i am not a monster and other findings

This week was officially the first week of winter.  I walked down the street, turned a sunny corner and saw the snow on the mountains.  Over the next couple of months it will creep right on down into town.  I’m back to wearing my my mitten/glove/muv things (can someone tell me what the right term for that is?), back to throwing a scarf around my neck, back to warming up next to my slow burning heater with a cup of tea. Our main street is slow-bursting yellow.  It seems over night the boulevard is all fall.  And the last flower of summer is sending out it’s last blooms to take in any left over warmth before the first freeze.

This week has been fairly slow.  I’ve watched a lot of screen things.  I’ve decided that The Big Bang Theory, besides being my new favorite show, also has the most in-awe-of-the-world inspiring theme song which fits perfectly with my renewed interest in jaw-drop inducing entertainment like Contact and Radiolab.

I have nothing else of relative significance to offer.  I am sorry.  But to make it up to you, here’s some things I’ve listened to, read, or watched this week that are all much better than this blog post.

-A genius blogfriend’s post on churchspeak.
-A friend’s repost of a much talked-about youtube video that reeks of bravery, timeliness, and importance.
-A New Yorker piece on social media and activism which went well with The Cove. (Standing in a crowded thoroughfare in the rain with a tv strapped to your chest showing extremely daring footage of dolphin slaughters beats clicking ‘like’.)
-How is it that the cosmos delivered two stories about women and underwear (here and here) that caused me to laugh out loud in my office? Bless ya lord, bless ya.
-There is of course the drama of the Chilean Miners.  I watched the live feed before heading with my French volunteer friend to his French class.  It’s true.  I’m trying to learn French.  (My link here is to a friend who’s news inspired idea is perfect.  Take that BBC.  Where’s YOUR costume idea?  And you thought you were cutting edge.)
-And finally, oh Muppets, it’s true.  Sadly, I am not a monster:

I’m going to go search for some more.  It’s Saturday; I’m free to waste some time on the internet!  Then I’m going to go home and check on the status of my chopped up persimmons that want to be jam.  They’ve been swimming in sugar all day.  Time to boil ‘em up!

 

Read Full Post »

privolnoye

Another visit to a village.  Another incredible time with an incredible family which feels like some kind of gift I do not deserve.  But what to do but completely soak it in which, of course, is what I did.

This time another PCV and I, plus a Latvian friend of mine from the European Volunteer Service, headed to Privolnoye up in the mountains near the Georgian border.  We met Ruzana, an ethnically Russian woman who returned to her village after a disheartening time trying to make a life in the capital city.  Ruzana runs a hugely successful children’s club which she started in her village from scratch.  The club meets daily in a partially run down building, the bottom floor of which was preserved by World Vision to help set up a health post and later to house Ruzana’s efforts.

From the outside, the building looks like a crumbling mess, but inside you’ll find a brightly painted room with shelves full of costumes, art supplies, toys and books.  There are two new computers and two sets of furniture that World Vision provided.  Of course, what is much more impressive than this slowly developed facility is the devotion of the club’s participants.  Comprised of mosly young girls with only a couple of exceptions, the kids meet everyday with Ruzana to practice songs, poetry recitation, theatre performance and dance.

I personally feel like a sham compared to this lady and her work with these kids.  I asked her, this highly motivated and innovative woman why she doesn’t try to work in a larger town or city.  “You’re clearly skilled,” I told her in my somewhat comfortable Armenian.

“I could,” she said, “but I tried living in the capital.  I was working all the time, and the life there was just so hard.  I worked a lot with very little reward.  And while I was there I kept thinking, ‘Every sweet thing I have tasted in my life, every happy memory, it is back home in my village, Privolnoye.” She paused to sip from her coffee cup. “So I came back here.  I just hope that the kids in this village are able to experience all of the good things I experience in this beautiful place.  Why would I want to go somewhere else when I can work towards this here?”

I, a middle class American with a short commitment as a Peace Corps volunteer, am simply humbled by that commitment to this small remote group of people.  And after only a few hours in her home, I understood what a beautiful life her village had to offer.

When we weren’t working with Ruzana in her children’s club, we were hosted in her home.  We sat and chatted over cups of Armenian coffee, turning the cups over and joking about what our fortunes might be.  Ruzana’s mother, a round-faced, thinned-eyed smiler, told me story after story about life in the village, about her children growing up, about taking care of her home, and about the first years of marriage to her husband, Dadya Roma.

“I was fifteen when we got married,” she told me.  “I had a daughter within the year, but Dadya Roma and I were insistent that we finished school. We would work all day on our farm, and then from 7 to 11:30 at night we would leave the baby with my mother and go to school.  Then we would wake up and do it all again.”  She smiled at her husband, proud of their commitment to themselves and to providing a high standard for their family.

“And my wife,” Dadya Roma continued, “she would carry a bottle of vodka in her bag for me and fold little drinking cups out of our school papers.”  He mimed taking a shot, laughed and slapped his leg.

