Posts filed under 'Azerbaijan'
Breaking the ice at XacBank
Why is it that when you’re just starting a job, you always introduce yourself to the CEO with spinach in your teeth, or rip your pants pocket, or spill toner on your shirt?
My finest hour was when I was starting on the copy desk at a newspaper, trying to make a good impression as a head-down, able worker, and the copy chief gave me a big story. I had my take-out dinner on my desk. As I stared intently at the screen, trying to be the model of a journalist who’s so totally engrossed in the task at hand he can’t even be bothered to look at his food, I gave my Orangina a vigorous shake, as instructed on the bottle. Forgetting about the cap. Which was off.
The guy sitting next to me said he couldn’t believe his eyes: me just shaking this bottle, the bright-yellow fizzy drink flying everywhere. And it took me a second to catch on, too: even as I felt myself getting I drenched I think I was in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of what I was doing, so I kept right on shaking the bottle for another second, soaking my clothes, dinner, and workstation in sugary goodness.
Yeah, I’m awesome.
So I’m on Day 2 as a Kiva Fellow at XacBank, here in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. XacBank is the first microfinance institution Kiva has partnered with in this country, and I have been given specific instructions to make a good first impression as a Kiva representative because Kiva is super-excited about the partnership. And I am, too: I’ve been pumped to get to Mongolia ever since I heard Kiva would be starting operations here.
In Azerbaijan, where I spent about two months as a Fellow before coming here, each of the MFIs I worked with rents a few rooms and has a few employees in their main office. I got to know the CEOs personally. We all wore sweaters to work most days. The employees were tight, like families.
XacBank (pronounced haas-bank) is like — well, a bank. It’s a microfinance bank, but it’s definitely a bank. Gleaming marble floors. ATMs. Currency exchange. An HR department. Fatigue-wearing security guards with guns. Suits and ties. A conference room with snazzy rolling chairs.
So, of course, Day 2, I break a mug right in the hallway by the stairs, the most high-traffic part of the office. I’m actually thinking, as I put the mug down on the blatantly-neither-flat-nor-level Hyundai water cooler (see photo): “This sure seems likely to fall, as this is not a flat surface.” I’m actually thinking that.
This is not a flat surface.
And this is not a new experience. I’ve been down this road before, either thinking “if I back up any more, I’ll put my tail light out on that fire hydrant,” or “if I flick this cigarette butt that way, it’ll hit that dude’s Harley,” and then proceeding to do it anyway.
So now I’m picking up broken ceramic shards and apologizing to whoever walks by. And I’m having a lousy day — I’m new to this country, it’s freezing cold, there’s bad news coming by e-mail from home and I’m too far away to be of help, I feel lonely and jet-lagged — and I’m experiencing wave after wave of let’s-call-the-new-guy-’butterfingers’ shame.
“In Mongolia,” he says, “it’s good luck if you break something. We say that if you break a glass, all conflicts will go away. So now, any conflicts people were having with each other on this floor will be solved.”
I’m not sure if this is true, or if he was just feeling sorry for me and decided to make something up. It made me feel better, though.
10 comments 4 January 2009
5 things I think I think about Azerbaijan
(with apologies to Sports Illustrated NFL writer Peter King)
1. Cats are great city animals.
Cat on car.
At one time, Baku was rat country, so I’ve been told. Someone decided to fix the problem by either introducing cats to the streets or firing all the cat-catchers. You don’t see many rats around nowadays.
Cats are everywhere. They stand guard outside the markets, scurry beneath the tables inside the posh furniture stores, sleep atop parked BMWs, pick through garbage, and mew in the hallway of my apartment building. A friend here started adopting street cats and now has seven in her flat.
Coming from New York, I’ve always held up pigeons (and to a lesser extent, squirrels) as the best city animals. And I’ve always taken rats for granted. But cats, quiet and clean, are, to me, the new gold standard.
