a summer blip in winter: the landsisters

Word has traveled from Moscow to our sleepy town via emigrated relatives of my Armenian friends: THE BIG FREEZE IS COMING.  Apparently, when Moscow freezes over, the same icy hand reaches out to our town in about three days.

This comes to me as a bit of a surprise.  You know what I was doing a couple of days ago? I was with my landdad, moving the nardi board into the house because the sun was beating down too hard.  (I was wearing a t-shirt.) And then I was hanging out with my landsisters on the terrace.  Meri and I built a car out of blocks my mom brought from the States.  We rolled it down a carpet my landmom left in the sun to air out.

In the game, I took on the roll of simple fool, dropping the car down the carpet and watching it crash and fall to pieces.  Meri took the roll of exasperated mother, skipping the now-is-that-the-smartest-thing-to-do’s and going straight for the this-horrid-child-is-killing-me’s, slapping her palm against her forehead and collapsing to the ground.

She did get over her feigned exasperation eventually.

Her sister Greta found me later while I was reading Timbuktu, lying on a bench under the leafless tree by my cottage.  She proceeded to build a fake barbeque by my head.

I love having landsisters.

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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.

 

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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.

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my texan mother in armenia

My mom is going to hate me for putting up a picture of her without her hair done. But besides just being joyful, this picture is proof of love, that she would give up a multi-decade, never-missed hairdryer habit for me. You're beautiful, Mom.

Most of the past week I think I’ll save for my novel/memoir/perpetually-put-off-piece-of-literature.  That is both a artistic decision, and a way of avoiding the impossibility of putting into words this past week with me, Mom, and Armenia. But, despite the length, consider this a taste.

I saw her at first down the hallway, behind the glass partition, my mother looking much skinnier, a little lost, and washed over with anticipation.  She saw me jumping up above the crowd, waving one arm and holding a bouquet of flowers in the other, this little collection of green, white and lavender, a message to my mom that despite the craziness of her first trip abroad, there is beauty, simplicity, joy and calm ahead.

Of course, directly after the bouquet presentation and tearful hugs came a walk through a dark, cement parking garage guided by a less-than-polished, self-proclaimed taxi driver.  In between waves of joy and disbelief that she was actually here, our hands holding each others hands, my mother said, “This doesn’t feel safe.  Are you sure we’re going to a taxi?”

“Yes, Mom, don’t worry.  I’ve got you.”  I was not 100% sure that this man was legitimate, but I was sure that I was so full of love right then that I would have crushed this little man into crumpled nothingness should he even try to threaten the joy.  Plus my friend Chris was recording her arrival, walking behind us with a HD camcorder.  If the taxi driver took us out, my mother and I would be recorded as innocents, full of life and love, and the taxi driver would be immortalized as a love-killing, evil monster.

We did however end up at the prearranged hostel room, both of us too excited not to walk around Yerevan, taking in the joy which the city wind whisked around us.  We ate falafel at Habibi then walked to the Cafe Rich and drank cafe glazses.  Our conversations circled around a few subjects but always came back to this:

Me: “Mom, I just can’t believe you’re right here.  Right here.  Flesh. Bones. Smile even.  My mom!”

Mom:  “I know.  I know!”

There were, of course, updates on everyone from my sister’s boyfriend to a high school friend’s mom.  I can still see her sitting right there in the outdoor cafe, across the table from me, holding a swirl of coffee and ice cream, framed on one side by a tv playing Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and on the other side by the artificial Swan Pond reflecting the street lights with Armenian lovers and families and friends circling it.  I imagined their conversations, unique and mundane, all of us sharing the same air while my mom and I sat and enjoyed a dream of mine coming true.

I know this may feel dramatic.  It’s a mom; it’s a visit.  I can try to explain.  Growing up, I thought everyone had the same life I had, going to little brick elementary schools, escaping to the toy aisle in Wal-Mart while my parents shopped, carrying cartoon-inspired lunchboxes, watching flat highways roll by through minivan windows on the way to our grandparents’ house.  High school mission trips to Mexico broke the bubble, and all the sudden the world opened.

The young traveler’s epiphany: for every unique fingerprint there comes an entire unique life with as many variations to it as there are drops of water in the sea.

