keshishkent coffee

Ծիրան եւ семечки or The Owl Sings at Night, Only There, Only There...

2011-05-03T22:47:00.000-07:00

Ծիրան եւ семечки: Living and Teaching in Armenia

Unbound Project by
Jonathan Maiullo
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Masters of Art

Humboldt State University
Arcata, California

2011
Submitted May 3, 2011

For Paige and Elliot

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction -----------------------------------------------------------------2
2. Pre-Peace Corps Service (Staging)---------------------------------------9
3. Arrival-----------------------------------------------------------------------13
4. Pre-Service Training (PST)----------------------------------------------15
5. A Host Family-------------------------------------------------------------19
6. Language Classes--------------------------------------------------------23
7. Meeting the Other Volunteers------------------------------------------26
8. The Armenian Education System--------------------------------------28
-a. School Number1 Malishka: A Physical Reconstruction----------31
-b. A Typical Day in the Armenian Classroom------------------------32
-c. Adapting to the Armenian Classroom------------------------------39 9. The Need for an Informed Grammar Translation Approach
to Language Learning in Post-Soviet Republics----------------------46
10. Overcoming Isolation and Integrating into Armenian Life----56
11. Amot: A Concept of Status Quo-----------------------------------62
12. Conclusion: Where I Found my Armenia-----------------------66
Endnotes----------------------------------------------------------------78
Works Cited------------------------------------------------------------79

“You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America it won’t be like it is here.”
Peter Hessler River Town
“Leave the Caucasus,” I said, mock incredulous. “I’ll never leave the Caucasus.
Wendell Steavenson Stories I Stole

Introduction
The railroad ties are unevenly spaced and I have to adjust my gait to them. Each right step is slightly extended, each left is restrained, one large, leaping step, one mincing skip. The early afternoon is bright. It’s not late enough in the year to see lizards, but I can imagine where they’d be along the ties, warming themselves on the steel tracks, throats lifted to the sky if only it were a month later and the air warmer. The grass is a heavy green where it lifts through the ashen rock bed. It reflects the dark and bulky clouds moving in from the west. It is about to storm but the sun is shining brightly overhead. It will shine through most of the rain as well. In Armenia I have almost never seen the rain without the sun somewhere off in the periphery, if not in the very center of the sky, glancing off every drop. Like everything else here, it is a picture of life. The sun and rain are not independent. They occur simultaneously, readied for the apricot orchards, for the wheat and the grey independent streets. It is a place where everything was meant to happen at once.
I pass the first station on the edge of Solak, a village of about 300 people just outside the regional capital of Hrazdan. Years ago, it was the first thing I really saw of Armenia, a village perched on a ledge, above a river valley, beneath the pastures. Solak had the most natural look to it. As a village it looked like something that had sprung from the ground along with the trees. It did not look intentional, but rather like something that had always been there. The people had this in their mien as well, something timeless.
One must view Armenia with the eyes of a poet, because Armenia is as vast and deep as the sea, because she has been carved under the blows of gales and winds, and because she is master of countless invisible currents and tides which one cannot recognize without the loftiest intuitions of spirit (Zarian 24).
In the past there has always been a dog waiting at this station. I don’t know if he lives here or if he was the watchman’s dog. It is not directly in town so few people other than shepherds pass by. If I had a herd of sheep or a few heads of cattle with me there would be no problem, but alone I look suspicious to the sheep dogs, as well as to people. But no one is ever alone here. You may think you’re alone and even feel alone, but there is always someone bumping around just on the other side of the wall, yelling at you to come in for a cup of coffee. There is always someone sitting in that empty looking car giving you a curious glance. There are always some young men just down the street eating sunflower seeds, trying to emulate their fathers who are doing the same thing but with more poise and gentleness. There are grandmothers getting up before dawn, laying plastic beneath mulberry trees, and with them a little boy who eagerly climbs into the tree to shake the branches madly, scattering bugs and the pale, overripe fruit in all directions. Well before dawn the hars has also been awake, preparing the house for the throngs of family, neighbors and friends that will swarm through it over the course of the day. “My house is not mine, it belongs to the one who opens my door—the Armenian version of mi casa su casa” (Petrosian & Underwood 196).
The dog doesn’t like to see anyone alone. The old station has long been stripped of anything valuable, but the dog will protect it anyway, much like the watchman who occasionally shares the porch with him. The dog and the watchman are half-asleep and startled by the sound of crunching rocks that marks my approach. The dog starts up quickly, but the watchman just opens his eyes, and without even adjusting his posture, stares straight into me as if I were a puzzle, a game of blot , that had to be sharply concentrated on. He has almost no expression. His face is neither friendly nor sullen. He doesn’t look angry but he doesn’t look the slightest bit amused. The dog begins to bark and makes to get down from the remains of the old platform where they are sitting. For a moment it seems a very hostile picture.
“Bari luys, axper ,” I greet the watchman by calling him brother. Though he does not smile in reaction his look mellows; his eyes have given up their intense search. He doesn’t say anything but makes a gesture by holding his arm up and shaking his open palm back and forth. He has asked me where I’m going in this gesture, although, in a different context he may have been asking me what I was doing, or perhaps more confusingly, where I was coming from with the same gesture. I tell him which village I’m going to.
“Inchu ?” he asks and I tell him I have to teach a class there today. He begins to wave me over, which he does with his palm down. He wants to ask me questions. If he has some coffee or oghi he will offer it to me. “Tti oghi, mulberry vodka, is the preferred drink of Armenian men to play up their machismo…One serious vodka connoisseur explained, ‘It does not make you drunk, it fills you up’” (Petrosian & Underwood 157). We will drink together while he asks me, roughly in this order:
1. If I am Armenian.
2. If I am married.
3. Why I am not married.
4. Why I have a beard.
5. Why I am not married.
Beyond this nothing is really certain, but if I go over and talk with him he will ask me those five questions. Over the last two years I have come up with some pretty clever answers to them. I use my moments to express levity whenever I can. In a different language and cultural setting it is difficult to joke. When I have a long way to go I usually tell people that I am in a hurry and continue on, telling them to have a good day. Today, I should hurry; I have to be down in the village of Qaritak by four and it’s already two. It’s going to rain soon and I’m not really too sure how far I still have to go.
These are problems that, however, I no longer understand; at least I don’t really consider them. Now that classes have ended for the summer and my projects have all been finished, there is nothing to do but to finally adapt to the exceedingly slow pace of life around me. The pace of life dictated by the dribbling sound of nardi dice on a board, the dull thud of broom handles connecting with dusty, autumn-colored rugs and the Ladas laden with tomatoes roiling the mid-afternoon heat. “Outside there were hundreds of cars jostling, old Ladas driven from the provinces full of tomatoes, or peaches or plums or grapes and marshutkas , small buses, honking like hell” (Steavenson 25, describing a market in Tbilisi).
I take a seat by my friend and begin to tell my jokes. He asks me where I learned to speak Armenian. I don’t answer right away. I take a sip of the gritty, sweet coffee and tell him.
“I’ve lived here for two years.”
“Did you speak Armenian before you came?” he asks.
“No,” I reply, using the informal ‘che,’ “I didn’t know a word before I came here.”
“молодец ,” he praises me in Russian, for having learned his language; he tells me to stay young, a popular idiomatic phrase for “good job.” When our conversation has dwindled down and the rain is nearly overhead I say goodbye and head back to the railroad tracks where the heavy light of the storm has burnished the tracks down to battleship grey.
“Bari janapar ,” he yells out to me.
“Apres ,” I yell back over my shoulder.
Just outside Charentsavan I realize that the village to which I am going is further away than I thought. The rain is still falling lightly through the sunlight and I have to break into a trot. I pass a sign that proclaims the village is three kilometers away and though I feel annoyed I am not really worried. So many times I have run to be on time here and have been the first one to arrive, though I am ten minutes late. Today, however, I am meeting with Americans, and if I am not on time they will be. Since this presentation is the last thing I have to do in this country I would like for it to be successful. I would like the new volunteers to hear about the Writing Olympics contest from someone who has been working on it for two years, from someone who has begged for funding from the British Council and has had to bargain with Yerevan printing companies to produce a booklet that showcases creative writing efforts from all over the Caucasus. In other words, I would like to show them something I have done for this country that has given me so much. I have about five minutes left and am still quite far from the school. The rain is coming down harder now and I am quickly becoming very wet. The village is quiet; everyone has gone in from the rain. In the late afternoon the cows are coming down from the pastures and the shopkeepers stand in the doorways of their shops to watch the rain in stoic silence. The smell of manure is especially strong and the earthy smell of wet stone and mud drifts from the gardens outside every house. From the open doors the fatty smell of lanolin and cooking onions mixes with the heavier smells of the pasture. “Behind each one there is a family, a kitchen table, a collection of beds and relationships; second wives, grandmothers, teenage sons and babies” (Steavenson 89).
A white Lada passes me then quickly pulls over. A man opens the door.
“Ari ,” he yells waving me over and I feel a surge of relief.
Without saying anything I jump in the back of the car and tell them I am going to the school. Over the years I have learned to dispense with unnecessary formalities. Here direct speech is appreciated when it is called for. When I first arrived here, like all the other volunteers, I used to use the modal, asking, “can I sit, eat, etc.,” while I felt extremely annoyed when Armenians would say things in a much more imperative voice. It took a few months to learn that this way of speaking was just much more efficient and that, by comparison, our hesitant, ever-polite English sounds uncertain and balking. Here, one simply stated, flat out, what one wanted, and if it was possible it would be done, no reason to mince words. There would always be time for that later.
So there was. The school was about 500 yards away, but the streets were muddy and potholed. The Lada, like all the others, had no suspension, so every dip and bump had to be taken extremely slowly. While I answered the usual questions about my marital status and facial hair I considered our pace and thought how it may have been faster to walk, but at least this way I was out of the rain, and honestly, no matter how many times I had explained it, I always liked telling people the reason I had a beard was that it helped me think, which I demonstrated by smoothing it over thoughtfully with my hand. It didn’t get too many laughs, but everyone always smiled. At the very least they understood it was a joke.
You can’t take a favor from someone without accepting another. In Armenia, if someone helps you with something they’re probably going to insist that you come to dinner afterward. My driver and his companion in the Lada were no exception. I declined the invitation as I was only going to be in the village for an hour or so. Still, at the very least, I had to take down some phone numbers, just in case I should come back another time.
The school had been recently remodeled, as a few of them had. It smelled of caulk and drywall inside and echoed with the emptiness of any school in July. I climbed the stairs and stopped at each floor to listen. When I reached the top floor without finding any evidence of a Peace Corps meeting I made my way back down to the first floor, yelling this time.
“Guys,” I yelled out in Armenian. “Guys, where are you?” Feeling light-hearted, I didn’t mind being so coarse as to yell while running through a school. I had spent the last two years in different school buildings all over the country. For me, Armenian schools felt like home. The posters of the alphabet (Armenian and Cyrillic) on the walls, the reliefs of Tumanyan or Baghramyan and the drawings of Ararat with rainbows and calligraphy surrounding it seemed to accommodate me. I began to feel the usual sense of purpose and excitement that I would feel before starting a new class. Even if it would only be held once, even if it was to be an informal presentation, even if I was leaving in two weeks and it was to be the last classroom I ever spoke to in Armenia, I could not stray from what two years of teaching had taught me to do to prepare: loosen up, consider how to make the content relevant, and smile when you walk in the class.
“Hey, Jon, stop yelling. We’re in here. You’re just in time. They were just going to start the Writing Olympics presentation without you.” I follow the voice to a classroom down the hall. The door is standing partially open and as I approach I can see a room full of expectant faces turned my way. I open the door.
“Barev, yeghahek. ”
Pre-Peace Corps Service (Staging)
Before I left for Armenia, we had what they call “staging” in Philadelphia, an opportunity to meet the other volunteers who would be going along and to make any last minute decisions in regard to whether or not to go at all, as, according to the Peace Corps Wiki the early termination rate (ET) or percentage of volunteers that leave before the formal close of service (COS) was 29.2 % in 2009. Over the next three days we future volunteers were introduced to the rigorous, mind-numbingly monotonous concept of training sessions, as defined by the Peace Corps. Most of what we did in staging can be described as team-building exercises, novel lessons that were designed to get us prepared for the kind of work we would be doing in Armenia. There was, however, no one on staff that had actually been to Armenia. I believe our primary instructor had never even served in the Peace Corps herself. In a New York Times article on professional cross cultural training, Gretchen Lang writes about the desire for specific cultural information, “While clients are happy to have some intercultural communication theory mixed in, most say they want specific information about the culture they are about to enter and that they are most pleased with that aspect of the program” (Lang).
As can be imagined, we were literally bristling with questions about the place we would be getting on a plane to in the next few days and almost all of the sessions went unheeded as they offered no consolation in the way of specific Armenia-centered instruction. We were prepared for basic cultural differences that would apply to almost any country outside the US. Concepts of time, personal space and folk-beliefs were introduced in sessions that usually concluded with the demonstration of gained knowledge in poster form.
I remember a specific activity in which half of the trainees left the room while the others stayed and were given note cards. Each card had an instruction, a code really, as to how to react to certain types of questioning and body language with unbearably incoherent actions. The point was to make those who had left the room feel alienated and awkward, much as they would when they arrived in Armenia, unable to communicate or understand social norms and mores. The half of the trainees who had left the room were given questions to ask us, without being told that we would not respond as expected. The point of the activity was to introduce all the trainees to the cultural discomfort that we would soon be encountering as a possibly beneficial thing.
To manage cultural discomfort, we must keep in mind that we will always feel some level of comfort or discomfort when interacting with someone of a different culture. The key is to not allow the discomfort to dictate our actions or reactions. Also, we must work towards turning fear into curiosity. Healthy curiosity about cultural differences can lead to cross-cultural dialogue and relationships (Wells).
The scene was not as chaotic as one might expect. When the trainees returned they approached a group of us and asked one of the questions they had been given. We responded through patterns in their questioning: for example, if the question had been a yes or no question we would all nod vigorously without saying anything. If the question had the word “the” we would all immediately frown and stare at our feet. The interrogators were all fairly nonplussed but continued asking questions, trying to understand the pattern, to find a key that would allow them to gain legitimate answers to our questions.
This activity stands out as one of the few relevant exercises that we engaged in while in staging. Mostly, this is because it brought us together. Most Peace Corps volunteers that I was to meet over the years in Armenia and elsewhere all struck me as being independent, self-assured people. Initially, it is difficult for them to mix as they are so caught up in their own ideas of assimilating to the culture they will shortly be joining. I heard trainees remark, during futile “meet and greet” exercises, that they had no need for such activities as they had no plans to spend time with other volunteers once in the country. It may sound like a rude thing to say, but given the prevalence of the idea, often most people agreed. I initially had very similar thoughts and didn’t make much of an effort to make any friends.
The activity that was meant to introduce us to feelings of cultural otherness was unproductive in that it didn’t have any connection to the kinds of difference in communication we would have to come to understand in Armenia; therefore, it had very little bearing on what we needed to know. We all knew that Armenia we going to be different and that people were going to have different cultural expectations of us. Over the course of our staging we were hit over the heads with this concept multiple times.
The cultural discomfort activity was, however, very helpful in that it introduced us to each other. Sitting around a sheet of flipchart paper discussing generic problems Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) face didn’t do much to bring us together. We made what comments we felt were necessary and moved on; all of us were inwardly groaning. The cultural discomfort activity demanded that we have meaningful interaction with each other. What we needed the most was to become a group so that a year later we would feel comfortable talking to each other, sharing ideas and asking for help.
I didn’t expect to become so close to the other volunteers, not only the ones that I began lifelong friendships with over the time that we were in Armenia, but even the ones I hardly ever saw. It was a gradual process. I didn’t come to feel solidarity with these people overnight, but gradually came to identify with everyone through my own experience. Regardless of where we had come from, we all shared a similar background, at least relatively, in contrast to the Armenian cultural milieu in which we all found ourselves after our arrival.
As the rest of the country identified us as Americans it was impossible that we shouldn’t come to think of ourselves in the same terms. It was, interestingly enough, the same feeling that I now have when I meet Armenians living in America. One of the most significant things that Peace Corps does for its volunteers is to take them through these loops of identity. Until I left for Armenia, I had always thought of myself in a static way in terms of how I related to the world at large. Now words such as Nineteen-Fifteen, apricot, Caucasia and even Eurasia produce a riot of emotional identification in me. We didn’t realize it while we were in training, but none of us were going to fulfill the assimilation goals we had set for ourselves. As these goals had been set with little to no knowledge of Armenia, after we acculturated we formed clearer, realistic goals. After all, it was very difficult to adapt to one of the most geopolitically varied regions of the world. “No definition is necessary because the South Caucasus has multiple identities. It is both European and Asian, with strong Middle Eastern influences as well” (De Waal 10).
The night before leaving we were given free rein to go out and say goodbye to the America that most of us would not see again for over two years. Some ventured off together to share drinks and expectations. I, having previously visited Philadelphia years before, decided to roam around and reflect on all that I had taken for granted about my native country and would no doubt come to miss very soon. I remember passing Benjamin Franklin’s grave at one point, which, for some reason, had pennies all over it, and thinking about the legacy of America, how it had formed and its place in the world. I was not suddenly feeling overly patriotic; it was rather a feeling of premature nostalgia. I looked at the lights of the city around me, and glanced into the faces of those passing by, knowing that it would be a long time before I could rest my eyes on such familiar sights again. I felt like I was moving automatically. It was like a scene from Sartre’s Nausea. “I was on the doorstep, I was hesitating, and then there was a sudden eddy, a shadow passed across the ceiling, and I felt myself being pushed forward. I floated along, dazed by the luminous mists which were entering me from all directions at once” (33).
On the eve of my departure I was able to see into the cultural heart of my country, but what I saw there was already just a reflection of what I had known for so long. At once it was who I was and who I had been: a careless citizen who would now, like Franklin, venture out into the world and, perhaps bring something back. Our flight left at 8pm the following night. We arrived in Armenia around one in the morning the 30th of May and began our slow, at times painful, acclimation to our new home.
Arrival
The beginning was a blur, studded with sharp, gleaming points of seminal experiences. In order to lessen, or rather to delay the gran mal culture shock we would soon experience, we were cloistered away in an empty campground upon our arrival in the country. Our first experience with the unpredictability of our host country occurred as we drove from the airport to our temporary lodgings. As the campground was situated, like almost everything in Armenia, mid-way up a mountain, the Uaz soviet-built trucks carrying our luggage began to gasp at the effort, packed as they were. The vans or Marshutkas carrying us made it to the campground without much trouble. We all tumbled out at once in a tired flurry and began to wait for our luggage. It was about 2:30 in the morning, and as excited as everyone was to finally have the process underway, to be, at long last, in the country we’d all been voraciously reading about for the past three months, sleep is not so easily evaded after a 13-hour flight.
It had been warmer in Philadelphia and, in the mountains of Armenia, we were all beginning to shiver. Standing there, looking at each other, barely listening to the welcome team that was comprised mainly of volunteers who had already been living in the country for a year, people who had become accustomed to speaking and listening to Armenian. They seemed to be testing us with their questions, seeking out those who would be new friends, and those with whom they could possibly work together on a grant proposal. Our questions for them were all in regard to the basics of living in Armenia; their questions for us were all personal. The conversation had begun to die out and still our luggage had not appeared. Without our luggage, and with most of us wearing light clothing, we unconsciously began to huddle together in the dark.
I wouldn’t really say that it was an inauspicious beginning to my Peace Corps career to have the truck with all our stuff break down about a mile away from our campground. Rather, it gave us on opportunity to display our ingenuity and commitment on a rather gaudy scale, like something one would see in a Boy Scouts of America commercial. Almost as soon as someone had mentioned the truck had broken down a number of us began rolling up our sleeves and slapping our palms together, thinking, “This is where it begins, from now on everything will have to be done by me; I have to take hold of the situation and forge my way to a preferred solution.” Oh, God, if only we could have realized how wrong we were then, none of us would’ve worried about the truck, we would have left it down there all night, had a drink together and then went to bed, but, we were still in our American mindsets, and, as such, we set off into the dark, eyes and teeth flashing, ready to drag up the whole damn truck if necessary, anything to demonstrate the utility of our Yankee ingenuity. What we didn’t yet realize was that “[working] as a foreigner was a matter of trying to negotiate your way through [a] political landscape,” a landscape that, when we first arrived, we knew nothing of (Hessler 41). Pre-Service Training (PST)
The Pre-Service Training (PST) portion of my Peace Corps service still looks monumental when I reflect on it. For the first three months we were in the country we were kept so busy with our adjustment we scarcely had time for much else. I remember taking short walks on Sunday afternoons and hardly being able to deal with the sheer amount of freedom; I remember it was as if I were going to float away without my tether of lesson planning materials, Armenian/English dictionary and my language and culture facilitator (LCF) there by my side.
The new volunteer is kept busy during PST for a very good reason: it’s about the only distraction from the twisting sickness in your heart after the first few weeks have passed. Initially, everyone roars into the country, unable to contain all their ideas for development and teaching practices. The enthusiasm is such that one can hardly breathe through the air of everyone’s ideas. The conversation is constant. Undergraduate courses are referenced, Durkheim is alluded to and woe be to anyone who had grant-writing experience, because everyone else is “really interested in doing something like that.” This is all fueled by a semi-professional conference air. Every time we all met we were expected to dress well. Instant coffee was available by the gallon and all the IT volunteers would be out smoking during every gap in the numerous lectures we had to sit through.
Initially, yes, it is almost exactly as you’ve imagined it for years: the Peace Corps is no longer a dream. You are in the middle of it with a group of like-minded people. Every dream, every vision that you have attached to the concept of Peace Corps whirs around your head night and day. The language classes are novel and produce results right away, considering there’s seldom opportunity to speak anything other than Armenian after class. You live with Armenians, eat with them, garden with them and fight for turns in the bathroom with them. People you only recently met become your new family very quickly.
The weekly central sessions you attend leave you feeling refreshed, and in possession of all your faculties for another week of dubious battle with an unfamiliar, but enchanting world. And you’re having a great time communicating with your new family. For the first time since you were young you’re living amongst elderly people again and you’re actually really enjoying their company, considering they are much more tolerant of your excessive language errors than the younger generation who never had to try to speak to the Russians. All this has you reeling with excitement over what the next two years are going to be like.
Then, one night, while you’re reflecting on another exceedingly productive day passed, the phrase, nay, the idea of two years sticks to something in the convolutions of your brain. You consider it. Since you’re still in training the two years hasn’t even really begun yet, in fact, won’t begin for another month and a half. I should stress here that at this point you feel pretty well-versed in this new culture. You’ve lived in the most real part of the cultural milieu for six weeks already. You feel situated in it, like you understand it. And as the plane-less night sky reels above and your last cigarette burns down, you begin to wonder how much more there could be to learn about this place. You begin to think about your friends and family back home. Suddenly, you find that someone’s birthday has passed. That somewhere there was a party without you, in which everyone that you used to live alongside had a good time without you. The places and habits of your American life suddenly come whirring out of the void, but between you and them is an abysmal two-year stretch of time.
Luckily, when you surmised that you understood this place and felt situated in it you were dead wrong, and after you get over the idea that the life you loved and left is moving along without you you’ll be able to see this very clearly; unfortunately, this realization is a long way off yet, and, meanwhile, you’re totally alone, listening to goats bleat under the glowering mountains.
The two and a half months in country are spent in Pre-Service Training, or PST. During this period which precedes the swearing-in ceremony, the recently arrived volunteer is termed a trainee and is subjected to fully-scheduled days of language and cultural trainings. Five to six days a week are spent in four-hour language class blocks. These classes are held in the villages surrounding the temporary Peace Corps training office. While the main Peace Corps office is in the capital, a regional office is set up in the provinces or marzer . The purpose of this is to introduce trainees to the level of local life that they will be living and working in for the next two years.
Our training office was in the town of Charentsavan in the region of Kotayk, a region that abuts the capital and is, therefore, slightly more prosperous than farther flung regions such as Syunik or Vyots Dzor. In Kotayk, as in other regions close to the capital, students often commute to the capital for university classes, but, as in the rest of the country, many either leave to remain in the capital or move abroad to work. The result is that although many citizens from this region have access to quality higher education the towns and villages closely resemble those elsewhere in the country with little superficial difference. The esteemed Armenian poet (Y)eghishe Charents wrote about the effects of early industrialization in 1923. “What is to come is the industrial, the dynamic…This is what is to come, what has already entered our lives, already edged into Erevan [Yerevan] and Kumri [Gyumri]. And it will decide whether our country is to be or is not to be, and it will require a new language to define its social character, its new creative impulses” (49).
Peace Corps trainees are placed with families in villages just outside the town. Around Charentsavan we were grouped by sector, or by the field in which we would work. In Armenia there were four sectors: EE, or environmental education; CHE, or health education; TEFL, or English language education and CBD, or community business development. In my last year these programs were cut to the latter two.
Because of the high number of TEFL volunteers, we were grouped in two villages, Bjni and Solak. Bjni, the site of a local spring and, consequently the name of a national mineral water company, was divided between CBD and TEFL volunteers. My village, Solak, hosted only TEFL volunteers.
Although Solak was close to Armenia’s fifth largest city, Hrazdan, and considered to be incorporated into its greater area, the village itself was small and lacking in basic amenities. My host family’s house had some indoor plumbing, but, the water only came on for a hour or two a day. The indoor sinks were used much less often than a spout located in the garden. There was no indoor bathroom and to bathe one used a bucket of water heated up on the stove in a room that was primarily used for laundry. Despite the poverty of the area the people are quite proud and externally happy. Most of the population is unemployed and spends the warmer months between their gardens and tending to the flocks in the pasture just to the north and south of town.

