fall plus nardi

I. Love. Autumn. Bring on the soup. Bring on the sweaters. Bring on fall colors and cozying up. Tomorrow is the big apartment move-in day. I moved up here with my Peace Corps bags and a few boxes, so I’m fairly housewares-less. But right now my dreams are filled with me, on a couch with hot tea, warm bread, and an blanket.

I’ve done a lot of wandering around in these first couple of weeks in Minneapolis. I’ve done a lot of sitting in coffee shops, a lot of walking down unknown streets, a lot of wandering into record stores and old-stuff stores and book stores. I’ve done a lot of wondering at the fall leaves.Seriously, yesterday I just stopped and stared at the ground.

Beautiful. There are reds and yellows and greens, and the wind whips them up and lays them down in brushstrokes. Every boulevard offers fantastic colors.

Yesterday was a bizarrely warm autumn day, perfect for the Armenian church in St. Paul which held a fundraiser festival, cooking lamahjo, kebab, and other delicious Caucasian treats. They lined the space outside with picnic table and cooked up a feast. They set up their foyer as a cafe, shuffling jazzves over hot plates to pour coffee into those familiar tiny cups. An Armenian woman hovered ready for anyone whose coffee grounds had settled, whose fortune awaited a reading.

I did balk a bit when she tried to explain to me how to turn your cup for a coffee-grounds reading. A wave of tiny moments rolled over me, moments when Alvard or Gayane or Serine or so many wonderful tatiks (grandmothers) laughed while I looked into their coffee cups and read their fortunes myself. ‘None of these Armenians know,’ I thought. Many of them have never been to Armenia. Certainly none know how much I am missing it, how much I wish I could sit with my landdad and play a game of nardi, how much I wish I could grab the pinkies of my co-workers and dance the kochari.

One man at the edge of the church yard sat whittling wooden boxes. A woman asked him a question, and he said, “My english, not good. Wait?”

“Do you speak Armenian,” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes el em khosum hayeren,” I said. I also speak Armenian. And there it was, a glimmer I’d been waiting to see. A connection I had so hoped to make on this Autumn afternoon at the Armenian church.

“Du hay es?” he asked me. Are you Armenian? Sweeter words were never spoken. This man was from Yerevan. When I told him that I’d just come from there a few months ago, he laughed, asked me about the city. Another PCV with whom I served in Armenia was there as well, and the three of us talked about the country and settled into this corner of the church yard for a game of nardi. I sat with him for a couple hours, hours that felt like a breath of fresh air.

The man lives in Iowa, so I won’t see him soon. But how wonderful to have a small, autumn day, a brief Armenian afternoon.

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wearing armenia

Speaking of Mom and her jewelry talents, she taught me to solder. I had this idea before I left Armenia, and with a little instruction, I made these:

I put them together in my first weeks back home. With a few photos, some microscope slides and my mom’s necklace odds & ends, I made a way to wear my Peace Corps experience on my neck. Each of these has a back side with a different picture, and I flip them over throughout the day.

From bottom left, clockwise: The first in the corner is a picture of my house on an icy day. The girl walking is my Belgian friend An, an European Volunteer Service compadre who served in Armenia with me. Above is a landscape of Armenia at dusk, a picture I took the night before I flew back to Texas. To the right of that are feet on the Vardablur gym floor (you might recognize the pic from my blog header!). Below is the Stepanavan central square in winter. And in the bottom right is a view of my tiny training village, Teghenik.

How excited am I to be wearing scenes from my second home? TOO EXCITED.

(For instruction on how to solder a project like this, check this video. And you can order microscope slides over here!)

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missing

Last night I called my landfamily in Armenia. I haven’t in weeks. I knew it would be hard to keep in touch. They don’t have internet. They live in another hemisphere. They wake up when I go to sleep. But still, I saw them everyday for almost two years, and the morning I left made all of us cry until we just couldn’t anymore.

I called them sitting in the living room of my Texas home. I heard Serine’s voice, and there it was, the first cry since I landed in Texas over a month ago. They passed the phone around. I tried asking Meri and Greta about their upcoming first day of school. Greta will be starting kindergarten on the first. Neither of them could tell me much, passing the phone quickly on. Serine said they have been asking to talk to me everyday but that now they couldn’t get passed a few seconds on the phone without crying. She said they watch my house video everyday.

“We’re adding a room to your house,” she told me.

“Really?”

“Yes, on the side where we were growing potatoes. Now when you come you can bring your family.”

A month ago I wrote about how Armenia felt like a dream, like this place I had just inhabited but now seems so distant it’s almost unreal. But yesterday I talked with Serine, Artur, Meri, and Greta. For the first time since I left Armenia I felt this weight of loss, this deep love for a place that I know is just half a planet out of reach.

