THEY GONE!!!

Ok, so they aren’t gone yet, but AZ3 will be leaving Azerbaijan this weekend. This past weekend some of them had a party in Mingechavir and some members of AZ4 went to hang out with them. We got to swim in the ice-cold river which felt amazing, and eat pork, and all sorts of other great food. We played music and danced all night, so unfortunately, my legs have been killing me all week. That’s just the price you pay though.

Work has been busy the last few weeks. Conversation club still meets every week and next week I am meeting with a bunch of kids to play volleyball. We tried to meet last week to play kickball or wiffle-ball, but only two kids showed up so I’m hoping for a better turnout next week. I’m feeling pretty confident that more will be there. We are also wrapping up our tourism booklet project, finally, and I plan on filling out a few grant proposals in the next couple weeks. We are also getting ready for ABLE camp in September. We are in the process of finding Junior Counselors from Lankaran that participated in the camp last year and can help us out this year. We will be taking four kids to participate in the camp and three Junior Counselors. We are all very excited.

This week, since there are no weddings to speak of, or at least none that I was invited to, I thought I would take some pictures of my cooking equipment that I use daily to prepare my delicious meals. I made an exciting discovery last week, too! As you all know, a staple meal of mine is the spaghetti noodles with butter and ketchup. Well last week I got ambitious and made some sauce that was actually pretty good. Not as good as mom’s but still not bad. It also didn’t have any meat, but still tasty nonetheless. Anyways, my discovery. I was thinking of ways to mix up the meal a little bit and searching the scant selection in my fridge, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted some leftover sour cream from when we made quesadillas with the AZ5 trainees. I had no idea that putting sour cream into my pasta (with ketchup or the sauce) would be as good as it was. So that was my interesting discovery of the last week or so. Next week I’m going to try to make a kind of alfredo sauce, so we will see how that goes.

The pictures are pretty self explanatory, I believe. The green metal thing is my gas balloon that I fire up every night and boil my water on. I got it filled a couple weeks ago and hope that it lasts me about two months. We’ll see. Now that it is full, I consistently burn the hair off my knuckles when I light it up. Gets me every time. The big yellow container is a big tub of butter/cow lard type stuff. It’s great and delicious. Some of my friends here are disgusted that I use as much of this stuff as I do, but it’s perfect. A solid spoonful is great with the noodles, or you can use it to butter the pan when necessary. It lasts a while, and is really cheap. Both families that I have lived with use this liberally. Plus it’s called “Super Sun.” How can you go wrong? Finally, I believe there is a picture of the ketchup. They sell spicy ketchup here that is delicious. The noodles are normal so they are not pictured. And that is typically what I use to feed myself. A lot of times I’ll buy bread or some fruit to supplement the noodles and ketchup, and I have been eating breakfast more often as well. I also buy potatoes a lot to make French fries which is fun.

That’s pretty much all I got for this week. This weekend we are going to Baku to formally say goodbye to AZ3 and send them back to America in style. I’ll be back on Sunday and before I can get back to my house, I have to swing by Ashley’s and pick up Lankaran’s newest resident. Lyka the dog came back to Lankaran with us from Mingechavir. Our friend Terah from AZ3 bought her and since she will be moving back to America she handed the dog over to us. We are excited to have her here and it made the 9 hour bus ride from Ming a lot more interesting to have a dog with us.