2. Traffic laws are outstanding.
So THAT'S what a seatbelt is for...
As a car owner, I have some ambivalence about traffic laws. I hate parking tickets. Sometimes I find a 65 mph speed limit to be — idealistic. And I’ve sent the occasional text message at a red light.
So I write this fully aware that I am a hypocrite: traffic laws are outstanding.
I’ve been in countries with bad drivers before. The drivers of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh don’t deserve any medals. But there, because it’s generally poorer and warmer, the streets are jammed with every sort of vehicle: hand-pulled, bicycle and motorized rickshaws, scooters, buses, trucks and cars, not to mention a variety of livestock.
So bad driving is mitigated by 1) self-preservation (as you can get thrown from a rickshaw pretty easily) and 2) weak engines. It’s hectic, lawless traffic, but it’s not that fast.
Azerbaijan, in contrast, has hectic, lawless, fast traffic. People are generally driving cars, buses or trucks, and good cars, too, not Tata Nanos, but Benzes.
And because cars are the only thing on the road and cars are expensive, if you’re driving at all here, you’re a big deal. That, in turn, means you shouldn’t have to break for any commoner on foot. Nor should you approach a blind turn through a narrow, residential alley at less than 50 mph.
It’s not that right-of-way is ambiguous here: the cars have it. I guess I’ve been spoiled living in places where cars break for pedestrians, but I find the traffic here beyond aggravating. Everyone uses their car horns constantly to express anger, and tricked-out horn upgrades (the “air horn” and the “Godfather theme” being ubiquitous) are mandatory.
What’s optional? Seatbelts. Headlights at night. Child safety seats. Staying within the solid double-lines on a highway. Most people with kids have them ride on their laps in the front passenger seat, their little faces pressed to the windshield.
On a recent road trip, we passed a roadkill horse (!), two dead dogs, and a brick truck that had lost its bricks on the way out of Baku. On the way back, we saw a dead person in the road (!!). No wonder everyone stops at the mosque just outside of town to make an offering to Allah thanking Him for a safe ride!
3. Russian is hard.
Three genders? Six cases? I’ve been studying for two months and still don’t know what a case is.
4. All politics is local.
So said Tip O’Neill, long-serving Speaker of the House.
Case in point. In America, we fought a “cold” war with Russia from the mid-1940s to 1991. There is still hatred and fear of Russia in some parts of our political sphere (ask Sen. John McCain how he likes the Russians).
We also have as our enemies the “Axis of Evil”: Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Iraq, of course, is now are ward. North Korea is flirting with giving up the bomb. But Iran appears to be carrying on as a threat, with worried talk in the news magazines and Sunday morning talk shows over when it will get nukes and what it will do with them.
So here I am in Azerbaijan, sandwiched between Putin and Ahmadinejad. Azeris don’t care. There’s nothing too frightening about either. They may not always have nice things to say about their neighbors to the north and south, but Americans aren’t always that charitable with Canada and Mexico, either. Anyway, Azeris have reserved 100 percent of their negative energy for their neighbor to the west: Armenia.
The cause is a dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which took the form of a war in the late ’80s and ’90s and now is the source of much saber-rattling, but little fighting. Some 800,000 Azeris were displaced by the loss of the territory, and bettering their lives is a major part of microfinance here.
It’s less of an axis and more of a singularity of evil. And, sadly, it’s no exaggeration to say that dislike of the Armenians is nearly universal and is strong. I don’t know, there’s some axiom here that fits, one man’s jelly is another man’s jam or something…
5. Bribes suck.
I finally paid one, last week. Sixty manat (about $75). It wasn’t, like, spiritually degrading or anything, but it was 60 AZN that I’m not going to be spending on candy and DVDs.
8 comments 16 December 2008
Hello, cool world!
I’m the only fellow headed to Azerbaijan from Kiva Fellows 6, so I’m pretty excited to bring word of this fascinating region to those of you who make Kiva such a success. I’ll be visiting each of Kiva’s partner microfinance institutions in the region to assist them in any way I can, support Kiva, journal and train the MFIs on new software systems being put into place.