A Host Family
After we had been isolated in the aforementioned campground for a few days we were soon after placed with our new families. I assumed the experience of moving in with a host family was going to be much more difficult than I found it to be. First, was a ceremony in which we all got to watch a local traditional dance troupe, after which we climbed on stage ourselves to receive the traditional welcome of bread and salt, presented to us by the dancers. “Hospitality is associated with bread and salt…Bread and salt offered to guest implies the promise that no harm will be done to them. Salt indicates the preservation of ties just as it is used for preservation of foods” (Petrosian & Underwood 42). Our new host families were waiting in the audience, listening for our names, names totally unfamiliar to them, to see who among this gaggle of foreigners would be the one joining their family.
When we came down from the stage we were introduced to our new families. It was a slow process. We all milled around for a while, many of the volunteers nervously talking together, out of sheer nervousness trying to avoid the flashing gold smiles of soviet –era dental work and soft brown eyes that took in the room under supercilious brows. There was a smaller guy named Danny in our group. He was introduced to two women that had entire golden mouths and huge smiles on their faces. I remember thinking that, as he was taken over to meet them, he had the look of a Hansel who has just seen the abnormally large pot past the threshold of the witch’s house. Danny ET’d (Early Termination) just before swearing in. I remember one of the things he said before leaving was that he was really going to miss was his host family. This is, essentially, what happened to all of us. Initially, we were overwhelmed by the otherness of our hosts. The initial reaction was to consider how these people appeared to be different from us, both in appearance and mentality. But it didn’t take long before their sense of openness overwhelmed us and we came to identify with them, perhaps more than we did with each other.
At some point I was introduced to Zhora, the policeman whom I was going to live with; his son Xachik was there with him. Within an hour I was living with them. Zhora had been a policeman, years prior, in Hrazdan, and still introduced himself as such, when we first met. At some point, a great deal later, I asked him if he thought he would ever return to this job. He didn’t sound too hopeful, but, as he had an ebullient character, he smiled as he said so. My host family consisted of seven people: Ani, Xachik and Anahit, 13,12 and 11 years old, respectively, my host mother and father, Naira and Zhora, and Zhora’s parents, mother Jenik and father Xachik Sr.. Next door to us lived Zhroa’s brother Naver, wife Anahit and their three children. Naira’s family also lived only a short walk away and her sister and brother came over almost daily.
Although my host family and I began to get along very well after my first week in Armenia, there were several instances of miscommunication. We tried very hard to understand each other, but, as we tried too much to anticipate each other, there were frequent periods of total communication breakdown that would leave both parties quite confused. An example of this can be found in the milk I was given for breakfast my first few months living in the house.
Most days were similar in PST. I woke up at eight and stumbled down the outside stairs to the kitchen below. In the late spring, the countryside was breathtaking. I had never seen so much life. Every tree bore heavy fruit, every trellis was festooned with vines and hard little green grapes, and every field was sonorous with the din of sheep, goats, horses, mules and cattle, all eating or lazing around together, depending on the time of day.
Naira was always in the kitchen when I awoke, ready with a sunny disposition and some simple questions to bring me into the day.
“Lav es knetsi ?” she would ask, slowly pronouncing every syllable.
“Shat lav ,” I would reply, wanting to ask her if she had enjoyed the same, but initially, not having enough command of the language to say much besides “yes” and “thank you.”
The first month or so she would have a large glass of warm, probably freshly squeezed, milk waiting for me on the table. I hadn’t drunk milk for about 13 years, but I gulped every glass down, not wanting to be ungrateful. As much as I disliked the milk there was always coffee to look forward to. I found out later that in almost every country where you’d expect people to drink what is commonly called “Turkish” coffee, no one does. In all the Turkic countries I would visit -- Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan -- everyone drank tea. If you wanted coffee it was going to be instant.
In Armenia, I am happy to say the abominable practice of drinking scalding hot tea from tulip shaped glasses never caught on, and everyone drinks a delightfully thick brew, in a demitasse cup. The coffee is usually mildly sugared and is served with a large dish of candy, which you will be ordered to take. “Coffee defines the life of Armenians. It is a common initiation ritual…in some offices a main chore for the receptionist is to make the rounds serving coffee all day long. A receptionist is judged on her ability to remember how sweet or bitter the boss likes his brew” (Petrosian & Underwood 162-3).
While I drank my milk I would keep an eye on the stove, making sure Naira was making some coffee as well. I did what I could to express my immense love of coffee to her in hopes of being offered a second cup. This never happened because it is simply not done, the whole country over. Over the two years I was in Armenia I never once was offered a second cup, despite the small size of the cups they drink from and every time I would order a second cup at a café I would be given an incredulous look.
After several mornings of the milk and coffee routine I eventually noticed that no one else in the house drank milk and often, Xachik, being the boy and the most forthright, would often stare at me while I drank it. I wasn’t sure if he was impressed with the rate at which I consumed so much liquid or if there was something else that interested him. When my language improved I was able to ask Naira why no one else had milk. Despite my poor language skills at the time, I was still able to understand that the Peace Corps, at some point, had told all the host families that Americans like to drink milk. Armenians usually don’t drink it at all. They drink tan and matsun but not milk. For the first month or so, I had been drinking milk against everyone’s better judgment.
I really enjoyed telling her that I also didn’t like to drink milk. Not only was it a funny cultural story we’d both be able to tell, but it also meant I wouldn’t have to drink any more of the stuff. Sure enough, the next day there was just a cup of coffee waiting for me. No milk.
After breakfast, which I would usually eat with Zhora and Xachik, I would grab my language book and go up the train tracks with Jay, another volunteer who lived with Naver, Zhora’s brother. I really enjoyed having Jay around; most of the time he was the only American I spoke with during PST. We would share our opinions and stories on life in our new homes. To counter my milk story, Jay would talk about how his host mother would put food in his room every day, most of it fresh fruit. Initially, he did his best to eat it all but in the end had to start giving it away and, finally, even letting it go bad in hopes that the message would be clear that he simply couldn’t eat ten apricots every day.

Language Classes
PST integrates four components: 1) Armenian language, 2) trainee health and safety awareness 3), cross-cultural adaptation and community development skills, and 4) technical orientation. The training is based on competencies (learning objectives) in each of these areas. You need to achieve a level of competence in all four components before becoming a Volunteer (http://armenia.peacecorps.gov).
Our language classes were held in the local school, a blocky soviet-looking construction. It seemed even in the smallest villages, in the furthest flung parts of the empire, the soviets had managed to build some kind of cultural center and a school. Usually, one couldn’t tell them apart, especially in the summer when both of them would be completely empty.
In class we worked initially from the book that had been compiled by host country national Peace Corps Staff. The book was called Kamurj or Bridge, and it began, as most language textbooks do with the alphabet, number, colors and greetings. The first eight chapters or so were based around three new letters from the alphabet. We had to write them over and over and identify common words in which they were the initial letter. There were matching activities, cloze sentences and a number of dialogues that we would listen to the teacher read or hear on tape. As the lessons were held six times a week, for four hours with the same small group, in our case seven students, our teachers had to do a lot of work to hold our attention. Luckily there was a lot of subject matter to cover to get us conversant in a totally new language in ten weeks, I also like to think that we were eager students, although there were certainly times when our attention waned drastically and our teachers had to resort to emergency strategies.
As I already had some teaching experience, I was able to understand a good deal about the amount of preparation that went into these lessons. In order to keep us interested our instructors had to vary their approach, and they did a great job, using different activities and games to introduce the language to us. Although most of the work we did came right out of the book, we started off every class with a homework assignment that was usually meant to make us interact with our families, using terms and constructions with which we were unfamiliar in familiar situations. One such exercise I remember was to ask at least two family members about their favorite things and other questions that we had designed ourselves. Initially, I found it an awkward exercise, as it seemed to make the conversation seem forced, as I tried to scribble down the answers to their questions. Later I realized how it was through meaningful language exercises like these that I had been able to build up a good amount of background knowledge on my family that may have never entered into our conversations. H. Douglas Brown writes of the benefit of “anchor[ing a new concept] in students’ existing knowledge and background so that it becomes associated with something they already know” (66).
We had a few lessons that incorporated elements of CLT, or Communicative Language Teaching. “[CLT] aims broadly to apply the theoretical perspective of the Communicative Approach by making communicative competence the goal of language teaching and by acknowledging the interdependence of language and communication”(emphasis added) (Larsen-Freeman 121). Since we were living in the midst of the context for our learning it behooved everyone involved for us to make use of this. In addition to the discussions we had with our families we also talked with shop keepers and tried to make a salad while giving each other directions solely in Armenian. This exposure was in turn to be useful in the formation of our own English lessons once we began teaching, as “Language teaching necessarily involves cultural contact” (Parry 665).
I studied a fair amount, but tried not to let it keep me from genuinely interacting with my family. Unfortunately, I initially took to my room to study at night, thinking, with the house quieter, that there wasn’t much conversation going on as everyone prepared for bed after a long day. Of course, in an agrarian society, this was precisely the time when everyone talked the most. During the day everyone was busy. I talked to the children, but I was denied the meaningful conversation from the adults who were all waist deep in weeding, threshing and planting at various times of the year. I later discovered, after I had moved and lived in a different part of the country that everyone got together and talked in the evening.
The language classes I had as a trainee eventually helped me build a decent amount of background knowledge up in Armenian. More importantly, they helped me to become familiar enough with the basics of the language to feel more relaxed when communicating. As I began to communicate more I became more confident in my ability to speak and, thus, became motivated to learn more. The concept of motivation has been held up, almost axiomatically, in TEFL scholarship. “The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the learner. Because the behavior stems from needs, wants or desires within oneself, the behavior itself is self-rewarding; therefore, no externally administered reward is necessary” (Brown 68). The more I wanted to know the easier I found it to learn, and, more importantly, to recall. When I began teaching I used similar techniques to foster the motivation of my students. The largest difference was that my fellow trainees and I were surrounded by an Armenian context, where my students had few opportunities to use English.

Meeting the Other Volunteers
Sometimes we had language classes on Saturday but usually we had to go into Charentsavan for what were called central days. A central day was basically a day-long review of our progress as trainees, peppered with cultural sessions and work in our sectors. The building where we met, Charentsavan’s House of Culture, was just as empty as the school in Solak was in the summer. The obvious reason for this was that it was usually pretty warm in there by the time the afternoon sun hit the western windows. It was also a soporific kind of place that was ill-suited to the beautiful weather outside.
During these sessions we would be briefed on any new developments as far as our jobs were concerned, for example if the Ministry of Education had recently made some changes in the English curriculum. We would also hear from the volunteers that had arrived one to two years before us. Often they were invited in to discuss their daily lives and patterns of Peace Corps regimens to us, but most of them just stood around and talked about how horrible the winter was, when the heat was out and they had to put on all their clothes, crawl in their sleeping bags and continually quaff homemade vodka just to keep from freezing. This was a common sentiment. “In a pathetic way,” Peter Hessler, a PCV in China writes, reflecting on his experience, “drinking became the one small thing that Adam [another PCV] and I were good at, although it was difficult to take much pride in this” (80). The veteran volunteers would also talk about the existentialist dilemmas that arose during the colder months, when most schools, not having proper heating, would be closed and when there would be nothing to do except trudge through the silent, snow-covered streets of the village, question value judgments, and, indeed, the purpose of one’s entire life up that point. I know during my first winter I had a few days like that, and I have often been curious as to whether there is any kind of approximation or analogue to this experience in Peace Corps service in tropical countries. Wendell Steavenson, in her book about living in Tbilisi, the capital of Armenia’s neighboring country Georgia, writes about the difficulty of the Caucasian winter. “’You’re cold eh? Take this blanket and put it around your knees…Jeez, Wendell, I’m sorry, Tbilisi in winter is a bad place for a broken heart’”(154).
Although we met in our sectors (TEFL, EE, CHE and CBD) during the central days, we also met about once a week for an hour after our language classes were finished. In these classes we worked with a Peace Corps volunteer and a host country national. Most of the classes focused on lesson planning. We wrote lesson plans and tried them out with a model school class that we met with for a few weeks in Charenstavan, a class, that most of us later agreed, was nothing like a real Armenian class. Although I believe there was a lot to be gained from the classes, I think we would have been better prepared to experience more of what a real Armenian class would be like. Of course this really isn’t possible with volunteer groups coming for training in the summer when all students are out of school. But the disconnect between what I had been led to expect, especially as I was assigned to a university, and what I actually got was incredible.
I like to think that we were all capable volunteers. Yes, we were young and inexperienced, but most of us had some level of classroom experience. When we met in our sectors, we planned lessons together with a fair amount of enthusiasm and presented different teaching techniques to our peers. When our training ended we left with a large amount of ready-made lesson plans, ideas, resources and even tactics for working with our counterparts. When we left for our permanent sites we wouldn’t see each other again for three months. When we met again at our annual All-volunteer (All-vol) Conference, there was a feeling of apathy and unrealized ambitions in the air. When we were asked to act out some situations from our classes, most of them were negative. We were at our collective low point. During the skits we muttered under our breath. I remember one volunteer began to cry. The next time we would meet, only a few months later, everyone would be much more comfortable. I think most of this disconnect came from our training that didn’t do enough to introduce us to the typical Armenian village school classroom.
The Armenian Education System
UNICEF, after they had begun a project to “develop a rights-based, interactive and participatory educational system” in Armenia, released a statement in which they justify a life-skills curriculum, where students are responsible for their learning contra the teacher-centered structure the country has relied upon since the Soviet period. UNICEF’s statement regarding the need for educational change in Armenia reveals the instability of the present educational system, at once mired in traditional teaching methods and seeking to incorporate recent innovations.
Indeed, an independent report commissioned by UNICEF in 2001[in Armenia] assessed the project positively, supporting UNICEF's opinion that "possessing life skills is critical to young people's ability to positively adapt to and deal with the demands and challenges of life. And such an approach in a country which still faces a long and difficult transformation away from a totalitarian past is of vital importance (Krikorian).
The Armenian educational system is a nebulous thing. It is in such a state of flux that it is difficult to discuss it as static. While I was in the country, I worked through a major change in primary and secondary schools. In 2009, an extra year was added to secondary school education. Prior to this change basic schooling in Armenia went up to 10th grade. Students, roughly, went to school from 7 to 16 years of age. The addition of another year added a “flying” form for all students who were in school, in any grade, at the time of the change. These students all skipped or “flew” over a grade in order to accommodate the extra year that had been added since they had begun school. I was never entirely clear as to why this was necessary. As can be imagined, this made teaching in Armenia very confusing.
Seventeen years after the collapse of communism, Armenia was still using parts of the USSR’s system to inform its structure. The idea persisted that education, in many cases, was perfunctory. Khodzhabekian, in an article published in 2005, reflects on the educational system of Soviet period and the unique setbacks it poses for education in Armenia today, where the Soviet mentality is still extant in many civic areas. “In principle everybody was supposed to receive (often only formally) a school-leaving certificate enabling them, regardless of their level of knowledge, to demand an appropriate job” (5). In addition to this situation, schools, especially outside the capital hardly received any funding and teachers, earning very low salaries, earned most of their money tutoring more advanced students after class to pass the university entrance exams; as a result, classroom instruction was unplanned. Khodzhabekian writes of the effects of the decreasing quality of classes where teachers must tutor to augment their income. “Serious social problems are emerging because of the rising inequality of opportunities to obtain a good education” (5). Such unmotivated teachers would frequently spend the entire period reading directly from the textbook. Nicole Vartanian, a Senior Research Associate in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and a senior international policy research chairperson for Armenia and Roben Torosyan, Associate Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University, both of Armenian heritage elaborate on the issue of the lack of teacher motivation:
The nation decentralized school and community governance in 1997 and shifted control of spending and appointments to local councils to attempt to address financial needs of families. But annual preprimary tuition for a single student now can cost as much as the annual salary of a teacher. Consequently, many children do not enroll in formal schools until age seven [only primary and secondary schools are free in Armenia]. Unfortunately, the teaching profession suffers too, due to decreases in training opportunities, status, salaries, and overall motivation in the post-Soviet era.

Everything was confusing in Armenian schools; both in the university and the school I worked at the schedule was constantly changing. One would arrive to teach a class at 10 a.m. only to be told that the class had been moved to 11. At 11 the classroom would be empty. The students, taking advantage of the confusion, would frequently leave en masse. A large part of the confusion was the transitional status of the educational system in Armenia. The Armenian school system was a hectic place, and I don’t know if I could say I ever came to understand it. After working within it for over two years, I did come to see what major problems enervated the rest of the system. These problems of organization, materials and teacher motivation pervaded every level of the educational system I came into contact with, from teacher trainings to classroom instruction and the fact that so many qualified professionals move. “Too many young people are unable to find their place in life and become unemployed college graduates, which is a major factor of the ‘brain drain…’ Armenia is using its own resources to train cadres or other, more wealthy countries” (Khodzhabekian 4). It seemed to me that the major problem that contributed to all the others was that the republic had yet to really create its own unique educational system. Most of what I saw outside the capital still stood in the shadow of the Soviet legacy. “All too often, diploma-holding specialists simply do not have the requisite knowledge. This is due to the quality of instruction, which is not very susceptible to control in the regions [marzer] of the Republic” (Khodzhabekian 4).
School Number 1, Malishka: A Physical Reconstruction
Three stories tall, the walls are hewn rock on the outside and painted concrete on the inside. The paint is a cheap sort of artifice. It rubs off in chalky whirls on anything that brushes against it. The bathrooms are ill-maintained. There is no toilet paper and often no running water. In each stall there is a rusty bucket that contains soiled notebook paper. There is no mirror. On the second floor there is a teacher’s lounge. In this lounge there is a television which is always on and a stereo which never is. On top of the stereo sits an old Apple computer, also never used, and probably no longer functioning. On the western wall of the lounge is a shelf that holds, among other things, files of student papers, and some classroom materials such as a globe, on which the countries are labeled in Cyrillic, and a section of a human brain in embalming fluid. Among the student papers are various reports, compiled by students, usually accompanied by traced illustrations and meticulously neat handwriting. In the middle of the room is a long table with chairs on either side. At the head of this table is a large office chair reserved for the school’s director and the person in charge of scheduling, the two most revered people in the school.
In the hallways there are student-made posters of various Armenian heroes. The first floor is entirely devoted to military subjects and features Marshal Baghramyan as well as heroes from the recent Karabakh conflict such as Monte Melkonian. There are pictures of modern Armenian soldiers working out and enjoying their leisure time together, all in full uniform with brazen looks on their faces. The posters on the second floor are of great Armenian authors such as Yeghise Charents, Hovhannes Tumanyan and the astronomer Viktor Hambardzumyan. Similar posters are found in each classroom.
The classrooms have a green chalkboard on the south wall with rows of two-person tables facing them. The tables have no room for storage, so even the primary school students must keep all their books and materials in their backpacks. Each classroom has windows on the east or west side of the room depending on which side of the hall it’s located. Down the hall from the teacher’s lounge there is a library that is usually locked. When it is open, its use is limited to faculty. Most of the books inside the library are old soviet textbooks that are no longer being used. Near the front entrance of the school is a closet that janitors use for storage and as a lounge of their own. There is very little in there beyond a few scrappy chairs, a few handmade brooms and the thin bent metal squares that are used for dustpans.
There is nothing soft in the building. There is also nothing colorful save for the few posters that have not been faded by age, chalk dust and sun, hanging from the walls.
Outside the school is a recently paved lot that serves no purpose save to cover the dust that is rampant in the village during the drier months. The lot is surrounded by a gate which is usually open. Just on the inside of the gate there is a water fountain, probably a memorial to a youth in the community, as most of them are, featuring the name of this unfortunate child and a memorial icon such as a broken flower.
A Typical Day in the Armenian Classroom
In an interview for the Caucasus CRS, an online magazine, Armenian community activist Marianna Grigorian reveals the common belief that education in the country is below the international standard.
"We should march in step with the world," said Narine Hovhannisian, head of the general education department at the country’s education and science ministry. "Our educational system does not correspond to international standards” (Grigorian)
I walk up the dirt road from the main road that leads south to Iran and north to Yerevan, the capital. There are cabbage and potato patches along the road. At nine in the morning the farmers are already out with their donkeys tied up and wheelbarrows leaning drunkenly in the furrows of the fields. Malishka is a large village with a population of about 4,900 people, according to the 2001 Armenian census (http://www.armstat.am). In all probability, this number, however, is greatly exaggerated due to unreported emigration.
Almost everyone is working out in their garden plots or cooking eggs for those that will have to walk about 7 kilometers to the plots and grazing grounds south and east of the village. The children are on their way to school. They hang back in groups or rush forward alone. At the top of the rise the school is built upon, there stands an old soviet war monument of a soldier wearing a great coat, holding what looks like a tommy gun with a slightly contemptuous look carved into his face of grey rock.
I walk past the eager children, all trying to give me high-fives. I nod politely, but am unable to reciprocate the warmth of their greetings. Even to nod to them is far beyond what the other teachers do outside of class and I don’t want to meet with any more opprobrium. One of the janitors is standing at the door. I return her warm greeting and think about how much it contrasts with the perfunctory greetings of the teachers. Before going upstairs I stop into the bathroom and hold my breath while using it. The air inside is mephitic although the window is slightly cracked.
Once upstairs I still have 15 minutes before classes begin. I enter the teacher’s lounge and say hello to the teachers assembled there. The men, on one side of the room, return my greeting, the women on the other, merely look up when I enter the room. I have tried to talk with my counterpart here in the past about the lessons of the day, but her manner demonstrated her unwillingness to do so, although she didn’t say anything. On another occasion, I planned to meet with her after classes, but again, she did not show much interest. The lessons are dictated by what’s in the book. National regulations require that the book is presented in a certain fashion, i.e., a certain section is to be completed by a certain date. I have shown her that this approach leaves much to be desired in terms of appropriate teaching by international standards, but she doesn’t see the point in how the material is communicated as long as the material itself is not incorrect. This approach is contrary to all TEFL scholarship. Brown, in his book Teaching by Principles, writes, “The best teachers always take a few calculated risks” (43); “The communicative purpose of language compels us to create opportunities for genuine interaction in the classroom” (53); “We have much to learn in this profession…and we will best instruct ourselves, and the profession at large, when we maintain a disciplined inquisitiveness about our teaching practices” (58). Because correctness is the only issue, most of my communication with my counterpart consists of her asking me specific grammatical questions, most of them dealing with preposition use.
“I sit in the classroom,” she reads to me out of the book, “or I sit around the classroom?”
“You sit in the classroom,” I tell her.
As a result of this biased focus, the students are subjected to dull and usually irrelevant instruction. For example, one of the readings that we seemed to spend weeks trying to finish involved two monsters that went shopping at Macy’s. The textbook did not provide any information to students on monsters or Macy’s, nor did it introduce other key vocabulary words that would be requisite in significant apprehension of the text, as will be shown.
Christina Sargsyan, an English teacher in Yerevan, describes the state of English materials outside the capital in an interview with the British Council to promote their English learning materials.
Outside the capital the only resource teachers have is the mandatory English language textbook, perhaps one or two short stories by Somerset Maugham, William Saroyan and O’Henry published back in the 1970s in Russia and a bilingual dictionary of English and Armenian published in the 1980s (www.teachingenglish.org.uk).
The texts were all presented the same way: as a native speaker, I was to read the text first without translation to the students. It was difficult to persuade my counterpart not to translate from the very beginning. In rural Armenia I noticed there is a tendency among teachers to exhibit their knowledge. They are the sentinels of the discipline they teach. It is considered important that they impress this upon the students. Regardless of the level of English familiarity in the class my counterpart would translate everything. She did so in a defensive manner that seemed to ask no one in particular, “I know what this sentence means. Who says I don’t?” Students in their fifth and sixth years of English study would still have the page numbers translated for them. There was no incentive to learn. All the student would have to do was to wait for the forthcoming translation if anything was said in English. It was not what one would call a challenging environment.
We spent at least two weeks on the Monsters in Macy’s reading. I continually patrolled the class when not actively instructing and checked comprehension as we practiced differentiated instruction. I rarely found any evidence among the students that they had the slightest idea what the reading was about. When we finished the reading my counterpart was all set to move on to the next banal and irreverent section in the book. I stopped her and asked if I could ask the class a few questions about the reading. She seemed nervous, but responded in the affirmative. The first question I asked was what the word green meant. I asked the question in Armenian so there wouldn’t be any confusion.
“Green inch e nashanakum ?”
There was no response. At this point I had been working with these kids for three months. They had no problems understanding my accent, which had been based in their dialect anyway, as I had learned the bulk of my language, like most Peace Corps volunteers, after I had gotten to my permanent site and began interacting with people. I repeated the question and one brave student ventured a guess.
“grel?” She asked. “Grel” is the infinitive for “write” in Armenian. I pointed to a green poster on the wall.
“Sa inch gyun a ?”
“Kanatch ,” they all replied.
“Kanatch vonc klini anglerenov ?”
It took a few seconds before one student made the connection. “Green?” she offered. All the other students were quiet. I turned to my counterpart with a look that said, “You see? There’s no way they understood anything we’ve been trying to teach them from this reading if they don’t even know such basic vocabulary as the colors.” Despite this and other similar attempts to demonstrate the impracticality of the means of conveying lessons in such a way, I was never able to get my counterpart to meet me for more than a few minutes before or after school. As this was a secondary assignment, I, too, eventually gave up trying to plan lessons and just tried to augment the classroom lessons with as much real and interactive English as possible.
Returning to the scene at hand, I sit in the teacher’s lounge. I read. I talk to the other two male teachers a little. I try to ignore the TV blasting a Russian-dubbed Brazilian soap opera into the room. When the bell rings I get up and meet my counterpart over by the door, only then do we interact at all, although we have been in the same room for the last ten minutes. I ask her which class we’re going to, since the schedule changes all the time, depending on which teachers came to class that day. I don’t get a chance to see what we’ll be teaching until I walk in the classroom with my counterpart. The students, well-trained, all rise.
Our first class is third grade (or form). These students, in their first year of learning English, are probably the only ones who aren’t thoroughly sick of it. In keeping with tradition the students are all very well-dressed in mostly black and white formal clothes. The class is ebullient with the excitement of unspoiled youth. I only make it to their class once a week, and since I am something of a novelty and I play games with them, they seem happy to see me.
Sometimes, I am able to communicate to my counterpart that there is something I’d like to do to begin the lesson and I can pre-teach a little of the relevant content by selecting a simple activity from a repertoire of such activities that I have amassed after teaching in varied contexts. Echevarria et al. in their book Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners, write of the benefits of previewing material in such a way before beginning a new unit. “When students’ attention is focused on the specific information they will be responsible for learning in the lesson, student are able to prepare themselves for the information that is coming, making it more comprehensible for them” (83). These activities are really basic, but help to introduce material and motivate students. In this particular unit I have noticed there are a few colors mentioned. I don’t know if the students have been introduced to these colors yet so I quickly color in six pieces of paper with red, blue, yellow, green, orange and purple.
I place these papers on the chalkboard and write the names above them in English. I read each on to the students slowly, automatically, they repeat what I say. After we have gone through all the colors once, I hold up each piece of paper and ask students what color it is. When I return each piece of paper back to its place on the board I intentionally put it in the wrong spot. I put green in the orange spot. I don’t say anything. I just put it there and look at them. After a while a student corrects me. I ask her to come up and put it in the correct spot, each time students saying the proper name for the color. After each piece of paper is in the correct spot I pretend to accidentally knock all the papers off the board. The students laugh. Acting flustered I put them back in the wrong places. Of course, by this point the students are getting to know these six colors pretty well, so it’s not hard for them to come to the board and correct my mistake. I conclude the pre-teaching portion by walking around the room and pointing to different objects, asking which color they are.
When I am finished my counterpart comes to the front of the room and tells the students to take out their books. She speaks only Armenian to them and they all duly open their texts to the unit on the letter “G”. I wince, having read, numerous times, things like, “It is important not to let your classes go to excess in the use of the students’ native language” (Brown 118). Each student is to have memorized the page and my counterpart calls on each one, asking for their recitation. She doesn’t stop to check meaning until they arrive at the part where the text mentions that “green” begins with “G.” My counterpart stops and looks at me, she turns back to the class and asks if anyone knows what “green” means. When they all shout out the translation in Armenian, my counterpart and I both smile. It may not have been monumental progress for one day, but it was something.

