up with the date

this is a pic of the fire i once wrote about...it is coming from a busted pipe.

what is today? the 26st? I guess some things have happened since my last entry.

firstly, my grandmother died and it has been terribly hard to be in Azerbaijan while my whole family is together mourning in Virginia. but i guess so much is self evident. One of the hardest aspects of being away from my family during this time is having to live with a different one. their intentions are great, but sometimes i just want to be left alone. or, i just want to be on my own schedule. it isn't that i can't at least get close to that here, it's that it is so hard to communicate what i want. when i'm stressed out, i don't feel like translating a longer conversation. in other words, i can't just be alone and do what i want without affecting other people. and that is the number one reason why i really don't want to live with another family other than my own. my own family has already had to go through hell of knowing what i want (for example, my mom knows not to talk to me about chores and duties, etc when i just wake up. it makes me insane. we've worked on that for years!)...and i don't need to go through that again. and, with other families i need to be polite. with my own, i can be the horribly cranky person i sometimes feel like being

on the volunteer front, some other things have occured:

i am now on the environmental committee. this is a great thing, but somewhat daunting bc azerbaijan is not exactly internationally renowned for it's environmental conscientiousness. the environmental committee is made up of 4 pcvs (two from my group: az 6 and two from the group that came a year prior: az 5). there is so much to be done it is hard to know where to start. also, i think there will be a lot of resistence to our ideas and therefore the committee will have to fight. i'm sorta of used to resistence against environmentalism from my COA days, but this is likely to be bit a tougher. i'm looking forward to it.

also, i am now the media manager for the softball league. there are 4 main softball teams (for kids mostly) from 4 cities in azerbaijan. this is entirely pc run. mingechevir is one of those cities and i definitely want to be involved.

my tutor (and the former lcf) Elvin wants to work on an English language publication for his student colleagues. i plan to work on this with him, but we need a small grant first. i hope to begin working on that soon too.

recently i got a large green light from my own host organization. to make a long story short, i want to bolster our relationship with P2P lending websites that link international lenders to international borrowers. right now, we have one such relationship with MicroPlace, which is owned by ebay:
https://www.microplace.com/investments/details/267

basically, this means i need to track, translate for, and monitor the progress of some of our borrowers. this sounds like fun, right? i think so...but that doesn't mean the customers are always going to be happy to have their pictures on the internet, or to speak frankly about their progress. also, azerbaijanis DO NOT like to smile for pictures. it is a culturial thing. they don't smile for their wedding pictures even. and this website wants smiles.....hmmm