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.
No comments:
Post a Comment