Adapting to the Armenian Classroom
Over the years that I lived and worked in Armenia, I taught in many different contexts, much like the one described above. None of them were easy at first. My primary assignment was to a recently opened university in the town of Yeghegnadzor, the regional capital of the Vyots Dzor region, the country’s smallest region. The university, in its fourth year of operation when I arrived, had not yet seen a graduating class. I taught classes there, from the beginning of my service, to a wide range of students. As I have mentioned, my only previous experience teaching in Armenia at this point had been teaching practicum classes during my pre-service training, which were entirely unrealistic, as far as classroom management and English ability were concerned. My students in my practicum classes were selected from among the best schools in the Charentsavan area. These students, most of them girls, were all very well-behaved and very interested in learning English. This was not, I later found, to be the case throughout the country.
When I arrived in Yeghegnadzor, after finishing PST, on August 15th, 2008, I had two weeks before my classes began to integrate myself and prepare my lessons. In order to be better prepared I went daily to the university to talk with what faculty I could find, and see what was going to be available to the students in the library for extra-curricular work. I attempted to meet with my counterpart a few times during this period, but found it especially difficult owing to the fact that she lived in the capital and rarely came to the university when there were no classes being held. Our first meeting was to be about a week before classes officially began.
It was a hot day in late August when I went down to a local café to meet with Nune, who was to be my counterpart. I had been instructed, as a final assignment of my training, to plan a lesson with her before the term began. I got to the café first and waited around with a book and a coffee for a while. Eventually, Nune appeared, looking tired. I came to understand that this was to be a common disconnect between the staff and myself, as they were subject to meetings and project advisement with graduating students, and that we would often be on different schedules. There were many times over the years that followed when my counterpart was exhausted just when I was ready to plan a lesson or discuss student performance. There were also occasions when I had stayed up late working on other projects (such as grants and community projects) when I would come to the university already tired before the day had even begun.
I tried to abide by the same duties that were mandatory for my counterpart, but as the meetings were all conducted in Armenian, it was to be almost two years before I could really take much information away from them. I found it difficult to sit through hours of a lecture that was nearly incomprehensible. Although I was initially able to speak on a basic level, I found it very difficult to listen to a sustained monologue. And, as these meetings were not mandatory for me, I eventually stopped attending them, in order to work on other projects I found more pressing.
After Nune and I had talked for a little while and I felt that she had sufficiently relaxed I asked if she was ready to plan a lesson. She responded that she was, but that she had to leave soon to catch a marshutka back to Yerevan.
Almost immediately, I realized that I was going to have to be really assertive if I wanted to add anything to the curriculum that she had been teaching for years and was very familiar, and therefore comfortable with. As we looked over an example introductory lesson plan I had been given by the Peace Corps, Nune suggested checking student comprehension and doing evaluations at the end in ways that I had been taught were outdated. She wanted to add dictation exercises at every available juncture in the lesson, and seemed to want to translate everything into Armenian. Basically, it seemed to me almost as if she wanted to sabotage the lesson and render the students completely reliant on her.
During training the Peace Corps staff had warned us, although very briefly, that we may encounter such resistance to new teaching techniques. My response to her ambivalence about whether students learned anything or not (as I understood it at the time) was to redouble my efforts. I launched into lengthy tirades about what I labeled “outdated methods” and gave examples from my studies about the absurdity of making students endlessly repeat after their teacher, never taking responsibility for their own learning. I cited the principle of student autonomy. “Successful mastery of a foreign language will depend to a great extent on the learners’ autonomous ability both to take initiative in the classroom and to continue their journey to success beyond the classroom and the teacher” (Brown 70).
After about an hour of this she seemed to concede to a compromise. I took certain portions of the lesson, where, I explained, I would introduce more modern methods of communicating the material such as Total Physical response (TPR) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). After my impassioned argument I could tell Nune was somewhat interested to see how I would implement this material. We had just about finished writing the lesson plan when she stood up and announced that she had to catch her marshutka.
About mid-way through the first week I began to understand Nune’s reluctance to teach through the more modern methods in an Armenian classroom. About a year and a half later I completely understood her reluctance.
In my first week at the university I changed counterparts. In fact, it was the third, and thankfully last time the I would be paired up with a different teacher. The change was actually something that I initiated myself. After lesson planning with Nune and seeing her reluctance to undertake different teaching methods I was overjoyed to find two of the women who had worked at the Peace Corps training sessions over the summer in attendance in the teacher’s lounge on the first day of classes. Although throughout pre-service training I had only talked to the Arakelyan sisters a few times I knew them to be cheerful and intelligent teachers. Since, I had concluded, these women had worked with Peace Corps volunteers in the past, they knew more of what to expect from them, and, by extension, me.
On the first day on school I was scheduled to teach a few classes on my own, something, to my knowledge, no other Peace Corps volunteers in Armenia ever did. I assumed that my previous teaching experience had somehow induced this decision, either on the part of the university administrators, or the Peace Corps staff who knew what kind of work I would be doing at my institution. Instead of complaining about my position, I decided to just go ahead and teach the sections for the semester to see how they would go.
My first day went well enough, but it quickly brought my limited language and experience capacity to the fore. After classes had finished that day, I went back to the teacher’s lounge to review my material, and make any necessary adjustments for the next day. I found Anna Arakelyan sitting in the room, also going over papers, and again began talking with her. I talked of my aspirations for the semester, of the things I hoped to be able to communicate to my students and what, I hoped, I would be able to learn about their learning styles. Anna seemed interested in all this. She asked me if I would like to come to her classes on occasion and I said that I would enjoy that as I didn’t have too many scheduled. It was de facto, but, shortly after our conversation, I changed my counterpart to Anna Arakelyan. I worked with Anna at Giteliq university for the first year and at Slavonski Universitet on a monthly basis in Yerevan the second. Anna, although I don’t know if she was ever aware of it, was probably my greatest support throughout my two years in Armenia.
The main thing that I had not been prepared for, and as a result would seriously advocate for any Peace Corps volunteer in training, was classroom management. Before going into the Peace Corps, none of my teaching experience had been sustained beyond a year. I had classroom management difficulty when I was teaching in America. Like many new teachers, I would leave the class at the end of the day often feeling as though I had done nothing but yell and discipline for six hours. Whether I was dealing with the apathy of high-schoolers or the enthusiasm of fourth graders, I was woefully underprepared. However, my cultural knowledge of these situations often provided me with ample equipment to skirt major breakdowns in communication. I was always able to avoid sliding into the abyss of total classroom mutiny. As I had attended similar institutions growing up, I was able to recall what had bored or annoyed me, especially in substitute teacher contexts. I recalled the importance of winning the students over somehow in order to facilitate the rest of the lesson. I was often able to reference popular American culture in my explanations and in doing so, was able to bring the students over to my perspective and to cut the traditional distance between teacher and student. In Brown’s Teaching by Principles, he quotes Martha Pennington as she enumerates the key attributes of a successful teacher; among these she lists “informed knowledge of yourself and your students” (490). As I didn’t know my Armenian students like I had known my American students, I struggled with this for quite a while.
Having only had a few months of cultural training before arriving at my job site of Giteliq University, I had almost no knowledge of what the students; daily lives were like. This is something very important that is overlooked in the Peace Corps training materials. As volunteer trainees we learned about different team teaching methods, different ways of communicating material and about the history of the Armenian education system, but nothing was explained to us of our students. For example, I continually tried to use Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) techniques without being aware of the potential for these, especially in an Armenian context, to “reflect a cultural bias that is not universally embraced” (Brown 518).
When I began working I tried to fall back on techniques that had worked in America. When I felt I was losing control of the class I would pause the lesson and ask the students why they were acting disrespectfully. I tried to appeal to them, to get them to understand that I was there as a tool for them, and although I was very much interested in the material I was trying to communicate, I was teaching it for their benefit, not my own. In American schools, I had had success with this open discussion device. The students would open up and tell me why they were having a hard time following the lesson. Often, our dialogue would be constructive. I would promise to modify certain behaviors if they in turn would modify their own. In Armenia, this device did not work at all. It was preemptively blocked by cultural norms that I had no knowledge of when I first began teaching. The experience of the students, or their schemata, played a larger role in their apprehension of language than I understood. Echevarria et al write on this concept of a learner’s schemata. “ It is a widely accepted notion among experts that a reader’s schemata—knowledge of the world—provide a basis for understanding, learning and remembering facts and ideas found in stories and texts” (54).
Armenian education is still largely based on the Soviet system, whereby the instructor is the supreme carrier of knowledge, uncompromising and inflexible. My students had never had a teacher who didn’t conform to this expectation. All through their schooling history they had been given a lesson to repeat back. There was nothing in the way of autonomy or willingness to learn. The students had never been made to feel personally responsible for the material, the way American students are taught to learn. There is always a correct answer and it is always the intellectual property of the instructor. In class the students would either participate or be ignored; they would either be respectful or be cuffed on the ear. There was no middle ground. All my students had a similar understanding of the classroom. I was the exception. Hessler, a Peace Corps volunteer in China, writes of this phenomenon of student collective understanding. “I realized that I was not teaching forty-five students with forty-five individual ideas. I was teaching a group, and these were moments when the group thought as one, and a group like that was a mob, even if it was silent and passive” (Hessler 173).
My problems arose precisely from trying to find that middle ground. I sought dialogue with my students. They were, after all, university-level students, capable, I thought, of self-monitoring. After a few months had gone by I noticed that my appeals to the class were always unheeded. When I tried to talk directly to my students I would be ignored and the level of calamity in the class would only rise, until at last, the bell would dispel the nightmare of another class where nothing had been accomplished.
During this stage I knew I was doing something wrong, but couldn’t seem to fully understand what it was. Luckily, it was not just my problem, as our annual All-Volunteer Conference in November showed. Up until I shared the session with my fellow TEFL volunteers, in which we related our successes and setbacks, mostly setbacks at that time, I had taken every mistake personally. Every failed class seemed like a pronouncement about my teaching abilities. It hardly occurred to me at the time that I was simply out of cultural sync with my students. When I began to talk with my fellow volunteers I realized that we were all making similar mistakes, based on the clash of our own backgrounds with those of our students and their expectations.
The Need for an Informed Grammar Translation Approach to Language Learning in Post-Soviet Republics
Before leaving for Armenia, before I was too certain where Armenia even was on a map, I was taking graduate classes on TEFL pedagogy, reading about the methods and principles behind the teaching process. Over the course of my studies I was frequently flustered by what seemed to me like a self-perpetuating argument over the correct method through which to teach a foreign language. Brown notes this constant state of academic flux, “For the century spanning the mid-1880s to the mid-1980s, the language-teaching profession may be aptly characterized by a series of methods that rose and declined in popularity” (14). I understood the value in learning the history of methodological language instruction, but the constant shift from one school of thought to another left me with little faith that an absolute solution would ever be reached. I couldn’t understand why modern textbooks would hold up new methods such as Communicative Language teaching (CLT) or Content-Based instruction (CBI) as ideal models. In short, it seemed to me there was no value in following a model that was inevitably going to be outdated by another fad in a few years. Over the course of my time in Armenia I came to agree with the other TEFL instructors. “English teachers, especially those who teach students of totally different cultural backgrounds, have discovered that the best method of teaching is an unattainable ideal, for what works well with people from one group may be a failure with those from another” (Parry 665).
Since the Grammar Translation method, so widely espoused in Armenia, was so often vilified, I sought to defend it. Contemporary scholarship, though it may weakly admit to a few workable points in the Grammar Translation method, has reached an accord in choosing the Grammar Translation method as a scapegoat without fully considering the implications of this decision, namely that it isolates certain communities which maintain historic relationships between teacher and student, and, regardless of the amount of coercion evinced by the west, will not change their social order to accommodate liberalized concepts of teacher-student relations anytime soon.
Brown defines a method as “a generalized set of classroom specifications for accomplishing linguistic objectives…concerned primarily with student roles and behaviors and secondarily with such features as linguistic and subject-matter objectives, sequencing and materials”(17). As other aspects of pedagogical study as well as sociology are constantly redefining student-teacher roles, language-teaching pedagogy must constantly adjust itself to accommodate new schools of thought on these roles; the result is a constantly shifting ideal method, in which past understanding and recent innovations are combined.
The mutability of TEFL scholarship makes it a difficult subject to define. As multifarious disciplines have informed its attitudes from psychology to social justice, it becomes more thoroughly obfuscated. Multiple views combine to form viewpoints that, while they may be totally relevant in one context, are nearly inapplicable in another. TEFL pedagogy must frequently consider its context. Since classes in Japan and Bolivia are going to differ greatly, TEFL pedagogy must attempt to be concise and flexible enough to inform teachers in both teaching contexts. “Teachers need to understand what is most appropriate for students of the particular cultural groups with which they deal and must base this understanding on realistic expectations of the students’ behavior” (Parry 665-6).
From my experience teaching in Armenia, a country where the primary second language is Russian (ongoing, due to work migration), I’ve adduced that such a country’s values are greatly under-represented in TEFL pedagogy. The condemnation of the Grammar Translation method is an example of such cultural inconsideration. To westerners, and those who teach in countries that have adopted western values, Grammar Translation “is a theory for which there is no theory” (Richards & Rodgers 7). It is seen as a non-method that was once used to give isolated language instruction, that is, language instruction almost totally divorced from a context. But that might be a necessary attribute in a country that has yet to develop anything other than tenuous connections with the English-speaking world. Richards and Rodgers find fault with Grammar Translation for the lack of “literature that offers a justification for it or that attempts to relate it to issues in linguistics, psychology, or educational theory” (Richards & Rodgers 7). What they do not seem to consider are the different ways the lack of ethnocentric thought might make it universally applicable.
It is easy to forget that many impoverished tropical countries have large tourist industries. In countries like Cambodia, Kenya and Colombia, where the overall quality of life is low, most of the people in these countries have seen some foreigners skulk through their village or swarm their capital city. While the fall of the USSR may have opened up many erstwhile Soviet republics in the west, many of its eastern republics are still under nominal totalitarian control. Visa regulations are impossibly Stygian for westerners as most despots still harbor a deep-seated xenophobia. The result is that the countries of the Caucasus and central Asia often defy convenient categorization. Not only is it difficult to establish which geopolitical zone to which these countries belong, but to apply standard TEFL scholarship to students in these countries, one would quickly find most materials completely inapplicable to the situation in the classroom. De Waal, a specialist on the area, describes the Caucasus as “‘lands in between.’ In between the Black and Caspian seas, Europe and Asia, Russia and the Middle East, Christianity and Islam and, more recently, democracy and dictatorship” (1). In such a place of transition, English education is just another voice fighting for an audience. It must relate to the people in order to be properly understood.
Such isolated countries may have a basic understanding of the need for English instruction in schools, but since there is little evidence of English as an international lingua franca in such places, scholarship is stagnant, with innovations being implemented from a capital city that is often very out of touch with the situation in the rest of the country.
It is extremely frustrating to teach in a place that continually defies one’s expectations. While studying in the US I had learned certain things about EFL scholarship that I had been led to believe were universal. The one that loomed in my mind after a few months of teaching in Armenia was that grammar translation is “remembered with distaste by thousands of school learners” (Richards and Rodgers 6). I had not taken proper account of the learning differences of different cultures. As Ellis writes on teaching in Vietnam based on the CLT method,

In the confusion between Eastern and Western world-views, it is quite natural to fall into the trap of assigning one's own hierarchy of goals and value orientations to our counterparts from the other culture. The often unexamined practice of making casual attributions about the behavior of people from other cultures from our own perspective is part of a much larger picture, in which social interactions in one culture are distorted through the prism of values in another.