I’ve never been to the Caucasus. It’s largely a blank slate to me. What the Lonely Planet, my Azeri taxi driver last night and previous Kiva Fellows in the area, such as Jonathan Buser, say is that it’s a real crossroads: a blend of post-Soviet bureacracy, Shi’ite Islam, impoverished “internally displaced persons,” fabulously wealthy petrocapitalists living off the transport of oil and natural gas from east to west and the ex-pats who help that happen. I’ll be living in Baku (birthplace of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov), the capital, for 6-10 weeks, and then moving on to my next destination for Kiva (Mongolia?) for the remainder of my 6-month fellowship.
I really hope to shed some light for people on this poorly understood region and its challenges for all of you. I’ll do my best.
–Mark Bulliet, KF6
2 comments 18 September 2008
Livestock Bazaar
Families in rural Azerbaijan are heavily reliant on farm animals, often just a handful of sheep and a cow, for food and income. Microcredit loans allow enterprising individuals to scale up animal raising activities so that excess milk, cheese, wool, and offspring can be sold for a profit. But where does one go to buy a cow or a half dozen sheep? I learned that once a week as many as 4,000 farmers congregate with their animals to exchange ownership at the Livestock Bazaar. Kiva’s field partner, Aqroinvest arranged for me to meet a client and conduct an interview at the bazaar. With the help of another fellow we filmed our visit to the sprawling animal market.
1 comment 9 May 2008
The Role of Microfinance in Azerbaijan II (video)
As I wrap up my time as a Kiva Fellow with Norwegian Microcredit (Normicro) in Azerbaijan, I realized that I cannot adequately summarize in words the knowledge I’ve gained on microfinance and Azerbaijan, things and places I’ve seen, and people and entrepreneurs I’ve met. For to share about microfinance in Azerbaijan, one must place it in the context of the country’s historical and current political and economic situation. Besides, the previous Kiva Fellow in Azerbaijan had already written an excellent blog on this topic. (See: ‘The Role of Microfinance in Azerbaijan‘) Hence, I decided to put my thoughts into a video instead:
1 comment 5 May 2008
Baku is Burning
The biggest holiday in Azerbaijan is Novruz. This spring event has its roots as a pre-Islam New Year celebration. It officially begins on the spring equinox but the celebration ramps up much earlier with large street bonfires every Tuesday for the month preceding Novruz. Each week represents a different element: earth, water, air, and fire. Much of the community comes out for the bonfires to socialize and listen to music. Tradition calls for fearless youth to jump across the bonfire regardless or how large it is. On one occasion I witnessed a boy run through a fire along a burning pole until he could leap the last 3 feet to the other side. I was coerced into making the leap over a much more manageable fire only to learn that once is not enough, three leaps is keeping with tradition. After four weeks of bonfires, and all the scrap wood has been burned, the Novruz holiday finally arrives with a full week of vacation for the entire country.
Novruz is also important for Azerbaijan’s small businesses. Many of the Kiva borrowers I visited were making business decisions based on their sales projections during the holiday. One client had pre-shorn three sheep with the hopes of selling them for butcher at a higher price during the holiday. All of the Kiva trading clients had stocked up on inventory for their shops. Some of the special items included small fireworks, nuts, and festive pots of wheat. This is a very enjoyable time to be in Azerbaijan.
Add comment 17 April 2008
English as a form of capital in Azerbaijan
On Sunday, I had the privilege of spending time with an Azeri woman over lunch and walking around Baku. For the record, I am female. I met Ulviyya on a bus a few days ago when I saw her reading English vocabulary from a dictionary that was falling apart to pieces and started talking to her. We parted shortly after but before doing so, Ulviyya jumped on the opportunity to practice her spoken English. She took down my mobile number and invited me to lunch on Sunday.
