Happy Dog Story

I wrote this article for the Peace Corps Volunteers' Azerbaijan newsletter.

I sent a dog from Azerbaijan to America. She has a good home with my sister in Wisconsin, everyone who has met her loves her, she is happy and healthy running around in the country and swimming in Lake Michigan with her new golden retriever sister.

But I don’t recommend that you do this. It was a crazy idea from the start and it is a miracle that it worked out.

To tell you why, I will go back to last summer, when I moved in with a new host family. Living outside the door of our house was a small brown dog of about 20 pounds. She lived there because my family fed her scraps once a day. She greeted me daily for months and if I paused from my walking, she tried to put her front paws on my legs. I never fed her, touched her and tried not to look at her.

I am a dog lover, but I felt that this dog needed to adapt to being a dog in Azerbaijan. She needed to go hang with other dogs, avoid humans, find her own food in the garbage, scrap it out. I thought to myself that making friends with a dog is not sustainable in Azerbaijan and that spaying and neutering are.

This dog was persistent. All through the fall and into December she greeted me whenever I came and went, walked me to the marshrutka (mini-bus) every day and waited with me. She would walk down the street right behind me and bump her nose against my legs. I still didn’t touch or feed her.

But I became increasingly concerned when I saw that she would not budge from our doorway to find shelter at night. Rain fell on her, snow fell on her and she would spend days wet. As I slept in my room at night, I knew she was right outside my window in the open on nothing but frozen ground. She was afraid of the feral dogs in our neighborhood and knew that men did not live in our house or come to our door. She could avoid kicks of men and boys by staying outside our door.

I also noticed that she was eating rice, bread and little else. She would dig up dirt with her nose and eat it. I could find no one who wanted a dog or could offer it shelter through winter.

Around January 1, she gave birth to 5 puppies and dug under a fence across the street to make a nest for her puppies. Some of the neighbors felt sorry for her and provided a cardboard box and some straw. But it was January, windy and at night, bitter cold. The water in the street was constantly either frozen or very cold.

At this point, I decided I had to start helping her. I bought some dog food and began feeding her. I started talking with her and touching her when she took breaks from the pups. I pulled her pups out of the gutter when they started walking and fell in. Her fur was thin and so was she. When I bent down to get them out of the gutter, she would slip herself between my body and my outreached arm and press herself against me. She was a good mother, with fat puppies. I wanted to send a couple of the pups to America, but could not get through the red tape and eventually they grew up and disappeared.

When they left, I could see that she would go right back to living outside our door and become pregnant again soon. She did not seem to be in good health and continued to eat dirt. But she continued to greet me happily. I really admired her spirit of continuing to be optimistic in spite of the fact that this life did not suit her. I decided I had to make a commitment to help her as much as I could. But how much I could help her would depend on what she would be willing to do.

I knew a vet already who could do most procedures, except a spaying operation, and took her there for an exam. Beforehand, we practiced walking on a leash and I eventually coaxed her into a taxi to get her there. The neighbors stared.

I had no luck finding a vet who could spay dogs until a fellow volunteer found someone at the Agriculture University, which is located in my town. He agreed to do it, but I knew I couldn’t pluck her off the street, have her spayed and dump her back on the street again. So I had to find her a place to stay. I left my perfectly good host family and moved to another family, people I knew, who agreed to give the dog a chance to live in the garden of their home.

After I moved in, it turned out that living in the garden meant tied up in the garden, that they were afraid of her and sometimes she got off the chain. Not a good solution, but she stayed while she recovered from the operation. (The post-op instructions I received were to feed her tea and soup for two days. She refused both because she is a dog and after awhile I gave her water and eggs, which she wolfed down.) I had to find her another place to stay while I figured out how to get her out the country.

In the meantime, The Dog and I (I didn’t name her, thinking it was bad luck) took walks all over town, causing a stir wherever we went. And my sister visited Azerbaijan, met her and decided to either keep her for me or her, or find a home for her (she has a husband who was skeptical) in Wisconsin. But our plans were to travel through Georgia and Turkey, so she couldn’t take the dog back with her. Besides, the airlines have a lot of rules and paperwork, which we were not prepared for. I had a lot of travel plans for the summer, so having a dog was not in my future.

Just when I thought I’d have to put her back on the street in her old neighborhood while I figured out what to do, my vet friend found a relative she could stay with for a couple of months, if necessary. He convinced the wife easily, but the husband required quite a bit of vodka in order to agree.

