In other news

From the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123067777878643861.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

How I Celebrated Christmas [Long Post]

I read an article in the New Yorker magazine a couple weeks ago about Gary Snyder, and realized I needed more excitement in my life. There were a few things about this guy that really made me think about my own life, and about how relatively bland it is, but the overall point was that I want to have realer experiences. This guy fell the trees that he built his house out of and was hung by a rope tied around his ankles over a cliff in Japan on a mountain climbing trip with zen buddhists and told “we’re going to ask you questions and we’ll drop you if you don’t tell the truth,” and then asked “what did you face look like before your parents met?”

My life, compared to a guy like this, made me think that all I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren will be, “I remember when I used to write a blog when I was in the Peace Corps.” Coming to such a realization forced me to think about my connection to the world, and how I can live to my fullest: hence my quest to kill a chicken and eat it.

It’s common in Ujar to see Azerbaijanis walking from the bazaar to their homes with live chickens in their hands; held by their feet.  The birds are held by their feet, so they are only looking at the road pass them by. Though I’ve always turned my head, there have been several times that I’ve seen people carry their hens out to the street to sever the head, and prepare the carcass for dinner. If I was ever going to have a chance to purchase, kill, prepare, and eat a chicken, it was going to be here. Still, I’ve always been a big squeamish when it comes to murdering things with eyes, but I knew in the back of my head that if I think it’s alright to eat these little guys, I should be able to kill it.

I talked to Joyce, my partner in crime, and we decided to do it over a Christmas get-together I was having in my house in celebration of the holiday season. The guy at the bazaar that we bought the chicken from didn’t trust us to carry the chicken by it’s feet in the Azerbaijani fashion, so he put it in a plastic bag with its head sticking out of the top. Instantly, the chicken’s talons ripped through the bag forcing Joyce to carry the chicken, which we named Pat, like a little baby.

To save me the embarrassment of being out-witted by a chicken, we tied it up to a pillar in my yard and thought about our plan of action. From the information I have gathered, there were a few steps that we needed to organize before we were to do the deed: Kill it, remove the innards, boil it for a minute, defeather, and in our case, put a can of beer inside of it and put it on my grill. After we organized our plan of attack, we went for the chicken.

There were a couple waves of feeling bad about what I was about to do, but I had already hyped myself up for the experience enough to be able to go through with killing my dinner. Every time I would feel like Pat’s life was a bit unethical, I would remember that this is the way humans have eaten since the dawn of time. The unethical thing, in my mind, is the fact that I felt like eating it was alright, but that I had never been in a situation where I had to see the meat go from animal to side dish.

Cutting the chicken’s head of felt a bit anti-climactic, to be honest. There was a bit of a dramatic moment, as the blade didn’t go through as cleanly as I had hoped. I was told that a sawing motion was the way to go, but I figured that since I was using my sitemate Kevin’s brand new knife (from America!) that I would be able to go through the neck pretty easily. I chose to go with a method that can be best described as ‘paper-cutter,’ where I put the tip of the knife into the cutting board, and slamming the heavier end of the knife into the neck with the weight of my other hand.

As soon as I began the downward motion, the chicken, understandably, started freaking out. This made Joyce freak out, so she let go of Pat. This left the chicken pinned to the ground by the neck, flailing around until I finally made the clean cut. The head of the chicken fell on to the ground, and the body went completely nuts, squirting blood everywhere, including all over my pants and jacket.

Joyce took care of the organ removal, and we shared the defeathering process, although she did most of the work. I figured that if I was going to kill a chicken for the first time, I might as well cook it in a new way as well, so I went with the beer-can-chicken method.

It cooked pretty quickly, since it was a real chicken and not one of the oversized, hormone-induced American roosters. I’ll be honest here and say that it wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever had, which is what I was hoping for.  Since we ripped a lot of the skin off in the defeathering process, it dried out quite a bit on the grill, and was pretty rough. The inside of it was amazingly moist and flavorful, which lived up to the legend of cooking a chicken with a beer can in it, but also lead to an unpleasant surprise.

We were all picking at the chicken, pulling the meat off the bones, when Tim grabbed a knife and went to cut off a chunk of some white meat. “What are you doing with a knife?” I asked, “aren’t you in the peace corps? use your hands.” Thankfully, he ignored my advice and cut open not only a nice piece of meat, but also the gizzard, which was full of the grain that the chicken had been eating all day.

We missed the gizzard because we had cleaned the chicken from the backside, up through the rib cage. The idea that a chicken could have a baseball’s worth of half-digested grains in its throat completely caught us off guard. As he cut it open, the room quickly smelled like vomit and bile, which turned most of the people off from the idea of picking meat from the carcass.

Proud of my accomplishment, I continued to grab the meat from the bones until I was satisfied with my efforts. In about three hours, I had killed, prepped, cooked, and eaten a chicken. I can’t see myself forgetting this one.

ALSO: For the not so feint-of-heart, here is the footage of the deed that was described above. If you aren’t into seeing a chicken getting its head cut off, don’t watch.