Throughout the few hours we spent together, I was incredible impressed at how diligent Ulviyya was at asking for definitions of words she didn’t understand, taking notes, and referring to what’s left of her Azerbaijani-English dictionary to express words she struggled with. I felt more and more embarrassed at how little effort I am putting into learning Azeri in comparison to her!
After lunch, Ulviyya took me to a place in the city where there were vendors selling English instruction books. We selected a few but the availability of affordable books was very scarce. She had already read almost all books at the level below her current ability. Ulviyya tells me that she would like to improve her English so that she can be confident of applying for and getting a job as a geologist at BP, where the salary is much higher but fluency in English is mandatory.
I am humbled upon realizing how hard Azerbaijanis at every level of society strive to better their lives. Some opt to borrow from microfinance organizations to expand their businesses while others increase their human capital by learning English.
2 comments 31 March 2008
Visiting clients in a small city in Azerbaijan
Greetings! My name is Ai Li Ang and I live in Chicago, Illinois, in the USA. I was born and grew up in Malaysia and am ethnically Chinese (this detail will be relevant later on). I arrived in Azerbaijan as a Kiva Fellow to work with one of Kiva’s partners, Norwegian Microcredit (Normicro). This is the second time that Normicro is hosting a Kiva Fellow. Since the previous Fellow, Liz Vallette, departed in fall of 2007, Normicro has continued to experience tremendous growth in number of clients served and loan portfolio. In less than a year, Normicro has added 2 branch offices to the 5 it had last year, improving access to microloans for many low-income and internally-displaced persons in Azerbaijan.
Last week, I ventured outside the capital city of Baku (where Normicro’s head office is located) to visit a branch office (where loans are administered) for the first time. My goal was to interview clients who received loans from Kiva lenders, write journals, and upload the journals to Kiva.org. Getting to Khachmaz, a city north of Baku, was relatively easy for someone who doesn’t speak Azeri or Russian. Minibuses, known as “mashrutkas”, line up outside one of Baku’s main bus stations with clearly labeled signs of their destinations. As far I know, the mashrutkas don’t follow schedules, but depart as soon as each vehicle fills up. For most low-income Azeris, mashrutkas are the most reliable and affordable means of traveling to other cities. However, the 3 manat (approx. 3.60 USD) one way, 2.5 hour bumpy journey is not for the faint-hearted. Many times the driver would pass slow trucks in spite of on-coming vehicles, swerving back to his own lane only at the very last minute. Sometimes, when the driver overestimated his mashrutka’s horsepower on a passing attempt, he would resort to creating an additional middle lane.
During my 3 days at Normicro’s Khachmaz branch office, the two loan officers, Vagif and Nafira, were quite busy meeting with clients at the office. Yet, they took some time off in the afternoons to take me to see borrowers of Kiva loans. I also received translation help from a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, Adam. Most of the clients we visited operated retail (e.g., clothes, groceries, shoes, furniture) business. Very quickly I got consistent replies that the loans were used to purchase inventory in bulk to get lower prices. This implies that the additional profit margin from lower cost of goods was more than sufficient to offset the 3% monthly interest rate charged by Normicro. Access to loans essentially accelerates the rate at which these entrepreneurs accumulate profit and grow their businesses. Many of them also expressed the desire to take larger loans so that they can make one-time infrastructure investments or buy inventory in even larger quantities.
In a small city such as Khachmaz, when two foreigners walk through the bazaar and talk to people, all buying and selling activities are paused because everyone gathers around to listen to our interviews! Each one of us also draws attention for different reasons: Vagif and Nafira, the loan officers, were constantly approached by current and potential clients with inquiries; Adam, a caucasian, was considered the rich investor who would provide the loan capital; I, on the other hand, was asked directly or indirectly what I was selling! (Chinese in Azerbaijan are typically seen selling toys and misc. items on sidewalks and on the streets.)