So she moved into their garden (also tied up) and I went to their home every day to walk her and check on her, except for when I was in Baku, the capital city, (twice) for The Dog’s flight-related paperwork and my sitemates picked up the slack. No one felt like flying to America with the dog, so we found that Lufthansa Cargo ships show dogs, racehorses, all kinds of other animals and has a good record and a special animal building for layovers in Frankfurt.

The details and paperwork overwhelmed me. I met everyone involved in Baku from the cargo people to the passport people/vet office to Customs, the city veterinary office and the document translator. Then on the other end, I had a friend arrange to pick her up in Chicago and hold her until my sister came from Wisconsin.

Frankly, this took away from my Peace Corps duties. While I think that walking around town with her every day and making friends with little boys, who ended up liking her and petting her was good, it took away from my other projects. I was distracted.

The tension was thick as the day of the flight approached. I had all the documents I thought I needed, but who knows what I didn’t understand that I needed?--I was speaking to everyone in Azerbaijani. Azerbaijanis helped me quite a bit, but once I got in the taxi for Baku (171 miles away) with The Dog, we were on our own. Well, almost. Our PC country director had given permission for her to relax at the PC office before the flight. We hung out in the yard, she had a bath with the car-washing hose and she searched for fallen berries to eat.

I was supposed to be at the airport at 10:00 p.m. About 6 p.m. is when they called to say I should come back in nine days because Customs is not open on Sunday. This was Sunday. I headed to the airport. At the cargo dock, I was quickly surrounded by huge, curious guys who looked like bouncers—they lug cargo around for a living. I told my Lufthansa contact that I had nowhere to go with her, they were the ones who scheduled the flight for Sunday knowing Customs was closed and she had to go or I would need to stay at the cargo building with her for nine days.

They figured it out. After awhile, they produced the crate, I said goodbye, kissed her while the giant loading dock guys watched us and left the rest to Fate.

My kind friends, the Harles, in Naperville, Illinois, picked her up at the airport and gave her excellent care for several days, including an oatmeal bath at a groomer. Afterward, my sister came to pick her up and they made the six-hour trip to her home in Wisconsin. My brother-in-law is no longer skeptical; he loves her and wants to keep her. She hustles around her rural neighborhood and goes to the state park on the weekends. She has gone to doggy class and even day-care for socialization with American dogs.

The real miracle of this story is not all of the people who helped me, although the support I received from everyone, including many Azerbaijanis, was tremendous. The real miracle is that this little dog is so unusual. She was not able to adapt to life in Azerbaijan, but was able to do everything I asked her to do to adapt to America—walk on a leash, ride in a taxi, accept physical exams and shots without objecting, walk confidently into an operating room when she had never been inside a building in her life, know not to urinate inside, not object to having me walk up to her on the street and shove worm medicine down her throat, and go from a crate in an airport to charming people in Naperville, Illinois within an hour. For awhile, her life changed radically and frequently and she kept accepting the changes.

So when I see a dog in my neighborhood scrounging his own food or lying in the sun enjoying the good weather, I toss him part of my candy bar and hope that he is finding some enjoyment in life. I don’t think I’ll ever meet another dog like The Dog.

Traveling ın Turkey

I haven't seen my son in almost two years. He was in the Navy and couldn't just up and come over to Azerbaijan. Most volunteers have come home due to a family wedding; illness or just because they mıssed theır famıly.

So since he recently left the Navy, he decided to come and visit. We met in Istanbul last week and are traveling through the rest of the country. This blog post is really just an endorsement of Turkey as a vacation spot and an interestıng country. Neither of us had ever thought much about Turkey and only thought of coming here because I am in this part of the world and the other options are not so appealıng--Iran, Turkmenıstan, Armenia, Syria, and the part of Russia that is having a lot of civil unrest.

Of course, Istanbul is an interestıng city wıth a lot to do—historical sites, a beautiful city on two continents and in three parts, all separated by water. Lovely palaces, beautiful parks, interesting places, such as the Grand Bazar, with over 4000 merchants, the Spice Bazar and a wonderful public transportation system, although we walked most of the time.

Istanbul is extremely clean, the parks are outstanding, we felt very safe and there are interestıng things to do everywhere. The Turkısh people are very welcomıng and everything is well-organized.