After I had spent hours planning lessons that accounted for multiple intelligences, promoted learner autonomy and lowered affective filters, I was shocked to see an immediate loss of respect for me glean balefully in the eyes of my students. Sometimes they laughed at the actions I would model for them, but the laughter had a derisive edge that seemed to imply that my attempts to teach them were only humorous because I was making a fool of myself, not because they were at all novel. My lessons followed this ridiculous form for months. I tried to vary them as much as possible, but with almost every activity encountered resistance. The students did not want to stand up. They were embarrassed. They did not want to get into pairs. The ones who had formed a perception of themselves as bad drawers did not want to draw. It was not their job to draw, as they were not good at it. No amount of coaxing or cajoling would convince them otherwise.
At some point, totally exhausted after about two months of late-night lesson planning and five hours of lessons a day, not to mention living with my second host family and still having to adjust to the prevailing culture around me, I decided to drop a worksheet into a lesson I was doing on prepositions. As the worksheet included directions like “up,” “down” and “to the right/left of” it seemed to tie in well enough to my lesson, but I disliked using a worksheet. For one thing copies were hard to make; The university only had one machine that broke down all the time (since some American organization had donated this machine, I never heard the end of it from the rest of the staff when it broke down on me; initially it was funny, but by the third time I got really tired of it). Most importantly, I felt like I was letting myself down by giving my students a readily prepared worksheet. I used to heartily dislike such assignments when I was in school. Even at an early age I rebelled against what I saw as a wall against creative input. The systematic form of the worksheet disguised itself as fun with a few graphics, but was mostly a rote fill-in-the-blanks exercise, scrambled words and word finds being good examples of such activities that didn’t require one to do anything with the learned information other than to locate it and write it down, independent of a definition.
The class I had prepared the worksheets for was one of my worst ones. The girls in their second year of elementary education studies seemed to have no desire to listen to me at all. A lot of what I encountered working in a university outside the capital of Armenia was similar to a high school setting in America. The students were mostly deprived of a social life with each other. In rural Armenia boys and girls are not really allowed to mingle outside of school and most students lived at home with their parents. The result was that the university was a sort of base for socializing that the students indulged in whenever they could. Young men who did not attend the school would crowd around the front stairs when classes finished for the day to attempt to talk with the girls exiting. Frequently, many of my students would show up to class flooded by emotions in a way that I had not seen since middle school. Bursts of tears or sudden bouts of illness were not uncommon sights. It was distracting to teach around surrounded by events that the students found much more important than English class. When the class began four or five girls were clustered around a single desk talking together in a disjointed and rapid manner. When the bell rang I asked them to take their seats so we could begin class. At first I was ignored, but eventually the girls took their seats.
Over the course of the class I struggled to demonstrate prepositional use to the students. Still adhering to the idea that techniques from the Grammar Translation method were destructive, I tried to avoid translating anything, especially if it could be readily demonstrated. As prepositions of place were easy to demonstrate I had brought in a stuffed animal to aid me in the process of teaching them.
I placed the stuffed animal (a duck) above the table and pronounced “over.” I wrote the word on the board. I then continued in this manner with other prepositions of place. I had hoped to engage any kinesthetic and visual learners in the class by having the students act out the prepositions of place by standing, in different positions, around their chairs, based on what they had seen from the example. The students, although they had previously demonstrated to me that they did not know the prepositions, seemed to be incredibly bored by this activity. They acted very put out, as if I had asked them all to do something outrageously stupid. Simply, I was not taking their culture into account. Parry, in her article Culture, Literacy, and L2 Reading, considers how culture can be easily overlooked. “The relationship between cultural identity and individual behavior is subtle, complex and easily oversimplified” (666).
After I took them through the activity of modeling the prepositions (motivation), writing them down and asking for clarification (presentation) and demonstrating understanding through the physical activity in which the students modeled the prepositions (practice), we moved on to the final (application) stage of the lesson plan. I introduced the worksheets at this point. Every student got a copy and I was surprised to hear them suddenly go nearly silent as they began looking at them. I explained the purpose of the activity (to demonstrate understanding of prepositions of place) in Armenian and told them that they’d have to listen carefully to me to complete the task. The worksheet was a grid with four or five pictures scattered throughout it. The point on the assignment was to listen to the numbers and prepositions I gave in order to draw a figure in the correct box. I explained that if everyone followed the directions all the worksheets would look the same at the end of the period (I shuddered inwardly at the self-betrayal I accused myself of through this last sentence).
I began the first set of instructions slowly. The room was the quietest I had heard it all year. It was the quietest I had heard any room in any Armenian classroom. Finally, I had gotten the students to listen to me, but how? The answer was not so difficult to understand. As heirs to the legacy of the Soviet education system, the students in my classes had a very different idea about what went on in the classroom. Students were expected to act out to some degree, especially the boys, but they also expected to be slapped upside the head with a book for it. Although education is greatly respected in Armenia, I often found that in rural areas it was shrugged off, especially for boys who would all be joining the army through conscription at the age of 18. I had a conversation once with my host family in which the mother informed me, with a slight grin, that while both girls were good students, the boy just couldn’t focus. For boys whose families did not have much money, the military was to be the experience that would make them into men, not going to the university. For boys whose families were wealthy, mandatory conscription did not apply to them. Khodzhabekian, considering the disparities in Armenian education, considers what mandatory conscription has done to his country: “The moral health of society is negatively affected by the sharp division of young people into men who have been able to acquire large incomes and avoid serving in the National Army [sic]” (4).
The Soviet system of education, as it persists today is also firmly rooted in the Grammar Translation method. Students are “expected to translate…The ability to communicate in the target language is not a goal…The Teacher is the authority in the classroom…Students should be conscious of the grammatical rules of the target language. Whenever possible, verb conjugations and other grammatical paradigms should be committed to memory” (Larsen-Freeman 16-17). Grammar was a major focus that would be explained inordinately in Armenian (L1). Dictations were common in classroom instruction. Most of the material came from outdated Soviet textbooks and often dealt with obscure if not altogether occult topics. The language in these exercises was so convoluted even I, as a native speaker, sometimes struggled to understand it. Sometimes students would spend an entire period copying down what the teacher had read to them. Their homework would be to translate the text in Armenian. In some classes they did little else. The students also rarely spoke English in class. They often repeated things from the book totally divorced from any kind of context. Until these university students had me they had never been taught another way.
As horrible and unproductive as it sounds, the constant repetition worked for Armenian students learning Russian because it was more accessible. The students’ parents all knew Russian and many people had relatives in Russia. In some way, everyone in Armenia had a direct connection to this language. Russian idioms were sprinkled through everyday Armenian conversations. Sometimes, especially in the larger towns of the north like Gyumri (Leninakan) people would just switch into Russian with no warning, sometimes without even realizing they were doing it.
From the perspective of the students their Russian education had worked well enough. They didn’t seem to realize that what had worked for a language that was readily accessible to them (Russian), had failed for one that was not (English). However, because of the prevailing notions of teacher and student roles, one could not deviate too far from the rigors of the Grammar Translation method to introduce language to these students. The teacher had to remain an authoritative figure. Outside the capital, to do anything inventive was to throw away all credibility. Sapargul and Sartor gloss over this notion in their essay on teaching English in another former Soviet country, Turkmenistan. “Although [Grammar Translation] is a widely criticized method, some students prefer its teacher-centered activities” (1).
The solution for Armenia, and other post-Soviet countries, needs to be one tailored to their specific needs, not one based on inapplicable findings of classrooms in Japan or Chile. The unique situation of these countries demands that the instructor assume a certain role, one that is in keeping with the mores and expectations of these countries. Likewise, a certain teaching model must also be implemented in order to successfully reach students and faculty alike. It is unrealistic and hegemonic to expect that TEFL instruction has any universal precepts. Every good instructor will adapt to his or her class. The situation in post-Soviet countries, however, will require the instructor to challenge his/her notions of what good language teaching is. According to established TEFL scholars, such as Brown, as teachers we must “Respect the diversity of cultural patterns and expectations among our students, while utilizing the best methodological approaches available to accomplish course goals and objectives” (518).
Research in TEFL pedagogy has been shown to be variable. One method eventually gives way to another and the idea that may be in vogue this year will be discredited later. Because there is no single answer on how best to instruct a class, a good instructor should utilize all available resources. If students are accustomed to learning through the Grammar Translation method, it should be employed in the classroom although tempered with other methods of instruction. The goal is not to emulate the other instructors the students may have, but to model just enough instruction on culturally accepted methods to gain the students’ trust and attention in class. Once the students have identified a TEFL instructor with their culturally-enforced concept of instructor, one can begin to challenge them in different ways, without fear of their bewilderment and misunderstanding.
My class would have had a much easier time understanding my position as an instructor if I had presented the material to them initially using the prescribed methods. I wouldn’t have made the mistake of having to stumble upon what was expected teaching material after months of inattentive classes. Had I begun with common teaching material I could have been on my way to using more creative teaching methods after a few months, instead of reeling at the spell-binding effects worksheets had on my students.

Overcoming Isolation and Integrating into Armenian Life
Although I did spent a lot of time in the classroom and planning lessons, I still had a good amount of free time. Simply put, for the first few months, there were no distractions. Since I had moved from the house of my second host family in December into my own apartment, I suddenly found myself with free time that I could spend on my own terms.
My first year in the country I was missing a lot, both in the sense that I wasn’t comprehending certain things about life in Armenia, and that I was longing for the past which was unavailable to me. I spent many afternoons in my apartment after classes, wanting to avoid the world outside my door, the world of students who didn’t listen to me, of teachers who poked fun at me and of groups of young men on almost every corner with nothing better to do than making kissing noises when I passed. Such troubles are fairly common among Peace Corps volunteers. Hessler writes of similar experiences teaching in China: “I was run down by the pressure of daily life as a waiguoren [‘foreigner’ in Sichuan dialect]. It was tiring always being the center of attention, and being a foreigner meant that you were more likely to attract complications” (294).
As the first winter set in I still had no viable connections to my community, other than my position at the university. Even there I had little to depend on as most of the faculty came in from Yerevan to teach. The place was almost entirely empty and silent over the weekend or any holidays. Even all the students in the dorms would return home for the weekend whenever possible. Other than the cleaners, I didn’t have too many people to talk to when classes weren’t in session. As kind as they were, talking with the cleaners wasn’t quite enough to break the melancholy that seized me after the rains started and roving groups of villagers cut all the branches off the few trees in town for firewood for the coming winter. Overnight, the charming utility of the soviet architecture suddenly menaced the town with the look of military occupation and cultural erasure.
For a few months I spent my time off shuffling around, walking to all the nearby towns, climbing the peaks that stuck out, higher than the rest of the mountains, against the rolling leaden sky. I met people, or I made people’s acquaintance, but I had no friends. I received numerous offers, after being invited into different homes, to return again soon, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to make this decision. I returned home in the evenings, on many occasions, to stand in my kitchen for a while, doing nothing, before moving into the living room to do the same thing. It was around this time that I began the practice of staring out the window. This, though it may sound irrelevant, signaled a drastic change in my demeanor and my ability to cope with the foreign ideological climate.
Until the evening when I found myself sitting by the window, doing nothing for hours on end other than looking into the night, I had always led a fast-paced life. Before leaving for Armenia, I had convinced myself that I would be able to cope with the absence of activities and distractions offered by western society with little problem. But I came to this conclusion without understanding how much self-effacement it required. In Armenia the solitude and lack of activity encouraged a degree of self-reflection that I had never before experienced.
When living abroad in western countries there is always some place to go or someone to meet, but in the developing world where young people get married in their early twenties, I found it very difficult to meet new people. Social life in Armenia was not nonexistent. In fact, I later came to find that it’s much more vibrant than its American equivalent, but that it occurs on a level that was almost invisible to me when I first arrived as a foreigner. Over the many evenings and nights that I initially spent sitting on the windowsill, watching time drift over the sky I came to understand that I was looking for the wrong thing, and that if I were going to make it through another two years in the country I would have to adjust my expectations.
From this point on, probably about January of my first year in the country, I began to alter my expectations, gradually allowing for the known aspects of Armenian culture to influence my outlook. I began to consider what people did, how their communal lives functioned and soon I found myself with a large number of options as to how I could spend my free time. But while I was gradually beginning to understand social life in Armenia, its microcosm form in the classroom continued to elude my comprehension.
After I began to feel familiar with the cultural environment I began to interact with much greater facility. I made friends all over town, from passing acquaintances to families whose homes I would visit on a bi-weekly basis for dinner. But as my social circles began to expand so did my work load. Where I was once employed solely by the university, and to some degree its resident NGO office that had funded its construction and other local projects under the title of Syunik NGO, I soon found myself working all over town, in many different capacities. During the day I would hear the mantra of the Peace Corps in my head. “The type of work a volunteer does is ultimately determined by the needs of the host country” (emphasis added) (www.peacecorps.gov).
It began with translation work. Word quickly spread that if anyone needed anything translated into English that I could do a flawless job as a native speaker. It didn’t seem to make too much difference that my Armenian was not very good. As long as I furnished some kind of translation my varying clients were usually happy. This sort of work began on a very mundane basis, such as the women at the post office calling me down to read something that had arrived with Latin writing on it, but it quickly accelerated when fellow professors at the university began asking me to do translations for their abstracts on topics like mechanical propulsion that were totally alien to me.
I also began to do tutoring, the activity that would become the most relevant. Initially, I was careful to avoid tutoring work. In training, we had all been warned that our entire communities would probably mob us for tutoring sessions upon our arrival at our permanent sites. As this never happened to me, although I know it did to some volunteers in other areas, I was grateful to have an opportunity to interact with people on a more personal level throughout the bleak months of winter. Tutoring forced me out of my apartment on days when I may have stayed in and read until dark. It also brought me much nearer to the basic unit of Armenian social life: the family.
Over my two years in Armenia, I tutored at least seven people of various ages, for various lengths of time. In some situations my tutoring sessions functioned like planned classes. In others I would show up with an ad hoc lesson, knowing that most of what I would be doing would be very basic. As time passed and my Armenian improved, some of these sessions became little more than open invitations to dinner, something which pleased me immensely after cooking all my own food for nearly a year.
I mention the tutoring because I think it lends itself well to my overall experience in the country. Some of the groups that I began working with when I first arrived quickly broke up due to lack of interest, and honestly, my lack of concern, after already having taught all day at the university. What is interesting is that these initial groups foundered solely because they were in formal settings.
A prominent example of a structured tutoring group that failed was a group of kids I met through a local youth-based NGO. The director invited me in one day to view the accomplishments of the group through the medium of a photo collage. While she was telling me about the past accomplishments of the group she asked if I would be available one or two days a week after classes to come in and do a lesson in basic conversational English. Seeing what looked like an impressive display of projects completed by dedicated kids, I foresaw a classroom where I would be free of the constraints of the university and could teach in a more communicative style. I agreed and within two months I had completely lost the class. From the moment I would enter I could feel the students’ attention slipping away. After about twenty minutes or so, they had completely ceased to listen to me.
I’ll never really know what went wrong in these classes. I planned, what I thought to be, fun and interesting lessons, although perhaps my cultural ineptitude (this was still early in my time in Yeghegnadzor) again prevented me from communicating with the students, much as it did in my initial lessons with the university students. Instead of drilling the students on verb tenses I posted a thematic word list on a board and elicited answers from them. This was followed by a hands-on type of activity, in which they would demonstrate knowledge of these concepts through the creation of something, a map or a recipe for instance. I don’t remember any of the activities being well received, but, as Brown writes, “Not all educational traditions value the learner-centered, interactive approaches” (518).
My one-on-one tutoring sessions tended to go much better, although for various reasons all but one of these came to an end before I left the country. When I became more well-versed in student expectations, I was able to anticipate their responses to my lessons much better. Although I never ceased to include some communicative language aspect in them, I learned how to maintain the dignified air of a teacher as my students had come to understand the concept.
One of my tutoring experiences proved more valuable than I could have expected for myself. It was late February of my first year in the country when I got a phone call in which someone, in Armenian, asked me about learning English. Since I had gotten a few similar phone calls at this point that had yielded no-shows, I was quite evasive and non-committal on the phone, using the language that I had learned to deal with these specific situations.
“Ok, sure, just call me when you want to meet. It’s got to be over the weekend, though, I have to work all week,” I said, assuming I’d probably never hear from this person again. I was quite surprised to hear her response.
“Can you meet now?”
It was already getting late and I had class the next day, but for some reason I decided to risk it. I agreed on meeting Hyarpi at a local café to assess her English ability.
After that initial meeting I met with Hyarpi at least once a week for the rest of the time that I was in the country. Our lessons were never very well-ordered, and she didn’t do anything beyond what I asked of her. Even what I asked of her would be done quickly, often right before we were to meet. Still, Hyarpi was considerate, and more studious than most of my students at the university. Although she would often complain of not being able to understand anything, she often knew much more than she would let on. I tried a number of ways to coax some oral English practice out of her, but, much like all her peers she would do nothing other than write. She didn’t like to have to perform in any way, despite the fact that she was one of the least inhibited people I have ever known.
My time tutoring Hyarpi really brought to the fore my understanding of how prominent the Grammar Translation method is in Armenia. I understood it in class, and even with a small group of students after school. Hyarpi’s reserve in her own home, however, demonstrated just how pervasive the accepted roles of teacher and student were. It was around this time when I began to become better acquainted with the concept of amot or shamefulness.
Amot: A Concept of Status Quo
In the streets, near the apartment blocks, out in the deeply-rutted lanes of the villages one can hear the call, usually made by older women, determining what is and isn’t appropriate for Armenian society. Not only did I hear the concept of amot being tossed around the marzer (see note xiii.) I also heard it in the cynosure of modernity, the capital, Yerevan. Nearly everywhere I went, I heard people pass judgment. In certain ways Armenian society looks very permissive. People hang around the market all afternoon with nothing to do. It’s not uncommon to drink vodka during the day, especially if it’s cold. Some of the areas inhabited by men (vulcanization service stations along the highway, marshutka stations for village to village travel or construction areas [usually a hole being dug in the road]) can appear very permissive, even gruff, in a way. Despite these superficial aspects, Armenia is an incredibly conservative society. An interview in the English-language Armenian magazine Ianyan underscores this in an article about Armenian perceptions regarding expressions that are viewed as outside the cultural norm:
“We are intolerant people,” said Boyadjian. “If you want to go dye your hair green for the month of January, because that’s how you want to express yourself, God knows what your father’s reaction is going to be and what’s the Armenian community going to think? You’re walking with green hair, which means you’re a prostitute probably” (Aghajanian).
Everything is totally regulated by the concept of what might be amot, from the clothes worn to school by the children to the way the shoes are to be organized in the hallway. If something slips out of line with the ascribed regulations it will be deemed amot or shameful. To say amot qez to someone does not sound like its literal translation of “shame on you,” but rather like the idiomatic “Well, I never!” I mention this because it had more bearing on my lessons than I had ever imagined. Although I learned of the concept early on, and was subject to blandishments when I violated its laws (I say blandishments because everyone went easier on me as a foreigner), I didn’t consider how it would affect my classroom until I was finally forced to recognize it.
Amot was a difficult concept for American volunteers to accept. All the expected cultural differences such as food, perception of time, music and social distance sound interesting when they are considered as singular representative things. Somehow, what is rarely considered is the overall outlook that creates these facets of culture. I came to Armenia with no understanding of what life was like there, and I think it took me longer than expected to eventually formulate an idea on this because I created so many false assumptions after I had first arrived. After five or six months, I grew confident that I understood the habits of the people on such diverse subjects as conversation, eating and going to church. I, therefore, made the mistake of thinking I understood the people in toto. What I was unable to apprehend was the universal concept of Armenian-ness to which I was purblind.
The concept of amot led me to a place where I could see some kind of greater rationale that concerned everything the people did. Even after 27 months I could not see Armenian-ness as the Armenians themselves could, but I had begun to unconsciously understand expectations about behaviors that for most of my first year I challenged and questioned, as did most of the other Americans. Asking why a certain thing was done and expecting an answer was something that we came to abandon. Having been taught that inquiry was the path to understanding we questioned that which was not immediately clear to us. When the Armenians could not furnish an immediate answer we began to consider certain aspects of their culture superfluous. We didn’t realize that some aspects had just been clouded by time, not by their lack of utility. While America is recreated daily, the rest of the world was established long ago, and the rules and norms that brought it out of the dark ages are the same ones subscribed to today, simply because they have always worked. To question them would be to question the point of abandoning the dark and seeking the light.
As this gradually became clearer to me I stopped questioning my counterpart Anna about everything she did. I stopped challenging her opinions as much because I began to understand that there was a logic to the way she thought that was different from anything to which I’d ever been exposed. It wasn’t a question of right or wrong, just different ways of understanding the world.
I mention all this to explain how I came to understand my students better. It began with Anna, my counterpart and Hyarpi, the student I tutored. Since I met with both of them a few times a week I gradually came to understand more about their values and, likewise, they came to understand mine. Having friends whom I taught and worked with began to clarify questions that I had had since my arrival in the country. Through Hyarpi I learned what mistakes I had been making in class, what cultural faux pas I had been unwittingly committing in front of my students. Until this point in my understanding, I had been ignoring the cries of protest from my students when I would act out of character for a teacher, or ask them to get out of their seats for the next activity. I assumed they just rebelled against the unconventional work because they were unaccustomed to it. I hadn’t considered the idea that it could be amot for them to do these things.
Most of the time, yes, the students just didn’t want to try a new activity. They wanted to stay in their seats and passively participate as they had been taught for their entire lives. Most of the time I was not asking them to do something culturally inappropriate, but it’s always a fine line between that which makes a student feel uncomfortable and that which breaks an ethical boundary. For example, an activity where I had students use the future tense to predict their futures met with great resistance. Most students didn’t want to comment on their futures for fear that they would jinx themselves. Now, while there was no explicit cultural rule that was being broken in this activity, I would not attempt it again, knowing what I do now. In every class some of the students refused to do this activity, but the majority didn’t seem to mind it too much. This led me to conclude that while it was not quite culturally inappropriate it came close enough to make it a lousy activity to force on the students that had no desire to proceed with it.
I learned these things from experience and from working closely with people like Anna and Hyarpi. Toward the end of my time in Armenia I had many different tutoring assignments and all of them taught me different aspects of the culture that were incredibly valuable to me later on. By my final tutoring assignment, I seemed to have discovered a pretty good formula for captivating the student’s interest and keeping with the sort of Grammar Translation formula to which they were so accustomed.
Although in many ways I would probably always be amot, I learned to understand more about how it regulated the behavior of the Armenians, how it automatically prohibited some options for instruction. I found ways to incorporate the concept into my lessons, to discuss it with some of my more advanced students. In the end I was able to use what had initially stunted my lessons as a means of exploring the lesson.
Conclusion: Where I Found My Armenia
It was over a year since my arrival before I left the Caucasus area to take a vacation. In June of 2009 I made a round trip over land from Armenia to Sarajevo, Bosnia with three friends. The trip took almost a month and in many ways was instrumental for my understanding of Armenia.
Until my second summer in Armenia I was coasting through my experience. It meant something to me on a personal level, and I believed that, despite all the difficulties, I was providing a valuable service to those I worked with. Something, however, seemed to be missing. By the end of my first year in the country I had written a grant proposal for a conflict resolution-themed camp for disadvantaged Georgian, Armenian and ethnic minority youth. I had taught classes at the university with English language majors proficient in the language and able to understand complex instructions. In the university, I had also taught students who were majoring in other subjects who knew little more than the ever-present “my name is,” something they all seemed to remember from their primary school education, regardless of how uninterested they were in English. I had stayed after school on average of two days a week to hold an English club for those interested and I had met with at least four students in their homes for private weekly lessons. In addition to this I was teaching a class with the local NIE (National Institute for Education) branch that used English instruction as a medium to convey communicative teaching methodology. Despite my multifaceted approach to working in the country, Armenia had not come to mean much to me outside the personal relationships I had established over the time that I had been there. I felt little connection to the country. When I considered my place in Armenia it was as little more than an outsider who had a rudimentary understanding of the language and culture. I knew some wonderful people, and as a result I didn’t feel as alienated as I had when I had first arrived, but, without these people, Armenia elicited very little emotional response from me. It was over my vacation that this finally changed.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trying to acculturate myself. In fact, over the first few months I had been trying very hard, but a number of events had slackened my resolve. The first was that I had a very hard time relating to the young men in the country. Most of the men I met who were my age were either married or preferred to sit around all day talking, quite lewdly, about girls and conquests. I don’t mean to stereotype, but after a year of living in Armenia and traveling all over I had met very few boys or young men that defied this definition. The typical young man squatted with his friends on the corner, ate sunflower seeds and smoked incessantly and guffawed loudly every time I walked by. It was hard to relate to these young men, and the positive encounters I did have were usually quickly effaced by the multifarious negative ones. It was difficult to relate to a country where the type of people who would usually be ideologically closest to you were, often, the farthest away.
I had learned by this time that I enjoyed interacting with children and their families, but despite how well I got along with the kids that lived in and around my bloc apartment, I still didn’t feel very close to them. Their families didn’t invite me over, and children can only provide so much in the way of a friend for a 25 year-old university instructor.
The other dilemma I faced was of the connections I felt were slipping back in the US. When I had first arrived in Armenia my friends and family had all been very excited for me. I got e-mails and letters from them with alacrity. We kept in close contact despite my far-away life, but after about seven months, our experiences had grown too different to be relative. When we would talk, I discussed things they didn’t understand. I could hear it in their voices. I tried to alter my conversations but quickly found I had nothing else to talk about. Armenia, though I still wasn’t sure what it really was, had become my life.
All these factors had also contributed to me becoming very close with the other volunteers in my region. From my group (A16) there were two other volunteers that lived in a town about twenty miles south of mine. Initially, we saw little of each other, but as time went by, and we began to realize that we weren’t just going to be able to become Armenians overnight, we started to spend more time together. In the end, Paige and Elliot, more than anyone else, brought me out into the country. They made me interact with it on a level that I probably wouldn’t have had I chosen to remain alone. It just took a while.
By the end of the first year, we were all still slightly confused and occasionally made to feel uncomfortable by the world around us. The America we had known was fading in hindsight, the future-- another year in Armenia--was uncertain and everything around us still had the tendency to be vaguely threatening. I often likened our experience to the scene in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland in which Alice follows a path, only to meet, head on, a dog brushing it away. The path ends abruptly. Alice takes a moment to consider the possibility of turning back before the dog sidesteps her and quickly begins to brush away the path she had taken to get where she was. She is left standing on a small patch of what was once a path, surrounded by darkness: Armenia.
When we left for our vacation, I was excited to see something new. We stayed in Georgia for a while, a place I had been before which was externally quite similar to Armenia, before moving on to Turkey. As Turkey is much more developed I was able to see things that I hadn’t seen since I left America. In Trabzon there were vast malls, parking lots and huge grocery stores with all manner of comestibles for sale. We feasted on all the things that we hadn’t been able to eat for over a year. In Sinop, we spent entire afternoons just sitting by the sea, feeling the cool breeze that is so alien to semi-arid climates in the summer, like the one we lived in in Armenia. In Sofia, Bulgaria, I was able to skateboard with people my age (an activity unheard of in Armenia) and in Sarajevo, Bosnia I spoke Italian to a waiter in a Mexican-themed restaurant after buying a copy of Ulysses from one of the many English bookstores.
Over the course of that trip we indulged in so many western things, but the most memorable thing occurred in Foča, Bosnia, a small town on the river Drina. We were staying with my friend Davor’s uncle. It was a nice day and Davor was translating a story his uncle was telling us about the war. We were all pretty relaxed, just enjoying the pleasant weather and the fact that none of us had any English classes to teach that day. Suddenly, Elliot, who had been quiet for a minute yelled out, “Oh, my god!” We all turn to see what he was looking at, to see what could possibly be so important as to intrude on the indolence of such a beautiful day. In his hand he was holding a bottle, and though it didn’t immediately register to me what made the bottle interesting, as I had seen its likeness so many times, I immediately felt a sense of familiarity. Elliot, there in a small town in Bosnia, was holding up a token of the past, and a fetish of the future, a cognac bottle, to be more precise an Արարատի կոնյակ (Ararat Cognac) bottle. It took a moment for me to see the incongruity that I was being presented with, but within a few seconds I began to feel something like nostalgia welling up inside me. We had found an object that would be incredibly commonplace in Armenia, while in Bosnia, it seemed so extraordinary and representative, almost as if all of Armenia had been placed inside the bottle. At that moment I realized that I missed Armenia, and in considering this feeling for the next few weeks I was able to ascertain what Armenia had come to mean for me.
I brought this feeling back with me. When I returned to Yeghegnadzor I almost immediately had to prepare to begin my summer lessons for a camp for disadvantaged youth in the Caucasus for which I had written the grant proposal some months before. As planning this camp had been a grueling process of writing, fact gathering and revision, I was dedicated to making it a valuable experience for all those who would be attending, both counselors and youth. The camp was to have three components; the first two were to be north-east of Yeghegnadzor outside of a beautiful village in a mountain valley called Yeghegis. The third component would be hosted by our Georgian counter-part NGO Lazarus in the southern region of Georgia Damanisi.
Both countries had recently seen outbreaks of violence. In March 2008 violence broke out in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, over election results that left ten dead. In August of the same year, a longstanding conflict between Georgia and Russia over the sovereignty of the south Ossetia region escalated into a brief war that ended in 850 casualties and 38,000 displaced persons or IDPs (DeWaal). Georgia and Armenia have also harbored resentments against each other since time immemorial. The reason for this no one I spoke with seemed to be able to identify. De Waal writes in his recent book, The Caucasus: An Introduction, about his own initial confusion over this enmity: “To the outsider, one of the mysteries of the Caucasus is why the relationship between Armenians and the Georgians, two old Christian nations, is frequently fraught and suspicious” (21). There were a number of issues that may have exacerbated this tension, such as previous surges of nationalism that turned a 1918 “border dispute over the regions of Lori and Borchalo into a small war” (De Waal 65). Varying allegiances over the centuries also fueled this sense of resentment. While Georgia and Armenia had historically been ruled by the same empires (Persian, Ottoman, Tsarist Russia, USSR), they had always acted separately to gain influence in the region. The south Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) was united briefly between the fall of the Romanovs and the established rule of the communists. The union was to last for a month before relationships collapsed. Things have never really been the same since. Although Armenia fought a direct war with Azerbaijan after the fall of the Soviet Union, most Armenians on the street, especially in southern villages, will tell you that Azerbaijanis are good people, but that Georgians are impossible. At one time “the Armenian Catholicos forbade Armenians to communicate with, eat with, pray with, or marry Georgians” (De Waal 21).
I had seen some evidence of the tension between the Georgians and Armenians. I had heard a fair amount of vitriol from ordinary people on both sides, but I had also heard a number of remarks ranging from indifferent to friendly, mostly the former, in regards to Armenian-Georgian relations. The camp was also to host ethnic minorities from both regions. Georgia, despite the two conflicts that it had after independence over the breakaway regions of south Ossetia and Abkhazia, has always been a tolerant multiethnic state. At certain times in its history its capital, Tbilisi, didn’t even have a Georgian majority. I was once told by a Georgian friend of mine that on his block alone in Tbilisi people spoke ten different languages, ranging from Mingrelian to Chechen. A year later, as I was leaving the Caucasus, I would have a conversation in Tbilisi with a Yezidi Kurd taxi driver in Armenian. He explained he learned Armenian through some of his neighbors, though he pronounced it like a first language. Still, I worried about how the two major ethnic groups would interact together at the camp.
Armenia, in contrast to Georgian diversity, is probably one of the world’s most homogeneous countries. After the deportations of Azerbaijanis, mostly living in the south and east, the country became 98% ethnically Armenian (De Waal 44). The only substantial minority in Armenia are the Yezidi Kurds (people who speak a Kurdish language, though they sometimes deny being Kurdish and who have a slightly animistic faith that reveres a deity that takes the form of a peacock). The Yezidis or Yezdiner as they say in Armenian, live mostly in Lori Marz along the main highway from Yerevan to Vanadzor (Kirovakan). Armenia also has (very) small numbers of Assyrians, Jews and Greeks as well as a transitional population of Iranians living in the capital, often students or professors.
When I first viewed the reports for the minority students who would be attending, I was shocked to find no Yezidis listed among them. When I asked why the Yezidis weren’t included, my colleague, who is probably one of the most astute, kind and caring human beings I have ever met, turned away and said, quietly, “They smell bad.” In an area where such attitudes prevail and are thrown in a heady mix with long-established ethnic conflict, I really had no idea what to expect from the camp. I envisioned a skirmish that would serve to inflame everyone’s patriotism or jingoism (as it certainly borders on this) and the camp that started as conflict resolution would become fodder for conflict maintenance.
Luckily, nothing like this happened. Over the summer there were isolated incidents, but for the most part everything went well. I conducted English lessons that combined physical cultural activities such as break dancing, skateboarding and basketball. I also tied my lessons in with the environmental lessons I was asked to do. In these lessons the youth went out into a nearby clutch of forest to find items that could be described by adjectives such as fuzzy or wet. In another activity I taught the basics of the food chain through having candy and different animal roles.
After returning from my vacation this camp marked a point of discovery for me. It allowed me to interact with the university students (who were also working there as counselors) on a more personable basis. Since my Armenian had advanced sufficiently I was able to speak to them with few problems. The presence of the Georgians, which spilt the counselors, into two groups, also gave me a special privilege as a tie-breaker. Most of the time when the counselors put something to a vote the Armenians and Georgians tended to vote against each other. As they were in even numbers the deciding vote was usually given to me.
The lingua franca of the camp was supposed to be Russian, but even the lingua francas of these two Caucasian republics varied. As Armenia still has a very close relationship with Russia, who guards her border with Turkey, Russian is still the primary language taught in primary and secondary schools. Most students’ parents also know Russian and it still makes its way into the daily language in countless expressions (da vai, poka ) and nouns for things that were introduced to Armenia during the Soviet period and therefore never really given an Armenian name (vulkanizatsia, banan ). In all my classes with younger students in Armenia, the students would frequently answer me in Russian when I posed a simple English question to them. Simply put, Russian still permeated Armenian society on nearly every level. Not so in Georgia where I was baffled when first visiting Tbilisi to see nothing in Cyrillic, whereas most of the signage in Yerevan (and elsewhere in Armenia) is still in Armenian and Cyrillic. Georgians had also, just the year before, had large portions of their country (including the capital Tbilisi and the port of Poti) bombed by the Russians (De Waal 214). When I had first visited Georgia in December of 2008, buses had large anti-Russian slogans written on them and similar graffiti was to be seen everywhere.
Still, in Georgia, most of the older people still spoke fluent Russian as did the people who had lived through communism in Armenia. This language had really only been heavily politicized in the last ten years in each country’s history. While Armenia continued to teach Russian, first and foremost to it students, Georgia, seeking NATO membership and generally looking west, had begun a rigorous push to teach her schoolchildren English. As a result, at the camp, the Georgians spoke Georgian to each other and English in mixed company, while the Armenians spoke Armenian to each other and Russian in mixed company. This put me in a very interesting situation.
By the end of the third session of the camp that was held in Georgia, I felt very comfortable around the counselors whom I had been working alongside since the camp’s inception a month and a half prior. I made many friends from both sides of the ethnic divide and, in many ways was finally beginning to feel like the citizen of the world that I had, in part, joined the Peace Corps to become.
I also had a different relation with the youth attending the camp. Whereas the Soviet rule that teachers and students didn’t interact outside the classroom had been a hindrance to me in the formal environment of the classroom, I found it worked to my advantage in the new and uncertain environment of the camp.
During the lulls in the day, I would frequently walk out to the courts and begin playing basketball with the youth, or I would bring my skateboard out and teach the more interested kids, which was almost all of them, more about turns and ollies. Although the kids changed between sessions I was able to quickly establish their trust as a foreign counselor who didn’t believe in telling them what to do with every minute of the day. In many ways I was abusing my privilege as a part-time instructor. If I had been a group leader like the others this familiarity probably would have led to problems. After adjusting myself to the appropriate behavior of a post-Soviet republic classroom teacher for a year, it was nice to enjoy myself with the kids. For once, without feeling like I was compromising myself, I was able to act freely and openly, as I did with the kids that I had taught to skateboard back in Yeghegnadzor who lived in my building. I taught the kids, and perhaps got them interested in English, but more importantly, I was able to become their friend and show them a good time for a couple of weeks. Again, these were kids that had come from disadvantaged backgrounds; some of them had seen open fighting in the streets and had seen the aftermath of war. I didn’t mind encouraging them to have a good time and to play with each other, regardless of who was Georgian, Kurd, Armenian or American.
My camp experience concluded on a very positive note. After working all summer with the same counselors and various kids, we had a culminating, farewell session the last night of the camp in Georgia. Groups had been picked to stage different cultural performances. I was asked to participate in this as well since I had my own culture to represent. Since a predominant aspect of this closing session was focusing on dance, and as I had taught break dancing, albeit quite poorly, to the kids, I decided to pick a few of my more eager students and put on a short break-dancing performance. Two kids readily asked if they could be a part of it: an older, slightly shy kid and a young, garrulous child, both from Georgia. I assented and we spent each afternoon practicing our routine for a couple of days.
When the last night came I wasn’t thinking much about the performance. I was preoccupied with the thoughts of leaving the camp and returning to another school year at the university in Yeghegnadzor. While I was initially disheartened by this prospect, I slowly began to realize that after a year of teaching, living and working in the specific Armenian context, it was something that I had become used to, even something I had come to identify with.
As I watched the Armenian dance group move into position I began to think about when I had arrived in the country over a year earlier, when I had been welcomed in Charentsavan by a similar dance group. I thought about all that had changed in my perspective since that occasion, how much more I understood Armenia. The country had ceased to be a job to me by that point. It had become a life. Perhaps for the first time I began to think about my time that remained with genuine happiness. I considered my students at the university, and what I could incorporate into the lessons that might challenge them, as well as entertain them and promote a higher level of motivation. The task did not seem daunting, but exciting. It was probably around this time that I also began to think of the life that I had left more than a year ago in America as something that wasn’t going to fade away with time. I stopped pining for the things that I missed. All the taquerias and late night walks and movie theaters were so far away that I saw how I had been idealizing these things, thinking that I had taken them for granted before without understanding how I may have been taking the beauty around me in Armenia for granted as well by dwelling so much on them. I was between letting go of the past and embracing the present when they called my group and me up to dance.
Yeah, the dance probably could have been a lot better looking, but we all had fun. We had planned a move at the end where the older boy and I hurled the younger boy up from the ground. It put him in the spotlight for a moment and when we pulled it off he was immensely happy. Still preoccupied with my thoughts, I went up to my dorm room to think for a while after the main part of the celebration had ended.
I had been lying down for about five minutes when I heard a small, hesitant knock at the door.
“Ha?” I said—‘yes’ in Armenian. The door slid open tentatively, a small voice enquired “Joan?” as everyone pronounced my name there. The young Georgian boy that had been part of my breakdancing troupe earlier slid into the room, taking me in with his huge brown eyes.
“Hey, Irakli, how are you?” I asked, not sure if he remembered the lesson where I had taught him and everyone else, “What’s up?”
“Joan?” He said again, moving over to my bed and holding his hand out for a high five. I slapped it, and he yelled out a practiced “best friends forever!”
It was that moment when the Caucasus forever became a part of me. In the year that was to come I had many similarly affecting episodes, especially those that accompanied my good bye, but that statement, made so matter-of-factly by a child, was the one that finally introduced me to the reality of what I was doing in Armenia. It was the one that made it my home.

