My Life in Azerbaijan - Another Mishap, another Disillusionment

May 22, 2010
Woke up this morning, I heard another plane crashed in southern India. Another 158 people have died. It was just a week ago that a plane crashed in Libya and everyone died except a little boy. What is happening to the world? What is happening to mankind? Were those accidents act of God or they were tragedies that we, human, inflicted upon ourselves?

Modern technology has better our daily life, but it comes with a price, at times, too high to comprehend. “I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future” Wilfred Thesiger wrote in his famous book the “Arabian Sands”. He detested modernization; resented what the shoddy and materialistic world had done to the Arabian Peninsula. Although I don’t agree his point of view totally, I do sympathize his feeling. Often, I found myself struggling between two worlds: the modern and the still not fully developed world, like Azerbaijan, where old values still exist.

…our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

Most of the Azeri youngsters whom I met welcome the modern technologies, skills and western cultures that Peace Corps volunteers offer. The university students in Baku loved the “sexy” dance that the American showed them during the “American Day”. Watching the young girls’ bodies twisting and swinging sexually alongside their male friends, I wonder what their parents will react if they see it.

Azerbaijan is still a conservative country. Most villages, single male and female are not allowed to go on a date. They cannot be seen in the public walking together. This seemingly repulsive culture may sound intolerable for the American, but it was the way of life that their parents, their grand parents and their great grand parents believed in. We, as an outsiders, are supposed to respect this ancient ethnicity or reject it just because our society does not believe in it?

I wish I had the answer but I don’t. Maybe I am old fashion, I still love to travel to remote places where cars and plants cannot penetrate and where something of the old ways still survive…..but those places have becoming less and less…..