I miss everything. I miss lunches at World Vision. I miss the Clooker sweeping around my feet in the morning. I miss calling to my neighbors on my walk home. I miss the handshake of the vegetable man and the smell of the bakery. I miss pizza nights with the other American in town. I miss the mountain outside my window. I miss having a bowl of borsht in my landfamily’s kitchen. I miss long walks to the fortress outside of Stepanavan. I miss the clack of nardi stones on the worn, wooden game board. I even miss the comments and kindness from blog friends I made along the way.

I miss everything about my life there. I am taking this moment to recognize that I am really sad not to be there anymore. Next up: rejoicing that I was so lucky to live there at all.

Two friends cresting a hill on my favorite walking trail in all Armenia.

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coming back to america: expected and unexpected

There are so many parts of reentry to America to talk about, and I’ve started to make two lists. Here’s what I have so far:

Things that are really not surprising at all:

Super Wal-Mart is super terrifying. For two years, I did grocery shopping the Armenian way. I chatted with shopkeepers, had coffee with my bakery ladies, and shook hands with the vegetable man. There were so many things I couldn’t find in Armenia like brown sugar, buffalo wings, or tostada shells. Still, after growing up on America’s industrial food system, it was actually thrilling to know I could make do and that I actually loved food that was good for me.
I went to Guatemala for a summer during college, and when my mom picked me up at the airport at trip’s end, she took me to Wal-Mart to get whatever I wanted. In the orange juice section I had a breakdown. I couldn’t stop talking long enough to breathe. I hyperventilated. I couldn’t take the aisle of cookies, the plethora of tortilla chips, and now how was I supposed to know which of the juices hit highest marks in taste, vitamin content, price, and what if there’s some orange juice criterion I DON’T KNOW ABOUT!?  Consumer culture made me whack-a-doo. This time I saw it coming years away, and when I go in, I actually alternate between wanting to buy out the warehouse and run from the aisles as fast as I can.  Despite being the only game in this small town, I avoid the place as much as possible.

I can pet dogs. Every Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia felt like their town was the worst when it came to aggressive, angry, barking dogs. Every town had its regular strays, and I had to adjust my route to work to avoid the worst ones. I’ve been in Texas a month, and I haven’t seen a stray dog yet. 99% of the dogs I’ve encountered are well-behaved with owners that treat them like best friends. I’ve got my sister’s dog in my lap right now.

I can take a shower whenever I want to. This is privilege, straight up. I can drink the water. I can do laundry or dishes. I can take a hot shower. And if I want to, I can do this all at 3:00 am. It’s the kind of privilege so huge it inspires guilt.

There are some things that have absolutely caught me off guard:

Our silverware is heavy and shiny and beautiful. I know, not the most massive epiphany. Still, my first day back, I was dropping the silverware into the drawer and couldn’t stop from marveling at the beveled edges, the roses on handles, the gleam on the backs of spoons, the weight of each piece in my hands. In Armenia, I bought all my silverware, some twenty peaces for about $3. I can still feel the edge of a fork against my lip. Each dull piece was simply cut from a sheet and warped. I used to think our Texas silverware was old and dingy. And when I arrived here weeks ago, I at first thought my family must have bought an entirely new set of the same things. But no, the silverware here is just really nice.

I love going to the gym. I know you don’t really know me, and I know I’m lookin’ fly. But this bod hasn’t seen a gym since finishing my college credits in phys ed.  However, after knee surgery, and after a general lack of exercise in Armenian culture, I am so happy to be pushing my limits. I curl things and press things and crunch things, and then I bike until start to drip. And while my jogging figure was a spectacle on the roads of Stepanavan, here I am just one in sweaty crowd.

There are hand-mixers. Do you remember how I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies in Armenia. The landfamily loved them, and I can admit to having way to many, what I called, “Baker’s Dozen Dinners,” where dinner was simply a pile of cookies. (Those were long, cold, and lonely winters!) I have a knack for them now, and the other night my family wanted them. So, I got everything together, including a perfect wooden spoon for the mixing. Butter melted, eggs beat, sugar creamy, I had my little sister start adding the flour.
“This is where it gets a little tough.” I chuckled.
“We have a mixer, you know,” my mother said from the dining room.
For a moment I had no idea what she was saying. Literally, the sentence didn’t make sense. Then, brain finally firing at top speed… A MIXER. I remembered what it was, and I flipped out.
This has actually been my first and only reentry freak-out. Over the mixer. That was the trigger, and the monumental privilege that I now experience slammed me in the face. I have a washer and a dryer. I have a dishwashing machine. I have DVR. I have a comfortable bed. And I have a mixer.

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dream

It feels like I dreamt it. The whole thing, the entire two years. This is a phenomenon I was not expecting, this incredible distance, both physically and emotionally, from the place I was living in just days ago.