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Choose Your Own Adventure, or, Choose Your Own Adventure

2010-07-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

I better write this now because it's beginning to be obvious that I'm not going to have another chance. I'm giving away my computer away tomorrow and, as I'm horrible at writing anything coherent in internet cafes, the time to conclude this long, rambling, at times incoherent, at times incohate account has come.

I wish the last entry I wrote would've been a little more conclusive. I wish I could've just left it off there, because, really, there's nothing else to say. But, as a brief story of an interesting nocturnal encounter would be a lousy way to end two years of thoughts, worries and dreams I'm going to endeavor to write one last note, but I can't promise any kind of closure, I can't promise it'll even be worth your time to read (not that I ever made that claim before.)

The last few weeks have seen so much activity it would be exhausting for me to recount all of it. I went back to the camp I worked at last year, saw some familiar faces, played some familiar games and concluded everything beautifully by walking up to the nightly disco after shooting a few baskets, dancing like a lunatic and then walking out, back to my room, to the sound of applause and my name being chanted. Not that this means much, you understand, those kids would chant anybody's name who was brave enough to join in their nightly bacchanalia. Still, it's always satisfying to know that adolescents still tolerate your presence; their praise is somehow more legitimate than that of adults, kids don't humor you, if they clap and yell your name you can be sure that they think you a decent human being.

Right now the thunder has reached a tremulous pitch outside my window, but the sun continues to shine and the birds are still singing, unmindful of the possibility of one of those crazy hail storms that spring up here from time to time, threatening to break the sad remnants of my Brezhnev-era windows.

I returned from the camp to meet the next generation of volunteers. I remember, two years ago, meeting the departing group and thinking to myself that, quite impossibly, one day I would be in their place, figures of mythical proportions, people who had completed their two years and were now returning home. When I met the two volunteers who leaving I remember being astounded by their worldliness, the way they conducted themselves around, at the time, alien Armenia, was astonishing.

Now I understand why they were so effortless, while we (the new group) were still totally encumbered with our thoughts of America, language lessons and uncertainty over the future. By the time we met these people they were finished. They had realized their ambition of coming here, working, making friends and accumulating memories. They knew it was all going to end and now I am able to see from whence the sleep-like placidity arises. Already I have nothing to do but remember and the thoughts crowd my mind to the point that everything else merely happens around me. While I am walking around town, I think of meeting Paige where the bus stop used to be, right before the first snowfall I saw here; when I am buying cigarettes I think of the packs that Elloit and I have burned away discussing Central Asia for nearly a year now; I think of walking through town, amidst the firework explosions for New Year's when I hear laughter, and when I look out my window I see a whole story behind me, the university classes, the homes in which I have eaten and the mountains I have looked down from, into this green valley town, ripe between the dry grass and dusty hulks of rocks.

...

Today was a day for goodbyes. I bought some toys, chocolate boxes, bootleg music video DVDs and some bottles of wine and drifted around town distributing them, like some kind of deranged Santa Claus figure. After all the time I've been here and all the meals, vodka shots and coffees I've been served it's felt wonderful to give something tangible back to my community here. I bought a generic Lego set for a little boy I know here who doesn't have anything in the way of toys and to watch him skip lunch and cease to pay attention to any possible distractions in order to try and put the dump truck model together was a wonderful feeling. Occasionally, he would get stuck, staring intently at the vague instruction sheet, and would look up to ask for some help. Not that I was much better at figuring out the zen-like simplicity of the Chinese instructions, but, again, to be useful to kids is a good feeling. When I left, I kissed him on the cheek, something I'd never done before in the states, but suddenly find myself doing a lot with little kids in my last days here.

I should add here that the kids of Yeghegnadzor, at least the ones I got to know, have greatly helped me to get through this experience. When my language was still incredibly poor, it was the kids that helped me learn to communicate. I can still remember my forth day here, when I first went to live with my host family, walking around with my little host brother, Khachik, pointing to everything and asking what it was, and my, what must've been quite confusing, rapture over hearing the word 'meghu' or 'bee' for the first time. When I came to Yeghegnadzor, it was the kids around my building that helped introduce me to everyone, as we would often play with my skateboard together, in the fading light, while the parents watched from their places under trees and along low walls where they could sit and talk together.

...

I'd really like to write something meaningful here. Something that describes the life I lived in Yeghegnadzor, something that illustrates these mountains, these empty factories and these dusty roads leading out to the nearby villages. I'd like to record the sounds of my neighbors, congragating below my window, the traffic of Ladas and Jigulis and the terse chirping of these birds that occasionally burst from the apricot trees and seem to dart through the sky for sheer pleasure. I like to bring more color into this journal than my pictures can provide to depict the tufa stone buildings, the bright yellow soviet ferris wheels, the single fiery dots of cigarette smoking pedestrians passing on in the night though a town with few working street lights, the milky azure of the afternoon sky, all roped off with steely, drooping power lines. I'd like to recreate the feeling of sitting in a cold January marshutka, riding up to Yerevan, when one's feet and legs go numb but the body is almost hot from the weight of a grandmother on one side, three guys on the other and someone else's bag on your lap. I'd like to give voice to the melancholy of the autumn sky stretching out before one, long and pacific, looking like two blank and mysterious years unfurled and the gloating summer sky that boils and rumbles with the evanescence of storm that will pass over this valley before it has begun.

In the end, the only thing to left to add, in case it hasn't been clear, and perhaps in case I am only now realizing it, is that, well, it was worth it.

It was all worth it.

If you want to attempt to procure a last minute Azeri visa at the land border with Georgia and continue turn to page 451

If you want to do the same thing, but with a little more class and a lot more pictures turn to page 128

either way, at some point you're going to have to flip back to the beginning to figure out how to actually finish the book.

Single File, or, Walks I have Taken/ People I Have Known

2010-07-07T01:11:00.000-07:00

Dilijan is in the middle of a wet, verdant explosion. Davor and I took a walk around though the meager lanes of the town one night, enjoying the cool air and the tintinnabulations of the river moving quietly through the dark. We had just crossed a vacant lot when we were suddenly accosted by a rather large man.
"Do you LIKE to walk...at night?" In perfect English, slightly drawn out and, curiously, without any trace of affect, almost like you would imagine a computer to speak.
"Uh, yeah, you?" I think Davor answered this guy, as I was feeling rather laconic.
"Yes, and to have a fun. Do you like beer?"
Davor answers, "Yeah, shot [which you probably remember is Armenian for 'a lot']" I was kind of annoyed that he answered this way as I knew this would lead to an invitation to drink beer with this guy, which I had no desire to do. And, of course, his response is,
"We can walk around and drink a beer and have fun tonight," which in the dark, in the company of this 2 and 1/2 meter guy who talks like a robot and seems to insist on walking directly behind, rather than to the side of me, does not strike me as being 'fun.' Still, maybe I was being unfair, I decided he, like, well, anyone else I've ever met around here, was probably a decent guy, meant well, but came off a little aggressive.
"So, what do you do here?" I tried, hoping to warm up to this guy a little.
"I don't like to talk about it."
Hmmm, ok I guess that's not going anywhere, still I persisted, "Why, is it boring?"
"No."
I looked at Davor, "Mafioso, KGB," I said, loud enough so that he could he could hear me, hoping this guy would get the joke and realize how weird his response sounded. Only he didn't even acknowledge my comment.
"I'm going to buy some beer for us here," he said pointing at a store. "I'll meet you here later, after you come back from seeing the hotel, under this tree [Davor had mentioned to him that we were going to see a resort hotel (unfinished) at the top of the hill]."
After we left this guy behind we began to joke about him, not in a mean way, just ribbing him for suddenly appearing right beside us in the dark, talking with no affect and spurning any talk of what he did for a living. We weren't afraid of the guy or even unnerved by him, it was just funny to consider the other odd things he might say, should we see him later, in that icy voice of his and as we walked on we lampooned him, for lack of anything else to talk about.
Davor and I walked around the hotel area for a little while, which is actually a really interesting part of Dilijan, there's a mock-Roman amphitheater up there and a promenade (of sorts) with interesting sculptures crowing all the balustrades along the walk.
As we walked our conversation gradually shifted away from the guy we had met earlier and we talked about various things until we forgot all about our new friend, presumably waiting under a dark tree with beers for us. I began to feel bad, which led us back to joking about the guy, we imagined him down there drinking all the beers alone and crying ( I know, not exactly a pleasant thing, but, at the time, it seemed funny, it's not like we wished this fate on him, sometimes exaggeration is just funny in and of itself). We decided to go back down and see if he was still waiting. He wasn't and I could tell Davor, who was getting pretty tired, was not exactly put off by this.
We continued walking back up to the place where we were staying, joking about this and that, the guy kept coming back into the conversation, we imagined seeing him on the bus to Vanadzor the next day, a fierce look of rage in his eye, saying something like "I waited for you all night!"
About the time that we were laughing over this, the subject of our jest appeared from the bushes (yeah, totally appeared, no noise, just a slight whisper of parting branches and he was behind us).
Our friend walked behind us for a while without saying anything. At some point, I remember asking Davor how long we were going to keep walking in this awkward single-file fashion without acknowledging him.
"It's dark," was all Davor said, which I took to mean, 'he doesn't know that we know that he's there and, at this point, it would be weird to turn around and acknowledge him.'
But as we walked on, this guy's presence began to weigh upon me, he was practically looming over me, not saying anything, how could he possibly think we hadn't seen him, and why wasn't he saying anything.
Just when I was about to turn around and say something, he sidled up to me, "Hi, guys, me again."
"Oh hey, man," I said, revealed that he finally said something.
"Here are your beers," he said handing me a plastic bag with cans of 'Botchka' and 'Baltika' in it.
Immediately I felt bad, "Where's yours?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"I drank it already." Meaning, 'I drank it thinking you guys probably weren't coming back.'
I began to feel more talkative, perhaps because I felt bad, perhaps because laughing with Davor for a while had opened me up a little more. "So," I tried, "you sure you won't tell us anything about what you do, not even a hint?"
"No," was his only response and he tried to change the direction of the conversation by asking, "Where did you walk to?"
"All around the main square," I answered.
"I know lots of good places to see in the dark," he said, again in that icy tone, "would you like to go? We could have FUN," as he said this he gestured vaguely toward the wooded area just beyond the road.
I quickly switched topics trying not to laugh, as with Davor right there, I knew we were both thinking the same thing, viz. 'shit, this guy says weird things.'
"Well," I asked, "when you say 'fun' what do you mean? What's fun?" As I finished my question a speeding car flew down the road. "Is that fun?" I said, pointing to the car, "driving fast?"
"Yes," he answered after a minute of stoic deliberation.
"What else?" I prompted.
"To have a walk, to drink a beer," he responded, seeming to take prompts of the things that were immediately around him, before adding, sotto voce, "and of course, to have sex."
I knew we were going to get to this eventually.
Before I knew what I was doing I found myself saying "yeah, but it can't be that easy here, right? I mean this place is pretty conservative." Usually, I don't prompt people like this, but after having to play the audience to a number of stories of sexual conquest I thought maybe I'd finally try to call someone on what could be a bluff.
"Well," he answered, taking time to chose the correct words, "when there's a, uh, human being, that likes that same kind of, uh, fun that I do, than, uh, we can have fun...together."
I didn't know what to say, but I began to understand that life must be kinda' rough for this guy. Davor asked if he liked it in Dilijan. He responded that he'd be much happier somewhere else, especially Latvia, not Lithuania, not Estonia, but Latvia, only Latvia, I guess he must've met someone from Latvia at some point.
I'm sure, by this point, the guy, had figured out that Davor and I didn't like the same kind of fun that he did, but, if he was disappointed, he didn't show it at all. We sat down on a bench together, talked a little more about life in Dilijan and Armenia in general. Davor and I recommended a few scholarship programs that would look pretty favorably on someone who spoke English as well as this guy. He listened half-heatedly, as though he wasn't really interested in applying for them, or already thought it to be hopeless. We sat quietly for a few minutes before finishing our beers and saying good night.
When Davor and I got back into the apartment building he asked, "So, he was gay, right?"

Haunted by The Sound of Broken Wings, or, a Cloud, A Rose, An Extinct Volcano

2010-06-28T03:40:00.000-07:00

I went to my neighbor's kid's baptism party last night. Here they wait a few years before baptising the kid, possibly so that the child will have some kind of memory of it, possibler as a hold over from the days when the child mortality rate was pretty high during the first few years and the ceremony, which must be somewhat costly, was held off until the child was, essentially, in the clear.

I got a ride with my neighbors around 5:30 as I was on my way up to the village where the party was to be held on foot. After all the walking I've done around here, and all the rumors that must've been passed around about me walking half-way across the country, I'm surprised to find that people are still incredulous when I tell them I'm going to walk to the next village. The eastern frame of mind is that there is nothing adventurous or ennobling in walking. It's associated with poverty; it doesn't matter if you're carrying a huge backpack obviously loaded with camping equipment and you're wearing a 300$ North Face coat.

