Resilience. Or, life lessons from a seven-year-old.

Sine curves…remember them from high school trig? Up and down, up and down, in a never-ending cycle. Kind of mesmerizing, as I recall. Mesmerising….that’s such a calming word. Makes me think of oceans and spinning tops. And now it makes me think of Peace Corps training. Which isn’t calm in the slightest, but certainly has the same ups and downs, ups and downs.

We talked about resilience just this past week, actually. The PC’s Country Director for Azerbaijan spoke with us about it. About expecting those highs and lows, those peaks and valleys. It’s all normal. Happens to everyone. And I can personally vouch for that. Because twice now in less than two months I have hit lows. I think I have cried more in the six weeks I’ve been here than I did in the previous eight months. I had to assure my LCF this evening that in America, I practically never cried. I said this as I was choking back tears. Somehow, I’m not so sure he believed me.

What brought on this bout of self-doubt? The addition of another person to my host-family household. Not just another person, actually….the father returned from his job in Russia. The entire dynamic of the household has changed. We went from a four-woman house (yay for estrogen!!!) to one with a ruling man. I have seen changes in my host mother and both of my host sisters. Not negative changes; this is a nice man, apparently. But the women are more subdued than they were just a few days ago. I’m sure, in typical Azerbaijani fashion, they have already told him everything about me there is to know from their perspective. He was very nice and non-intimidating when I was introduced to him. Things were definitely yaxşı (good). Until late last night.

Because late last night, just before I was going to bed, came the kicker. My new host dad said a bunch of things to me, and as I was trying to sort out all of the sounds I was hearing, wondering if I should be recognizing these words, if I knew these words and, if I did, what on earth it was they meant again (for the zillionth time), suddenly there was a string of words I recognized… Leigh, yoxdur inglisdili evda danişmaq! (I think that’s what he said; I probably have words in the wrong order and with incorrect endings, knowing me. Oops.) What he was saying, basically, is for me not to speak English in the house anymore…to ONLY speak Azerbaijani.

Well. Not knowing this man but for a few minutes, really, I took this as a directive. Nobody laughed. Nobody in the room smiled. Just boom. No more speaking English in the house.

I have spent six weeks forming and cultivating friendships with the women in this house. I have gone evenings where I was completely unable to form an intelligent phrase to evenings where I felt completely comfortable and the words came to me easily, dictionary all but cast aside. There haven’t been many of those occasions, mind, but I relish the few I’ve had for the hope they provided. During the six weeks, I have honed my perception skills, reading tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, context. I can usually tell pretty much what’s going on, what’s being said. I don’t contribute a lot to the conversations, because in the time it takes me to look up the words for what I want to say and get up the nerve to actually SAY them, the conversation has long since moved on and the moment lost. But I get them. And sometimes, in my desire to be a part of the conversations around me, I do speak in English, which they mostly don’t understand….but sometimes they read my facial expressions, my tone, my body language, and they get me, too. It’s a symbiotic kind of thing. Awkward, yet comfortable. Until Mr. No English.

I’m going to admit here and now that I got about two hours of sleep last night. It didn’t matter how much I read or how much my eyes hurt, each time I tried to go to sleep my brain stirred up the pain of that statement, No English. I understand why he said it. He wants to make it “easier” for me to learn their language by being forced into it. But shouldn’t I be the one making that decision? I mean, after all, is it not I who will suffer if I don’t learn Azerbaijani sufficiently to survive when I move to my new home in four weeks? He doesn’t know how far I’ve come since I got here. Or how much I sacrificed to come to his country. Or that I was once (in my own mind) competent of doing just about anything I put my mind to. He honestly knows basically nothing about me.

So I got angry. And sad. And afraid. And devastated. And angry some more. And I wrote letters to him in my mind, letters I would translate into Azerbaijani and have handy at a moment’s notice for when the opportunity presented itself to let him know what I thought of this No English in the House policy. And I cried. And cried some more. I think I got two hours of sleep, and when I got up this morning, my emotions were still right below the surface. I mean, if you had pricked me with a pin anywhere on my body, tears would have come gushing out of the resulting hole, I felt so vulnerable. Everyone left the house except my older host sister and me. I tried in vain to sleep some more. I did a little homework. 

Early in the afternoon I ventured out to take my laundry from the line, and she asked if I wanted to eat. I didn’t really care; I was just one big emotional mess by that point. But she fixed some pasta and set the table, so I sat down to eat. That was when she noticed I’d been crying and got really concerned, asking me niyə??  Why??  On the verge of tears yet again, I told her in broken Azerbaijani, and she immediately said, “no, no!! Leigh….joke!” She said he was joking, that he was trying to help me speak Azerbaijani, but he was joking.

This was when I started to question just how much I was expected to infer from a directive coming from the ruling member of the household. Someone I don’t know, who may think they have a good handle on me already (but really doesn’t), and whom I know not at all. So it’s a little awkward around here, now. When Papa speaks, I have a very difficult time understanding what he’s saying. I don’t know if it’s his accent or speech mannerisms, or if it’s words I haven’t learned yet. Could be anything. Anything.

I thought about all of this as I walked along a sidewalk behind a seven-year-old boy this evening. Two young men, my LCF and a mutual friend of ours, were kind of messing with the kid, bouncing a soccer ball around the boy, keeping it just out of his reach. That little kid just kept coming back for more, trying over and over and over to get that ball. Maybe this time. No? Well, maybe this time. Darn. Well, maybe THIS time…. No matter how close he got or how frustrating it was to just about be able to get that ball and have it be just out of his reach, he kept trying.

Kids. They’re the bestest teachers of all.