We talked late into the night, me insisting that, despite Armenian cultural rules, Americans feel much more included if we’re allowed to do some cleaning up after dinner.  So, in the tiny kitchen we talked about my family, life in Texas, what winter was like there.

On the second morning I asked if I could wash my hair.  “My head gets very oily,” I explained to Ruzana, pretending to squeegie oil from my bangs and flick it on her.  I had thought she would heat up a kettle of hot water so I could do a quick rinse, but her mother instead lit the wood stove under the bath basin, and before I knew it I was standing barefoot on years-smoothed, wooden planks throwing steaming water over myself.  Later, warming up by the wood stove in the living room, I explained to Dadya Roma that people pay a lot of money for a sauna in the States, and they have a wonderful one right here.  He jokingly stuck out his hand and asked for 1000 dram.

We came to the village to work on a tourism project, setting up a blog for the village to use for attracting visitors.  However, for me the real fun came with an unexpected project Ruzana set up herself.  Knowing we were coming, she organized a trash clean-up in her village.  This is a fairly standard small project for Peace Corps volunteers to do, and I was expecting the usual plastic grocery sacks, unenthused kids and disillusioning moment where we realize that we don’t know what to do with the trash.  But that’s not what Ruzana had in mind.

She asked World Vision to provide matching shirts (they brought donated NFL XL turtlenecks), plastic gloves and large, donated, pink biohazard bags.  Ruzana and her girls sewed and decorated two costumes to look like bags of trash.  I, the long gangly American ,was invited to wear one of them.  Ruzana wore the other, both of us pretending to be a bit of trash.  Then while the kids were cleaning, Ruzana and I stopped people on the street with a dialogue that went something like this:

Ruzana as Trash, “Don’t you think trash is beautiful? Don’t you think that there should be trash covering our village streets?”

Passerby, “Well, no.”

Ruzana as Trash, “What?!  You don’t think there should be trash all over out village?  Brent, did you hear that?  This guy is clearly not on our side.  Sir, I think if you don’t think there should be trash in our village then you should just go over and help those kids get rid of it.”

And it worked.  Our group of eight girls grew to about 30 young people and even adults stopped to help for a bit.  And after I exclaimed that they were gathering up my family in bags, after I saved one candy wrapper saying that it was my dear dear grandmother, the kids brought every piece of trash to me asking me which member of my family they were holding.  They all ended up in the biohazard bag.

Later that afternoon, Ruzana’s brother, Gevorg, drove a few of us out to the hills to have a mushroom hunt.  The mist was thick; the road ragged and curvy.  I’d never searched for mushrooms before and Gevorg and his village friend enjoyed showing Greg and I the mushrooms we were missing in the loam.  At one point, with the voices of the others spread out over the hillside, I walked unknowing up to a ring of mushrooms.  I’d never seen one before;  I didn’t even know they grew in a circle like that.  Looking through the mist-drops collected on my glasses, I picked a few of them and headed down the hill towards my friends who were calling me back to the road.

 

Read Full Post »

good, really good

I’ve been in that catch-up-with-normalcy phase that happens after your mom makes a whizbang journey across the earth to see you.  I feel like I used up all my language skills on my mother and for the last week or so can’t seem to construct a full Armenian sentence.  I’m feeling the weight of my current state, the missing of mom added to the pressure of work projects mixed with the swirl of information concerning my grad school search sweetened by the idea of visiting friends all floating on an under current of Oh How I Love My Life and Won’t I Be A Total Mess In Less Than Ten Months When I Have To Leave.

It’s true.  Already I’m feeling the fear of leaving, the dread of saying goodbye to this beautiful place full of beautiful souls.  Let’s examine, for instance, the past weekend.

It begins Friday night with a simple canning lesson.  Serine, the sweet landmom of mine, comes over to show me what’s up with that favorite Armenian past time.  There’s an actual word for it in Armenian, but up in my marz, people just use the word pakel which means ‘to close’.  So here we are boiling tomatoes for closing, with Serine’s daughters (pictured here) watching Finding Nemo on my computer.

The next morning I wake to banging on my front door.  Serine has come to close the tomatoes, so just like that we’re up and boiling, the smell of parsely and red pepper and tomatoes quickly filling the cottage.  With merely a few spins of the zakat, I have before me five jars of chunky tomato sauce chilling by the window.  I also have within me the fever, a revelation tindered by my friend’s canning spree and sparked to flame by this tiny canned success.

All the sudden, recalling that I have recipes stowed and a helpful landmom, I am in flight to the shuka to by kilos and kilos of eggplant, red peppers, green peppers, spicy peppers, onions and more tomatoes.  With a pile of veggies on the floor, I chop and dice and follow a recipe in our Peace Corps cookbook for chunky salsa.  I finish up Finding Nemo on my own.  After almost every Dori line I overlaugh, high perhaps on tomato fumes and sun rays from the window.