I tried to walk back home from the baptism party as well. Tired and sweaty after dancing around for hours on end I wanted to walk back home under the full (or nearly full, I can never tell) moon and think of the score of crazy uncles I had just danced with and the kid who followed me around most of the night, copying my ridiculous dance moves and asking me questions with incredible reserve, rarely observed in little boys around here. I wanted to play some of the Tamada's speeches back in my head before going to sleep, to remember the grandmother who seemed positively overjoyed that I spoke Armenian and, shortly afterword, ecstatically, pointed me in the direction of the bathroom, as if she had just finished the most beautiful work of art and had just been standing around waiting for someone to ask her where it was. There's always a few very attractive girls at such parties too. Most of them, in all possible modestly, cling to the corners of the room and hardly seem to talk to each other, but, every so often, while up-rocking or trying to pull off some incredibly lame break dancing move, they whisper and point and sometimes they smile. Are they humoring me? Suppressing a laugh? or as one girl said to me in the foyer, do they really think I am dancing well? Then there's the young boy, trying to copy my footwork and smiling up at me when I tell him he's learned it already, one of my neighbor's children, continually trying to get me to show her how I did that thing were I spun around on the floor, so excited she's unconsciously hopping around a little, the old men outside who smoke the cheapest cigarettes, holding them up with gnarled hands and waving them around, positing another point about France or Russia or Azerbaijan; the aunts in polyester dresses, hooting and bouncing all over the dance floor, which is the entire room, pausing occasionally to bring in thirty more plates of food, stacking them on top of the previous, as yet, unfinished courses, and there's always one rotund gentleman, who is impossible to imagine outside the party atmosphere, so well does it seem to suit him, who bellows things that make everyone smile, is constantly raising a glass and dancing around in a way so ridiculous it takes a lot of the pressure off me.

I wanted to muse over the party for a while, walking through the still night, with little traffic, no streetlights, no bars with doors open, scattering particulate music through the night; in such silence, the voices of the night almost seem to follow one home in the dark, as the sweat and cigarette smoke cling still to one's clothes, what the band played, what the uncle told me about being a bee keeper "you're a language specialist, I'm a bee specialist," the boy's giggle when I told him he had ten minutes and then would have to dance, and that I was counting, the flaring noise of those firework candles they always put on cakes here, my neighbor, who always talks kind of loud, insisting that I do not leave before the cake is cut, all before a car, unnoticed, drives up and convinces me to get in by telling me that one of the children is crying, why this concerns me I do not know, but the walk has been long enough and no one wants to turn down a crying child. I got in the car, turned around and told her not to cry, she was quiet in the dark, probably sleeping, not even dreaming of crying. The ride home was short, we talked about my bizarre penchant for walking places, which everyone in the car praised, seeming to overlook that they had just practically demanded that I get in the car a few minutes before. I told them that a few days before I had walked over to Martuni...

The walk takes one through a valley that slowly climbs higher into the mountains that surround lake Sevan, the villages taper off and with every one passed the traffic thins out further until it get so quiet a car can be heard, rattling down through the pass, engine off and coasting, miles away.

The sun is bright, the winds that come down from the mountain have an emolliating effect, but the dried sweat has covered me with a thin cast, like the feeling of dried glue on one's fingertips, that seems to spin the wind off me without really letting it in. After dealing with the pack the entire day it's weight seems natural, like it serves as a counter balance, making my movements even more dexterous.

Near the top of the mountain pass is the Selim Caravansary. I notice two Persian oil trucks parked on the road just behind it, and in front of them a typical soviet truck probably bringing fruit over the pass. So many hundreds of years later and, in a way, the caravansary is still serving its purpose as a resting and meeting place for travellers from different lands. Noticing the mustaches on the guys standing in front of the stone entrance I nod and test a 'Salaam' and they respond with something that I don't understand and smile. Just behind the caravansary are two old men sitting down with some food spread out on a nearby rock, this scene I've seen so many times that I can't help but to assume these men must be Armenian, especially after I see the food, lavash, tomatoes, pepper, dried fish and white, spongy and humid cheese. I say hello to them in Armenian, but then, just to be sure, I ask them if they are Armenian, to which they respond with such gentility and assurance that there can be no doubt. I am asked over to eat with them and I and my huge backpack saunter over to lean over their meal for a while. The men beg me to take some of everything represented on the oil cloth covering the rock. I take some cucumber and bread, knowing they will not be content with my selection, that cheese, at least, will be proffered as will the bug-eyed fish staring into the sky above, glimmering with a copper sheen. We enjoy a conversation with a little mutual questioning, this being one of the marks of the progress I have made as an Armenian speaker, that I am now able to ask as many questions as I receive, perhaps it's only that now that I'm leaving I find myself more curious about what other people are doing, when before I was comfortable just telling them about myself. The arak (vodka) is offered, but it seems awful to my parched and sweaty countenance and I joke with them, telling them that after living in Armenia for two years I have had this stuff enough times already to know exactly what it's like and that for this reason there's no reason to try and force it on me, as one would do to a tourist who doesn't know the taste of fruit and solvent, introduced to the body from a plastic cup cut from a one liter bottle, slightly filmy, but sharp enough to make the eyes water, no matter how smooth it might be.

I part with these two wonderfully common goodwill ambassadors of this country and continue up the pass to where the sun is setting, which seems odd considering that I thought the top of the pass faced east. When I crest the summit there is a cloud-blurred fire smoldering along the horizon, which for the first time all day, falls in a straight line. It feels like I have been climbing all day to see this flatness, and to seeing it as the sun's last rays glance over it brings a feeling of accomplishment and I have no problem making the decision to stop and camp up at the top of the pass for the night.

With the sun setting and light wind drifting over the alpine grass, whispering, a feeling of somnolence steals over me and I feel a certain respect for my own position and everything involved in it. Although I had eaten nothing but peanuts and raisins all day, I have no desire for anything but water and sleep, both of which I try to satiate myself with, first gulping down most of the water left and then taking off my shoes and rolling myself up in the meager covering of the sleeping bag liner I brought with me, thinking nothing more would be necessary, as it had been so warm in my own part of the country only a day's walk away. But about an hour later it becomes clear to me while vigorously rubbing my legs and rolling myself into a little ball that I am not going to be comfortable until the sun comes up again. I lie there, in the dark, waiting for the nepenthe of sleep, the sleep of the physically exhausted, that never comes. I try lying in different positions, my hat, hood and sleeping bag liner all pulled over my head, hoping to contain what little heat my body is still generating. I consider getting up and eating something but the effort seems incredible, and as cold as I am I really have no desire to move around, and then the sniffing sound starts.

Now, every time I have ever gone anywhere the least remote in this country, there has been a shepard nearby to tell me that the place is "lika gayl" or, literaly, "full of wolves." Since I have gone so many places and never seen a wolf (and very few snakes, which they also constantly warn against) I have always been dismissive of such warnings, but lying in the dark, suddenly aware of how alone I was, out in a massive wind-swept field, the nearest village at least a few hours away on foot, the sounds that began to draw closer and closer to my tent began to disquiet me. It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn't even sure what to do with wolves, I know that some kinds of bears you're supposed to play dead with, others you're supposed to fight, punch on the nose; I wondered if I should attempt to punch a wolf on the nose, if, say, a blazing muzzle, serrated by an open mouthed snarl, induced by the smell of fresh blood were to punch through the thin nylon of the tent, would I even want to get near that? Would it even do any good? I tried to remind myself that wolves rarely attack people and are usually pretty timid in human presence, but, the animal outside the tent was sounding bolder all the time, not at all like a timid and retreating animal. "Sniff-sniff-snort!"--long pause, as if contemplating the smell it just identified, "sniff-sniff." the muzzle of this animal was pressing into the nylon so hard I began to wonder if the tent would hold, surely it could only take so much weight against it. In my exhausted state I could not make a definite decision to do anything. I just lie there, hoping whatever was outside would go away, I was also somewhat worried that any attempt to shoo the thing away would only confirm my presence inside the tent, that, up until then, was not absolute. That is to say, that up until that point the animal outside, thought itself just sniffing around something that perhaps a person had recently been near, but upon hearing some kind of absurd 'yah!' or some such pathetic attempt to drive the animal away, that it would become apparent that something threatening was inside and there would be no other option than to immediately dispatch this foolish person who had been left behind by the heard in the field all night. That is, I imagined my shooing noise being immediately greeted by a fierce growl, and in my last moments, while the wolf readied itself for the pounce, I would have the awful knowledge that I no one but myself to blame. Considering this, I decided on a more subtle approach, shifting around lightly a little at first, and when that proved totally ineffective (there wasn't even a pause in the sniffing) I got out a cigarette, figuring if I was going to have to deal with this I might as well do as comfortably as possible.

I never figured out what actually was outside my tent that night. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a wolf, a little later on, feeling a little braver with the passing of time, I opened the flap and tried to see whatever was out there, but, opening the flap and springing out as quickly as possible, I saw nothing, nothing anywhere in the empty, moon-bright field all around, only to get back in the tent again to hear the sniffing return a few minutes later. Curiously enough, the more I listened to it, I began to realize that it really wasn't a sniffing, but rather more of a loose shuffling, as if a large bird with a broken wing was trying to upright itself using my tent as a brace. This sound drifted around the tent's perimeter all night long and nothing I could do would permanently drive it away, batting at the tent where it seemed to be, making noises or smoking cigarettes and muttering to myself. After a while, in the most desperate hours of a long, cold and sleepless night, I was happy to hear the noise return, remarking to myself that 'ol' floppy' was back, and other such nonsense that only someone really tired with nothing to do would say to him or herself.

Around dawn, I finally fell asleep, and woke again later to the tent filled with the heat of the mid-day sun, which I felt justified in soaking up for a while and returned to sleep, glad to have warmth back in my bones again. It took until nearly noon to fully rouse myself and upon taking down the tent and trying to breakfast in the open field before getting back to the long road, I was again greeted by the clouds of mosquitos that I had ducked into the tent the night before to avoid. I quickly ate and packed everything up, hoping to put some distance between the offending insects and myself, but after about twenty minutes on the road, it began to be obvious that my walk for the day was going to plagued with that particular whine, that becomes almost unbearable after a long amount of time, especially when one is shouldering a heavy bag that limits how easily one can swat and try to shirk off the pests. I didn't have to deal with it too long though, as it soon began to rain.

It started as a light rain, refreshing really, as my clothes felt salty and stiff from the long walk the day before. It washed off the grime that had cow-licked my beard in all kinds of crazy swirls of barbarity and left high water marks on my forehead where my hat had settled the day before. At first the rain was something that was probably necessary before going back to the civilized world, it did the grooming that I was reluctant to undertake since I was just going to get dirty again anyway. But the rain didn't just drift over me like a light shower and then depart leaving the sun to its turn of drying, rather, it steadily increased growing at last to near deluvian proportions; the water running in streams around my feet. Around this time I also began to notice that the warmth I had saved up from the morning in the sunny tent was quickly departing and soon I would be cold again, but as I had no water proof layers to put on it seemed ridiculous to try to alter the situation with clothing, as it would only get wet and would therefore be useless that evening when, once again, I would need every article of clothing I had on hand. (I forgot to mention that the night before in an act of sleep-deprived desperation, I wrapped the two pairs of underwear I had brought around my feet hoping the extra layer would keep them a little warmer.)

As I was in the mountains I wasn't surprised to see hail soon coming down with the rain. It hails a lot here, and up in the mountains, in the summer, it seems to be a regular thing. I only hoped that this would be the usual mercurial summer storm, blowing in quickly as it had done, pouring itself out and evaporating quickly under a reinvigorated sun. The hail, however, did not let up, nor did the rain, in fact they mixed together to form a miserable combination of precipitation that sluiced down the back of one's neck, soaked through the socks and, at once, pelted one with marble-sized pellets, as if annoyed that there should be any obstruction in its course between the sky and the ground.

There was nothing to do but continue to walk through the storm, now an absolute storm with thunder and lightening crashing all around me. There was no place to take shelter and in every direction all that could be seen was the grey-blue confusion of hail and rain falling fast over the flat terrain. I began to wonder if I had some kind of masochistic kind of streak going on to be doing such things, walking all day long in the summer heat, freezing and listening to odd shuffling sounds all night and waking to a breakfast of mosquitos followed by a walk though a pelting hail storm. When a car came by and motioned for me to get in I realized that I had to take the offer, or be forced to confront what must surely be a self-destructive impulse in my consciousness.

The car was brand new, smelled and looked it and, for that reason, immediately felt uncomfortable. The first question was, of course, 'what are you doing up here?' Followed by all the usual stuff that I was not really in the mood to describe. I wondered about the difference between the two young guys that I was now riding with and the old guys the evening before near the caravansary. Why had I felt friendly toward the old guys and felt annoyed that the young man should ask me any questions at all, especially considering the fact that they had been kind enough to stop and take me out of the hail and rain. The conclusion that I came to, somewhat later, was that the old guys and I were on equal footing, we had both stopped to have a rest together going over a long road, there was a sort of equanimity in our conversation, whereas the young man, now totally turned around in his seat, seemed to be interrogating me.

I remained cordial and answered all his questions, but after about 5 minutes asked to be let out of the car, after so long outside it just felt really uncomfortable to be sitting in the backseat of a new car. In fact I had been watching the hail outside the minute I got in waiting for it to abate a little so that I could get back on my way, which is an interesting thought, considering that, in the car, I was making much better progress in the direction that I was going than I was while walking. When I noticed that the sharp 'tik, tik, tik' sound of hail had quieted and that the rain was no longer coming down in torrents I had the driver pull over.I wished the two young guys a pleasant journey and they returned the wish. Within five minutes of walking the storm, that I had done nothing but temporarily outpace, caught up with me again and began to pelt me with hail harder than ever, as if angry that I had temporarily escape its wrath.

This didn't go on for too much longer. Eventually, the storm tapered off and in its wake large bulwarks of clouds surged up around the peaks of the pass, still covered with the dull crust of summer snow. The sky was leaden but had ceased to precipitate in any way. A cool wind rippled the puddles left on the road by the recent storm. I walked through the lackadaisical weather and soon began to feel despondent. the walking, which up until that point had been enjoyable, became dull. With every passing car I began to think about flagging one down; there seemed no reason to continue walking rather than to prove a point to myself, a point I had already proven the last time I had walked over this pass about 15 months before.

Coming down into Martuni didn't help my cause. The same iron sky hung over the town that I had already been walking through for hours. And I couldn't help but to remember a friend of mine who had lived here until he had gotten sick and had to return home. I found myself wishing for good company. A place to take my bag off and talk to someone for a while. The exhilaration of the previous day had passed.

I drifted through Martuni, talking with the inevitable group of kids that began to follow me, hanging back behind me, walking single file, like the tail of a comet, the older kids clustered around the walking bulk of myself and my backpack and the younger kids keeping a safe distance behind, looking, big-eyed, from me to their older brothers.

It seemed to take longer than it should've to reach the town's center, when I got onto the main street the sun was just starting to come out from behind the clouds and I stopped and bought a few apricots to keep myself going a little longer. Further down the street, I stopped again by an empty shop window and wrote my name in the accumulated dust, then walked out of Martuni onto the main road leading to Sevan. Before long the sun was setting as I passed a gas station outside the village of Yeranos.

The gas station attendants hailed me as I walked by. I attempted to wave them off and keep walking but, considering it was already getting dark and I would have to stop and camp soon anyway, I decided to stop and talk with them for a while, see if maybe they had an old blanket they could spare to keep the cold of the approaching night off. I was greeted with the usual questions and answered the men fairly passively at first, not really too interested in their conversation, but as the conversation moved out from the usual, mundane, topics I found myself discussing politics and international positions. I soon realised that one of the men, who later turned out to be the owner of the gas station, was pretty well-versed in the outside world. I enjoyed talking with him and another one of the workers was so ingratiating and friendly that I couldn't help but to gradually become more relaxed in their presence.

We stood in the parking lot, talking while the sun went down, I told them I had to find a place to stay for the night since it was getting dark and they declared that I would stay with them at the gas station, as the whole team (something like 6 men) worked throughout the night, sleeping and getting up to provide fuel for the occasional night customer. When the sun went down we retired into a small room where I was feted with cucumber and tomato sandwiches and coffee. One worker offered to have someone bring vodka but I told him I had no taste for it, and after a long day of walking and a sleepless night, wanted nothing more than to lie down. he seemed to understand this and soon dropped the inquiries. I stayed awake for a while talking to the men about their work, sitting up on a spring mattress, smoking and feeling comfortable and drowsy. Soon after the lights went out I feel into a deep sleep.

During the night I woke up once with the feeling that someone's large hands were probing my neck as if to strangle me. I awoke with a start and realized it was just a dream. Everyone in the room was asleep and the road outside was quiet with the absence of any traffic. It had gotten cold in the room so I went over to the heater in the corner, turned it on and warmed myself up, letting the heat soak into my sweatshirt as I was sleeping without a blanket of any kind, knowing from the previous night's experience that my sleeping bag liner was totally useless. Soon I fell asleep again and did not wake until morning, when I heard the workers rise with the day's first customer, one of them placing an old and heavy coat over me as he exited the room and saying my name endearingly as he draped it over my shoulders.

Around ten, the worker who had been particularly nice woke me telling me someone outside would give me a ride to the next town. I hurriedly got up and packed the few loose articles that I had taken out of my pack. Still drowsy, I said goodbye to the workers, promising them should I get rich in America I would send them money, and jumped in the front seat of a waiting car.

The ride took me into Gavar, or K'var as it's locally known, perhaps and amalgamation of the old soviet name Kamo and Gavar, the new name. Within a few minutes I was on a marshutka heading toward Yerevan. The ride took me through the better part of the region, the northern part of the road that's more attractive for bordering lake Sevan. Still somewhat drowsy, but feeling refreshed after a full night's rest, I stared off across the lake over the heads and shoulders of the other passengers in the marshutka.

I stayed out traveling around, visiting friends and talking with the new group of volunteers for another day before returning back to Yeghegnazor for the baptism party. As the latter part of the trip was much more comfortable, there's not so much to tell about it. I ate some great meals, had some good conversations, took some shorter walks in more climate weather and met some nice people. I stopped and visited my old host family for an afternoon and sat under the walnut tree where I used to study my Armenian homework when I first came here and talked with my host family grandparents. For the first time totally able to understand my host grandfather whose speech is often difficult to understand owing to his lack of teeth. We spoke of the crops and the weather and the sheep flock that he tends. I talked with the children about how they had done in school that year and joked with the boy for not having done too well in English when he had lived with a native speaker for three months, of course, that had been two years ago, two years ago---

so many things I saw over the latter part of that trip reminded me of the time when I had first arrived, how new everything had felt, how strange the weather and the customs had seemed, how a walk to the next village felt so alienating and how I used to take my headphones out into the field in the evening, listen to them, look up at the stars and imagine what it would be like when I returned home, unable to comprehend how one day, returning to the same field would actually feel like returning home. In the same place where I used to sit and re-read letters, pouring over every word, every scrap of information from the states, every syllable from the pens of my friends and family, where I used to listen intently to the music that I had left behind, playing in the hundreds of clubs and bars that I had known from Detroit to San Francisco, where I used to look at the sky and take solace in the fact that it was the same sky that suspended itself over certain American streets and American heads, in this same place, I long for nothing more than to sit quietly and see it for what it is. I want only to keep it as a memory, because I know that unlike so many other things and places I have known, it will not change and some day I'd like to find my way back here again.

Mothers, Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Peace Corps Volunteers.

2010-06-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

Thin Rain on Poppy Petals, or, There Probably Weren't Any Bullets, Anyway

2010-06-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

At least I was able to come home and eat something warm. That's always the nicest thing to return home to after going camping, a nice warm meal, that and a comfortable place to sleep, but I leave that out because my couch isn't really that comfortable.

A one day camping trip, however, doesn't really allow for these pleasures, one hasn't been away long enough, and even after carrying a large pack for something like 10 hours all together, the feeling of personal merit isn't there. But my camping trip didn't end through my volition. When you get too close to a border between two countries that have been at war with each other, and still haven't resolved anything, in fact, talk frequently about starting the war again, you really aren't left with much choice as to whether or not you're going to continue camping. You're lucky if you don't end up in jail or with a permanent rifle but indentation on your forehead.

I woke up outside the village of Zaritap where I had camped the night before coming from Vayk on foot. I'd tell you how far that is in kilometers but they confiscated my maps. Early in the morning it was still raining. I lay back down inside my tent and listened to the light rain sound on the nylon. For a while I dozed in and out of consciousness, trying to make up for a night spent sleeping on rocks with a thin sleeping bag.

Around 8 I decided that I had not come out camping to lay in my tent all damn morning. I got up, put on my clothes, shook the rain off the cover and began taking down the tent. As it has been more than a few years since I've put up or taken down a tent I was feeling really good considering what adeptness seemed to remain for this work in my muscle memory. And after I get everything packed in my bag I was quick to get on the road and enjoy the morning that was gradually developing all around me.

The village of Zaritap was still asleep behind me when I began moving further up the mountain, towards was a profusion and dancing around with color, like those spots that you see before your eyes after rubbing them too hard. I listened to the birds singing and tried to keep my eyes on the ground in case I should cross the path of another snake like the beautiful one I had seen the evening before.

With all these sights and sounds around me I practically entered the village without realizing it. I walked through the early morning streets feeling fairly light, but not particularly talkative. Although the village was peaceful, I wanted to get the water I needed and get back to the quiet, shattered concrete of the road that led on to the last village by the border. I stopped and filled up my water bottle at a local drinking fountain and said hello to a guy who walked past. He asked if there was anywhere he could help me in the usual hospitable way that betokens the village mentality here. I told him that if he knew how to find a certain road to a certain village I would be obliged to him and within minutes I was standing in a throng of men, quarreling, jabbing fingers at my map, and occasionally gesticulating wildly toward some empty field, as if the road was somewhere underneath all the weeds that had sprung up out there.

I listened to eight people give me directions they had agreed on, the essentially informed me what I already knew; I had to go back the way I came and the other route on the map was unheard of to these men. Since the walk had been so nice the way there I didn't mind going back, but, before I reached the intersection to turn off, I found a weed-choked tractor route and decided to follow it just to see where it led.

As I walked the sun had begun to pull out from the clouds and the fields around me reverberated with various insect tones and the skittering of lizards and field mice. Going straight up hill I began to get tired and thought of things to perk me up such as places I liked to eat at in the states. Before long my mind was stuck on an endless loop of visits I had payed to an ice cream place in San Francisco. While I was thinking of a time when my friend Mikey and I had walked there from downtown on one of those beautifully indolent San Fran. Saturdays, I looked up to find myself crossing a road that looked like it had once been paved, although now it wasn't much more than a flat road strewn with rock and clods of concrete. I took this road the direction I thought I should go and continued until I felt my pack beginning to pull my shoulders apart.

After a brief rest, that was cut short by flies, literally, piling up on top of me, I continued on my way. The road continued to drag on, rolling over the sides of mountains and down into bucolic valleys where a few scattered trees could be seen along the edges of the dried river.

As I was beginning to feel tired again I told myself that I'd try to walk for another 20 minutes to make it to the two hour mark since the last time I'd stopped. I hoisted my pack up a little higher and continued to walk. I was surprised a few minutes later when a sign for a village came into view. I was curious to know which village it was, as, if I was where I thought I was, the village must surely be another hour away at least. I thought perhaps I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere, but, at the time, this didn't worry me at all. I was happy just roaming around, and with the map I had, a village would help me locate where I was anyway. When I got close enough to read the sign I found I was on the right road, and had walked much further than I had thought over the last four hours or so. In fact, if there hadn't been a village there I probably would've walked right through the boarder thinking I was still well in Armenia territory.

I was interested to talk to the people in this village and rest for a little while. The walk had been long, unbroken by any shade and as this village is right on the boarder to Nacheijevan (Azerbaijan) I wanted to hear if more Turkic words came out in these people's dialect and they any stories related to living under the shadow of a hostile country.

The first person I met in town was a grandmother heaving bricks of manure from one place to another. I stopped and said hello to her, asking if there was a store in town where I could buy some water. She told me just to stop in somebody's house and ask for their water. I asked again if there was a store where I could buy it, not wanting to just barge in on someone and ask where their faucet was. It was difficult to understand her, she had no teeth and spoke dialect very rapidly, she was also down in a ravine and I couldn't hear her very well. I decided to walk further into the village and ask someone else if I didn't just run into the store on my own. I thanked her and walked on.

