Barda!

Salam! Let’s see… since our last update I (Carolyn) was officially initiated into Peace Corps. That’s right, I hurled my brains out and had other *ahem* issues for about 9 hours! Welcome to Peace Corps, Carolyn!!! I think I ate something bad and my stomach got mad at me. The PC doctor sent me some Pep to and Gatorade, so I’m back to normal.

This past weekend we got to go visit some current volunteers at their site. We travelled 6 hours by marstruka to Barda. A marstruka is basically a VW bus sized van thing that they stuff full of people and drive a billion miles per hour. We drove over a mini mountain and into the huge lowland of central Azerbaijan. The countryside was beautiful and vast and reminded me quite a bit like northern California. Rolling hills of brown grass with trees and bushes that are very similar to things back in Oregon/California… or maybe Eastern Washington near the gorge.

We got to Barda and were greeted by some current volunteers. They were great and so much fun! The first night we went to Ina’s house to have chicken tacos. Yay, American type food! Ina lives in a great house on her own with lots of privacy and a great yard. We hung out there with the volunteers and other trainees who travelled with us - people had some beers and it was a great bastion of Americanism!

The weekend was filled with softball, chicken cacciatore, beer, movies, Americans and good times! We got to see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that is training. We were told over and over again, “Make it through training and your world will change.” We are so busy these days and totally overwhelmed. We’re trying to learn the language, figure out our jobs while dealing with the immense culture shock! It will be great to get to our sites with enough language to survive on our own!

Right now we’re in week 4 and we will find out our permanent site in week 6. We are really looking forward to knowing where we’re going. We’re hoping that we will be in the mountains in the north, so any prayers or positive thoughts of that nature would be greatly appreciated!

As always, we hope that this finds you all well and happy! Take care and sag ol!

Pictures for this week are as follows: 1 Jesse hitting a HOME RUN at the softball game in Barda. That’s right, a home run. That’s my husband, folks. 2 Us in front of the Nushaba tower in Barda. It was built in 1322. It was said to have three tunnels running from it – one to Baku, one to south Azerbaijan and one to Istanbul. Pretty cool stuff.