By Christi Mays
When Babak Aghayev meets someone for the first time and tells them he is from Azerbaijan, he almost always gets a quizzical look, and they either pretend to have heard of his home country or fess up and ask, “Where’s that?”
A tiny country about the size of Maine, Azerbaijan is on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, surrounded by Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey and Iran.
The next question he often gets is “how in the world did you end up at UMHB?”
The majority of the people in his country are Muslim, but Babak, a Christian, found his way to UMHB in a way that only God could orchestrate.
It all started with a bus ride a couple of years before he graduated high school. Babak saw an older couple and paid for their bus fare.
“It’s just customary to do that for people, especially if they’re guests in the country,” he explained.