Before I left, it felt like there would be no end to tears, to this ripping at my heart as I left a small piece of myself in a home I loved. And now, honestly, I feel as if I woke up, and here I am in the house where I grew up, in a comfortable bed, fans blasting back the summer heat, endless entertainment of a cultural language I understand, a fridge stocked with food I know, and my flesh and blood family right here, hugs with whom feel as natural as breath.

Armenia, where did you go? I can hardly feel anything but panic when I think about people who were just within arms’ reach, a whole world that I swear I had in my sights a minute ago and now seems to have puffed into smoke. I might just believe it never happened if it weren’t for a Facebook chat with my Armenian counterpart or a phone call from a fellow volunteer, these faint whispers that my life there actually existed.

Why the distance? My friend and fellow volunteer who landed in Maine the same day I landed here, she and I talked about it over the phone. We thought that perhaps the absolute ease of such a familiar life might be distracting us from the change. We thought that maybe it would take some time to realize everything that had happened and all that it meant. Or perhaps we’re just in some kind of shock so severe that to take stock of the whole situation might be incapacitating.

Maybe there’s just so much to miss that I can’t grasp it all just yet.

Tomorrow, early in the morning, my mother and I are driving to the Louisiana bayou to visit her parents. There will be no internet or pool or gym to distract me. I am going to take my blog friend‘s advice and start quickly digging deep into memory and taking some notes on that Armenian life I was living. Perhaps I’ll start with names like Gayane, Artur, Arpine, and Liana and then work my way to memories from there.

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thank you; your gift is a rabbit-eared family

I woke up in a panic this morning. Five days left before I leave Stepanavan. Two of those days will be spent doing a camp in a village near here, so in truth, we’re talking three short days here before I cram everything I own, and something things Peace Corps owns, into a taxi and ride to the capital.

Good news, I did not stay sick, and Easter-In-June was a wild success.

Bad news, I don’t have time for a good post. I have pictures to get printed, camp materials to gather, unseen waterfalls to find, and flesh and blood people I need to reach out and touch to remind myself that I’m still here. I’m having that behind-glass feeling again that makes me want to touch everything before it becomes yesterday’s.

I will say that the last few days have included a taco dinner, uncountable and quickly eaten batches of chocolate chip cookies, Easter celebrations, visiting friends, games, long talks, and sunsets that make me cry. What am I saying? Everything is making me cry. Including the crying ladies at the grocery store, the long speeches about how they will miss me and never forget me, and the Clooker sitting down at the desk across from me, then immediately getting up to kiss me, pressing her tears-wet cheek to mine.

I’ve got things to get to. However, I do need to say that you are one of the main reasons I am here right now. I would never have finished Peace Corps with having you to share it with. I came here to put down some words, show my family some photos, and I found friends to write to, people who let share my love of this place. You win. I owe you big time.

Thank you for sticking around. Thank you for forgiving my faults. And thank you for letting me know you’re around, seeing me through this.

I’m not sure if I’ll write in the next week, with all the moving across the planet; however, I assure you that I’ll be writing about readjusting to Texas, and then the move to someplace new, Stateside or otherwise.

In the meantime, here’s a few photos which I promise are worth checking out, if only to see my landfamily wearing rabbit ears. They are amazing. Oh, good grief. The tears again.

a favorite American friend, visiting and playing nardi

kneading pizza dough with aven

americans and armenians heading out to the dasht

well, obviously, if you see an abandoned bus in the middle of nowhere, YOU GET IN

claire and heghmine

a favorite friend and her mom teaching us to make jingyalov hats (herbs bread)

our tatik is cooking; our imogen is dancing to enrique iglesias. enrique always makes us forget our work.

closing the jingyalov hats

jingyalov hats roasting on a stove-closed fire

my coworkers and i hiding in the trees

eating a strawberry. as cute as a strawberry.

eight

one of world vision's social workers

workers jumping. the one second from the left is the clooker!

a totally happy easter!

loot!

 

applying a foam rabbit "tatoo"

I will miss this place. A lot.

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my peace corps house

This started as a tiny effort to show you guys my house here in Stepanavan. It became a multi-day ordeal as I waited for each cloudy day’s hour of sunlight to do another take. It became a THING, an event my landsisters and I did every afternoon for almost a week. They loved it, began to tell visitors to their house that they had to help me make a video, that they were my ‘astghiknere’, my little stars. (You can see Greta explaining this to her grandmother in the video.)

I have never felt more myself than I have in this little cottage. It has been a refuge from the cold winter. It has been my favorite reading spot. I have laid out my mattresses for many sleepovers on the cottage floor. I have reveled in morning light coming in through the windows, beckoning me to get out of bed, eat breakfast and read, and then dance my way through daily chores. Every inch of the place feels like me, more than any space ever has. I am the first person to ever live in this house, and right now, for three more weeks, it feels all mine.