Later, while the jars of salsa boil in a steamy bath, Serine comes over to teach me to cook one of my favorite Armenian foods, bdrijani khaviar.  She bakes and peels eggplants while I send all the rest through a grinder and into the kettle.  Herbs are chopped and tossed in and all of it boils while we listen to a mix of Pete Yorn, The Temper Trap, Local Natives, and the like.  Sweet aroma swirls with savory smells.

In the midst of stirring, a bell rings from the road, and Meri comes running to tell her mother that the vegetable man has come.  We leave everything steaming, and head to the street finding a truck full of figs, roughly $1.30 a kilo, and both of us buy a bag full and plot a jam.

By the end of the day I have 17 jars full of sauces and a pot full of slowly gelling figs.

The next morning I head out with The Europeans, An and Kristine, two great new friends who enjoy a sunny day or a warm cup of tea as much as I do.  We take an avtobus out to Kurtan, a village on the edge of a canyon.  After saying hello to some friends of mine there, we walk out the muddy road to the cliff edge.  We sit on a rock, our toes hovering some hundred feet about the ground, and consider the expanse.  The sky is a calm blue and the colors of fall are just beginning to peek out at the tips of branches.  A river winds it’s way from around a cliff corner and brushes past a centuries old church perched on a small hill.  After a while we pick up and hike down into the gorge on wet, craggy edges.

Down in the gorge, we dip our feet in the river; I feel the sun on my back.  We try to catch a fresh water crab the size of a silver dollar.  We name it Louise, making up a story about how Louise is a female crab trapped in a male crabs body, a transcrab.  Perhaps, we say, that’s why Louise is being so shy, why Louise keeps running under the rock where we can’t ask Louise which pronoun Louise prefers.

We picnic on the bank sitting barefoot in the shade, eating that homemade khaviar with tomatoes, bread and cheese.  And thanks to Autumn, I fall in love with those cinnamon-sweet persimmons all over again.  After eating,  I climb around on the creek stones, collecting, working my way back to shore holding bunches of freshly picked wild mint in my hands.  Finally when the clouds start rolling over the canyon, when an unwelcome thunder starts to rumble through, we pack up and head back the way we came.

Right before the climb up, the one we’d been considering as possibly dangerous, we meet again two Armenian village men who had helped us hike down from the top.  While we were picnicing, they were collecting walnuts from canyon trees. Their fingers are stained black from peeling the rinds.

“The rain is coming,” they tell us.

“You’ll wait here then,” I ask.  They are sitting by an abandoned domik, someone’s old canyon home made of plasterboard and tin.

“Until the rain ends.  Then we’ll head up.”

“Can we wait with you?” I ask.

They nod, hands still busy cracking open walnuts, chewing a reply, “Of course.  Why not?”  And before we know it, there we are sitting in the dank cabin playing Durak, each eating from the offered walnuts.

After only twenty minutes or so the rain lets up, and we wait for the men to sweep up the husks and gather their filled bags before we head out of the cabin and up the cliffside.

On the hike back we pause to see a rainbow and later to pet the goats who are making their way down the trail we’re taking up.

Back at my cottage, two more of The Europeans come over, and we make a pizza while An so kindly reboils the fig jam so we can seel it in jars.

So, you see, this place seems now to just be day after day of A Damn Good Life. All in all the weekend turned out twenty cans of yum that will give me a much tastier winter.  And what’s more I spent time with good friends enjoying fall weather that couldn’t have been sunnier.  Right before The Europeans left my house for theirs, a new friend came to visit.  I picked up the tiny thing who graciously posed for a photoshoot.  It was as if, just when the weekend was over, she showed up to say, “Hey, don’t think because your party’s ending the goodness needs to stop.”  Indeed.

Read Full Post »

shnor havor

An Armenian student waits to go inside on her first day of school.

Today is the first day of September.  Remembering this, I woke up early, ate a bowl of cornflakes and went with camera in hand to congratulate my Armenian landsister on her first day of school.  I had missed her and goofily said, “Shnor havor,” to my landdad as a consolation for missing his daughter’s departure.

It should be noted that Armenians congratulate each other for everything. At work I was shnor-havored by my friend Liana because today is Knowledge Day (don’t I feel smarter now!) and shnor-havored by my friend Armen because today is recognized as the first day of autumn (I made it to another season!).  They’ll congratulate you for your birthday and for your family member’s birthdays or their weddings or their new babies or their babies new babies.  They’ll buy their friend a small gift if he gets a new car.  They congratulate you on new clothes or a good shave.  They just through that appreciation around, and it feels good to get a dose every once in a while.

Here’s another feeling all together.  Today is the first of the last things. I start counting them now.
Today is the last First Bell for me in Armenia. The last Halloween in Armenia is coming up.  The last All Volunteer Conference will happen after that.  There’s no sadness to it just yet because I do have quite a bit more time here.  Mostly, I’m feeling satisfaction.  Shnor havor, me.

Read Full Post »