Turning around a corner to one of the main mud and water thoroughfares of the village I was immediately stopped by two men, sitting on a bench with a bottle of vodka between them. I couldn't help but to notice two women in the yard behind them working in the garden, backs bent at 90 degree angles, pulling weeds, while these men, probably their husbands, sat pouring each other shots of vodka, possibly congratulating each other on finding such great, hard-working wives. When they saw me their eyes lit up at the possibility of a third party joining their afternoon debauch. To make it clear that I had other business I asked them where the store was, one of them gestured vaguely to the head of the road and again bade me sit for a minute. Reluctantly, I slipped off my bag ( I had been looking forward to buying a juice of some kind and taking a nice break alone) and joined them. It started with the usual questions, "Where are you from?" "Are you married?" "Why are you not married?" "Do you not want to get married?" "How old are you?" and finally the closing argument "You should get married, you're old." After this perfunctory, but absolutely necessary topic was out of the way they began to ask me what I was doing there, but with slightly more curiosity then people here usually ask, they seemed very interested. I told them I was just strolling around, and that after two years living in this region I wanted to see some of these little-visited villages out by the border. "yeah, but you gotta' be careful they responded, eyes rolling in their heads from caution and afternoon shots, "the Turks are right up there!" One of them got up in deadly seriousness and motioned for me to follow him as he got up and walked to the middle of the road. He stopped there, squinted and pointed at a mountain not far off. "You see that, they're right there!" There was nobody on the mountain that I could see, but I think he was referring to their land. "Wow," was all I could think to say. They laughed a little; we sat back down on the bench and the questions returned to my disconcerting unwillingness to marry immediately.

After a few more minutes of this talk I decided I had been polite enough and told them I was going. They warned me not to go up into the mountains and a few minutes later that's what I was doing.

I hadn't planed on going up the mountains, the map made it look like the road I needed went straight out from the village, but, before I knew what was happening, I was being led between mud, chickens and running children by a somewhat surely grandmother, who kept telling me how many grandchildren she had. Since the number had been high I wasn't surprised to see her latch on to some boy running by, wheel him quickly around to face me, and declare, "this is one of my grandsons." The kid didn't seem much interested in either her affection or my weak attempts to compliment her on her brood and ran off to join a gaggle of kids crowded around a tumbledown stable wall on the other end of the street. The grandmother continued to lead me along and I continued to actually trot alongside to keep up with her, when she abruptly said, "this is one of my daughter's homes, goodbye," and darted through a gap between two lengths of fence. "Is this the way to the next village?" I called after her. She turned around and made a shooing kind of motion which I took to mean, 'yes'.

It didn't take long to get out of the village, and soon I found myself walking down a loose gravel road that seemed to lead to nowhere. There was no one around and as I walked I listened to the sound of donkeys braying all around me. I came to a little stream and dipped my hands down into it, awkwardly trying to keep my balance with my pack on and doused my hair with water. While I was cooling myself off I stopped to consider which way to go as I was at a fork of sorts. From the look of my map the next village was close by on the right, closer than the one that I wanted to go toward on the left and I decided to stop into the nearby village just to try and get the juice or water I was hoping for and take a break, since rushing grandmothers and drunken gardeners hadn't allowed me to linger on in the last village. It was here that I began to follow a road up the mountain. As I ascended I told myself that if I did not see the other village soon, after the next corner, I would turn around and take the other road, rather than risk going too close to the border, where, apparently, they shot first and asked questions later.

As I was thinking about the vodka-tinted warning I had heard, I caught site of some soldiers coming toward me. I assumed they were just regular soldiers, coming into the village from where they were doing guard duty. I friendly inquired from a distance if this was the way to the next village, just so they wouldn't worry about my intentions. At this one of the guards took his Kalashnikov off his shoulder and placed it in his hand. No response. I tried again. He cocked the weapon and brought it down, leveling it at me.

Shit.

The two soldiers continued to advance, one with his gun still aimed at me, and the only thing I could hope for was that they were Armenian, and that I hadn't somehow gotten into Azerbaijan, where I would not be able to talk or explain how I had crossed a heavily guarded border with no hostile intentions. I also began to think about how it would feel to be shot.

When the soldier reached me they were laconic, they asked me a few questions, but said very little, I kept repeating my question if this was the way to the next village and received no answer; it became clear that I was to follow them and stop talking, which, upon understanding I promptly did.

Luckily, they told me they were Armenian soldiers, so, although I knew I was going to be interrogated, I didn't worry too much, after all I was innocent, I was just out hiking around. Then I remembered that, usually, people here don't hike, and have very little understanding of why anyone would want to walk around and sleep outside when cars and beds were available.

We continued up the hill until we crested at a little place that was obviously their base, or lookout point or whatever.

"The village you were going to," the soldier with the gun said to me, "this was its school." And with that cryptic remark he gestured for me to go inside.

When I walked into the little barracks I keep thinking about all these Orwellian descriptions of soundproof cells, extorted confessions and silent bullets. I began to realize that I had essentially just walked into a war zone.

Armenian and Azerbaijan went to war in 1991 and although the war officially ended in 1994 peace talks have come to a total stalemate. Armenia refuses to cede any territory that it gained in the Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan refuses to accept that what was once it's territory is going to remain in Armenian hands. Since no resolution has been reached shots are occasionally fired across the border, just a few days ago some people were killed by fire coming across the border. I have heard that although the western border with Azerbaijan (the Nachijevan enclave) has no boundaries with the war zone, that here the mistrust and disdain runs the highest, perhaps because the Azeris living in Nachijevan are now isolated from the rest of their country. Where before southern Armenia was open and heavily populated by Azeris, it is now firmly closed and all its Azeris gone. Of course the Armenians have cause to be angry in this dispute as well, the massacres in Sumgait and Baku certainly hearkened by to the other historical pogroms against the Armenian people. And, I'm sure there were more than a few people that thought to themselves "it's happening again, 1915 is happening again."

What I found in the barracks wasn't quite so disconcerting as all the things I had begun to imagine. I sat down on a bed, trying to decide if I should be light-hearted (after all, I had done nothing wrong, at least not knowingly) or if I should just keep my mouth shut until I found out what was going on.

I handed over my camera and asked if I could smoke in the room. While the soldiers went through my pictures I smoked and talked to them about what I'd been doing in Armenia for the last two years. When they asked me if I wanted coffee I realized that either some good cop/bad cop shit was about to go down or that I didn't have much cause to worry about being shot anymore.

Eventually, I ended up being driven all the way back to the main army base. When I arrived, It was obvious by everyone's demeanor that they don't get too many prisoners or suspects or whatever I was. Nearly everyone was standing around, all the privates anyway, mouths agape.

I had to talk to a few sergeants or generals or whatever, repeating my story and trying to make them understand that Americans often go wondering around with no definite destination. I tried to explain how I had gone many other, less off-limits, places in Armenia, on foot, with the same intention of seeing what was there. No matter how many times I put this response forth it was greeted with "yeah, but why did you go there?" and the whole discussion would start all over.

In many ways it was a high point of my time here for me. Since I got here I've always wanted to go over by the border and see what it looked like. Nachijevan is such an inaccessible place I always wanted to see if I could maybe get a glimpse of it from the border. It's be like living about 30 miles away from the North Korean border and not being curious if you could see what was going on next door, if you could only get close enough. I was also quite proud of my language skills that I was actually able to be interrogated in Armenian and respond and understand most of what was being said. In high stress situations usually language skills shut down and I was happy that nearly everyone kept asking me how my Armenian had gotten so good. I never realized, back in my language classes, almost two years ago, that one day I'd have to speak Armenian to the barrel of a gun. It's a point of which I think any volunteer could be proud

Bari Galust Means Goodbye Now

2010-06-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

The Kruetzer Sonata, or, When I Woke Up He Was Gone

2010-06-18T23:57:00.000-07:00

Reading The Kuetzer Sonata was a lousy idea. If I had known that it was going to play a part in throwing me down some emotional stairs I probably would've left it alone.
I've already mentioned that it's hard to leave. I won't go into it again, but I should add that some days actually go really well, I mean, some things really confirm, or rather, justify, my experience here. A few days ago I went to the dentist to get some cavities filled. I spent most of the day skating around and listening to my headphones. It was one of those days when I was really happy to be in Yerevan, to be in a big city, where people are busy and don't pay much attention to the odd foreign skateboarder rolling past. Although the day was hot I wasn't feeling too fatigued. The music I had been tired of a few days earlier on my headphones sounded nice to me again, as if it had undergone some kind of remastering since I'd last listened to it. I felt friendly too, as often happens when the world seem to be smiling upon one. I remember joking with everyone, buying some food for a stray puppy and blundering an attempt to compliment the receptionist at the dentist office.
[I should add that where I live it would be unheard of for a single young man to just blurt out a compliment to a single young woman that he didn't know. I thought it might be different in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, but it didn't seem to be.
I used to enjoy complimenting strangers because the few times I have received such unexpected compliments they have stayed with me a long time. It's one thing for your mom to tell you that your hair looks nice like that, and quite another thing for someone in line at the bank to turn around, notice your hair and say "hey, I like your hair!" Ok, yeah maybe nobody's complimented me on my hair in a decade, but you know what I mean.]
Anyway, you can see it was just the kind of day where things fell into place. The fillings went pretty easy, my dentist was a pleasure to talk to, being from Baghdad. On the ride home the marshutka had side windows that opened so we were able to dispel the afternoon heat pretty well and I got invited to a curry dinner and was actually able to eat it as the Novocaine wore off just in time.
That was only about five days ago and for the last three days I've been smoking constantly, feeling awkward even in previously comfortable situations and quick to anger. It's probably true that I have had many similar episodes, even over the past month, but going through this, Fortuna's latest downward spin, compounded with the memory of a very believable bleak story regarding that which supposed to bring us happiness in life is really playing at my nerves.
In the story the narrator (and Tolstoy's experience in a bad marriage definitely factors in) begins a story in a train carriage about how he ended up killing his wife. He takes a good 60 pages before reaching this climax describing all the petty misunderstandings, miscommunication and misgivings that resulted from his attempt to get married and live with a woman, who, in the eyes of society, he was supposed to cherish. He delineates all the things that make such long term adoration and even cordiality impossible. Eventually, the narrator and his wife are constantly arguing, while the narrator is, only half-unconsciously, trying to force her away from him, so that he can feel justified in his repugnance of her, and feel vindicated in, by that time what has become his hatred of her.
When he thinks about his wife from the perspective of other men he is able to understand how she could be beautiful although she has longed ceased to be for him. In the births of his children he finds no solace, saying that they, too, were only drawn into the battle between him and his wife. Both these points struck me as particularly depressing. To be able to see someone as beautiful but not have the courage or the means to appreciate them anymore, only to feel jealous that this person should still appear beautiful to others when she has long since ceased to be beautiful for you. I remember having somewhat similar feelings when I was younger in regard to my friends, who, having been friends with me, suddenly discovered some other crowd and left me alone. I remember thinking something like "yeah, I know you think this person is great right now, but you don't really know them. Not like I know them." That is to say, I can see what beauty you think is there, but I myself, have long ago discovered it to be false, as,no doubt, will you. At one time or another I think we have all had such a feeling.
In the end the narrator leaves the house, becomes insanely jealous when thinking about his wife, although he positively loathes her, with someone else and rushes back to find her with another man whereupon he stabs her. The story ends shortly after this action with a debatable note of repentance.
Personally, I have always thought Tolstoy to be the master of characterization, he writes characters' inner lives as plainly as their physical actions. In Anna Karenina there are so many thoughts of hubris, fear and apathy that seem pulled out from one's own phyche. He writes all the little things that we think make us individuals, the reoccurring day dream, the awkward way we sometimes talk with a friend we don't see very often when meeting by chance, saying the wrong thing and then not knowing how to correct it and the little things that make us happy such as a proffered drink of water, an agreement, a comfortable silence or a frost covered road.
When he turns his powers of observation on a certain event its interesting to read, sometimes you find pieces of yourself amongst the foibles of his human characters, but sometimes, like in any novel, their actions seem ridiculous. But in The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kuetzer Sonata, he focuses on a general situation of two people who thought they'd be happy together and ended up trapped, and living lives into which they felt forced.
There's no sense of agreement necessary here. The hardest part is that Tolstoy isn't asking you to subscribe to his idea that marriage is horrible and that everyone feels alienated by one's children. He merely shows you how the scenario, as it were, is entirely possible. Even if the reader doesn't believe in the possibility of this scenario, even if, as some unreasonably positive person, you choose to ignore all the correlations between this bleak story and your own life you are still forced to file it away in the portion of your brain where you retain memories and thoughts on relationships; and there it seems to fester, tainting the picture of happily-ever-after that's much more prominent, but somehow less convincing than Tolstoy's brutal depiction.
You read this and examine all the past relationships you've been in, and see how they all ended because there was a flaw there that couldn't stop growing a flaw that, unchecked, may have grown into something monstrous like in Tolstoy's vision. It's not that it's assured, it's just that it seems possible and it's awful to comprehend that such a miserable life could grow from something that initially was a great source of happiness; that one might find, in another human being, something so repulsive, just doesn't, itself, seem human.

The Mantoux Test, or, A Tangle of Fountains

2010-06-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

The days have gotten so long that taking a nap doesn't seem to take up any time, no matter how long it lasts for. You get drowsy around 3 or 4 and wake up, sweating to a six-o'clock world that looks exactly like the one you left. But, even after a week of siestas, the skin on your arms still has a burnt siena color to it and the hair that grows from them has a sweaty pomade kind of look. I spend more time than ever sitting out in the fields north of town, sometimes not even bringing any distractions with me, just sitting there and trying vainly to memorize the landscape and the feeling it produced over the course of two years of contemplation. I'd like to take some pictures of it but I know I'll probably forget before I go. I don't really want a reproduction anyway. Pictures of people are nice. They help one look directly into the eyes of the past, but landscapes often look like postcards of unfamiliar places no matter how new or relevant.

Everything Breaks When You Want to Move.

The water pressure has been vacillating incredibly since the summer heat set in. This caused me no small amount of irritation due to the malign nature of my bathroom facet, bandaged as it's been since I moved in with a piece of wire to keep it together and to hold the gush of the building's pipes at bay. Although the facet has always mercelessly dripped it never reached a deluge proportion until last month when I began to hear the pipes growning in the walls. I would wake up in the night to find the facet spraying water all over my bathroom and the meter faithfully recording this rediculous unchecked water expendature. Sure, water's not that expensive, but it just seems so wasteful to watch it swirl pointlessly down the drain and leave rust deposits all over the place. I'd try to tie the wire tighter, but often this would permit an even more devulian quantity to belch forth from the useless facet. Aftet fighting with it for weeks I finally got tired of the whole farce and just punched the damn thing.
I immediately regretted it.
Everything in this building came from Brezhniv. None of it's reliable, none of it's sound or even secure. The windows drop out of thier frames when storm winds blow through the staircase, the drywall/whitewash combination drops in chunks from humid bathroom walls and nearly every time I go in my bathroom there's a party of large roaches in there that have gotten stuck inside the slick and steep washtub basin, like skateboarders skating a pool they dash madly up one side only to slip down and be carried by their momentum up the other convex side. Yeah, they're big enought to have momentum.
Considering all this I shouldn't have been suprised when a light punch of irritation suddenly bathed my bathroom from floor to ceiling in water. And in fact I really wasn't that surpised, but even when one intends to splash cold water on one's face it's still shocking, the mouth still opens suddenly as if seeking a final source of air before going under an enormous wave. The facet, now rendered completely useless, ratteled into the sink and the water, free from and obstruction at last, maddened by its lengthly captivity, roared from the open pipe socket.
I stood there stupidly for a while, trying to block the flow and replace the facet. The pressure only angered the rushing cataract and the facet acted as a conduit to get the most water on my ceiling as quickly as possible.
I believe it a good indication that something of the pace of life here has effected me that I was able to actually stand there, in front of the raging torrent, and contemplate what to do next. It wasn't until I noticed my weight had changed due to the amount of water I had taken on, that I decided I had to get someone else's opinon. My neighbors weren't home so I went upstairs to the apartment of one of my students, a nice kid who's helped me out with apartment problems in the past. As he was apparently not in a hurry either we slowly made our way downstairs to where my bathroom was beginning to seep out into my hallway.
When we met the water outside the bathroom door my neighbor regarded it quite stoicly, merely glancing down at it for a second, looking at me and saying,
"Jure ka" [There's water here].
I responded my saying, "ghist eh" [that's correct]. And nothing in this exchange felt odd to either of us.
After this appraisel I almost expected him to turn around and return to his apartment, as if he'd only come down to make sure I was telling the truth about my broken facet, but had no deside to help me do anything about it. Luckily, he went in for a closer look and I soon found him, trying, just as unsuccessfully as I had, to cram the broken facet back into the rushing stream. I told him I thought we should turn off the water. He agreed but kept trying to get the obstinate facet back into the hole it had produced. Once again the water was blasting the cobwebs off my ceiling and raining down amidst the flaking paint and dead bugs that had peacefully been reposing up there.
When we got outside by the main shut off switch (I didn't have one in my apartment) he pointed it out to me and walked rapidly away, as if to secure a place of innocence when the water screeched to a halt in the two adjoined buildings. Luckily, I was firm in my resolution to not flood out my downstairs neighbors, and much to my neighbors' irriation, pulled back the hubcap that served as a cover for the water shut off switch and cranked the thing around until I heard voices lifting from every window in dismay.
"Inchi anjetel es?" [why'd you turn it off?] a chorus of balcony voices demanded to know.
"im ban@ jartvel eh" [my thing broke (I didn't know the word for faucet)].
I like to think how it must of looked for them. One minute you're washing clothes, or running bathwater for the baby and suddenly the water is ktrats [cut-off, it sounds so much better]. You look out to see if maybe the guy from the water board is down there doing repairs, or if someone's tapping the pipes to wash their car, and instead you find the foreign kid from the next building over, grunting with effort and totally soaked with water.I can't help but to think it looked like some really ill-concieved sabotage effort.
My neighbor's father, sitting in the gazebo-type of thing that's usually staked out by the old men, playing nardi in the afternoons, called me over and told me to go buy another facet. Soon he was in my bathroom with an acetylene torch blasting away at my pipes with a bunch of old and battered tools all over the place. My neighbor and I watched while he banged tool after tool down on my pipes to clear out the facet threading that had broken off inside of them due to my careless punch. Although the work was rough, my neighbor's father showed a deft familiarity in his trade and soon knocked all the offending objects out of my pipes.Within minutes my facet was in perfect working order and I was upstairs eating strawberries with my saviors, trying not to think about the huge mess that awaited me downstairs.

The Kind of Person that Always Adds 'Right?" After Saying "We're Friends."

Yeah, I neglected a bunch of friendships, to some degree I even neglected my family, simply because I had to if I wanted to remain here. I know this might sound pretty sevire. And I'm sure many Peace Corps volunteers would disagree with what I understood as an inherent incompatability between the life one leaves behind in the states and the life one starts in a host country. Initially, I didn't give it much thought. Before I left I occasionlly considered the effects of two years of transitional living, but I wasn't able to really ask myself what that would mean for the life I had in the states. I thought of new and exciting relationships and letters back home that would make reference to them, and I did have both of these things at different times since I've been here, but not quite the way I had imagined it.
I have often told the story of my first homecoming back to Jackson, MI (my hometown) after my first move away at 18 in order to illustrate the importance of holding low expectations for any kind of return trip. I tell this story to my friends here and to myself when I begin to get too excited to see old faces and walk old streets. I've heard myself telling it so many times that it no longer disappionts me, no longer feels pathetic, but rather just seems like truth, and indeed reminding myself of this event before any kind of reunion has never let me down.

I moved to Chicago. I had been there for about a six weeks when I had to come back for my Grandfather's funeral. When everything was finished I still had a day before going back to Chicago and decided to drop in on my friends.
I can still recall the scenarios that played out in my head on my way over to the house where many of my friends had been congregating before I moved, and, as far as I knew, still were. I imagined all kinds of surprise and champaigne bottles popping as I walked into the room nonchalantly. I saw my friends bounding up and down in surprise; every handshake turning into a bear hug, actually lifting me from the ground.
I parked down the block to make sure that no one recognized my Dad's car and proceeded up to the back door. As I approached the house I could hear all my friends' voices lifting and falling like a fond but forgotten song. I was suddenly overcome with a sense of lonliness that I hadn't been aware in Chicago. I realized how much time I had spent with these people and how much strain our friendships had stood over the often turbulent high school years. I was beginning to feel relieved, happy just to be back around them. Still, I hoped for something in this way from them. I wanted reciprocity.
I found the door unlocked, exactly as I had hoped, and entered, trying to supress a latent grin. As I crossed the livingroom threshhold I found them all facing the TV, playing the same videogame I remembered them playing before I left, six weeks before. I walked in, they turned around, and the great reception I had expected barely leveled out at an enthusiastic hello.
For what it's worth, any of my friends that were there at the time might contest this. They might say that I actualy recieved a thoroughly enthusiastic greeting, but I don't remember it that way. I couldn't remember it that way because I expected too much. I had only been gone six weeks. To the people that had stayed behind hardly any time had passed at all. Life had continued on as usual, and suddenly, I was back. They had hardly noticed my absence. I, however, had been very well-aware of every passing day, thinking constantly to myself, "I'm going to make it, I'm going to start all over again and be happy." But, at first, this was not easy, I had no friends, I didn't know anything about where I was, and although I enjoyed a lot on a superficial level nothing had touched me the way a good friend's phone call or smile can.
I remembered this lesson well, and although I continued to pine after my friends long after returning to Chicago and living there for a while longer, I gradually learned to distance myself. To live with them, so far away, was just torment. they became figures of near-mythical proportions. Even the most drab memories became colorful stories, and I spent most of my time telling these stories to people I met who probably didn't care to hear them.

Although I never repeated this mistake with the same intensity, I certainly repeated it.When I moved back to Michigan I spoke of Chicago as a perfect and baffeling place, where everything one could want was easily procured. When I moved to California I hung out with other people who had moved from Michigan, true, they were all wonderful people who I'm sure I would've befriended anyway, but our shared Michigan past certainly didn't hinder things. It wasn't until I moved to a small town in Northern California that I began to truely see how I had always cluched to my recent past.
When I moved to California I had gone to live in San Francisco with a very good friend of mine. We lived together for a year and became impossibly close. Upon suddenly finding myself in the boonies of northern California, I longed for the companionship I had known in SF. I thought not only of my friends in SF but also those in Chicago, Lansing and Jackson, MI and all the other places to which many of my friends had scattered. I felt lonliness like I had never known and although I tried to make new friends I just couldn't seem to get close to people with the knowledge that I already had so many wonderful friends all over the country.
Eventually, I found myself in a realtionship that substituted for all the friends with which I couldn't be. I poured myself into it, overjoyed at finally having found something familiar in what, until then, had seemed a desolate place. What I hadn't realized was that I was setting myself up for prolonged longing. If I could have left northern California without having ever really attached myself to anyone, without having made any lasting friendships perhaps my Peace Corps service would've been easier at first, but once again, upon arriving in Armenia, I found myself without, I found myself missing something too strongly to truely look around and appreciate what was around me.
It took nearly a year, but eventually I began to open my eyes and see the country in which I was living and the people with whom I was living.
And now, with about five weeks left here, I know what I've done. I've established more relationships that will echo well into the future; voices without people behind them when I find myself back in northern California again, again a stranger, again alone. That's not to say that I've ever regretted any of this. In fact, I know that all these people have ultimitly made these places for me. If I had never met Viki in Arcata, CA I couldn't possibly think much of it, if I hadn't moved to SF with Mikey and met Sam there the bars and the bikes wouldn't have held my attention for long. If Bretton hadn't enticed me to move to Lansing and Mark and Akikwe hadn't been there it would've been a lousy five years and I probably never would've been able to get through college.
So as I begin to comtemplate some kind of return back home, experience has taught me not too make to much of it, least I find myself a half heartedly received guest at my own party, and, probably for the first time, I am truely conscious of just how much I am going to miss the friends I have made here. I can already feel it pulling at me, although I am still here. I can feel the echos of so many voices, that have yet to travel across the Atlantic and reach me in California, but certainly will, all too soon. At the same time, these echos have confirmed this place for me, and without them, as with other places, Armenia would mean nothing.
I did what I had to do. I have missed many things over the course of time that I have been here, but it was necessary, for me, to live here without constantly checking Facebook updates, or sending long e-mails of heartfelt longing. Now, as I begin to look more at the place to which I will return, I find these things confusing. My friends talk of things to which I can't relate. They post pictures of people whom I have not met. All of them smiling in appreciation of a life I have not known. And I talk with my friends here and feel comforted, they too understand this feeling of disorientation, they too know they are going to miss speaking Armenian and drinking hykakan s'rge, to mention nothing of oghe. It may have been awkward but we have built up lives here, we have places, that though we may be tired of occupying them, they still feel familiar to us.
If I neglected anything it's because I truely made it. It's because I became comfortable enough here to let go of the past. It's what is always needed, but, after an experience like this, I know that I cannot fully do it again. I will not go one living in Vyke, in Yeghegnadzor, in Yerevan, I will not try to drag these places back into an incompatable America, but where ever I go, I know that eventually I will leave that place too, whereas, in some way, I will always have Armenia with me; it's simply been too long and too seminal and, in many ways, too damn beautiful.

