On revisiting Azerbaijan

As I have promised more than a year ago, I am back with another post. 

Once upon a time there was a Romanian lady who was very interested to revisit the place which was her home for about a year. Thus she applied for a training course in the beautiful country of Azerbaijan and taking into consideration her outstanding qualities of course that she got accepted.

Now let’s speak about the training.

I should mention that I consider myself pretty knowledgeable regarding Azerbaijan as I have lived there, worked with young Azeris, I’ve read a book or two about the Caucasus, I am constantly checking the news about Azerbaijan, but mon Dieu this country never ceases to amaze me.  

The venue: a hotel in the middle of the freaking nowhere and I am not kidding. Who on earth would build a 4 stars hotel, more than 20 km away from Baku, in one of the ugliest neighborhoods, not even that close to the sea as they would like you to believe? Just to give you an idea, I have been told that I am a hero for managing to get to the city center only by public transportation.

Programme. Oh, oh, so naïve of me to believe that all those meetings with representatives and experts from the EU Delegation, State Migration Service, Yia programme, OSCE, IOM would actually take place. But in fairness we did have a fancy opening at a very top hotel in the city of Baku. With no coffee at the end of it. Apparently BP people do love their coffee and they reserved all the coffee in the hotel and us poor youth workers couldn’t even get a sip.

What else? What about wasting about 2 hours to discuss about our hopes and fears? An entire day was dedicated to GTKEO, but it didn’t turn out to be very efficient, as at the end of the day we still didn’t even know the name of most of the people.

There were exercises with no purpose, leading to no conclusion, not to speak about the total lack of interaction.

I honestly estimate that every single activity was delayed with at least half an hour…this in the very few happy cases.

The most “exciting” part was the visit to one of the IDPs camps. I won’t write too much about this one, but let me tell you that the schools in Azerbaijan are a sight to be seen. Every single inch of a wall was covered with photographs of the much beloved leader. But the cherry on the top were the small flags displayed on every desk in the classrooms…unwrapped from their plastic covers.

Some positive aspects. I learnt a lot from the other participants, had some interesting discussions, met friends in Baku, and had some good walks around the city.

P.S. Big thanks to Andreea and my lovely sending organization Gipsy Eye.