Week 1 in Azerbaijan

After two tiring days of travel, 61 new Peace Corps Azerbaijan volunteers arrived in Baku late Tuesday evening to be greeted with several current volunteers and key staff members. We traveled by bus to our resort/ hotel approximately one hour from the capital along the Caspian Sea.


This week ("Orientation Week") we have a fairly rigorous schedule of training seminars, introduction to the language and culture, and opportunities to talk with current volunteers and staff. Despite the entire group being a bit jet-lagged, we are all holding up pretty well, just excited at this point to learn the ropes and meet our host families this weekend. We've already gotten a handful of vaccinations and talked over safety, health and security procedures at length.

We will move in with our host families this weekend and begin the awkwardness of trying to communicate with them given such a significant language barrier. For the training period of almost 3 months, I will be living in a community with a number of other volunteer trainees, including the 4 who I will be training alongside with a native Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator. We will have language lessons 4 hours per day, followed by lunch with our host family and an afternoon of work training or practice sessions. This will occur (most weeks) 6 days a week with Sunday to rest although during the next 3 months, there are a few outings to Baku or days in which all 61 of us meet up in Sumgayit scheduled.

All in all, things are going great, and I am both excited and nervous to meet my host family and really experience Azerbaijani living! Unfortunately, it looks like our internet access will be somewhat sporadic during training, but I hope to be able to post once 2-3 per month.