Spring Is Here!!

April 13, 2008

Hello everyone. I can’t believe how much the weather can brighten a person’s attitude! This last month and a half has been pretty exciting. We had our annual Peace Corps prom in Baku, I moved out on my own, and spring arrived.

Over one weekend the weather went from winter to spring and now everyone is outside and happy. Today I went for one of the best runs in my life. We had a thunderstorm last night with tons of rain then when I woke up this morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky but all the roads were still wet and clean. I ran down toward a great village called Danaçi which has all these little village country houses spread out along this long straight road that has tall cottonwoods on the sides spread out enough to still see the fresh snow on the mountains from last night. I had my ipod playing some great music and felt like I could have gone on for hours. (Then I turned around and realized that feeling of being able to go on forever was aided by the fact that I was running on a slight down slope that I had to run back up at a much slower pace.)

Our prom was all sorts of fun. Volunteers have been planning a prom in at the end of February for a few years to have something to look forward to during the hard winter. This year the theme was high society and everyone dressed up really nice I however decided to do it high society redneck style! I had been growing my hair out since our swearing in ceremony in September which was fun but time for a new look so I had one of my friends cut it into an awesome looking mullet complete with lines on one side and a lightning bolt on the other! Then I had my mom send a tuxedo t-shirt which unfortunately didn’t arrive in time (something about accidentally being sent to Thailand?) So I took a white t-shirt cut off the sleeves and made my own which turned out to be even better. Then I got a brown bag from our medical staff and bought some beer in pounder cans from the store next to the bar and drank cheap beer form a brown bag all night. My camera was acting up that night so you’ll have to wait a while longer before I can send you some pics of all my sexyness in a mullet!

A month ago today Peace Corps let us move out of our host families and into houses of our own! I thought the process would be really crazy and interesting after I asked my brother how I could find a place and he said we would just walk up and down the streets asking people if they knew of places for rent but it turned out to be easier than that by using my conversation clubs. I sent everyone home with the assignment to find me a home. They came back with all sorts of places but two actually were cheap enough to meet the PC requirements. One of them was nice and relatively new sharing a courtyard with a family but the family said the only way they would allow me to live there for that cheap was if I would teach their kids English. The other place which I took is really old but huge. I have three bedrooms a huge kitchen an indoor western toilet and an indoor shower. The first story has a divorced old lady that people say is a prostitute and who has a key to my house and has stolen food and clothes from me living in it but other than that and the fact that I have very sporadic water and wont have any in the summer and winter the place is great. I’ve realized being here how much Americans myself included really pride ourselves on our independence. Even with all the issues living in this house have and will produce it is still so nice to have a place of my own where I can cook my own food, wash my own dishes and laundry, wear socks only when I want to, and not have someone constantly hovering over me.

Moving out has also produced some great topics of discussion for my conversation clubs. It is unheard of here for people to move out of their family’s homes until they get married. I have some students who are in their late 20s to early 30s, who for some strange anomaly because people usually get married early here, are still living in their parent’s homes. Then there is the whole topic of how I eat and take care of myself without a mother, sister, or wife to take care of my eating, tea drinking, and cleaning needs. In the last two weeks I’ve had two of my clubs over and I cooked dinner for them. They were more than astonished and not only at the realization that Chinese food isn’t made entirely of weird looking bugs. When I met with my girls club the next time I realized how much they liked the experience when they (who are all between 16 and 22) all told me it had been the best day of their lives. Then this last Friday I cooked for my teachers club which is a bunch of middle aged women who are used to doing all the work over here and it was funny to watch how much nervous energy they had sitting there watching me do all this work for them. They kept getting up trying to jump in and help but I wouldn’t let them. It turned into a great cultural sharing experience as we sat over dinner and I explained to them how men and women share household responsibilities in most US families.

In all things have really been going really well and I’ve been having a great time. There are still the moments where I sit in my big empty house all by myself on a Friday of Saturday night and go to bed at nine o’clock because there’s nothing else to do and think about how long these 27 months are going to be, but the good times are still overwhelming making up for some of the long nights.