4 comments 16 March 2008
Busy Streets of Baku
Stepping out onto the streets of Azerbaijan’s capital city is a quick way to gain insight on the local economic situation. The streets of Baku, much like other large cities, are plagued with traffic and drivers who use their horns more than they obey any sort of traffic laws. The mixture of vehicles that fill the roads is telling of the wealth disparity. Public transport is accomplished by aging mini-buses called marshrutkas plying the streets in all directions. Larger city buses are mostly absent so these marshrutkas provide the most comprehensive city transport in Baku. Although bus stops do exist, they are rarely used so one can wave down a passing bus at any time. Boxy, Russian made Ladas are most prevalent passenger car because they are cheap, easy to fix, and will last for hundreds of thousands of miles. However, with their 13” wheels and a manual choke lever, Ladas have less style than your back yard lawnmower. The final component of Baku’s streets is luxury cars. In stark contrast to the rest of the 4-wheeled street machines, BMWs, Mercedes, Land Rovers, Hummers and other high value vehicles by anyone’s standards are surprisingly common, clearly the spoils of the rich Azerbaijan oil deposits. Although watching these mismatched cars interact can be amusing (until you need to cross the street) one of the most enjoyable things to do in Baku is walk through the walls of the old city. The cobblestone streets, thankfully too narrow for cars, quickly dampen the noise of the busy modern city leaving you to enjoy the ancient architectural beauty in peace. The winding maze of alleys helps to prolong the peaceful experience before you inevitably exit the gates and face the modern world again – wishing that car horns wore out as frequently as brake lights.
2 comments 13 March 2008
Kiva Training in Baku!
On Friday, with the help of the NorMicro staff, I held a “Kiva Training Session” for the employees of the Azerbaijani Kiva Field Partners. There were seventeen of us total, representing NorMicro, Komak, and AqroInvest. Bahman (NorMicro’s Director) suggested that I hold the training, while Tasaduf (NorMicro’s Human Resources Manager) worked really hard to get us a very nice briefing room in Baku’s fancy Caspian Business Plaza. For over three hours we discussed (in English and Azerbaijani, with translation by Tasaduf!) pertinent Field Partner topics, such as writing Kiva business descriptions, taking good client photos, how to post business profiles, and writing journal entries. The attendees had lots and lots of good questions and are obviously committed to further enhancing their Kiva efforts!
I made sure we had an internet connection and a projector so everyone could experience Kiva.org — some of the attendees have not yet worked with Kiva, while others do not have consistent internet access in their offices. During the presentation I surfed through the website, highlighting important points and answering questions about lenders and clients. (I even impressed them with the fact that almost 12% of all Kiva funds, thus far, have gone to Azerbaijani clients!) One thing I really focused in on was that Kiva lenders are individuals – I think it’s easy for the uninitiated loan officer to assume that Kiva is just some faceless American corporation throwing big money at international projects. I pulled up Hajibaba’s business profile and used Mrs. Diba’s Class as an example of Kiva’s lenders. The mental image of six-year-olds collecting pennies for Hajibaba really helps illustrate the Kiva spirit!!
To train the newbies and reinforce Kiva’s processes to the experienced loan officers, we used a “real” client as an example. We tested out the new Kiva Form created by Adam (Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to NorMicro) as a means of systematically improving information flow between loan officers and the individuals who post the Kiva listings. Next, we all worked together to develop a concise, but detailed business description. Finally, Behbud (NorMicro’s Beylagan Branch Kiva Coordinator) walked us through posting a profile – keep an eye out for Rafig’s profile!
The Kiva Training attendees:
The response to the training was very encouraging and I expect that the Azerbaijani Kiva listings will soon be even better! The training was a little bittersweet for me – I leave in just one week! Time has flown! I am sad to go, but I guess I do need to get back home and finish up my degree at some point 
I hope to post some links to pictures before I leave!
Add comment 13 August 2007
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