We next went to Gallipoli, the site of the WWI battle, because my son is a history buff. We then saw Troy, the ancient cıty—I didn’t know that there are 9 cities here built on top of each other. It was interestıng to see the different excavations.

We then took an overnight bus to Cappadogia, an area wıth giant rock formations and soft rock cliffs into which are built whole cities. We are stayıng in a cave hotel carved out of the rock. What a lovely place. Tomorrow we will go to some cave citıes and explore a canyon.

We are so impressed wıth the bus transportation—clean, effıcient and they go almost everywhere. We had a butler on our Mercedes bus giving us drınks and snacks. It ıs inexpensive. The bathrooms in the bus statıons are immaculate.


As we traveled on the bus, we saw many cities along the way. They are immaculate wıth beautıful apartment buildıngs and wonderful infrastructure. The architecture is interesting and attractive wıth beautiful mosques everywhere.

Everyone has been very kind to us and some people on the bus have even invited us to their homes.

It's Hot Outside

Diary of a Hot Day

I was working in a lovely mountain village last week at a camp for kids.  Peace Corps volunteers there got the idea to create a camp for four weeks and organized it.  We served 60 kids and it was a lot of fun.  But despite the mountain setting, it was HOT.

Part of the week, there was no water in one of the volunteers' homes.  It was difficult for them.  We had water where I was staying, but it smelled really bad and came out of the tap sandy.  Mountain or no mountain, the water there is bad.

I came home today on a 3 1/2 hour hot ride in a dilapidated van that serves as a bus between my community and the other one.  I found that we had no water at our house either, but the rest of the neighborhood did.  Despite this, yesterday my family had a circumcision ceremony at the house for a 14 year old relative and killed a lamb there too for good luck.  I am glad I was not there.

The relatives are lovely (the boy is holed up in another room for 10 days), but I wish we had water.  I have a lot of dirty clothes.

I left to go to the internet club and buy a watermelon (delicious and cheap, but hard to get home) and read these factoids from the Peace Corps monthly newsletter for Azerbaijan volunteers: 

If you need to blow your nose, leave the room.   It is acceptable to gently dab at your nose in front of others, but not to blow your nose.  If you are in la ocation in which you cannot leave (say, for example, on a 6 hour bus ride), you may blow your nose but try to be as discreet as possible.  

 It is believed that for women and children, sitting on cement is bad for your health (bad for reproductive health). 

 Appearance is everything. Do not wear clothes with mud. Clean your shoes. Bring napkins/rag on a muddy day to clean your shoes before lessons. Iron your clothes. Men: Shave your face. Keep your hair cut clean. 

Men in Azerbaijan commonly shave armpits.  

I am going home to sit in front of the fan.

Traveling and Twitter

Azerbaijan is physically separated into two parts. To get to the other part from where I live, you must take a bus through Iran or through Georgia. It takes many hours and I obviously can't go through Iran. So when I went last week, I flew. It took 40 minutes.

I went with a Peace Corps friend and her Azerbaijani husband, Ferid. An interesting thing happened. Before we left, a young woman told Ferid that her brother was in the army in the part of the country we were going to. She asked if he would bring her brother some home-cooked food. Ferid barely knew this girl. But he told her he would, got information about his location and when we got to the other part of the country, he told his mother about the situation.

The next morning she got up early and cooked for several hours, making him a large packet of food. Ferid then went to the base, met with the young man and gave him the food. He was gone about 5 hours.

This is perfectly normal in Azerbaijan--spend hours making food for a stranger and delivering it.
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Some of the things that are part of everyday life in America didn’t exist when I left the country in 2008. So this time I will ask questions about these things.

For example, Twitter—I have heard of it, but we don’t have it here. It seems like if it did, I could get tweeted (I think that is the term) by Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears about what they are doing or thinking. Why do people want that? It seems like a lot of people use it. What useful things can a person do with Twitter?


Lady Gaga—I haven’t heard her sing—it is not possible to download from Itunes here. Is she any good? Her outfits are interesting.

The Tea Party---I don’t get them. They seem like a contradiction. They don’t want much Federal government, but they are angry at Obama about not doing something about BP. But according to them, isn’t the government supposed to stay out of regulating stuff?

