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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what bearded people know

A Giutkokwwabipimooacf(*) recently threw the following into her friend’s facebook newsfeeds:

“I would love for someone with a beard to tell me things about the world that only bearded people could know.”

Well, as it turns out, I have recently become bearded.  Proof:

Please save the date accordingly.

 

So as One With A Beard, here’s what I know:

1. Obviously, if you grow a beard you will look older.  Why? Because babies don’t grow beards.  Because the most famous beard is on Santa Claus, and he’s older than dirt.  Because we most often see beards on homeless people and grandpas.  Because Brad Pitt did this and made us ALL feel older:

2. Having a beard precedes a compulsion to check your beard for food. I lick the corners of my mouth at a ridiculous rate during meals; I think my lunch mates have now seen my tongue more than they’d like.  It’s become a little character around the table, coming out to search for food like a ground hog or an eel.  Maybe I’ll outgrow this need to find a mirror after I eat yogurt, but for now TELL ME IF THERE’S FOOD IN MY BEARD.

3. On the upside, the mustache works as a great spoon rake. No crumb left behind.

4. Other things besides food can get stuck in your beard. Lint from your wool blanket, for example.  Or a woman’s hair after an embrace.  Or snow.  My mustache was actually icy after I walked to work yesterday morning, my breath condensing and then freezing on my lip follicles.

5. People will take you more seriously when you have a beard. This one only applies to people who look like teenagers without (a small group, I know).  But after working with Armenians as a twentysomething-seen-as-high-schooler, I now feel just a twinge more confident talking to school leaders and NGO partners who, upon meeting the bearded me, are assured of my manliness and therefore my trustworthiness.  My beard means I know how to throw back vodka shots with the best of them and that I am, in fact, one of the grizzlied Them.

6. Jokes and all, the thing actually keeps your face warmer. Armenia’s current icy wind doesn’t zap my chin like it does my unbearded friends.  Turns out fur IS a good insulator.

6. A good beard is worth talking about. Walk into a room with a new, full beard and people will notice.  You may remember that my mustache made me look like a creeper.  The molestache, I believe, was how it was referred to in some circles.  The beard, however, has garnered much praise.  Wearing it I’ve been called some pretty flattering things. We’re not even talking the fairly common “distinguished” or the kind, “You really do look good with the beard.” I have in fact more than once been referred to as a “sexy beast”.  Just relating the facts here, people.

7. If you can grow a beard, you can change your face. That’s a beard’s appeal to the bearded at it’s most simple.  Even if, like me, you’re not really a big fan of facial hair on others, things change on a personal level when you get a new face.  Every beard is as unique as the bearded soul it sits on.  But inevitably the smile get’s its own space, and the eyes proudly hover above it all.  Even if no one sees your beard or your goatee or your handlebars, you are baffled by the mirror’s reflection as right there, before your eyes, you become someone totally new.  And probably more bad-ass.

__________________

*Giutkokwwabipimooacf- girl I used to kind of know whose wicked awesome blog is proof I missed out on a critical friendship

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knit-hate

I knit, right?  We’ve established this. And I know, I’d like to pretend that everywhere in the States this is standard, that we have arrived as a nation to a place where knitters can be knitters. But let’s be real, you see a dude flailing his needles and trailing a wad of string, and most anyone still has to suppress that urge to think him queer.  James Franco, can you just let some paparazzi snap you with your half-finished hand warmers?  It would do a lot for the XYers with a proclivity towards small time productivity.  And also for those of us who like hats.

Still, I feel fairly certain I could wander into any ol’ coffee shop in the States, whip out the needles and go to town, and no one would give me the stink eye or start whispering to their friend.

Even in Yerevan I can walk into the yarn store, Tel, without so much as a sideways glance.  Rather, the staff tend to ignore me.  Better yet, sometimes they help me find what I’m looking for and then over-enthusiastically cheer for my choices.  The manager of the place greets me like an old friend every time I go in for a skein.

Yesterday, however, I was in Stepanavan with a knitter’s quandary.  You may remember that it get’s cold in Armenia, especially without central heating (re: I can see my breath when I wake up in the morning).  So, believe it or not, leg warmers make sense.  And, like Veruca Salt, I want them now.  Problem: I didn’t have the right needles.  Since I’m not going into Yerevan soon, yesterday I grit my teeth and walked right into the only store in town with needles.

