any minute now

I should be asleep.  I’ll be waking up tomorrow at a very early hour, one I’d call unholy except that what could be more holy than a reunion?  I’m not even sure I can sleep because… wait for it…

… the reunion is starting in just a few hours.

See that friendship displayed above.  That is pure, unadulterated love there, captured in digital form the last time Kelly, Sarah and I were together.  That was Texas.  This time we’re doing things Eurasia style.

First things first, this one…

… is landing in a matter of hours.  HOURS.  This friend who travelled with me through Europe, who taught me to knit, who didn’t know what spooning was that one time when we all slept in the parking lot downtown, who, when we pulled over on main street at midnight to dance to “Thriller”, climbed up on my spare tire to play the part of the menacing voice, who in a park in Berlin let us bury her in plate-size fallen leaves, THAT friend is going to be here with me in Armenia tomorrow.

We’re going to eat good food, dance to everything, and talk late into the night.  We’re going to walk out to the ravine and soak up my small town in the fall.

Then we’re through some combination of vehicles, we’re going to be seeing this one…

… in Turkey.  Yes, the country, not the bird.  This one who, after meeting her for the first time told my hippy, peace-love-bean-burritos self that she was studying business to make money and I better be ok with that, but who only last month finished her Peace Corps service in Bulgaria.  I used to hang out at her apartment with my roommate and hers.  She’d come home from waitressing at that Mexican place, and I’d tease her about smelling all sexy and enchilada-like.  We used to go to the Episcopal Church together, both of us taking comfort in the ritual of the service, and the ritual of eating Taco Bueno together afterward.

The three of us will be missing a lot of our friends, likely sharing those little bits we  might know about who’s where, when’s their wedding, why she’s living in that city now.  We’ll probably talk about Sarah’s engagement, Kelly’s cheffing, my Armenia-ing.

One of our last days together in Abilene we went to get snow cones…

I can say that each of us knew that with Sarah going off to Peace Corps we wouldn’t be together again very soon.  There’d be worlds and borders and years between us.

But, y’all, we ARE going to be together. Any minute now.

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table collection

I know this is going to feel silly, but follow me for a minute.  Web Urbanist featured a photographer who’s much cooler photos feature an individual’s carried items and one of the hands that brought those bits around.

Last night I looked at my coffee table, a mess for sure, but also a story about my little ol’ life.

It’s a collection of things that have something to say about me, and there was no forethought to their being there at all.

There’s a favorite scarf I bought back in 2005 at the advising of an ex girlfriend.  My landmom rolled it up and put it there on the table.
There’s the Peace Corps cookbook on the top right, a collection of recipes Peace Corps volunteers have passed down over the past 15 years or so.  From it I’ve learned to cook in my time here.  And when you look at the fruit & veg chart or one volunteer’s beer and wine guide, you get an actual, tangible feeling of legacy.
The two green bowls on the bottom are full of the sunflower seeds I’ve taken up munching.  It’s an Armenian tradition.  If you come to my neighborhood you’ll see the grandmothers, young men, daughters and fathers, sitting around talking and shucking seeds.  And now you’ll find me there as well, my pile of shells growing just as fast as theirs.
There’s a hat I knit and the arm of a monster that will be a gift for a friend.
That guy sitting with his feet in the water, he’s the top of a stack of cell phone cards I’ve covered with magazine pictures, ones I use as inspiration for stories and poems.
The wood is my homemade incense burner with the ashes of a stick I was given by a friend in Yerevan.
The bowl with spoon and fork was previously filled with chili my sitemate and I made at my house last week.
And there’s a photo of a friend and me at the top of a peak near Sante Fe, New Mexico.
The teapot was a gift from World Vision, my placement here, and was humbly presented to me last night in a pink biohazard bag from my close friend, Liana, who knew I’d love it.
There are walnuts on the table from the tree in our yard, and one special nut sits by the square green bowl. That nut was given to me by my Latvian friend who told me that at home they carry them in their pockets for good luck.

I love collecting things.  When I was in elementary school, I had a small box that I carried around while playing in the yard in the afternoon.  In it I collected odds and ends, knobs, nails, toy cars, discarded photographs.  Sometimes I spread all these items out and wondered at where they each came from, who might have held them before me, where they might end up.

When I looked at my table last night, I had an overwhelming feeling of connectedness.  The items on that table connect me to more than 10 people directly and even more than that when I think of all the hands and thoughts they’ve passed through to end up right there on my table.

I love what the things we carry say about us.  I wonder what’s on your table now and what it might be saying about you.