Most of the Tea Party people seem to be from conservative states like Mississippi, Alabama and Arizona. Maybe they don't know that when Mississippi sends $1.00 to the Federal government in taxes, they get $2.02 back. The balance comes from the liberal states they make fun of, like Massachusetts, which gets 82 cents back for every dollar it sends.

And on the personal responsibility part of the Tea Party—Arkansas, where the Tea Party is strong, has a divorce rate almost twice the rate of Massachusetts. The same for SAT scores, teen pregnancy, school drop-out rates and incarceration rates—the Tea Party states seem to have a problem with personal responsibility as well as for paying their own way. So why don’t they like the Federal government?

The Real Housewives—who are they? Are they really "real"? Are they actresses? Is this a reality show or a drama?

Apple Tablet—I want one, I think. How does the virtual keyboard work? Can I get away without a real computer if I have one of these? Will I miss the optical drive? Is it better to read books on it Kindle-like or is it better to tote the book around?

You May Have Closets and Electricity, But I Have Mulberries

I have written about things that annoy or inconvenience me in Azerbaijan—lack of central heating, closets, competent repairpersons, intermittent lack of electricity and water. On the other hand, there are some things that to me are better.

Azerbaijanis don’t see the point of having a tree on their property unless it gives fruit or nuts. So throughout the summer and fall, fruit and nuts are everywhere. Now it is mulberries and apricots and cherries. Later it will be plums, other berries, peaches, figs, pears and apples. Best of all is pomegranate—they are everywhere. In the southern region of Azerbaijan, people have tangerine, orange, lemons and grapefruit.

Although we only have one tree of each, my yard has many more mulberries and cherries than we can eat, so we are canning, giving fruit away and feeding some to the chickens. Azerbaijanis don’t seem to fertilize, use insecticide or prune their fruit trees, but they do just fine. I like the idea of trees producing something instead of just being there.

Another things I admire about Azerbaijan is that there is reliable, frequent public transportation almost everywhere and towns and cities are compact and walkable. Good, cheap public transportation in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia is seen as necessary for the country to be successful. The capital city of Baku has new, clean, frequent buses going everywhere for the equivalent of about 25 cents a ride. They also have a good subway, with new stations being built. Many of the foreigners in Baku and wealthy people don’t want to take public transportation, however, and there are many SUV’s there.

Smaller cities have older buses and vans that are sometimes pretty dilapidated, but they run. People who live in the country can travel on these older buses and vans for work or visits to relatives. Things are more pleasant because people walk and take public transportation instead of having to buy a car. And the poor are not at as much of a disadvantage transportation-wise.

As I meet Europeans and travel around this area, I hear comments and realize how much more violent America is than most other countries. I feel much safer from crime here and even in the capital city of Baku. When my daughter was in Berlin as a 13-year old, I wondered why the teacher allowed her and one other student to wander around by themselves for hours. She explained that Europe is overall much safer than America.

Many Americans feel safe in their own neighborhoods because most of the crime and violence happens in neighborhoods where the poor live. And that is one difference between America and some other countries in which crime is lower—the poor do not live in neighborhoods by themselves. They are able to be dispersed to live with everyone else. The opportunity for poor children to be surrounded by people with jobs, decent schools, a safe environment and city services helps them to become productive citizens and not repeat the cycle.

Which leads me to the final thing I like about Azerbaijan and living in this part of the world. Azerbaijanis don’t think they have all the answers. They think they can get some good ideas from people in other countries. Maybe I am cynical from reading all the bad news that has happened since I left the country in 2008. But I do know that no other country thought going to war in Iraq was a good idea.

We are the only developed country that still executes people and somehow we still have by far the highest murder rate of all—execution doesn’t seem like a deterrent. And our teen pregnancy rate and infant mortality rates are much higher than other developed countries, but we don’t seem very curious about how other countries do so much better than we do. Canada’s banking system is doing just fine—they have good regulation so did not have unsafe mortgage instruments and did not allow the type of financial products that led to our collapse. But we don’t seem to know how they did it or even that they are okay up there.

Now I will go back to eating mulberries.

Becoming a Prima Donna

These are some things that have happened to me lately:

Last week I had to go to the airport in Baku. It is about a $25 taxi ride, so I took the bus. That involves being dropped off a couple of miles from the airport and hiking along an expressway with no sidewalks.

Since I don’t have much call to go to the airport, I didn’t know how far it was and how difficult the walking would be. I saw no taxis coming or going.

