I'm sitting in front of the t.v., once again obsessed with Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. It was a little over three years ago that I first got hooked on the show, sitting on the floor of our house packing books and dishes (which have yet to be unpacked) ready for adventure. We were preparing to leave for Azerbaijan and the show encompasses all of our excited expectations. I have a feeling this sort of thing is cyclical-or will be for Mathias and I.
Step 1-Wanderlust. The undeniable pull in the belly to foreign lands and different people. Enter obsessive Bourdain watching and jealousy, and reminiscing about past trips.
Step 2-Arrival. For a week or two everything is magical and perfect, simply because you wish it to be so. Bourdain's visit to Kurdistan is an excellent example. The food is amazing, severed cow heads charming and everything pin-prickingly special.
Step3-Disillusionment. Exhausted from spending so much energy deliberately ignoring those things which don't match your expectations of the place, your manic swings to depressive. Everything is horrible. This is the most boring/frustrating/backward (insert your own adjective here) country in the world. You spend a lot of time being angry with taxi drivers.
Step 4-Acceptance. Or whatever mix you can find. There are things you'll always hate, but you're ready to appreciate your favorite foods again and some of the local oddities. You make friends and appreciate them. Perhaps you are so bored that you spend all of your time making home videos of your cat.
Step 5-The joy of returning home. Eat all the donuts you can. Endure mild own-culture shock in the supermarket.
Step 6-Amnesia. Like a woman who's forgotten her 13 hour labor while holding her newborn, you cannot for the life of you remember what was so bad (something about taxi drivers?) Nostalgia sets in. It was such a great experience, why didn't I appreciate it more? You make your very first attempt at cooking indigenous recipes. You must find these recipes on the Internet because while you were in country you couldn't have been less interested in a cooking lesson from a local. You go back over all the photos and videos you took and wonder why there are so many of your cat. You realize that maybe you don't want to go back there, specifically, but you want to go again. Somewhere else. Next time you'll do better.
You watch No Reservations. The cycle begins again.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
An Episode in Culture Shock
"That is too heavy for you!" He cries, hurrying towards me and taking the bucket of kitty litter from me as I emerge from the pet needs aisle. The older cashier and young bag boy grin at each other; obviously most adolescent sized women don't go stumbling through the grocery store carrying things half their size. "Why didn't you get a cart?" The bag boy asks, lugging the bucket up onto the conveyor belt. I say something about exercise and pull my cloth bazaar bag from my purse. The thin young man seems appreciative of my environmentalist gesture and cheerfully bags the rest of my groceries as I pay the cashier. Maybe it's his dark skin and lightly accented English but I suddenly feel like I am back in Azerbaijan. I automatically count how many males are looking at me, which is quite a lot since it is immediately clear that though the bag boy only outweighs me by a dozen pounds, he will squire me to my vehicle with the majority of the load and the others are going to tease him. My glance darts around to the ground, the sky, to my peripherals. As we walk towards the car I find that I can no longer make eye contact. I'm walking a few steps ahead, mentally telling myself not to walk so quickly. What is my problem? I find the intimacy of the help unbearable. I unlock the car and gesture towards the passenger side, "You can put it down on the floor there" I say, my gaze staying at a safe unfocused chest height. You probably look really bizarre and rude. American women are perfectly capable of casual interaction with service persons! "Have a great day!" I chirp at the last moment, hoping this will make up for my awkwardness. He's already off, cheerfully helping another customer. I spend the rest of the drive home wondering what triggered such a vivid emotional response. Was it the small Azerbaijan-sized onions in the produce section? Was it that choosing between the brand-name cat litter or cheaper publix kind I vividly remembered Mathias digging concrete dust out of our crawlspace into a laundry bucket for Baby Cat's first litter box? (I went with the off-brand.) Or maybe it was the bag boy himself, something (forgive me) but not-quite-American-yet about him? Or maybe it is I who am not quite American. There is one thing that is for sure and that is that Azerbaijan is not leaving me anytime soon.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Three Months Out
It's a strange thing, when you're back, it's hard to look back.
I had always suspected as much. People in my town would tell me how their emails and phone calls went unanswered when they tried to reach the volunteer who had left. There were a lot of stories like that-volunteer leaves, never to be heard from again. And near the end more than one volunteer jokes they will never attempt a good deed ever again, that their allotment of humanitarianism has been used up for the rest of their lives.