Even Though They’re Different

What do Michael Bloomberg and Azerbaijan’s president have in common?

Answer here.

Or here.

Where am i?

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to everybody back home.

Game Changer

Internet streaming radio.  Straight out of WYPR from B-more

Carl Kasell’s voice never sounded so sweet.

The Apparently Controversial Peace Corps

As I was reading this nytimes article about how the U.S. Foreign Service is one of the few places in today’s economy where there might be jobs that are opening up.

For the last several years, hiring in the United States Foreign Service was minimal because of a lack of Congressional funding. In addition, war has created an urgent need for diplomatic personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as officers have moved to these countries their previous jobs have remained unfilled.

So, in the last several months — with a new president on the horizon and new funding from Congress — both the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, or Usaid, are ramping back up.

Part of the article later goes on to talk about the USAID program, and how many of the employees in its ranks are former peace corps volunteers.

I wanted to see what else was going on in the Times about the Peace Corps, and I found this article by Robert L. Strauss.  I’ve come across his anti-Peace Corps rhetoric a few times before, and I think he comes off as leftover cynic from the pre-Downsize This era.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

It reads to me like starve-the-beast economics.  According to Strauss, PC is a bloated government agency which ought to be scaled back like any other and until it is, it will continue to be ineffective.  I have to disagree with this guy though.  Obviously, a more-qualified corps of volunteers would better serve the communities in which they serve, but I don’t see how this necessarily means that the number of volunteers needs to be cut down.  What about providing better training?  How about a more appropriate examination of where volunteers are placed?

To share my own perspective as a volunteer (and then turn it on its head), I feel that even though I don’t have a compelling background in TEFL, I still do quite well as a TEFL volunteer.  Sure I could have used a couple of years teaching English somewhere else to straighten up my classroom style, but doesn’t that argument apply to every job out there?  Wouldn’t Barack Obama be better as a president if he had already spent time as such?  One might argue that a leadership position, like governor, could have been given him the experience he is going to need as president.  All one would have to do is look across the aisle at george bush and sarah palin and see that a gubernatorial position doesn’t necessarily lead for a fit executive branch.  In the same way that Barack Obama is going into the white house with relatively little experience, many volunteers join the Peace Corps straight out of college.  And equally, the experience is so unique that there isn’t really anything that you could do in the past that is going to adequately prepare you to be successful.

Finally, there is this page, which is letters written in the the nytimes, replying to the Strauss piece.  A bunch of people wrote in (including the current PC Director), writing about how their experience proves that PC should be expanded or contracted.  My favorite argument is written in the first letter on the page.

In applying the metrics of management consulting to the Peace Corps, Mr. Strauss ignores the essence of this marvelous organization: its humanity.

If he wants to deal with ”customers,” his matrix for analysis makes sense. The Peace Corps, however, deals with people.

No matter how small or large, professionally seasoned or impractically green, the PC experience seems to be so unquantifiable that there will never be a blanket solution to the imperfections that will exist.

A Case of the Tuesdays

It really is amazing how a place that gets so hot in the summer can be so cold in the winter. I guess coming from the coast of Oregon makes me a little ignorant when it comes to extreme temperatures.

What really makes the chilly weather noticeable today, a tuesday, is that I have no gas to heat my house. I feel like I’m essentially outside. I have a real hard time understanding how a country that is famous for producing natural gas and oil cuts off the gas to an entire city on tuesdays. It doesn’t make sense to me, at all.

In line with that, I’ve heard from a couple volunteers that their towns’ gas supply is in trouble. Rather than cutting a single house’s gas off, which is known to happen, an entire city can get cut off if there is a big enough bunch of the population isn’t staying up on their bill.

Maybe it’s a ploy to get people to bug their neighbors to pay their gas bill, but it seems silly to me.

Snow 2.0

Winter is upon us.  My last winter in Azerbaijan has started out with a bang.  Last year at this time, I was still living with a host family, so the threat of snow and frozen pipes didn’t really threaten me, as much as someone else who could take care of it.  Yesterday,  it was so cold that my water had frozen up and I had to wait until the afternoon before I could wash my dishes (not that I really wash them that regularly anyway).  But this morning, as I saw the first few snowflakes fall the the ground, I couldn’t help but think about what a logistical nightmare it’s going to present.

1.  Frozen water equals: no shower, and a much more difficult process for all the things that require water, which as it turns out, is all things clean.

2.  Freezing cold.  Even with my gas heater on all day, I still ahve to wear a hat, big socks, and a coat inside.  It makes typing difficult, as it does juggling.

3.  Dirty roads.  The snow isn’t always pretty here.  It  builds up on the roads, melts, and then turns to mud, which manages to get everywhere.  See bullet point 1 for why this is a problem.

4.  Cold teacher, cold students.  As I teach my classes during  the winter, I keep a hat and my bit coat on at all times.  Who can teach in this environment?  Well.  I can, but it makes it a lot moredifficult for the students to pay attention all day, which I can totally understand.