But what did happen is that many, many drivers stopped to offer me a ride. Some backed up on the expressway, others pulled over abruptly. Ninety eight percent of drivers in Azerbaijan are men—so many men traveling alone offered me a ride.

Later, I found out that on this stretch of the road, it is normal to get a ride to and from the bus stop.

I think I have written before about another volunteer who was flying to Europe to meet her parents. Unbeknownst to her, her flight had been rescheduled for two days later. When she arrived and learned the news, she was unsure what to do, since she lives about 6 hours away from the airport. Several airport staff invited her to stay with them for two days.

After I left the airport, I was in the subway. I asked a woman sitting in an information booth which train to take. She was so thrilled that I spoke Azerbaijani (most foreigners working in Baku don’t speak Azerbaijani) that she invited me to her home for tea. She was ready to pack up and leave. I had to tell her that I was in a hurry to get back to my town.

Yesterday I needed to go to a notary. Someone told me where the office was located, but when I got there, I didn’t see the office, so went into a travel agency in the same building and asked. They said the office had moved. The owner of the business told me where they had moved, but insisted on driving me there.

When I got to the office, they did my transaction and when I asked how much it would cost, they told me that since I am a guest in the city, it would be free.

The Peace Corps tells us that most volunteers experience reverse culture shock when they get back to America. I remember that in America I was not a celebrity, but I am not sure I will like this fact!

Travel and Carpets

Most volunteers travel out of the country while they are here. We get 22 days travel time each year, and the Peace Corps hopes we will spend most of the travel in the country. This is because when we go back to America, we are supposed to share our experience here with others and speak knowledgeably about Azerbaijan. We are given the equivalent of about $25 per month for travel in the country. Since buses are cheap and many times we can stay with another volunteer, the money is adequate.

Of course, since the country is small--about the size of Maine—we are able to do significant in-country travel over a few days, including weekends. There are numerous holidays throughout the year, so some volunteers travel in Azerbaijan without using vacation time and spend most of their 44 days of travel during their two years of service outside the country.

Most volunteers use some of their vacation time to return to America once for family events such as weddings, funerals or for Christmas. Nearby travel alternatives are somewhat limited—to the south is Iran; to the east, the Caspian Sea; to the north, a part of Russia that is experiencing a lot of civil unrest; and also Georgia, which is interesting and where many volunteers go.

To the west is Armenia, where we can’t go. Azerbaijan is locked in conflict with Armenia, which is occupying part of Azerbaijan. Further to the west is a separate part of Azerbaijan which we can fly to; and west of that is Turkey.

So when my sister recently came to visit, we visited several cities in Azerbaijan; the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi; and Istanbul in Turkey.

One of the things I like about traveling in Azerbaijan is that outside of Baku, the capital, there are few tourists or foreigners. Azerbaijanis welcome tourists and sometimes I even feel like a celebrity traveling around Azerbaijan because tourists are spoiled. It is easy to engage with locals and learn from them. Interesting sites are never crowded and it is possible to see much more than in a roped-off guarded tourist-popular museum in another country. Museums in the regions of Azerbaijan mostly display things outside of glass cases and touching is often allowed. The curation is somewhat haphazard and the information about each piece is often scant or missing, but the overall experience is interesting and charming.

Tourist sites are also different that in more often-visited countries. For example, Azerbaijan is one of the few places in the world with mud volcanoes. They are vast flat plains of dirt with occasional small and large pools of mud in which gases regularly pop to the surface, creating bubbling pools which sometimes throw up a geyser of mud. The mud is cold. Most of the locals don’t realize they are there—they just go about their business in their villages. One you find the volcanoes—nothing is marked on the road--you can walk right up to the edge of an individual volcano, stick your hand in the volcanoes and maybe get hit by a geyser. Nearby are 20,000 year-old cave paintings. There are guided tours in the cave section if you want, but the whole scene is relaxed and there are no barriers.

In the few artisan workshops in Azerbaijan, such as a rug weaving workshop, workers will stop and talk about their work or allow us to sit and watch them work. They will explain the different types of designs, how wool is spun from local sheep, is dyed with vegetables, fruits and herbs, how designs are chosen and how rugs are made.

So when my sister came, I knew we wanted to visit certain sites in Azerbaijan. I also took her to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I had been twice before. But this time, I thought I was ready to go to Istanbul with her.