Leigh in Azerbaijan

Well, I’m on the internet, four weeks after arriving, but it’s still a trial.  Email still won’t send, Skype still won’t transmit the microphone, 1Gb of traffic costs 41manat which is around A$60.  (as compared with around A$25 in South Australia.  You can rest assured that wealthy families here are growing wealthier still.

Some quick reflections on Baku:

• labour is cheap.  One teacher assistant at school who has a Masters of Economics was offered a job for 200manat/month at a bank. She couldn’t survive on that.   A taxi driver who is a computer engineer at 22 y.o supports his parents and siblings and feels there is little hope of returning to his career.
• In the centre of the city everyone lives in high-rises, but further out the mostly single stories looks like an unpainted version of Guatemala.
• There is one beautiful historic monument in the city which people should see (The Maiden Tower) but other stuff has been knocked down or built over through the different regimes.  There are small castles further out, the type that would protect a few families for a while.
• Beyond Baku on the Absheron Peninsular here, there are thousands of backyard drilling rigs and 35,000 hectares of uninhabitable land, due to oil-soaked land and many old oil rigs left to decay.  People in these areas live with the smell of benzene and my teacher assistant reports that the cancer rate is quite high amongst the residents.  Some houses we saw on the weekend, had a trench running past them (two feet wide) gurgling with oil and water.  The soil on both sides was oil saturated.  I don’t know whether it was going to the sea or a seepage pit.
• Cats are as numerous as in Istanbul, but here local custom is that any old bread or cake is never thrown onto the ground but placed on ledges for cats or other animals.  I live on the 4th floor of an apartment block.  We live around a courtyard, really a carpark, where numerous cats survive.  No-ones seems to have them inside, but they are looked after to some extent.  They are scrawny but have some life at least.
• Beggars are mostly women with small children or old women.  One woman on the weekend had a baby that was just a few weeks old.  I had to empty my pocket of change as the child was a little too close in age to Keeley, my grand-daughter, to attempt to walk past. I have been  accosted by a small group of boys who had a few words of English.  As they grabbed hold of me I could imagine that getting nasty. The only man who came begging had alcohol on his breath so I didn’t believe his story about needing 10manat for blood and plasma.  Of course, just maybe it was true.
•  I heard that the President’s daughter is buying many of the retail shops of the two main mobile phone carriers of the country.  She is then setting up her own competition.  She uses young women mostly to distribute her brochures.  It will be interesting to see if she becomes the dominate force.
• Azerbaijan is rated as the 4th most corrupt country in the world, but according to a newspaper report in English, the government still has the majority of support in the country.  There can be many explanations for that, including the imprisonment of a number of journalists.
• It will not be surprising if Azerbaijan attacks Armenia in the near future as they have felt hard-done-by since 1994 when a peace agreement was signed after Russian backed Armenia took 20% of Azeri land.   (In 1990 Russian troops shot many protesters in the middle of Baku.)
• I’m told that two hours west and north of Baku that the country starts to look good.