Azeri God and his BBB!

When I was a child, I caught my mom couple times trying to bribe the God. I overheard her saying "dear god, if you do this this this, I will do something good for that that that". And then, that something happened and she did whatever she promised to God. WOW! What a power!- I said and did it couple times as well. It worked again! Eventually I got addicted to bribing God to do things for me for less and less money. I thought God is generous and he does not really care if I give him big money or small money. When I had big money I was spending it for buying sweets and when I had coins, I was promising it to God until we became very poor and I did not have anything to bribe the God with. 

Eventually we became broke (obviously not from bribing God) and I thought that God is angry on us because he understood that I have been cheating with coins. As I grew older, I learned that there are other ways of asking things from God as well. I asked a neighbor to teach me how to do it and I prayed five times a day for about three years. I even advised my mom to learn how to do advance herself in talks with the God. But no matter how much I begged him to send us money it did not work. I even promised him to donate half of it to orphanages, he still did not hear me and finally in tears I quit. My relations with God has been rough since then. I am not sad actually. You see our relations with God was so materialized, it would not go too far anyway. He was not doing things for me unless I promise him something and that became too commercialized. Unhealthy as such, it would not go too far anyway. 

Then I heard a black joke from a friend. So, here it goes. A very old man is trying to cross the street. When he sees cars driving like crazy, he approaches the Donation Box of the Mosque and drops a coin by making a wish to cross the street safely. While he crosses a car hits him. All his world shattered he falls to the ground and moans from pain. In the meantime a small boy drops a coin in the box and crosses the street. A man starts screaming: "Don't! Don't drop any money in there. That one does not work". And he laughed like crazy. I froze for a while. Apparently, it has been part of the Muslim culture in my country that I did not know that was systematized. 

You see, maybe you are laughing now (I do too), but can you imagine great politicians, businessmen, teachers and doctors of Azerbaijan on the way home dropping a coin or two in the Black Bribing Box of God? 

Balsacian Age: Who is evdeqalmish in Azerbaijan?!

When you hit 30 in Azerbaijan life stops there. You become an enemy of yourself. Oh wait, playback.. when you hit

30 in Azerbaijan while you are single...that is like end of life. Mom's become perky, dad's become worried, relatives become bitchy and all because you are "a looser". I am not trying to insult you or anything, I am one myself:).

When we hit glorious 30 single, we enter a new phase of life in Azerbaijan which is called "evdeqalmish"(old maiden). If we have entered as a working career woman self sustaining ourselves, lucky us. If we depend on the family funds, we are s**t out of luck.  

To be honest when I started this post, I thought I had so much to say about this stupid concept, but when I started writing anger blocked my logical thinking. Now I am thinking how to finish this post by giving you a clear picture on what it means. Let me start from the beginning then. What it means to be a girl in Azerbaijan. 

When you are born, some families mourn as they were expecting a glorious boy. Some cherish you as they know girl is the one at the end of the day who takes a good care of family better than boys. Some sigh deeply and think about the expenses one needs to invest into the development, education, marriage and bla bla bla with lots of troubles for the family. So, you are already born guilty in one or the other way. As you slowly grow older you start experiencing lots of differences between how they treat you and how they treat your brother(s). Your brother automatically obtains freedoms to many things as for you, you have to act girly. While your brother is enjoying himself outside you have to take care of the chores. You help your mother in household, clean, help cooking, take care of the requests of father and clean the s**t after your brother. You slowly start experiencing limitations in your social life. Most of your teenage times, you spend in heavy studies to prepare for the university. If your family is socially able to help you study you are lucky  which is another story!, if not, they start telling you not to prepare in vain as they won't be able to send you to school anyway. I guess now I will cover what happens when you do not study. 