First, the girl on the floor recognized me.  She hid her smirk VERY poorly, I’d say.  I asked patiently for needles.  A boy standing with his girlfriend watched me, shocked, and then without breaking his line of site to my guesturing hands, shout-whispered to his girl, “Does this boy knit?”  She actually laughed.

Then, the shop girl led me to where they keep the needles.  And of course, THAT’S where they keep them: with the panties.

Shop girl couldn’t find them and eventually I had to point to the one pair that sat on top of what I think were millions of panties.  I then endured another girl giggling at me all the way through check out.

You’d think I was about to walk around this town in drag.

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loneliness, an unavoidable peace corps companion

I’m still sorting through pictures and thoughts about Turkey.  That post will come soon enough.  However, upon landing in my cottage a couple of days ago, my thoughts have moved quickly off of what feels like a dream of water-pipes, Ikea, cheesy bread, and Turkish hipsters.

I’m home in Armenia, and after arriving here on Sunday, the first days of the week found me hosting Danelle, a new volunteer who arrived this summer and now works at a kindergarten and at a children’s NGO in a small town by the Georgian border.   We spent some time comparing our experiences which led me to recall how I felt around this time about a year ago.

A year ago I was considering going home.  After a couple of months the previous spring working for an organization in Kolkata slums, I came into Peace Corps not expecting to enjoy it.  I originaly gave myself six months to either love it or leave it.  This time last year I wasn’t sure if I was loving it and told a friend I would go to our All Volunteer conference and would make a decision afterward to stay or go.

Around this time last year, I took this picture:

I actually found it a couple of days ago when sifting through files, looking for something to submit for our volunteer photo contest, something for the category “I, Volunteer”, something that was supposed to shed light on ‘the volunteer experience’.

I was sick then, as I am now.  I had a sore throat.  I hadn’t slept through the night for days.  I would wake up at night, the freezing air sitting heavy on my cottage without the threat of central heating.  I’d turned on Friends.  (I explained to a fellow volunteer, “I watch television shows so much more than movies here.  I used to prefer a movie alone at home.  But now I’m watching Friends because, as lame as it sounds, I like that fact that when I turn off my computer at night, I know I’m going to hear the same voices in my living room tomorrow.)

That night, without a flashlight to look in the mirror, I felt a flash of brilliance and whipped out my Canon for a shot at my tonsils.  Despite being equipped with a Digital Macro setting, the Canon didn’t do the trick but instead gave me pink, cavernous blurs, a slobbery abyss to stare at and wonder if indeed I had strep or some kind of something growing on my stinging throat.

I was in a state of loneliness I had never reached before.  My Armenian community was trying, but at the time I was still hoping for something akin to movie nights, late night taco runs, or long kitchen chats that, often without our full appreciation, keep our souls afloat.  I was longing for social structures I understood.  I was longing for a place that felt like a comfortable fit.  I was longing for a friend that could take a look down my throat and tell me how sick I might be.

I have since, of course, come to feel quite at home here.  I treasure my landfamily.  On Kelly’s first night here my coworkers were holding a party for work birthdays in August, and during my toast to them, I could hardly hold back tears saying how proud I was to be able to introduce Kelly to my Armenian friends.  I will likely be sitting in Texas this time next year wishing for a khorovats with friends and whispering to myself those Armenian phrases that have been stitched into my soul fabric. The tables have turned, and I know I’ll be in Texas wishing for some Armenianess, wishing, for example, that I could walk into a neighbor’s home on a whim and sit down to warm smiles, good conversation and a steaming cup of coffee.

I am so thankful that I can say, “I love it here.”  But my time in this place has surely not been without its moments of profound loneliness, and as I begin to round the homes stretch of my term of service in Armenia, I think I’ll be hoping to find out how all of this, the bright days and dark moments, have shaped me into the person I will be in the years to come.

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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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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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i’m pretty sure that

-There are critters living with me.  I hear tiny toenail scrapes in the walls some nights.  There’s a poster in a plastic bag under the chair-that-is-my-bedstand.  Again last night I heard it crinkle.  I turned on the reading lamp, flipped over, slapped on my glasses and saw nothing.  I heard it again and imagined that Lady and the Tramp rat crawling much to close to my head.  I did the Ah-Hell-No jolt out of bed again to find nothing.  I decided to dim the reading light and watch. Yes, my reading light dims… I have mood lighting.  This, however, is the first time I’ve used it.  Needed the right kind of light for that Catch The Rat mood.  However, what I caught was a fluttering moth.  I pinned it with the fly swatter I keep on the bedstand, and I threw it to Charlotte, the spider that lives between my bed’s headboard and the wall (somehow Charlotte’s and my teamwork attitude, our I-hate-bugs-you-eat-bugs partnership, cancels out her creepiness).  Oh, bedside critters.

