a Camp Stove

July 20, 2007

Today was a great day! We had our language club right after our language lessons and we had a ton of kids show up. We decided that next week we are going to split again so we each have our own group and can give more one on one attention. Growing this group is working exactly like I had wanted Cub Scout packs to form when I was working for the Boy Scouts. We are also running it like a Cub pack. We are going to meet in our own ability groups and then meet together in a larger group to do bigger activities hopefully working on language in our smaller groups that will lead into or help the larger activity. It’s great to see all the enthusiasm these kids have when they show up.

After language I went home and started the prep work for chicken fajitas! I invited my site mates, LCF, and a friend from a site next to ours over for a little taste from home. In the Bazaar I was able to get green peppers, onions, chili peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, lemons, cayenne pepper crushed red peppers, and some bread called lavash that’s like a flour torttia.

When I got home I got all the chopping done and then before everyone arrived I found out that the gas was off for the whole town. That’s when my host mom pulled out a camping stove and I thought ah I think I know how to work one of these. The process went a bit slower but I got all the food out and everyone was thrilled to be eating something with some spice to it.

The food here is great but Azerbaijani’s don’t really like spicy foods so having something with a little fire in it was a real treat. Many of you have been asking what kinds of things should you send in care packages and I haven’t really come up with anything in particular because I think completely random things from home is great but after this dinner I’d have to say if anyone could fit a bottle of hot sauce and taco seasoning into a box that stuff is like gold over here. You can’t buy it in any of the stores here they say there are some expat stores in Baku where you could buy some of the taco seasoning but we still can’t go in there and they said they were like $5.00 for one of those 50 cent packets you can get in any grocery store at home. And normally something like that I wouldn’t think $5.00 is a lot but here on a Peace Corps salary that’s a small fortune. (old sports illustrated’s or ESPN the magazine’s would be a great contribution as well especially as college football season get into full swing. Even just email updates on things that are happening in the world and sports. One girl’s friend sends her things like that and she is trying to keep us informed. I don’t get to the internet very often and when I do it’s too slow to browse the news pages)

The dinner was great in two ways the first being the food was so good but the second was the example I was setting for my host brother. This last week in our Youth Development sessions we had a discussion on gender roles and how things are so completely different over here for women. Women here (being mothers, wives, and sisters) are expected to wait on men hand an foot. In my family over here from the beginning I insisted on clearing my own dishes and they thought that was one of the weirdest things they’d ever seen. Then I took it a step further and insisted that I wash my own dish. Now I am able to do all the dishes after meals, but the first few times my mother would stand in the back of the kitchen and watch to make sure I was doing everything all right and occasionally jump in and tell me I had too much soap or something like that.

So as you can believe a man in the kitchen cooking was hard to swallow. My brother came in a number of times with a concerned look on his face and would ask, “Donny, why are you doing this? You should be sitting on the couch and the women should be in here cooking.” and this wasn’t just playful joking he was absolutely serious. After he asked me this I explained how in America men cook for women all the time and how chores around the house are shared equally and how if a women wants to work she can and sometimes men stay at home with the children. Then he would just shake his head and walk out of the kitchen confused.

After the meal was over I told the girls not to help because I wanted to extend the example. I went in and was doing the dishes and my host brother came in, as I was finishing, with another dish and I told him to go ahead and put it on the counter and I would wash it when he said in English, “no I wash” and I stepped aside and watched as my brother probably for the first time washed a dish.

This one thing defiantly is not going to “change the world” or for that matter even make it to where my brother does the dishes on a regular basis, but it did open one 17 year old boys eyes that in some worlds men and women are more equal than they are in his, and some day hopefully this example will make him a better man. I think that’s what Peace Corps is really all about working at the grass roots level showing people through example that there sometimes are different ways of doing things.