Peace Corps Turns 50; I Write The First 500 Words Of My PCV Memoir

March 1st was Peace Corps 50th anniversary. (It was also my little sister’s birthday). I had every intention of acknowledging this particular milestone with some sort of catchy poem about world peace or an appropriately PC-service-themed list of 50. (It might have also been worthwhile to try and get it posted on the ‘birthday’ in question…)
But I am lazy. (I didn’t send my sister a birthday card either.)

Instead I present the story I’ve been meaning to post on this blog since my first month in country. ‘Avtobus On-Iki’. Which incidentally, if I ever get around to publishing a “My Life in The Peace Corps Book” will be the title story.

Avtobus On-Iki.

It was the first or second week of PST, I had just gotten home from the first hub day in Sumgayit, and Ana asked me which bus I’d had to take. I replied in Azerbaijani – I had learned to count the previous day: on-iki. (12). She mimed the clunky slow motion that chracterised the WWII relic of a bus I had just gotten off: ‘Starii Avtobus?’ she questioned. (In those early weeks, Russian was our mutually intelligible lingua franca.) I nodded and she laughed sympathetically. Oh Avtobus on-iki.

The moniker of this slow-moving bus became a familial code-word that encompassed any sort of frustrating circumstance: a difficult verb tense, a miscommunication between friends, a visit from obnoxious relatives, a thwarted lesson plan, an uncooperative colleague, a less than ideal housing situation or any of the other little things that make up the sometimes exhausting effort of living day-to-day in the regions of Azerbaijan.

The fact that I now live in a region where the buses that come down my local roads often look much older than the original ‘Avtobus On-Iki’ should have been my first clue that Avtobus On-Iki would become a larger part of my life than I ever could have imagined on that first October evening when Ana playfully mimed it.

And yes, I do mutter ‘avtobus on-iki’ to myself on an almost daily basis - it has become my go-to personal catharsis for any number of small annoyances from the lack of a seat on a marshutka to the afternoons when the electricity goes out just as I’ve put a batch of cookies in the oven. And it finds its way into almost every conversation I have with Ata and Ana as I talk about my life at site. Whatever it is doesn’t seem quite so catastrophic if there is an ‘avtobus on-iki’ tagged on at the end – it lessens the sting.

Avtobus On-iki – those six unassuming syllables that allow us to communicate so much. I can express a dozen sentiments with a simple phrase in my phone calls ‘home’. We sympathise with each other when discouraged. We lament misfortunes and complain about injustices. We laugh ourselves out of bad moods. We say it sarcastically, ironically and playfully- sometimes within a single exchange. We throw it into conversations around people who have no idea what it represents and smile conspiratorially at its significance.

Our collection of family words has since expanded beyond the bus numbers of early days and has since been supplemented by other circumstances, family members and PVCs. But it is ‘Avtobus On-Iki’ that is the genesis of this familial lexicon, the one that is instantly understood and brings a smile to our faces no matter how exasperating the situation that occasions its use.