-I shouldn’t be laughing so hard at this little youtube virus inspired by this piece of news (WATCH THIS FIRST).  I know that an attempted rape isn’t funny.  IT IS NOT FUNNY.   It’s just that crazy Antoine, the language he uses to express his rage, and then to combine that with the genius of auto-tuning the news, I mean, how can I not guffaw at the over-raged face singing to the attempted rapist that he’s “so dumb…really really dumb, for real,” then waving that silver thing at the camera.  Reminds me of those times I got spit-fire mad at my mother, and right in the middle of my tirade she’d just start laughing, increasing my rage which increased her laughing.  I cannot stop this song from playing in my head. Is there something wrong with me?  (Research shows: Antoine and his family actually love the song and are using it as their ringtones.  Antoine was consulted before he was auto-tuned, and now he’s using his flashfame to help rape survivors and hopefully get his family a house.  You can run and tell that.)

-I should give credit to The Hoot for this kind of blog post format.  Thanks, Annie.

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in which a homeless man thinks that i am also a homeless man

So, after you spend time thinking your neighborhood might explode while you stare at beached whales (please see last post), life gives you a little less bitter perspective.

I know I’ve said that my town is fairly cool and all, but it’s startling how cool it is compared to Yerevan which is a mere two hours away.  It tends to be twenty degrees warmer there, and yesterday, at about 3pm the capital had surely surpassed the 100 degree mark.  After searching for the right road for a blistering hour, I, of course, fresh from yesterday’s puke-time, had to hike with my backpack up a 70 degree slope for 700 yards or so to find the vet’s house where in Spring Chicken was waiting with her worms.

I wish she didn’t have her lady parts anymore, but apparently she’s puting up a fight.  I bet she ate some feces on purpose, just to throw me off the ovary-scooping trail.

The two of us sweat our way back down for another hour or so to the center of town where we collapsed under the shade of tree, laying on the grass only a couple yards from a fake pond.

There we were approached by Gago.  Clad in baggy black duds, he offered the last bits from his plastic bag of popcorn to the Chicken who devoured them immediately.  I, barely waking from my nap, rolled over to see the Chicken scarfing and the tall man grinning down at me through a grey, crudely braided beard.

Maybe I threw him off with my groggy shnorakal enk (we’re grateful) because he immediately turned around and went and brought another bag of popcorn which he spread on the grass and from which the three of us ate.

“You’re hungry?” he asked.

“I’m ok, thanks, ” I said, “but I think she loves you now.”

Gago grinned and reclined and brought out a small bottle of vodka which he offered me.  I declined which didn’t stop him from guzzling.  He never directly asked me if I was homeless.

“Drink some vodka?” he asked.

“No, thanks.  I’m waiting on someone who is taking me to my town”

“You live on the grass up there?” he asked.

“No, I live near a family in their small house in their garden.”

Later on, he asked, “In America, you live on the grass?”

“No, no.  I live with my family,” I said.

Whenever my hand was empty, he gathered kernals of popcorn from the grass and dumped them into my palm.  Perhaps it was my I’ve-been-puking-in-a-sweltering-apartment hairdo, or maybe it was my dirty clothes, or my heedless sprawl on the park grass, but this was surely the first time that a homeless man assumed that I was also homeless.

He offered Spring Chicken a palm full of vodka, which to my relief, she seemed to hate.  We talked about his cat, about Yerevan, about the heat, about music.  Grinning, we stumbled through “Hotel California” together, his phonetic rendering all the more marred by his vodka guzzles.    He kissed Spring Chicken on the mouth and wrestled with her.  He seemed very interested in her teeth, opening her mouth to study them while she wagged her tail.

When people passed he sometimes asked them for khmelu pogh, for drinking money.  But when the taxi came, he didn’t ask me for a penny.  He shook my hand and told me what a pleasure it was to meet me.  He hugged my dog.  He waved to me.

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ways running in north armenia is different from running in west texas

For the first time since summer ’08, I ran yesterday.  Back in the late college, early work years I ran.  If I wasn’t running, I was doing yoga, playing racquetball or tennis.  I moved around back then.  I think these days I just creak.

