Ujar Revisited

I’ve been Ujar and i lived to tell the tale.  In all honesty it was nice.  If anything, I feel like a bit of a jerk for being so upset about getting placed there.

The story goes, for those who haven’t been keeping score, is that I am now in at the training site, finishing up the last few weeks of pre-service training (PST).  After PST everyone will be distributed throughout Azerbaijan.  We all got a preview of what our lives will be like last week, as we spent four days visiting our future.

In a lot of ways, I’m moving up in the world.  I’m currently living in a ’settlement’ that is comprised of some pretty dense housing, which is surrounded by the Caspian Sea and garbage.  In Ujar (spelled in Azeri Ucar), I’ll be living in a house as opposed to the fifth floor of an apartment building.  I have a huge room to myself, and live with a really nice family, comprised of a grandmother, mother, father, and three brothers who are 19, 17, and 6 years old.  Along with the new family, I’m also had to spend some time marvelling at the clean city streets, which include sidewalks of all things.

I spent time meeting my counterpart, who is named Hamlet.  He’s my link into the community and we spent time walking around town, being introduced to other teachers, educators, and administrators.

Most people seemed pretty happy to meet me.  There wasn’t as much gawking as happens here, and I think that’s because they are used to having volunteers around.  One of the volunteers left last month, and a lot of people assumed I was his brother coming to take over for him.  A funny conclusion, but at the same time, it’s some footsteps for me to follow in.

While it was nice to see the town, at the same time there was one blaring issue at hand; it was completely boring.  I saw everything in the town in the first 12 hours, and other than that it was biding my time until I left.  The other volunteers who have been stationed there took their vacations to turkey for the summer.  It was an indication of things to come.  Overcoming the lack of direction and boredom that might come will be, in my opinion, the hardest challenge to overcome.  I did get to start and finish Everything is Illuminated, which was amazing.  So i guess I’ll read a lot for the next two years. 

When I actually move there, I’ll take some pictures and post them here.

A Forgotten Milestone

I mentioned that it was a year ago that I returned to America from Korea, but I forgot to say that two years ago i left America.  Pretty interesting to think of that as my sense of what two years feels like.  The last two years were amazing, and i hope the next two are as good.

And I’m going to Ujar tomorrow.  I’m warming up to it, but still feel like I got a fast-one pulled on me.  I’ll update that situation as the news comes in.

Ujar

Well I found out my site yesterday, and in all honesty, I couldn’t be more dissappointed.  I had made several requests for what type of site I wanted, and what environment I was looking for, and I feel that Peace Corps missed pretty badly on all accounts.  I feel as though I was the one who was left behind so that the ‘greater good’ could be appeased.  It’s really quite hard to believe, but then again, there’s nothing to be done about it.

Ujar is a pretty big town by Azeri standards, and is smack-dab in the middle of Azerbaijan.  Travelling to other volunteers in other towns should be easy.  I plan on doing quite a bit of it, as I can’t see anything that will be compelling enough to keep me in my town.  Despite being one of the most populated regions in Azerbaijan, it isn’t even in on the map of the country in the Lonely Planet guide.

 Then again, supposedly I will be working for a good school, and maybe my host family will be great, but I feel betrayed by the Peace Corps.  There have been several incidents where I have said “Fine, I’ll defer myself for the group,” hoping that I would get rewarded in the end, only to be disappointed one more time.

I suppose this could serve as a warning to all PC applicants,a nd probably trainees too.  Be forceful with what you want.  In the end, and one discovers this in the nomination process, it’s about what PC needs, not you.  Be mindful of that.

I know that was a big rant, but there isn’t much of an outlet for that over here, as everyone is pretty excited about where they are going.

I’ll be going there next week for a couple days.  Maybe it will be amazing.

