Fall break in Deutschland

I just returned to Baku from Germany via Vienna. It was nice to be back in the west for a few days. Germany now feels almost as familiar as the US, compared to Azerbaijan. I had a good time supporting the German economy and buying stuff that's not available in Baku (peanut butter, dehydrated soup mixes, salad dressing packets..pretty much anything full of chemicals and preservatives).

Patty and Manfred and I watched parts of a documentary about two guys who go on a motorcycle trip from London to NYC via Ukraine and Kazakhstan and Mongolia and Russia--it's called "The Long Way Round" with Ewan McGregor (actor) and a friend--it's astonishingly entertaining! Get it on Netflix if you can!

The other day Patty (GOD BLESS HER) spent almost the entire day at a travel agency w/me helping to arrange flights from Baku to Frankfurt to Minneapolis for Christmas and New Year's. It involves four airlines and connections in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Chicago, and Moscow. I'm sure absolutely nothing will go wrong, no glitches, no lost luggage, no missed connections, nobody wondering if I'm a terrorist because I live in a Muslim country...

The two young women at the travel agency put a lot of work into it. We kept hearing one or the other on the phone saying something like "Baku. in Azerbaijan. I know, we never heard of it either!" (I don't speak German, but even I could understand THAT, esp. since there was a lot of laughter going on at both ends)

Kai and Mac had their school break this week as well, so it was great to spend some time with them. Kai is about ten feet tall, Mac not quite, but getting there...they're delightful nephews and I was so happy to be on the same continent w/them for a while.

Small world cliche, but fun

On int'l day I met the father of one of my German students, stilted conversation, but he warmed up on hearing I was off to Deutschland for the break, near Mannheim, where he grew up!

"My sister and her family live near Speyer."

"In Speyer?"

"No, a village near Speyer. Bohl-Iggleheim."

"Bohl-Iggelheim? My brother is in Iggelheim! a doctor! ear nose throat" (so jubilant that he forgot the words and pointed to his ears nose and throat) "It is a small world!" the dad said.

So in the next few days we'll be going for a walk along the street where this uncle lives. Manfred looked him up in the phone book and wants to knock on the door and say hello. With him, I won't look like a stalker.

International Day at school

International schools host an "international" event every year. Kids dress in their national costumes, play native games, perform dances and sing songs from their countries. Parents bring in regional foods to share. When I was in Ukraine, the school had an "International Night" so regional beverages were served as well as foods (that was fun!).

Here at my school in Azerbaijan, International Day was on Friday, during the school day, so no beverages. It was a wonderful day, with fantastic performances by both adults and kids: a Korean drumming dance, Indian bridal dance ritual, the singing of the Azerbaijan national anthem, Haka dance from N.Z., salsa and tango, "We Come from a Land Down Under, " on and on.

The ELS dept. ran a games workshop--the M3s/grade 8 kids played bingo in three languages and alphabets. It would have been four if Ling from China hadn't gone on vacation a day early.

Rumors and visas

Azerbaijan doesn't have a free press (the country is #97 on a scale of 100, according to a map I saw at the Newseum this summer). In a country without a free press, people rely on rumors. It's the same way at my school, unfortunately--we hear rumors about things going on in the larger community that affect us personally, but we hear nothing officially.

Azerbaijan has been issuing 30-day tourist visas to visitors at the airport. A rumor went around that the 30 days had been decreased to 7, but the school wouldn't confirm or deny. "It's a rumor," was all we were told.

Well, it's true. And it affected a lot of teachers who were expecting family and friends to visit during fall break. My friend Eileen's parents were coming from Ireland for 9 days. They were forced to leave within a week or pay $600 each to stay the extra two days. It was cheaper for them to pay to change their flights and leave sooner. (and while Eileen may be READY for them to leave after 7 days, it's still a disappointment!) Some friends and family cancelled altogether.

The latest rumor is that Azerbaijan will no longer allow visas to be obtained upon arrival at the airport, no exceptions. No one can come in as a visitor/tourist without an official letter of invitation. This is allegedly because of upcoming elections--the government wants to prevent outside observers from monitoring the elections in November. (In Ukraine, observers regularly come from other countries to monitor elections, and a good thing, after what happened to Yushchenko in 2004.) But...that's another rumor.

