Sunday, March 20, 2011

My Life in Azerbaijan - Begining to Live

March 7, 2011

Woke up late Friday morning, light snow is falling and I do not feel like to go to work. (Good thing about being a volunteer, you are not obligated to work!). Sitting by the kitchen table, I warm up my fingers with a cup of steaming hot coffee. Feeling unusually content, I watch a cheerful bird leaping up and down between the branches of a giant Pine outside my kitchen window. The snow in March is just a teaser, it does not last. I smell Spring already!

I am idle for the rest of the day; read some books, cook lunch, read more and work on my book for a few hours, after an hour of yoga, cook dinner. Before long, the day dims and I stretch out to watch the dark clear sky outside my balcony. It is a moonless night and the stars grow thicker and brighter. Besides feeling a twinge of nostalgia for a special friend, I am absolutely content.

Here in this foreign land, I grow to enjoy the seemingly dull chores; hanging my laundries on the wire, smelling their raw freshness from the sun, peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables in the kitchen, rolling a flour dough for my dumplings, eating a coarse local bread when my allowance is low or simply holding a cup of tea and listening to the sound of the frigid wind from the Sea, the contentment of doing one thing at a time or nothing at all.

I am alone most of the day, but I am never lonely! I realize I have reached as Sigurd Olson wrote,

“ the point where days are governed by daylight and dark, rather than by schedules, where one eats if hungry and sleeps when tired, and becomes completely immersed in the ancient rhythms, then one begins to live”.
Amen!

My Life in Azerbaijan - Junior Achievement Project

March 7, 2011

Susan, my site mate and I have been working on a community project since February, helping five school students to prepare their Junior Achievement Award competition. For the first time, I feel like a REAL Peace Corps Volunteer. I enjoy spending less and less time in the bank, and take pleasure in helping those ambitious and certainly bright and cheerful Azerbaijan youngsters.

Our job is to help those students to develop a business plan for their project, an Art Shop. The final product will be a PowerPoint presentation both in English and in Azerbaijani. The students will deliver their plan orally in front of the judges and answer questions if needed. The competition will be held in Baku mid May. Working for AXA, the French insurance company for nine years, I spent most of my working years preparing quarterly financial results in a PowerPoint format for the CEO, CFO and other senior executives. My knowledge in this area was once considered by my colleagues as highly skillful, an “Expertise” in a way (sorry to be so cocky). I cannot wait to share my knowledge with them.

Five of them have lots of great and interesting ideas, just need to be more focus on their thoughts. We meet once a week, Susan and I go over what they prepared and give them some feedbacks. They are really a group of delightful teenagers. I enjoy seeing how their faces lit up when Susan and I praised their work.

This country has frustrated me in many ways. There are lots of things needed to be changed but unfortunately the necessary reforms have not yet be recognized by its people, or encouraged by its government. Only with better education and more open policies from the top, there will hope and brighter future for the Azeri people and generations come after.

I am not a politician and I hate to be one. I just know that if there is a budget line for “bribery cost” in a company annual plan, shamelessly and conspicuously be included in a pie chart with bright red color, something does not sound right.

The future of Azerbaijan lies on these young men and women, I hope they will excel and continue to excel when Susan and I leave them behind after Peace Corps.

My Life in Azerbaijan - The "Why" Question

March 2, 2011

It has been over a year since I joined the Peace Corps. I am still being asked over and over again the same question, “Why did you join the Peace Corps?” The question came from surprisingly a variety of individuals; friends back home, strangers from internet, my host family, Azerbaijani and even my Peace Corps friends. I figure this question most likely will be asked again when I return to the United States, when I am going through a job interview, when I am “drunk” in the bar having a casual conversation with strangers, or when I travel back to Hong Kong and am interrogated by relatives, therefore, I should really prepare and come up with a short and sweet (according to RPCV, usually people lose their interest about PC story after 5 minutes) but convincing reason.

I contemplate the answer for quite sometimes now, instead of answering the question; perhaps I should begin my anwser with a series of question. At one point of our life, we need to look into our heart and ask ourselves:

Is our own happiness enough to justify our living? Can we truly be happy when others suffer? Is it moral to ignore the needs of helping others? Can we continue to pretend there is nothing wrong to be selfish?

It is high time to “Giving it back!”