(There are a lot of Peace Corps House videos up on Youtube. I like to peruse them and imagine my life around the world. Here’s a friend of mine and her Peace Corps House in Sevan, Armenia. Here’s another friend’s home in Honduras. Take a look around the vids; tell me which ones get you dreaming about life in a new place.)

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ants

Yesterday, a nardi demonstration by my landfather showing that even after two years, he can kick my nardi butt.

And this morning, I battled the army of ants living in my door. Ok, fine, my landmom battled them. But she used MY bottle of khandzori katsakh (apple vinegar), and that counts for something, right? She laughed at how I freaked out at their swarming from the door frame, how my feet were dancing all over them, trying to stop their advance into my living room.

“It’s the weather, Brent,” she says. “Give me your broom. We’ll sweep them out.”

“I don’t want them swept. I want them dead.”

Giggles. “Just pour some vinegar on them. They run from the smell.”

She was right, of course. And now, I’m headed to the store to buy a months supply of apple vinegar. Later, there will be lighting of incense to cover the smell of my door frame pickling.

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i should live on two sides of the world

I took took my language proficiency index exam in Armenian last week. I scored Advanced-Low, which I feel great about. Still, today is exactly one month until I leave my life in Stepanavan behind, and moments ago I was eating dinner with my co-workers, unable to follow the conversation. I might have, I bet, if I listened very closely. But I instead nodded, I smiled at appropriate times, and as I have done almost daily for two years, I let my mind drift. This drifting is familiar to anyone living around an unfamiliar language, and even after learning to speak a new tongue, the habit of drifting is hard to break.

Usually, my mind wanders among go-to drifting topics, pulls them out like worn folders from a file drawer. I think about relationships. I dream about my future life in the US. I wonder about the lives of my friends and family. I worry about work.

This time however, I kept my mind at the table and thought about my office friends. I thought about Davit’s charm, how he sets the table at ease with deep-voiced interjections and warm laugh. I watched the sibling like bickering between Alvart the Clooker and Arman who argued over the location of the tea break’s remaining snacks. As usual Hasmik jumped into the lunch time conversations with questions and prompts that seem to keep the conversation moving. Armen made sure everyone has good food on their plate before piling a big-boy sized portion onto his. And after another one of Edgar’s room-raising anecdotes set everyone chuckling, I realized that here is a family. Every single one of them has a beat in the rhythm of this place, and because I work here I do, too. They would have to tell you what  part I play, but I know I play it because as soon as I walk in from being away I fit directly into the flow as if I never left.

As soon as I hear my name mentioned at the table I start listening again, and it’s Davit asking me something. I have no idea what he said, so I nod and say, “Mmhmm,” and see if the conversation will end or keep on and clue me in. But this time he knows.

“Inke chi haskanum,” he says. (“He doesn’t understand.”)

Somehow I am touched that he knows me well enough to know the difference between my understanding and my merely wanting to. Despite my trying to hide it, he knows the cues that say I haven’t followed a word.

“Asel em, ko oratsuitsi vra es jinjum orere minchev gnalu?” (“I said, ‘Are you marking off the days on your calendar until you leave?’”)

“Che, che.” I tell him I can’t do that because I don’t want to think about how soon the leaving starts.

“You don’t want to go?”

“I want to be home. I don’t want to leave. I want to live in both places at once.”

“Apres,” (“You should live”) he says, and with that common affirmation he leaves me to drift into a dream of a life on two sides of the world.

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yerevan sun

Aaaaaaah, yes. There it is, a blazing sun slapping my shoulders. I’m in central Armenia for sure.

After sweatering up in cool Goris, the capital brought on some heat exhaustion and a massive headache which wiped me right out for a few hours. But after a cold shower and some gellato, CURED! I was then able to enjoy dusk by the cascade with the my best fulbright scholar (and otherwise) friends, Claire and Imogen, guzzling some sweet Laimon Fresh (a Claire and Brent discovery). Imogen had seized a couple donuts off a pile at the US Embassy’s Independence Day party, and after removing them from their crumpled napkins, we had a vertible street rat feast (re: beginning scenes from Aladdin, late night, scraps of food, feeling poor but free!). Then we went to check out my friend’s new bar, D.I.Y., which had such a creative vibe I immediately felt the need to write a poem, get a tattoo and splatter paint on the walls.

This morning, after a greeting from Tim’s cats,  came a moment I’ve been waiting for since last September: breakfast at Gemini Cafe. The place serves crepes and coffee from a corner shop window, and patrons choose from some smart looking small tables sitting under trees up and down the sidewalk. Cool morning air, ham and cheese crepe, my friend Zoe, and a neighborhood feeling worthy of a scene in You’ve Got Mail.  This is me taking it in.

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