I told my mother I’d like to spend my first college summer abroad.  She told me, “If you can find the money, go ahead.”  She would later confide that she didn’t think I’d be able to, and was surprised and even a bit worried when I told her I’d spend my summer working for a church in Auckland, New Zealand.

I spent a collective year of my four in college living and traveling through other countries, full of wonder and joy at each new life I got to know and love.  I changed; I saw the world.

It didn’t stop after college, with 5 months in Kolkata, 3 in Panama, and a year working in refugee resettlement in West Texas.  And now I have lived 16 months in Armenia.  What has changed, or what has intensified I should say, is my desire to share these experiences with family.  Let’s bypass for now my hope to find someone who wants to build a family around this kind of world-chasing life.  Since those first trips to Mexico I have wanted to visit these places with my mom, my dad, my sisters, and with my brother’s family.

It has torn at my soul, this feeling of being in love with people all over the world, being pulled to La Laguna, Mexico, missing my Indian family, and being so far away from my Texas loves.  After a short collection of months, I’ll be a mess of collected memories, current tears, and full full full of joy and love for my Armenian home and the friends I cherish here.

And so, here for just this brief, bright week, my mother did what I’ve dreamed someone in my family would one day want to do and make it happen.  My mother visited a distant country I love, experienced every place I love, met souls I’ve fallen in love with and fell in love with them herself.

We traveled by rickety marshutka to my old host family, that summer home of mine.  Within the first five minutes, sitting in my family’s general store, neighbors gifted us with a plastic bag full of live crawfish.  Later my mom cried giving a toast at the feast they set out for us, already full to the brim with the love they showed us.  I watched her during our morning hike, wondering at the dry yellows and silvers and light blues rolling through the valley.  I named the surrounding villages, speaking for her the unfamiliar sounds of a language she’d never heard.

She spent five days in my valley town.  We feasted on khorovats, danced at her birthday party, hiked to my favorite spot in town.  Every morning she’d shower and then head over to my land mom’s porch for a cup of Armenian coffee.  She couldn’t use her low-voltage hair dryer here which led to the blessing of my land mom doing her hair.   She fell in love with my friends at work, visiting their homes for so many cups of coffee and tastes of Armenian life.  At night she came home to more coffee with the landfamily and finally, long talks with me in my little cottage, with cups of tea and desperate attempts to stay awake to treasure the fact that here we sat in Armenia together.

She even tried to learn some of the language, finally mastering shnorakalutsyun but leaving without mastering the french ‘r’ in deghts.  I translated for her, feeling the blossom of new friendship open through me as she sat and talked with the clooker, with my coworkers, with my tiny little landsisters.

She brought a smorgasbord of gifts for me: Rosita’s refried beans, 80 ounces of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, 9 pounds of brown suger, and my loving Aunt’s hand-tossed Puppy Chow.  She filled my spice cabinet to overflowing and brought more Hanes socks and underwear to try to outlast the wear-and-tear of handwashing.  And she brought so many gifts for my Armenian friends that she was wrapping the last handmade bit of jewelery around my friend Gayane’s wrist while we walked to our marshutka on the way out of town.  A volunteer from our office had accompanied us and without a pre-planned gift, my mom dug into her make-up bag and pulled out eye-shadow, telling her that with such beautiful eyes she should could easily pull of some wild blue and shocking pink.  Gayane, one of the Armenians who fell in love back, waved to my mom and me through the marshutka window as we rolled out of the parking lot and back to Yerevan.

The last two days were a mix of stress and the coming departure.  My mom recalled a Kolkata story of mine, quoting my little Indian brother, who upon seeing the white curb lines that signaled the coming airport entrance, sat back in the bus seat next to me, sighed and said, “Oh, no.”

“What is it, Martin?” I asked, confused as to the change in mood right after a series of goofy-face pictures we’d taken.

He looked out the window again. “This is where the missing starts.”

We stressed each other out shopping in the Vernassage, her wanting to bring back some worthy gifts to our family in Texas, and me at the end of my ability to calmly translate Armenian to English and dollars to dram.  But the moments I’ll remember most about that last day in Yerevan are my mom insisting that we sit with Zeena, our homestay host, while she told us about growing up in Soviet Armenia, about running from Turkey in 1915, about her life hosting Americans with her sister in their home, about her sister’s recent passing, about her brilliant father, about her own career working with the early, room-filling super computers.