Oh, these wacky ex-Soviet countries! Fall break begins on Saturday and I have a flight to Germany at 7 a.m. Because I came in on a now-expired tourist visa and still hadn't received a resident visa, I might not be able to get back to Azerbaijan from Germany after the break. Frankly, I wasn't that worried about getting back IN, it was the getting OUT that concerned me. (I just read an amazing book "The Forsaken", about Americans who believed Soviet propaganda during the depression and emigrated to the USSR, some to work in Henry Ford's plant. They all ended up in the gulag.)

On Monday, the business office took my passport (or "confiscated" it, as I'm now thinking), claiming it was needed to obtain my resident visa. And I would have my passport back, along with the resident visa, by Friday. Friday afternoon at latest. Maybe Friday evening. But before flight Saturday morning. Yes, will have it. Driver will bring to flat. Stay in flat, don't leave.

Okay, whatever you say. The woman in the business office is a lovely person and she's not the one causing the problems--it's systemic.

It was an enormous relief today to receive my passport along with my resident card. I'm now here legally! and I can prove it if a cop stops and questions me! although that's not likely because of my skin color!

So I'm off to Germany on Saturday, should be able to get out and in. No updates on what's really happening with visitors and visas, just rumors.

Cult of Personality

When my electricity failed a few weeks ago, two employees from the school came over and poked around the wiring. A socket had "melted" probably because I'd had the ac on ALL THE TIME (dumb entitled American, I could see them thinking).

At least I know that the circuit breakers are functional. The workers later drove me to school. I had a nice conversation with Rashid, who speaks English and is learning German and is trained as accountant but school has better pay than accounting and is necessary to know someone to get accounting job. "It is necessary to network?" I asked. "Yes, network!" he said, happy to learn a new idiom.

I asked about Heydar Aliyev. Rashid told me Aliyev had been the head of the KGB in Soviet-era Azerbaijan, "worse than Stalin," he said, and even today old people "shudder" when his name is brought up.

That must be hard for them, because his name is everywhere. The Azerbaijan airport is called Heydar Aliyev. Libraries, parks,and boulevards are named after Aliyev. Billboards of Aliyev are all over the place. He died in 2003, now his son is president, and he's allegedly grooming his own son to be the next president (a pre-teen who owns 6 palaces in Dubai).

I team-teach in M1/grade 6 Humanities. A recent assignment was to research and write a speech about a famous person, ie Gandhi, Elvis, Napoleon, Vaso de Gama, Genghis Khan, Helen Keller. The 6th-graders had to include positive and negative points about their subjects.

One of the local students chose Heydar Aliyev, but she couldn't find anything negative about him. She's not allowed to.

Carry your papers

Everyone at school was in a tizzy this week, esp. new teachers. Alvin, the music teacher, and his wife were picked out of a crowd by police when they were walking downtown on Saturday, asked for their papers, and since they didn't have them, they spent SEVEN HOURS IN JAIL.

So we're all being warned to carry our BP badges, copies of our passports, and letters stating that we're employees of the school and here legally because--here's the catch--we're NOT here legally. We came in on 30 day-tourist visas which have expired, and our long-term visas haven't arrived yet. So without all this documentation, any one of us could be picked up and thrown into the slammer.

We all know, however, that it most likely happened to Alvin and Tina because they're from India. The first thing the police officer asked was "Pakistati? Hindustani?" Alvin said "Hindustani." The officer wanted documents, they weren't carrying them, the officer told them to get into the car, Alvin refused, and the officer forced him into it. These were plain-clothes policemen in an unmarked car. Apparently Tina was relieved when they were driven to the police station; they could have been taken anywhere.

Alvin and Nina are gentle, kind people. It's a shame that this happened to them, but overt racism is common here (as it was in Ukraine).

And now we're all even more illegal because Azerbaijan just reduced its 30-tourist visa to 7 days. So we've been here without proper documentation for 49 days instead of 26.