So, now that you know there is no reason for studying, you stop trying at all. In the meantime relatives and neighbors who have sons  start scanning you to see how nicely "domesticated" you are. They keep asking if you are cooking well or know how to clean and stuff. Parents start decorating you like a Christmas tree and take you to different social events like weddings, parties, family meetings and etc. where people can see that the family has a daughter ready for a marriage. When they see you alone, they keep asking if there is "something" which means if there is anyone interested in you. As time passes pressure at home keeps growing. Moms and dads become unbearable. You don't leave the house much. Everyone is wondering when you will get married. Neighbors start "chirping" here and there that somebody's daughter is still "at home" meaning not married. You slowly cut yourself from all communications. You don't leave house alone when you go to markets, to visit your relatives as family needs to guarantee your honor and prevent things like side romance, sex, flirting. You have to continue being virgin as this is the family honor. If you want to get married, you have to stay virgin. Hormons slowly rushing up and down, you have nervous breakdown now and then, stop socializing at all. Eventually you stop going to those social events. Your classmates and friends are all married and have kids. 

You hope for the future becomes less and less clear. Eventually you give up and slowly accept that you are "evdegalmish". From time to time there will be someone's relative's cousin's brother-in-laws group mate who is divorced and have two kids. He does not work now but he might in future. Everyone tells you that this is your last chance to have a family. As your age is above 30, you won't have kids anymore. So, this is good chance to take care of somebody else's kids. You either choose to be "free" at husband's house or stay at family and keep being pressured. 

Many of these women who get married at later age become a victim of domestic violence but because of family pressures they do not get support to leave their crazy husbands and move back to their loved ones. They choose to suffer which is better than the stamp on your forehead as "evdegalmish". 

I just described the life of thousands of young girls in Azerbaijani regions suffering from social concept called "evdegalmish". One thing is important to mention that, families who have enough social income to educate their daughters have a different experience. Educated girls tend to be more independent as they have a social life, they get access to different events, programs, seminars where they develop world vision and better understanding of what they want. 

Many of the educated "evdegalmish", spend good old youthood for education, and then more education, and then more. Hungry to learn, they spend all their resources to develop themselves. They become independent  and spend most of their "under thirty"  for building self confidence, self assurance and self understanding. While they also dream about ideal family, they also understand marrying just a random guy would not do good to them. So, picky enough, they end up in their 30s still single. After certain period of time, dreams like perfect guy, perfect wedding, perfect dress, perfect kids become part of unreachable dream that slowly fades away. Some choose to marry and try to have kids in mid or even late 30s, some choose to continue building a career that benefits not only them, but millions of others. They start seeing the big picture. Some of them choose to marry mostly foreigners (local men in their age are already married) and leave the country. Some stay and fight with this cruel cultural concept and stand true to what they want from life. 

Generally accepted perception is that "evdegalmish" can only get candidates from low income families, divorced, widowed, or unsuccessful like these women themselves. People pity them as they can't bear children who will be taking care of them. They will die lonely in house for elderly perhaps and there will not be anyone to buy you a grave stone. What about adoption? Oh thats out of subject. None should adopt a child unless you have a husband and a hostile uterus. Sigh! 

Because of this concept and social pressure, many girls drop out of school, end up in early marriages, suicide as a result of forced marriages, get killed by husband as a result of domestic violence, get disonored because some are not virgin and etc. These women spend all their lives worrying that they are not enough, living a depressed life. 

In developing countries like Azerbaijan, society and families are not always the best example to follow. Women need strong foundation at kindergarten, at school, at university. They need a social institution to educate, to empower, to inspire girls to get as much as they can from their lives without falling into mentality and tradition trap. 

Girls who are the future mothers are the best teachers for their daughters. We need to make sure these girls get a strong foundation and grow up in a healthy environment calling for healthy future. We need to try a lot to prevent cultures from destroying the lives of girls! 

What a concept ha?! 

Victims or Perpetrators: Episode 1.

Every single day there are trillions of traditions made, wrapped and delivered to control the youth of Azerbaijan. Not that I don't like them, it is just they are annoyingly too many and sometimes too stupid to make a logical conclusion. While respecting elderly, giving your a seat to a pregnant, feeding poor are good traditions/common ethics that I like and follow, there are also many others that my western brainwashed mindset refrains from understanding. This post is not about these traditions, its about those who creates them. 

Azerbaijani women are naturally beautiful, awesomely hardworking, unconditionally loving, amazing mothers, daughters and sisters. Really, they can make anything out of anything. Or something out of nothing. Among many things, they also make couple of things that no women can beat them: traditions, gossip and good food.