And there my mother sat, soaking up all the good, radiating compassion, looking at that old, amazing soul with love and wonder.

At the airport we put off goodbye with two cups of coffee and an apple crumble.  We sat on uncomfortable chairs, holding hands and talking about simple things like my sister’s percussion lessons and her making Armenian coffee for my dad.  We hugged each other some twenty times before she finally walked through through to security.  I watched her through the crack in the glass partition, and when she turned around to catch a glimpse of me, I jumped up above the glass and waved.

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doing some drifting

Some World Vision coworkers and I have been working on a Youth Leader Small Grants project, teaching Armenian village students about project design and management and, through a series of steps, awarding some of these village kids with small grants to do projects in their communities.  In one small village, Yaghdan, the students applied for furniture and supplies for their new youth center.  The first thing they wanted to do with these new supplies was a small weekend camp.  So, after World Vision supplied the furniture, myself and another Peace Corps volunteer went to the village with a couple days of summer camp planned.

The camp was inspired by a project called Little Drifters (check it out at the killer creative blog,  BOOOOOOOM).  The two of us PCV’s expanded the idea to a two day workshop exploring creativity and nature.  The kids made journals, wrote nature poems, and discussed how creating art that explores nature helps protect nature by helping others come to value it.  We made posters out of their poems to hang on their youth center walls, and just before sunset we hiked up to a hill peak above their village.  Most of them, including the Youth Center Director, had never hiked up the hill; they watched the sun go down with the excited chatter of kids discovering.

The next day we discussed litter, wrote more poems and then talked about creating found art using examples of garbage art and the boats pictured at BOOOOOOOM.  Then the kids went out to collect garbage from their village fields and likewise picked up natural refuse to create their own Little Drifters.  We waded out into Yaghdani Get to let the boats go, splashing at the boats and each other and ignoring the blazing sun.

Enjoy the pics below from our Little Drifter creation:

My Armenian friend teaching about volunteering to protect the environment.

Yaghdan’s very supportive mayor, one of the few woman mayor’s I’ve met

Below: Collecting, building, and sending off our Little Drifters.

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satisfying your needs and a fine cultural moment

First of all, let’s satisfy this need right now.  I know you’re all waiting for shriveled wet puppy pictures similar to those of the departed/possibly-eaten Sanity.

So, there’s that.

Now you’re probably wondering, when I’m not eating Taco Maco, craving Mexican food, plotting to intercept huge shipments of Mexican food things on their way to anywhere, or thinking about how much I NEED MEXICAN FOOD, what do I actually do in Armenia?  Well, I’ll tell you by telling you this:

Earlier this week some Armenian teens, a guy from work, and I crammed into a Lada Niva and drove to some villages near Lake Sevan.  Thanks to prearrangements from PCV’s living in those villages, our Armenian teens talked to other Armenian teens about HIV/AIDS.

The brave little bunch trusting each other during a team-building exercise. (I can't resist mentioning how much the boy's posture, second from the last, brings to mind Junior from "Disney's The Jungle Book".)

Our Stepanavan teens are a brave little bunch, willing to stand in front of their peers and talk about some very sensitive topics (condoms, abstinence, saying no to drugs, discrimination) which is difficult for any teenager but, as I’ve already said, can be really difficult in a world where teenage sexuality is pretty much completely underground.
I am continually impressed by these kids, their initiative, their patriotism, their humor and their hope.

During our trips out to villages, when we aren’t teaching forums on HIV/AIDS, we are playing a new favorite game of mine, Durak, in which I am fairly consitently given that label (which means stupid), or we are playing ERS which I taught them only to dominate the game thoroughly.

On this trip however, things evolved into a particular cultural frenzy. Let me explain.  I am in the kitchen with another PCV and two of our teenagers.  I decided to make chocolate chip cookies, and the kids were eager to see if a real live man could actually prepare something edible.  So, I am mixing butter and sugar and cutting chocolate bars into bits and sounding out the words, “Chak-a-let ch-eep koo-kee-z”.  They want to know exactly what I’m doing.  Having just watched Julie & Julia, I couldn’t resist the opportunity.  In my very best Armenian, and using my very best Julia Child voice, I began,

“AraCHEEN du petk e takaNAL kaRAke.”  I keep it up instructing them not to be AFRAID of the chocolate bar but to simply give it a solid whack.  “Never apoligize!” I tell them repeatedly.  And so on, until the teenagers were giggling reservedly at the joke they were missing and the other volunteer was heartily guffawing.

