Hospitality

Hospitality is a really big deal here.  A really big deal.  And it shows in more areas of life than you would think.  A friend of ours who is pregnant still tries to give me her seat on the bus.  I have to be stubborn and practically force her to sit down before she gives in.  And I've lost count of the number of times I've gone to pay my bus fare on the way out only to find that one of my friends paid for me already.

 

Of course, there is also the more traditional form of hospitality, which translates as food, food, and more food!  A guest should never have to ask for food or a drink refill.  In fact, sometimes they will refuse the first time (or even the second) out of politeness, and the host is expected to offer again, even up to the point of putting food on the plate anyway.  And it's not just like having a huge pot of chili on the stove with some cornbread.  No- variety and choices are key as well.  Once, while visiting someone's home, I found myself with three different drinks in front of me- a glass of juice, and two different kinds of tea!

 

A perfect example is the Turkish breakfast the school hosted for us at a restaurant.  Eggs, fried sausage, cheese pastries, fried cheese, black and green olives, a refilling bread basket (with three different kinds of bread), and every conceivable topping to go on it: two kinds of butter, honey, two kinds of jam, a peanut butter-ish spread (maybe from sunflower seeds?), three different kinds of cheese, prosciutto, cucumbers, and tomato slices.  Oh, and of course the never ending cup of tea. :)

 

This was just my plate- and you can't even see the
plate of pastries and fried cheese to the right

 

Valerie and me enjoying our Turkish breakfast

We've tried our hand at hosting a few times.  The first time, our guests called at the last minute and couldn't come, but more recently we had our vice principal and Valerie over for tea.  We did our best to set out plenty of options, but it's still a weak imitation of the real thing.

 



Of course, there's the other end of hospitality- guests should bring a small gift (often food, but not always) to the host.  On the occasion mentioned above, our guests apparently decided that giving each of us a coffee cup and a stick of deodorant was the way to go! :)

Oh, and there's also the lovely lunch ladies at our school, who will load us up with enough food for an army if we don't stop them.  One of the first words we learned in Azeri was "enough"!  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, as the following picture shows.

All we could do was laugh (and take a quick picture), and then I just split it with her rather than getting my own.

In fact, the hardest part of this hospitality is making sure we're not always on the receiving end- inviting friends over, insisting that someone else take the comfortable seat, and sometimes racing to the front of the bus to pay for our friends before they can pay for us.  It's a wonderful expression of the culture here- where we've met some of the warmest, most generous people I've ever known. 

Thankful

This weekend most of the people in our home group were busy, and it ended up just being all the single girls, minus one.  Rather than have someone host, we decided to go out to dinner, and it ended up being an impromptu girls' night out.  It was wonderful, and exactly what we needed.  We had dinner at a rooftop cafe downtown, ice cream from a place around the block, and then walked to Andrea's apartment to hang out for a bit. 

Lovely ladies, lovely view, lovely day!

The topic of the night was gratitude.  Several of the girls have been reading books or doing studies on gratitude, and they shared the things they'd been learning.  Among them was that it's not enough to simply enjoy the good things in life, but we need to turn that into praise for the One who gives them.  We delved into the hard question of how we're supposed to give thanks in all circumstances, even bad ones.  We also talked about naming our blessings (instead of a generic "Thanks for all you do for me") and going beyond the big, obvious ones.  It's important to notice and thank Him for all the tiny things, to develop a general attitude of gratitude and praise. 

In honor of this, I thought I'd make a list of some of the little blessings I've noticed in my life the past few days:

• It's been warm enough for me to eat my breakfast on the balcony the last two days.
• It's also warm enough to wear skirts again!
• The 4th grader who spontaneously hugged me on her way to my class
• Someone put a sponge (to be used as an eraser) in my classroom at the elementary school.  In a school where every classroom has a smartboard, it's impossible to find an eraser for the one chalkboard.  I've been tearing paper out of a notebook. 
• The coffeeshop/elevator music version of "Gangnam Style" that was playing at the cafe where we had dinner.
• Typos/mistranslations in menus:
  
• The taste of clean, cold water.  An everyday occurance, but not one I usually pay attention to.
• Lightbulb moments with the kids in kindergarten
• I haven't had a mosquito in my room for several days now.
• My preferred bus pulling up to the bus stop just as I walk up (with open seats)
• The babushka standing on the corner selling individual portions of nuts wrapped in paper.
• The fact that the paper turned out to be an unused worksheet from some English language class!  :)
  

All told, that's a lot of blessings for just a few days!  And I know there are more that I'm not remembering right now.

So here's my question for you (didn't see that one coming, did you?  It's an interactive blog now! :) )- How has He blessed you lately, in big or small ways?

TGIF

This Friday we took our kids on a field trip to what was essentially an international science fair.  There were booths set up for each of the countries represented, some manned by local students who had studied the country, and some by actual students from there.  Our vice principal set up the trip and ordered taxis to take us there after breakfast at the school. 

The thing is, they timed it so that we arrived during the opening ceremonies, which was nice for not losing the kids in the crowd, but it also meant that no one was in the booths to talk to us and explain things.  So we walked up and down the aisles trying to keep them from touching things.  The school wanted us to take a lot of pictures along the way (I suspect the photo ops were an important factor in choosing this particular field trip) and you can see the progression in the pictures below.

First picture



Sixth picture

Teacher!  No more pictures, please!

Last picture, on the way out the door

Those poor kids!  Despite all that, though, we did manage to get some good ones.

Those are some of Rachael's high school students running the South Africa booth

Farida!  Don't touch!

After 30 minutes of this, they were DONE!  But the taxi wouldn't be back for another half an hour, so we took them upstairs to the cantine.  Along the way we discovered... bouncy castles!!!  Thank goodness!

Now this is what I call a field trip!

Getting the kids off of them when it was time to go was an ordeal all of its own.  We got back to the kindergarten in time for a late lunch ("No, Nasreddin, the tea and cookies we had at the cantine don't count as lunch") and then it was our class' turn to have the logic puzzles the school bought recently.  The kids love them.  They have to use logic (and sometimes basic math) to match pictures.  Then they put numbered tiles in the right places, and if they did it correctly when they flip it over, it will show a pattern.

Here's a short video I took of Muhammed working on one.  I love it because it's not just him figuring out the puzzle, but talking through it entirely in English!



He was so into it that when it came time to go, he refused to leave.  He wanted to finish the last one.  We had to physically carry him out the door, put his coat on, and walk him down the stairs. 

I'll tell you what.  For a day in which we didn't teach a single lesson, we sure were exhausted.  In fact, this is what happened as soon as all the kids were gone:


Not staged at all: this is what Peri found when she walked in the door.
And we definitely stayed like this until it was time to go home!

What a day! 

T.  G.  I.  F.