But we didn't want to vanish off the face of the earth. We didn't want our friends and colleagues to question our fealty. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, Skype and Facebook, keeping in touch with our dear Azerbaijani friends has been easy. Easy say "Happy New Year!" or "How was your vacation?"
But part of it hasn't been easy- staying connected to the American experience in Azerbaijan. By that, I mean that I could not read a single Azerbaijan volunteer blog. I tried. But I couldn't do it. Maybe the struggles are too familiar, something I'm not willing to feel again so readily. Perhaps I am reading the subtext behind each line, knowing the things I never wrote. Maybe it is the residue of all the things I did that I didn't want to do-all the times I smiled when I wanted to cry, or tried to brush off offense, or be a stronger person than I was. You never want to feel some of those things again, those things the current volunteers are doing right this very moment, and I fear if I read their heartbreaks that mine will come crashing back through--I want to be finished with that part.
I miss Azerbaijan. I miss my friends. I miss speaking Azerbaijani, the walking to the store and laundry hanging in the breeze. But I do not miss being a volunteer. I do not miss realizing that I am not even 10% close to being able to be selfless for a single day, let alone two years. Which brings me to my final judgment of my time. All those times that I was disappointed, the frustrations, the fears...they were not because of Azerbaijan or it's people. I mean, some of them were, but for the most part they were merely the big dirty mirror by which I learned the of the flaws in myself. That I am not as selfless as I wish. That my self-esteem could be stronger in the face of disapproval or rudeness. But for every time my inability to handle such difficulties frustrated me to tears, like a muscle aching under strain, I did get the tiniest bit stronger. I'm still getting stronger.
And so this week I could enjoy Hillary and Joey's post about the computer-ray-eating-cactus, and practice my Azeri to my Azerbaijani cat. I walked into a lamp shop whose owners were Turkish and had to go hide in the sconce room because their accents made me weepy and nostalgic. I could watch Egypt and think of Baku without bitterness, but hope.
Perhaps now is the time to go back to my novel, and begin editing again.
I had always suspected as much. People in my town would tell me how their emails and phone calls went unanswered when they tried to reach the volunteer who had left. There were a lot of stories like that-volunteer leaves, never to be heard from again. And near the end more than one volunteer jokes they will never attempt a good deed ever again, that their allotment of humanitarianism has been used up for the rest of their lives.
But we didn't want to vanish off the face of the earth. We didn't want our friends and colleagues to question our fealty. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, Skype and Facebook, keeping in touch with our dear Azerbaijani friends has been easy. Easy say "Happy New Year!" or "How was your vacation?"
But part of it hasn't been easy- staying connected to the American experience in Azerbaijan. By that, I mean that I could not read a single Azerbaijan volunteer blog. I tried. But I couldn't do it. Maybe the struggles are too familiar, something I'm not willing to feel again so readily. Perhaps I am reading the subtext behind each line, knowing the things I never wrote. Maybe it is the residue of all the things I did that I didn't want to do-all the times I smiled when I wanted to cry, or tried to brush off offense, or be a stronger person than I was. You never want to feel some of those things again, those things the current volunteers are doing right this very moment, and I fear if I read their heartbreaks that mine will come crashing back through--I want to be finished with that part.
I miss Azerbaijan. I miss my friends. I miss speaking Azerbaijani, the walking to the store and laundry hanging in the breeze. But I do not miss being a volunteer. I do not miss realizing that I am not even 10% close to being able to be selfless for a single day, let alone two years. Which brings me to my final judgment of my time. All those times that I was disappointed, the frustrations, the fears...they were not because of Azerbaijan or it's people. I mean, some of them were, but for the most part they were merely the big dirty mirror by which I learned the of the flaws in myself. That I am not as selfless as I wish. That my self-esteem could be stronger in the face of disapproval or rudeness. But for every time my inability to handle such difficulties frustrated me to tears, like a muscle aching under strain, I did get the tiniest bit stronger. I'm still getting stronger.
And so this week I could enjoy Hillary and Joey's post about the computer-ray-eating-cactus, and practice my Azeri to my Azerbaijani cat. I walked into a lamp shop whose owners were Turkish and had to go hide in the sconce room because their accents made me weepy and nostalgic. I could watch Egypt and think of Baku without bitterness, but hope.
Perhaps now is the time to go back to my novel, and begin editing again.
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