So there you have it.  What is my work here in Armenia?  Among other things, it is impersonating Julia Child in Armenian.

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to teach about female condoms, to not teach about female condoms, and other questions

In a couple of days I am finally starting my first real project.  That’s a weighty statement when you consider that I’ve been here for nine months (!), that I live in Armenia and not my own sweet motherland, that I will be executing said project in a language I can barely speak.

The Project: “Youth Empowerment and Action for HIV/AIDS Awareness and Prevention”.   Last week a coworker, my director and I travelled to four schools to interview prospective peer educators.  In a couple of days we will get those students together to train them on training their peers on HIV/AIDS and will later take them actually give the trainings themselves in villages all around Armenia.

What this has meant to me so far:  First my head is spinning around in a haze of grant paperwork, curriculum writing, coworker coordination, and logistics of getting students from their villages here and back again.

More interestingly, this has gotten me into tricky cultural territory of HIV/AIDS.  Most of the information given out on HIV/AIDS in this country is about drug use.  A booklet prepared by one NGO presents stories of persons living with HIV accompanied by photos of these men and women with masks on their faces.  There were stories about twenty or so persons living with HIV/AIDS.  All of them were infected in some way through drug use.  Drug use!  It’s true, needles are bad!   But not one mention of sex in the whole book.  Most of the material I’ve come across done by NGO’s talks much more about the easy black-and-white of drug use and less about the terrifyingly grey area of sex.

(Disclaimer: way to go NGO’s for teaching about HIV/AIDS!  Progressive and growing more so.  And I feel very supported by the NGO I’m working with.  But writing the actual curriculum has been a trip.)

A recent conversation:
I say, “So, in the states we think knowledge is power.  The more you know the better you can protect yourself.  So, when talking about ways of transmission, I assume I can talk about sex.”
My Armenian coworker, “Well, you’re not going to TALK about sex, right?  You’re just going to tell them that that’s a way you can get it.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell them how to have sex, but I think I would mention contraceptives like condoms. Can I talk about condoms?”
“Yes.  You can say ‘condoms’.”
“But maybe it wouldn’t be ok to show them how to use it.”
“No!”
“You know, in American high schools they take out bananas and do demonstrations.”
“Well, I don’t think that in the village kids are even thinking about these kinds of things.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.  They are too young.  They aren’t doing these kinds of things.”
“Well, can I talk to them about other ways to protect themselves?  What about female condoms?”
“What?”
“Female condoms.”
“No.  I think ‘condoms’ is enough.”
“What about telling them that it’s possible to transmit HIV and other STD’s through oral sex?”
“No.  Seriously.  Kids aren’t doing these kinds of things.  And most of them will get married and can deal with these things then.  You know, there’s an idea that if you tell kids about these things, they will have it in their imaginaiton and then they will do them.”
“I see what you’re saying.  But I’ve seen things that come on tv when little six and seven year-olds are running around the room.  You don’t think that when those six or seven year-olds… get older… they will feel something that will spur on their imaginations anyway.”
“Well, maybe… but we don’t need to put these things there.  Plus then we’ll have parents calling us and saying, ‘What are you doing with our students in these classes.’”
“Ok… I see what you’re saying. So, I will say, ‘You can get HIV through sex.  You can keep from getting HIV through sex if you use a condom.’  And done.”
“Yes.”

Now, these kinds of conversations are going on, and I’m having my own imaginings.  I’m remembering my high school health teacher throwing a contraceptive sponge at my head.   Scenes of Pleasantville come to mind as well.  And I’m wondering how its possible that in the same country where, on multiple occasions, young boys have tried to show me porn on their phones, those same young people are not really thinking about having sex.  One even graphically communicated that he’s had sex eight times.  They offered to help me find sex.  Surely they are thinking about it.

That said, I’m thrilled to be teaching soon.  My Armenian coworker and I have been preparing for a long while and working with him has been great.  We’re playing a lot of games, and the main idea behind our training is that youth can be proactive in protecting their communities against HIV/AIDS.  I can get behind that even if I’m not allowed to say ‘female condom’.

