Like thousands of his peers, Jeff Bailey is living far from home in a Muslim nation. But the 23-year-old Coos Bay native isn’t in Iraq. He is in Azerbaijan, where he is serving in the Peace Corps as an English education volunteer.

Bailey grew up in Crab Flats, before moving to Charleston during his high school years. He graduated from Marshfield High School in 2002 and enrolled at Portland State University. He spent a year studying and teaching English in Seoul, Korea, before returning to Portland, where he received his bachelor’s degree earlier this year.

After graduation, Bailey joined the Peace Corps. He was assigned a post in Azerbaijan, a former republic of the Soviet Union nestled between Russia, Iran and the Caspian Sea. He left the United States in June, and after two months of training, began his two-year assignment in September. He lives with a host family in Ujar, a town in the plains of Azerbaijan, where he teaches at a local public school.

This is the first in a series of columns Bailey plans to write for The World about his experiences there.

When I shut my eyes to think about what being in the Peace Corps would be like, I imagined myself on an exotic landscape filled with plentiful fauna, crimson dirt roads, and having to light a candle to find the outhouse, because surely there wouldn’t be electricity. I thought of having to rough it and how that would give me a new appreciation for the privileges we have in the United States. Such was the Peace Corps experience that had been suggested by the media over the years through print, film and folklore.

Looking back on it, I should have put more effort into curbing my expectations, because Peace Corps Azerbaijan isn’t as close to my daydreams as I would have guessed.

Of course, there are still the surreal moments that come with being an outsider every moment, but the experience that I was anticipating was playing on the old stereotype of the Peace Corps. My time in Azerbaijan is more representative of what the modern Peace Corps is doing.

The first goal of the Peace Corps is to “help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women.” The goal is mostly the same as it ever was, but there is something different about it. The stories on which we base our stereotypes of the Peace Corps, the stories from volunteers who served in the ’60s and ’70s, tell of a pre-globalized world that needed volunteers to come in and help build schools, reservoirs and other infrastructural facilities. Those types of needs still exist, but my version of the Peace Corps is much more about assisting a community in itself development, which, for me in Azerbaijan, looks like a push toward modernity.

I’m a Teaching English as a Foreign Language volunteer whose purpose is based around raising the capacity of Ujar, my site in Azerbaijan for two years, to communicate in English. It’s a worthy enough task by itself, but the idea of teaching English in Azerbaijan becomes particularly interesting when you consider the direction the country is going.

Last year, Azerbaijan had the highest GDP growth rate in the world, due to oil and natural gas resources. The new natural gas pipeline that spans the Caucus Mountains as well as the Caspian Sea will certainly add to the momentum that this country’s economy has. This makes me think that it is fair to say that Azerbaijan is becoming part of the global economy and thus, part of the modern world. The status of English as the economic and political lingua franca requires that Azerbaijan has a grasp of the language from within, in order to fully realize its economic potential. This is part of the reason why the Azerbaijani government requested Peace Corps volunteers from the United States, to assist in the English education of the youth, and five years ago, they got them.

Similarly, as Peace Corps’ presence in Azerbaijan is reflection of a new-style volunteer program that differs from the old, brick-and-mortar program, I feel that I am part of a modern crew of volunteers that serves differently than did volunteers of the past. For example, TEFL volunteers here have started an international, pan-Caucus writing competition. We can send and receive text messages amongst ourselves or back home to the states for just a few cents (or qapik for me). Packages and letters from our families arrive in days, rather than the months it used to take. And the world of blogging has reached the Peace Corps, allowing volunteers to write about there experiences and post them to the Web, allowing friends, family, and anyone in the world with an Internet connection an insight into what they are doing as volunteers. These technological advances, along with the movement toward a modern, globalized world, make me think that the way people volunteer in the Peace Corps has changed.

I think I was surprised about how different the life of a Peace Corps volunteer is compared to the stories that have been told over the years. In the end, I could view my experience here as a disappointment because it doesn’t fit into the storybook version of the Peace Corps that I had originally envisioned. The idea of getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere, the old Peace Corps idea, doesn’t fit with what I’m doing.

I wonder if the Peace Corps of old would have provided me a more alluring, purer experience that might be closer to what I was looking for when the idea of volunteering first occurred to me, but I continually come to the conclusion that the difference is superficial. I don’t live in a jungle; instead I have a television with a nice satellite package. I don’t have to take a boat to get between villages, but I am involved in an interesting country that people will be reading about more and more in the coming years.

It’s new and exciting, which, stereotypes aside, is exactly what I signed up for.

[Bailey writes further about teaching, cultural experiences and his beloved Portland Trail Blazers on his Web log, http://www.northwestjeff.wordpress.com.]