Why I’m Here

Peace Corps has made me re-assess where I am and what I’m doing more times than anything else ever has. Obviously, there are a lot of variables involved in that, but what jumps out is that this is the first thing I’ve done since I’ve stopped being a student. Kind of like the idea of walking out of the house for the first time, and this is the direction I chose to go. Without going into the hundreds of reasons why this is and isn’t the best place for me to be, I feel that I am in a similar situation to the one I was in weeks before I left for Azerbaijan. My recruiter said, “We have a country in the Caucausus for you to go to, we can’t tell you which one, but if you are going to go, you have to say ‘yes’ in the next 24 hours.”

I was reluctant to accept for a few reasons, but the thing that really got me was the question, “Is this where I want to do the Peace Corps?” I didn’t know it would end up being Azerbaijan, but at the time, you couldn’t tell me a difference between Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan that would have mattered to me. The idea I had in my head was that it would be colder than anything I could imagine, that I would end up in some colorless soveit-style apartment building, and eat nothing but cold soup all day (I wasn’t too far off, but thats not the point). Whatever the reality was, compared to my perception the choice given to me wasn’t the attractive choice that Jordan or Morocco was (where I had been told I was going and where I was sure I was going to go).

I didn’t know if it was what I wanted to do. I told myself, “If I’m going to commit two years, it should be in the right place, so maybe I should put my name back in the drawing bag. At least that’s what I was telling myself.” I called my cousin and told him “Dude, sell me on this, because I don’t know if I want to do it.” He did a good job of telling me why the caucausus are an interesting place to be these days, but what he told me that really stuck was something that very much applies to a situation I’m going through right now, which I will explain soon. He said “What does location have to do with why you are going into the Peace Corps?”

He stopped me dead in my tracks because whatever reasons I had for wanting to do the Peace Corps in an exotic location like Guatemala, Morocco, Cambodia, or Cape Verde, they had nothing to do with why I was volunteering. They helped when I daydreamed about what my life would be like, but ultimately, I joined the Peace Corps because it would give me a chance to create some tangible, noticable change in a community that I could look at after two years and say, “Look, I did that.” It doesn’t need to be tropical at all.  In fact, it can be quite soveit too.

If you read that title of the blog, you know I accepted and I’m in Azerbaijan, but a similar dilemma is happening now.  We’re all centralized in one place, and in less than a week now, we’ll all find out where we’ll live for the next two years.  I requested a town that seems to be a pretty popular spot, that I’m sure a lot of people want to go to, which lessens my chances of actually getting to go there.  And of course, there is a sliding scale from there, all the way to a place I could never imagine myself going; some small, desert, conservative town with no other volunteers .

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but in the end, I can’t help it.  I want to go to certain places, and I want nothing to do with others.  That’s that.  However, I’m at the same crossroads that I was at a few months ago.  It doesn’t really matter where I go, no matter how much I tell myself it does.  The choice is made for me, therefore wherever it is that they do send me, I need to remember that I’m here because of what there is to do, not because of where it is.

Especially for people applying to the Peace Corps, location is everything, as we tend to romanticize that part of the service.  There are so many more variables involved in how much I will like where I am that simply location, I have to get past it.  We’ll see what it is on Friday.

To Tide You Over

I updated my blogroll, which is a list of blogs.  You can find it on the side of this page.  The newly added links are from people in my Azerbaijan Peace Corps.  As my attention span dwindles in and out, I thought this might give a little bit of light reading to those wondering about Azerbaijan, and what goes on here.  Might be interesting to see how my experience compares…

 On another note, in one week I’ll out where I’ll spend the next two years.  I requested a specific place, mostly because I heard it was nice, but I doubt they will give it to me.  I’m really nervous about it.  I’ll rant once I find out.

Also, tomorrow will mark my one year anniversery of returning to the U.S. from Korea.  Can’t believe it took less than a year to get out again.  Actually, today, my host mom told me she bought some crappy toy from a Korean in the town we live in.  I’ll see if I can’t find them and prove to myself once and for all that I no longer spreak Korean.

It was 41C yesterday, see if you can do the math on how hot that really is.