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These are the most interesting photos I’ve taken so far.  In a nearby village where our World Vision office does some work, they celebrated Military Day.  Two schools formed teams of high form students and battled in games that included pull-ups, demonstrations of First-Aid knowledge, and gun reassembly.  The day was fantastic actually, culminating in a feast of horovats and numerous toasts to cooperation, children’s growth, and country preservation.  A great day.

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my day keeps going back to cat.

I’m sorry that all my posts seem to be about my cat.  There are more interesting things that happen during my day, I promise.  But she receives the blunt force of my inner turmoil.  Let me see if I can give an example.

Yesterday was downright blizzardy.  I’ve never seen so much snow blowing around.  And in the middle of the deluge, Arman, a guy from my work, and I drove to a village in the far north to see buildings we may possibly renovate for a women’s initiative.  The meeting turned out to be somewhat counterproductive and ended in my getting yelled at by the woman who’s partnering with us.

Frustrated by the afternoon, my dismay brewed on the snowy 1.5 hour drive home.  I was then further perturbed by an exchange over a ride home and a candy bar (something I won’t relate because it makes me look stupid).  Then upon arriving back at the office a Yerevantsi (people from Yerevan sometimes come with an aire of superiority) looked at my ‘Word-of-the-Day’ desk display, and rudely said, “You’re not going to learn Armenian like that.  You at least have to learn 10 words a day.”  To which my emotionally cranked self replied, “Well then I guess I’m just not going to learn Armenian then.”

I arrived home, finally smiling at the sight of my legs disappearing into icy powder.  I got inside, changed my frozen jeans for sweatpants, and then, forced by smell, slipped my shoes over naked feet and headed outside to replace the dirt in Sanity’s poop tray.  The snow quickly found its way into my shoes and down to my toes, and here, I had an epiphany.

This is my life. Here I am, feet wet and freezing, digging in the snow with a tiny bowl, dumping cat poop into an icy hole, digging elsewhere in search of fresh mud to carry back in for the cat to defecate on.

Upon returning inside, I changed pants again and went to cuddle the cat.  She of course merely clawed my hand.  Ungrateful rassafrassin’ idjimtin’ clapsnake.  (That by the way was NOT what I said to her.)  And then I realized that I may never have wound free hands again.  And then I decided that the next day (ie: now) I would write a post about how my cat is a demon.  Which honestly is not true, but you see, I have to keep my head up when it comes to my cross-cultural exchanges.  It would be a mistake to let myself go on and on about my frustrations about business or otherwise cultural exchanges I’m having.  Gotta keep my head up.  So… well… the cat recieves the brunt of my negativity.  (Quite a personal revelation if you take it steps and steps further.)

Still, Sanity better watch her claws, or I’m going to become a dog person.

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t-town in the snow

I went back to the summer host family to visit for Nor Tari.  It was really breathtaking, seeing the miles of white surrounding Teghenik, the mountains covered in powdery snow.  I had to stop mid-walk many many times just to take a look around.  My family owns a khanut* in the center of the tiny town.   From there I walked with my host brother, Arshak, up to the house, sliding on tire trails of ice and crunching through calf-deep snow.  Looking around over the rooves of houses at all the distant snow covered place, I got this overwhelming, wonderful feeling of being the only people in the middle of our own white world.

I spent the next two days wondering what it would have been like to spend my entire service in that small town.  I missed this family.  They may argue a bit, but they are warm and friendly.  We played games and danced and laughed and laughed.  My Armenian would certainly be much better; I talked with them, just shooting the breeze, for a good long while.  I kicked everyone’s tail at nardi.  I felt comfortable in a way that I just haven’t felt comfortable in Stepanavan.  People are kind in Stepanavan, but in that village, I could just read or write or nap on the couch.  No one wondered what I was doing or thought twice about my presence in their living room.  And they’re excitement at seeing me was the closest feeling I’ve gotten to ‘going home’ since I’ve been here.

Of course, Stepanavan is my place and Stepanavantsis are my people, but Teghenikers know how to make me feel like family.  It was a great couple of days

*There are a lot of Armenian words that have been incoporated into PCV speech.  “Khanut”, meaning “store”, is one of them.

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