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backing up to the island

 

These cookies were made at a factory in Abilene, Texas. The factory employs many hard-working refugees, many of whom I worked with while I lived there. The fact that we were in Panama eating the cookies I watched my African friends make in Texas kind of blew my mind. I sent this photo to my friend in HR at the factory. She appreciated.

 

 

I happened upon a saved document yesterday, a bit about impressions after a week on Isla Taboga, an island off the coast of Panama City.  I had gone with my friend Travis, and for a couple of weeks it was just the two of us waiting for our other two friends to arrive on the ferry.  It was supposed to end up on my blog exactly two years ago, but because of lack of internet on the island it stayed on my hard drive.  It’s a bit heady, but it took me back to some of those first emotions after arriving to an island that felt a world away.  I thought I might share it now, where for me it stands out starkly against the Armenian winter that is fast approaching.

Expectations.  Every time you imagine a place it is different than what you expected.  Every time.  The real always affords a more complete picture for the mind’s eye, the mind’s ear, its nose, tongue and fingertips.  The mind’s map has streets; the mind’s census has a list of the mind’s names for men and women (the lady at the ‘China shop’, the umbrella guy, the men who drink by the park gate).  You had some very sparse collection of these things before in your pre-arrival ideas.  Now those are gone and replaced.

I have been here one week now, long enough to have the new set of perceptions, short enough to remember the old ones.

The pre-arrival ideas of a beach front house which let out onto a long sandy beach that reached towards the horizon, the back door that leads out onto a sandy terrace, the surroundings a tangle of green, thick enough to hide us from everything, they are all replaced.  Now there is the real house.  The house up the hill on a thin road, the pad locked gate with pink flowers running up chain link, the porch where we sit with our light dinner and watch the tuna boats at dusk turn on their crisp lights which glitter  over the water in the straight, they have stepped in and given the tangible Taboga.

There are two rooms.  I took the one with the double bed which I’m beginning to believe has tangible bugs in it tangibly biting red marks in my tangible skin.   I will tangibly wash the sheets today, I think.

The kitchen is small and remarkably clean.  The living area provides a place to sit and read and opposing padded wicker armchairs which are the perfect perch for the daily Scrabble game.  Travis has yet to beat me, but his moment is coming.  I am warding it of with brain-storming sessions on eight letter words.  I am saving ‘xenolith’ for a special occasion.  The radio has only two volumes: soft and take-the-wall-hangings-down-and-cover-your-ears-because-this-is-ungodly.  So we use my computer when need to hear something besides our own voices.  We have watched one movie so far.

Our neighbors sit out all weekend on the porch and get louder with greater quantities of dark wine and cerveza. Most of the people who live in the pueblo are aloof to our presence having seen us before, or at least someone very similar who came and left and will come again.  We have met some really interesting people.  A couple vacationing from Sacramento who go fishing and who invited us over last night to watch the presidential debate over tea and Snickers.  A couple of Panamanian college guys in for the weekend from the city who let us sit on their porch and listen to their Beatles compilation.  An American woman who has lived here for three years with her husband and her german shepherd.

Our first walk to the beach was very tangible.  Sitting down to the high tide we surveyed a mix of coconuts, beer bottles and twisted plastic bits. That we were not removed far from civilization was evidenced by the debris and further confirmed by Aunt Jemima floating half full in the surf.  The beach was frank,  ‘We are what we are; you are here and will need to adjust your perceptions.’  Consider them adjusted.

On our second and now daily trips to the beach, Travis and I have been received by the beach with a more laid back tone.  The reminders of potato chips, Coca-Cola, and most of all alcohol vary in frequency, but generally, with the first trashy message already taken, the beach let us off the hook and showed us instead the crabs, old boat hulls, sea shells and sun that we’d hoped for.   Now we stay there for hours at a time, reading, dozing, walking, swimming, collecting.  We watch the brown pelicans ride drafts, the ferry come in and go out, and the tide rise to our feet.  The sun is out, and we have enjoyed a beach dotted with umbrellas and the same beach abandoned, leaving us floating in our own globe of island paradise.

These daily beach times are a change in my perception as well.  I had hoped for more time in the city.  I am American, after all, and how would I get along without a plan, without a schedule of productivity.  My pre-arrival expectations are again put out.  What I thought would be afternoons volunteering in city barrios is now all day at the beach.  I am embarrassed really.  Searching out the opportunities that were set in my mind has turned out like digging for a shoe I might have left out on the sand last night.  I will dig, but likely, the tide has pulled it out into the sea leaving me to accept the loss and make the most of one shoe.  Most days the sea offers clear sky, some nice shells and a laze on the sand.  Some days the tide pulls up a used condom.

So I am taking what opportunities I can and waiting for tomorrow’s surf.

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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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