I told myself after leaving West Texas, that I’d run in Panama.  The island wouldn’t let me, demanded instead that I simply lay on the beach and then move to the hammock.  I told myself I’d run in Kolkata.  The anti-American rhetoric blasted from the neighborhood temple wouldn’t let me.  I told myself I’d run in my Peace Corps training village.  My laziness wouldn’t let me.

So finally yesterday, I ran in Armenia.  I have concluded already that running in Armenia is much different from running in America.

Mind you, running from a pursuant such as a fire-breathing bloodhound or a mace-wielding court reporter would likely be the same here as in the good ol’ USA.  Running for recreation your health, that non-descript sort, really is quite different in my VERY LIMITED experience.  I’ll give you what I observed on Day One.

Ways running in North Armenian is different from running in West Texas

1.  Terrain. Back in Texas I lived across the street from a well lit, smooth and even, clearly-marked-by-the-mile running track.  Here in Armenia, I live on a street that is mostly mud.  The parts that aren’t mud are made of puddle.

2. Community Involvement. Back in Texas I got very little recognition for my running.  At most, I would hear the occasional, “Saw you running,” from a friend, possibly a car-horn honk.  Here in Armenia, The American Running is a community event.   Apparently I can contribute to the flexibility of necks here;  I’ve never seen necks stretched so far to see something so insignificant as a guy putting one foot in front of the other.  Granted, I’ve never seen an Armenian run.  Not once.  So one morning when the American comes by at seemingly break-neck speed (what? 5mph?), with a beet red face, huffing like a steam engine, perhaps that’s something to brighten up a calendar with.

I hear reports of village running in which villagers literaly bring the family out to see the runner huff by.  This was expressed by another PCV in the form of a complaint.  I’m hoping that if I generate this kind of community involvement, that perhaps I can get them to cheer for me, maybe even throw flowers!

3. Lack of social elevation. Running in West Texas brings prestige.  I, for one, know that I never ran just to be healthy, and I certainly didn’t run because it was Such A Blast.  I don’t enjoy pushing myself.  I’m not a Mountain Climber kind of guy, more of a Lay In A Field Watching the Clouds Float type, I’d say.  While, “I want to be 80 and able to get around on my own if I can help it,” was my general (and really true) public explanation of my running, I know that I enjoyed the prestige.  I ran because I was then recognized in a new group, an unspoken class: People Who Take Care of Themselves.  I was someone who had Learned From History, someone who’d paid attention to “Supersize Me”, etc., and had taken the noble resolve to make sure I was going to live down America’s larger-than-life stereotype.  I was Taking Care of Myself.

Running in Armenia does not bring prestige.  As an American here, I already stand apart.  Also, no one runs here, as I said, so I’m not joining any kind of zeitgeist by taking to the road in my Nikes.  Yes, I can get recognition for running, but I’ll get the same kind of looks if I stand on the corner juggling hedgehogs.  Neither is really done, and neither really elevates me socially.

4.  Cleaning up. Exercise in America comes with a shower.  That cultural tidbit is rather awkwardly delivered to us starting in Junior High.  However, as you grow older and you can afford your own personal shower, being clean is almost the reward.   Many times I’d get through a hard run thinking, “It’s alright.  Very soon I’ll be fresh and clean, eating a burrito and watching an episode of The Office.”
You may recall my water situation here in Armenia.  My lack of running water means that I either get up before the Lord (you know Jesus be sleepin’ in), or I run in the evening and sleep sticky and smelly.  Yes, I know, I know.  Don’t be lazy.  Plan around it.  But why don’t you consider your commitment to running if YOU could only take a shower during the first chunk of YOUR workday (10am-1pm)?  Imagine that sometimes the water for no reason just doesn’t run out of the spout.  Imagine that not only are you running and showering, but then you are mopping, doing dishes and handwashing all of your laundry.  Yes, I know, people in the world have survived much, much harder routines.  I will be the first to admit that I have eaten from the bourgeois silver platter.  But I know for sure that trying to figure out when I’m going to run based on when I’ll be able to shower next does not make the enterprise more enticing.

________________________

Whine, whine, whine, complain, complain complain.  Really, running yesterday was really nice.  I’m going to go ahead and do it again.  And maybe even some more after that.  Til death do us part, if Running will still have me.

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