Today's episode is about traditions. Who makes these traditions and why do they even exist in this 21st century? Reasons are many, so, I will touch only some of them in the article. In the meantime lets talk about the types of women who are somehow engaged in the operations of tradition making: There are the ones who compose traditions (there are the dangerous kind), the ones who blindly follow these traditions, and there are the ones who preach them. I am sure we all have women in our mind from neighbors, colleagues, relatives that you immediately matched the picture off :) well, me too! These types of women are not doing it because they think this will save the planet. Each kind of tradition operator have a unique reason:

Type: COMPOSER
Reason: UNEMPLOYMENT

This is a sign that there is a huge unemployment in the country. People have nothing else to do with their time and life in general. Busy person is always too tired to make up a tradition.  So my dears, it a terrible economic occurrence in Azerbaijan. Picture it, aunt Sheker sits outside half of the day eating sunflower seeds and observing neighbors, then goes home to feed her husband and sons and then watches a little bit of soap opera and then some minor house stuff. While she is doing all this stuff, her complicated brain structure analyzes the situation and starts composing traditions. Some of you will argue that men are not better than women. Why am I not mentioning them as well?! Well, first men can't beat women on this. They simply are not competent enough and second, even if they do, that means they are unemployed too. 

Type: FOLLOWER
Reason: LACK OF CONFIDENCE

There is another group of women that disastrously unique by nature. They are excellent followers of traditions because they do not know other way of living. They follow the same pattern as other women of the family like mother, aunts, grandmother and etc. Imagine that Tukazban has been beaten to death yesterday by her asshole husband. So, Tukezban has couple of options here to handle the situation:

1. Stability: Tukezban loves her husband, the father of her kids and she keeps her head high. As they say "if he beats, he loves". So, she continues walking in bruises and bumps without complaining. She chooses stability over escalation by following the traditions.

2. No way back: When woman leaves her fathers house for a marriage that means she can't come back to her fathers home. I am serious. This is the tradition. Woman has to die at her husbands house and never return permanently even if she has problems. Tukezban's husband is also a drug user. He rapes her, beats her, takes all her money, makes kids suffer and etc. She will at first complain to her mother who (traditional as well) will tell her, if your father hears, he will cut us in pieces. So go back to your family and stay there. Tukezban knows that according to traditions, she can't go back to fathers house anymore and she chooses to follow and stay as there is no way back.

3. To go to police: Finally neighbors advice Tukezban to call a police once. You know what happens when woman complains to police on a domestic violence?  1. He makes you to write a complaint letter and then does nothing about it; 2. He arrests your husband and after he gets out of detention, beats the shit of you again; 3. He tells you (the most common one), "we can't interfere with your family life". Go deal with it yourself. 4, Because of reason 2, you decide to take your complaint back. Now, think about it yourself. Woman has been degraded, dehumanized, insulted but police does not do anything because beating wife is a tradition and that it is normal. It is not only fault of gaps in legislation itself or the implementation of it, but also women themselves. They don't have confidence to stand up for themselves.

Type: PREACHER 
Reason: RETIREMENT GLAM

Preachers are always the member of elderly generation. You can't compose when you are young. You need certain experience to be able to do so. That comes only by age. After retirement it is the most commonly practiced extra curricular activity. Chichak is an old woman. Her daily activities are based on waking up, complaining about bad health, walking around and picking on daughter-in laws, taking care of grandchildren, hiding sweets from the rest of the family and finally seating outside to talk to her girl friends about what happened yesterday at home. Then she as a role model starts giving examples of her lifelong experience and calls others to do the same as it works only the certain way. As they say in Azerbaijan, "boyuyun sozune baxmayan boyure-boyure galar" ( Those who do not listen to their elders will keep bawling). Fear of bawling keeps these women to follow the advice of an experienced preachers.

Now dears, of course these examples are very limited and I can extend them to kilometers, but for now I think these are good enough to give you a big picture of how these traditions are made, wrapped and sold. It is all "Made in Women".