Bleeding to Death on the Bus (heavily anthologized)

2010-05-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote this story almost 4 years ago, but I really enjoyed reading it again so I thought I'd pull it off Myspace where it's been moldering, unread, for quite some time now.
Apologies to those who have already read it and didn't like it the first time.

"Damn!"
The kid's looking at me like I've got leprosy.
"What do you mean 'damn'? How bad is it?" I ask, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice.
"Man you've got a hole in you chin!" The kid lets me down gentley.
"Fuck." At this point it's all I've got. It's all I know: fuck. "Fuck."
I'm about an hour subway ride from home out in the middle of nowhere sitting on a bench trying to keep my blood from running all over the place. My shirt is covered with gore and hair from my unshaven face. Well, unshaven until now when the concrete did it for me. Taking just a little extra and only in one place. I've got no map or anything so I hardly know how to get home despite the fact that I did a bang up job of getting down here. Also, when your bleeding as much as I am now your thoughts tend to jumble around a little. The blood splatters down on your shirt making new red lines in the cloth. On your shoes the blood coagulates in the dust and forms little beads. When it hits the sidewalk blood looks so remarkablely red and opaque that it has all the visual power of a bright yellow wasp or one of those poison dart frogs, bouncing around the rain forest like fire globules. Stop signs are dramaticaly red for a reason, the color makes you pay attention. It's a warning and right now I've got warning spalshed all over me, from my chin down to my shoes.
"Do you know where there's a hospital?" Suddenly it occures to me that I should probably get moving.
"It's like a BIG hole, man" I've apperently impressed the kid with my injury but as flattered as I am I'm starting to get a little nervous. I lift the edge of my voice a little higher.
"DO YOU KNOW WHERE THERE"S A HOSPITAL?"
"No man, I have no idea."
This kid's been a great help. I'm starting to walk away when he suddenly snaps to.
"Those guys might though," he says pointing to a group of surly looking kids in the corner of the park.
Immediatley I'm walking up to the kids trying to control my steps afraid I might fall again. Everything feels numb. My finger tips are tingling. A trail of blood is following me around the park.
"Hey guys," I butt into their conversation trying to look as relaxed as possible, you know like I bust myself open everyday.
"Do you know where there might be a hospital around here?"
"Not really." The surliest looking one says without even looking up. And I can't help but to think about grabbing him, shaking my head and screaming like Tyler Durden did to his boss in Fight Club, flinging my blood all over the place, mostly on him.
'Not really?'
What kind of shit is that either you know or you don't. Look at me for shit sake. Do I look like I only kinda' need a hospital?
Another one takes sympathy on me, or maybe he just doesn't want any blood dripped on his new Emerica shoes.
"I think there's on on Valenica, like Valencia and 19th."
Ok that's enough I have a vague idea where that might be and I don't want to stand around anymore leaking like a faucet. I thank the guys and skate off in the direction I came.But the skating is slow under my wobbly feet. One of my shoes is all ripped up and the blood pouring down my shirt is taking my concentration away from everything else. After about three blocks it's all hills and I've got to get off and start walking. The kid's words keep echoing through my mind.
"There's like a big hole. Your chin. Big Hole"
It just keeps playing over and over again. making the injury in my mind worse with each repitition . By the time I'm out of the hills I'm seeing half of my face hanging off. I start thinking about debilitating scars and and amputations. My mind is abuzz with staples and stiches. If I do get out of this I'm going to end up looking like Frankenstein's monster. All the while my shirt is growing darker and darker with the blood its taking on.
After about 10 blocks of intermitant skating and running I begin to realize I realy have no guarantee there's going to be a hospital at the end of this road. Those kids didn't sound very sure and it seems like I would've seen a sign by now.
"Fuck."
I'm back to that again now. Cursing my self for my exteme penury that won't even allow me to get a cab at a time like this. I've got blood all over myself but I can't stop thinking about how expensive cab rides are. It's a good thing I've got insurence or I probably wouldn't even go to the hospital.
After about half and hour of searching I'm moving up the lower Mission. I see a man at the bus stop who looks like he might know where things like hospitals are and, hesitating no longer I ask him.
"Well what kinda' hospital you looking for? There's quite a few. They got St. Luke's up on Chavez St. there's the General on...wait where's the General again? I can never seem to remember that one or maybe you want a clinic there's a shit load of 'em around here."

The man continues to drone on seemingly oblivious to the severity of my situation, as if he sees blood streaked guys around all the time. I finally cut him short and ask which hopital is closest.
"Well," He begins seeming kind of offended at my impertenence. "Well this bus here'll take you right to one of 'em." He gestures to a bus coming, about a block down the street.
"Thanks," I tell him fumbling for my change hoping I have enough for one of the costly San Francisco buses.
The Number 17 Valencia pulls up in front of me and I wait for everyone else to get on so I can speak to the driver.
The bus is packed. The seats are all filled and the people standing are all packed in like sardines. The windows are all up and the air inside is stiffeling, at least 20 degrees warmer than it is outside.
When I reach the bus driver he's yelling in Spanish for everyone to move back further,despite the fact that everyone is already shoulder to shoulder, even head to head, childern and elderly people are squashed in the middle of the crowd. I don't know what these people are breathing but it isn't air. I think air technically has to have some oxygen left in it and there's none what so ever in here.
"Dude, you got like a hole in you chin!" Ahh fuck. The kid's words again. Why did I ever ask him what it looked like? I should have just gotten up and walked out of the park to the donut shop down the steet and asked one of those nice old folks how bad the wound looked. Shit, they probably would've offered to drive me to the hospital too. Instead I...
"Come on kid get moving!" Oh shit almost forgot what I'm doing must be the loss of blood. the bus drivers scowling at me, either because I havn't payed my fare yet or because I look like I just robbed a liquor store and didn't quite make it out before the shotgun went off.
"Hey are you going by a hospital?" I stammer, no time for formalities now.
"Which one?" He asks looking at me from under his bus driver visor. A green plastic thing that makes his face look even less inviting.
"Anyone." I'm getting tired of this run around so I answer blankly hoping he'll get the point.
"Well if you get off at 16th and walk about 8 and 1/3rd blocks clockwise from the five-way intersection there's another bus that'll be coming by, you don't want that one but you want the one after it. you take that to..."
This seriously went on for about 10 minutes. Someone in the back starts to yell, babies are beginning to cry.
"You got that?" he asks, almost pleased as if hes been enjoying the convoluted directions hes been giving.
"No," I tell him. But I'll try." I don't know what else to say.
"It's easy!" He tells me closing the door and slamming down the gas. Sending my stumbling toward the back, blood and all.
As the stops go by I begin to notice that no one is actualy getting off the bus. Riders get on but none get off, there is no counter measure and within a few short moments I am engulfed by the crowd. They swarm around me edging by, stepping over the seats, hanging from the safety bars and crawling beneath the seats. Normally I wouldn't mind but I'still bleeding all over
the damn place! Doesn't anyone notice? I've got my shirt brought up around my chest trying to catch all the blood that seems loosened by the warm, fetid bus air. My shirt, is sticky with blood, it's all over my hands and running down my chest. A man is standing right in front of me with a brand new white button-up shirt on. The bus rocks and sways going over the bumps and around the bends. I am doing everything I can to stay far away from that white shirt, straining my muscles to compensate for the movements of the bus. I hear someone near me say 'Sangria.' I look up but no one is looking over at me. I'm trying to hold the bar with one hand and mop my face with my shirt with the other. The bus stops again, more people get on and the guy with the white shirt is even closer to me now. I notice a few mothers pushing there kids past me, quickly. A group of kids are learing at me. My skateboard falls and when I reach down to steady it five or six drops of blood splash on the floor. I pretend not to notice but I'm afraid that they've splashed on someone. The bus is getting hotter by the minute more
people get on. I feel like I'm saturated in blood, light headed, beginning to wonder why the hell I got on this damn bus.
"It's like a HOLE, dude!" Shut up, kid. I hardly even care anymore. I'm resigned to dying on this bus now, The Number 17 Valencia. I'll fall down, collapse in a pool of my own blood and these people probably won't even notice, if they do they won't care, probably just take my wallet or something.
"Hey Hospital Guy?" The bus driver is suddenly yelling at me over the din of the 3 thousand people on the bus.
"Hospital Guy, get off here ok?"
"Thanks" I stammer out shaking with excitment of finally getting off this terrible bus.
"Yeah," he adds. "Get off here and get on the bus behind us."
Great another bus probably packed even tighter than this one, everybody wearing brand new white shirts.
When I go to get off the bus everyone clears a path for me. I almost feel gratefull that they finally seemed to have noticed.
The next bus is almost empty. The bus driver is very cordial and there's even a place to sit. After about five minutes she nforms me that we've reached the hospital.
I walk in, check in, wait in the waiting room, still bleeding all over myself.
The nurse calls my name and I follow her to the preliminary room.She runs through all basics asking me how it happened, where it happened etc. while taking my blood pressure. I've got gauze packed in the wound now and I'm waiting for here to tell me they'll have to amputate or do a graft.
She doesn't say anything so I ask.
She looks at me, smiling like nurses do. "Oh you'll probably just need a few stiches, nothing major."
I practically collapse in relief.
"We'll have to do something though," she smiles " I mean you've got like a big hole in you chin."

"but Soft..." or Posies

2010-05-12T10:28:00.001-07:00

It's always the usual days I want to write about, but when I sit down to write something about them I find that all the flavor was in the individual moments, leaving me with nothing to write about, nothing that will flow anyway. For example if I wrote a sentence like "the sky had that faded rose color that precedes a storm, back over the mountains, and two of the neighbor's kids were chasing each other around a broken pipe sticking straight out of the ground, running around and around like they were never going to stop." it's fine as a sentence but if I tried to expand upon that further, by bringing in a series of events to lead up to and away from the kids and the sky, well, it just wouldn't work; it would be obvious I was just leading up to that sentence. Furthermore, some days are just paced out in sentences rather than paragraphs or pages.

-I went down to get bread from the new Georgian place (Vratsakan haats), yesterday's rain still all over the place, and it took me twice as long to get home as I decided to pick up everything else I wanted for breakfast on the way back.
-Paige and I walked to another part of town that I now realize I've hardly been through; I was still drowsy from sleeping in so late but it didn't hinder our conversation as I'm so comfortable talking to her.
-We waited for the marshutka to take her back to Vyke sitting on a rock by the road.
-I stopped at the post office as I've been waiting for a letter from my friend Sam for awhile; the letter was there along with the last package my mom said she'd mail me, what she called my "welcome home" package, full of stuff that could be eaten on the road, some of which I've already eaten.
-I read Sam's letter on a ridge just north of town that overlooks the village Getap below, while the flies buzzed around me in the hazy May afternoon.
-I couldn't ask for a nicer letter from an old and dear friend, although it arrived nearly a month late,
-I stopped by the trauntella nest I found about a week ago and have been looking at nearly every day since.
-One of my students called me down to the university to practice for a recital coming up that my skateboard and myself are to play a part in, while I was talking with her I noticed her eyes, in some way, remind me of a butterfly, and as a result I talked in a quieter tone than usual.
-I came back to find the area around my apartment building in a flurry of late afternoon activity, my neighbors talking while their kids jumped and ran around shouting; they joked with me and I joked back, including me in the community activity.
-Bought a local brand of spring water to take to my favorite bench to read some more of the Central Asian Lonley Planet guide that I haven't been able to put down lately, jotting notes here and there, only to scribble them out after finding out about another visa restriction.
-Two old men sat down next to me and talked for some time; it was clear from the way they spoke that they'd been friends for their whole lives.
-I was offered popcorn later brought to the bench by a young girl and and young woman who was there with her 2 or 3 year-old child, who'd just been gifted with a new tricycle.
-Every time a car would come down the sleepy street everyone would stop talking and look up to see where the little girl and her tricycle were.
-I spoke with the old man after his friend left; he invited me in for vodka, I declined but meant it when I said I'd take him up on it some day, he does, after all, frequent my favorite bench and I'm sure I'll have another chance.
-I listened to Bjork's Vespertine while making a dinner that I expected to be lousy, but turned out to be tolerable.
-The sun went down about half an hour ago but I still haven't turned on the lights in my apartment.

Dreaming with the TV on or Your Tone of Voice is far too Serious for this Occasion

2010-05-10T03:14:00.000-07:00

I.
There's a mania taking over. It's not really a bad thing; I haven't lost any ability or sense as a result and I wouldn't even say that anything has been dulled, still, I'm living with thoughts that vacillate so quickly I usually have a difficult time gauging my own opinion on anything, especially issues of importance. The problem here is that my service here is almost over. This brings a cascade of thoughts that have been building up for these last two years down on top of me. The stretch of time that separated the day I arrived from, say, today, often seemed interminable. I realize now that in my listless, day-to-day musings I was thinking about eventually leaving in such an abstract way that I had nearly blocked the possibility from my mind. Now, just two months from some kind of departure, I find I am not at all prepared for this drastic change. In part because I anticipated it far too much, and in part because I took my anticipation to be indulgence and not really connected to reality or worth my time.
The question I seem to be continually asking myself is whether or not I want to leave. Of course I don't want to stay here for ever, in fact even the idea of staying here another year is really not appealing at all. There are things I miss, things that I feel entitled to miss. Yet, the idea of returning to America does not fill me with enthusiasm either. I know I've built up a ridiculous picture of what America is in my mind. Two years of exaggeration have taken their toll. And when I really look through the memories the only relevant and worthwhile thing I can find are my friends and family. Yes, I desperately want to eat avocados, fake cream cheese, bagels and all sorts of crap again, but, really what is appreciation of such things? Am I going to savor the flavor of these things for months on end? Am I going to thrill every time I get on my bike (Which I've been without) for years? Yes, there's going to be an immediate, probably overwhelming shock of readjustment, but later, when these things again become normal, I know that my mind is going to wonder back to this place, the people I met and the things I did, and I already know that I'm going to regret not having done more of a great many things.
So I find myself in a kind of limbo. Stuck between the incredible contemplation of a realistic return home to all the things I have ever known and my last two months in Armenia, a place that I will not return to for many years, if ever, but none-the-less, a place where I have left an indelible mark of persistence, of will.
I know that I will continue to relive this place for years, much in the same way that I still remember what was happening in California right before I came here. Sometimes, what was two years ago seems like it was only a few months ago. For example, my last night in America, in Philadelphia, before catching a plane from NY the following evening,I walked around all night, past Ben Franklin's grave, down by the river, up to the north side, which seemed more hood than the west side. I remember walking through this city thinking over and over to myself that this was the country that I was going to be leaving the following day, that all the things I found familiar here were soon going to cease to exist except in memory.
I had my headphones on most of the night, I remember listening to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" a lot and finishing a letter to a girl, shortly before trying to call her from eight different payphones and losing something like 6 dollars in quarters on old drugdeal AT&T coinslots. I went to a bar later on where other volunteers were meeting each other. I felt pretty numb to the whole thing, trying to remind myself that it would be a long time before I heard live rock music again.
And then, like that, it's the next summer and I'm standing in a bar in Novi Sad, Serbia listening to a decent rock band, with vague memories of a year in Armenia. After I left the country for my first vacation after a year, it was almost like I'd hardly spent more time than a month there. If I really pondered it I could pull up all kinds of memories from training and subsequent site placement, my first host family and moving out on my own after 7 months of living with families, but, usually, I didn't really ponder it, I just experienced it in waves of vertiginous dreams.
It'll be like that again, too. I'm going to lose a lot of this experience just by leaving. It's collapsible somehow. When I really want to think of it I will, but not without regret, but mostly I'll just remember the tunes to Armenian and Russki pop songs, the swallows outside my window and the sound of the recording on the Yerevan Metro, warning passengers that the doors are closing.
"skushasek dnera pakvum en--hajort gayarana yeritasardakan"
but that one I'll keep until I'm old, shuffling around a retirement center, mumbling it to myself through a trick of Alzheimer’s.

II.
I haven't been writing much because I can’t help but to feel like these posting are becoming fairly formulaic. I try to elucidate on my internal struggle, my new dual identity as someone who lives in Armenia, someone who hasn't seen his friends and family in years, someone who has changed with none the usual people around to witness the change and, well, the kid who graduated from Jackson high in 2001, moved to Chicago, moved back to Michigan, worked in a bookstore, took road trips to Minneapolis and Pittsburg a lot because he knew people there eventually moved to San Francisco after discovering it to be the most beautiful city in the US, one February evening after driving all day up from LA, to the Richmond and getting out of a van that smelled like Red Bull and socks on 19th Ave and something, watching the light from the setting sun run up the street car rails that cut the streets out there. The kid who grew restless even in SF and moved up north and, eventually left for the Peace Corps, by again driving back across America for the forth time.
I write and try to reconcile these identities by talking about what I miss about America, indulging that character for a while, but this always seems kinda' fake, not that I don't miss these things, but I often find that I hardly have the attention to give full description to what I miss and why, mostly because my life here is continually hammering at my door. The kids who live in my building are coming in and bring their English homework, or their just coming in and asking me what I'm doing while sorta' drifting around my apartment, as kids are wont to do. If it's not that, someone's calling me asking me when the hell I'm ever going to come back over, people I met once, months ago are still calling me with this question and it's not unusual to me at all anymore. Even if nothing is deliberately intruding on my American musings Spring here is just too lively to ignore. In the evening the crickets chirp in alternating waves of somnolence, a sound at once so beautiful and bucolic that I listen to it and wonder why I ever enjoyed living in cities so much. During the day my neighbors are outside working on cars, revving the engines, yelling out their windows to each other, walking their babies, who have been imprisoned inside all winter, around the building. There are at least 5 different kinds of bird song that I can differentiate outside my window, all of them enchanting. When the kids get home from school they seem to just run frantically back and forth under my window, switching their aim every three minutes but always running, running and yelling. With all that going on I try to reflect on my time here, I try to think about what I left and what I'm going to return to and I'm not really there at all. I get fleeting glimpses of things, American things, that I try to write down, but can never seem to mold into anything substantial. I think about food and I mention that I miss certain food but no one, besides perhaps my mother, would care at all that I miss certain foods, to tell the truth I don't either. I write those kinds of things and I think to myself, "you're writing about avocados again, aren't you tired of writing about that?"
This all, of course, begs the question what the hell am I trying to express? If I'm totally acclimated to being here why do I keep trying to reminisce about things that I've obviously drifted too far away from to say anything interesting about. If my Armenian life and my American life can't be reconciled why do I continue to write about them in the same post? The only solution I have is that the two, for me, are totally intertwined. My Armenia doesn't exist without American fantasy. I can't really think to any time period that I was here when a certain facet of American living wasn't in the back of my mind. The first six months I was here it was the people. I just missed the raw material behind the people I knew in the states and wished I could somehow conjure up analogues to this in Armenia (I also didn't really have any friends here at that time.) Then, as I began to meet more and more people I began to miss the specific entertainment options. I would meet the people I had come to know and wish that we had something better to do than smoke cigarettes and talk, I wanted a background to the conversation like I'd always had at home, a bar, a bike ride, a to-go coffee and a beach-side bench. In time, I found this as well, cafes replaced cafes, mountains replaced the ocean, kitchens replaced bars, marshutkas replaced subways and bikes. As I became more and more acclimated I began to miss the little things, like sounds and flavors, things that are hard to replace, things that do not often play a very auspicious role in one's life but are constant. This began the long lament over foods and ephemera of life in America. But now I feel even this is fading, the little specific things have lost their import, they just aren't important enough and I can't hold on to them forever; I like the foods and the smells and the sounds of life here now. These things have become my life, and as they too are ephemeral I'm taking more time to appreciate them. So what does that leave me with? Just when it seems like I've gotten over every American fantasy my mind could conjure up, a new theme presents itself, probably the most troubling theme of all, that of pure fantasy. What now prompts me to write about America at all is nothing that comes from my own experience, but things I imagine I may be able to obtain when I go back, things that I have no familiarity with heretofore not because I've never done them, but I've never experienced them the way I think I will after having been away from them for years. It seems odd to say but this category of pure fantasy is probably the most mundane longing or nostalgia of all because it takes the most commonplace things and converts them into nearly limitless experiences. Let me give to an example to illustrate my point.
I was listening to This American Life today and there was a segment where two people talked about watching TV together and singing the theme song to a new TV show that they liked. A married couple singing along to a sitcom theme. When I heard this I was immediately transported to a reality where I was sitting next to someone after a long day of work and awaiting the start of our favorite new TV show. The between-shows commercials ended and the theme began, we began to sing lustily in anticipation of the continuation of a story we had come to appreciate and identify with. There was really nothing else to this fantasy, but while I was considering it I felt inexplicably happy, especially for someone who, back in the states, hadn't had any kind of network TV connection since 2002.
That's it, that's what I think about now when I think about going back to America. That's what makes me happy. The really boring parts of life that are probably the hardest to appreciate anywhere. I don't like TV, but the idea that it could really mean something to me and play a background role to the relationships I would have with other people is novel as hell. That's what entertains me now, the prospect that the things I used to reject as dull and unimportant will now be reinvigorated with a sense import, a sort of background potential I was never able to see before.
The only other thing I really think about, fairly frequently, are the cups of coffee I'd like to drink with different people in different places, some of them don't even make sense, that is, the cafes I'm putting these people in are thousands of miles, in some cases, from where they live. Sometimes my vision of America can almost be totally reduced to a handful of people and cafes, indeed there's really little else I'd want from it at this point, permitting a job.
There are about 14 weeks left. I'm going to travel around the country, work at a summer camp or two, finish all my paperwork and try to get a final project finished, then I'm going to Iran and onward to central Asia through Turkmenistan. My somewhat sedentary period is coming to an end, so the focus of this record is probably going to change. There's a lot to anticipate in returning to America, but I'm not going to write about it anymore, I think I exhausted it tonight. It would seem, just 20 days short of a full two years, I've finally used up all my desire, which should make this summer incredibly interesting.

Hro or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Answer the Phone

2010-04-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine went back to Russia about a week ago and another friend of mine is coming back from Russia in a few weeks, or at least he said he was the last time I talked to him. The season changes and people from the CIS countries go back up to Moscow to resume summer work, mostly physical labor, and send the money back home, buy cell phones and other western products that are either really over priced or not available here. My friend Arshack is an exception in that he owns a skatepark in the capital Yerevan, where he hopes that summer will be a higher grossing period than the winter, wherein he had very few customers, other than myself, dropping by on occasion to practice the same tricks that I've been doing for the last eight years or so now.
My friend Hro, who went back, left without much pomp. A few friends and I dropped by his place in the evening, had a barbecue, talked, danced a little and then left, leaving him with an unopened bottle of vodka and two new DVDs, that I don't think he really cared much about. He walked my friend Paige and I back home and we joked a little, dodging open manholes and unmarked trenches in the dark. When we arrived at my apartment, I suddenly realized that I was going to miss what I used to consider his relentless badgering but had come to understand as his means of relating to people.
When I first met Hro about a year and a half ago we would occasionally talk and walk around town together on my days off. It didn't seem to be a big deal to him whether we hung out or not and I found myself appreciating this after having met so many younger kids that would call me 7 or 8 times a day just to ask me where I was and what I was doing. With Hro it seemed simple; we hung out for a little while, had a coffee and then parted ways, really just what I was hoping to do usually. But when I moved out to my own place he began to drop by, it was, after all winter, and he had nothing to do. The problem was that I was really busy, still getting used to my work at the university, and even after seven or eight months, still getting used to being in Armenia. I can remember far too many occasions when I would return home after a long day to start a meal and put on some music (the kind of private activities I had been longing for after seven months of living with two families) when my doorbell would ring, not a normal doorbell either but a screeching racket of an imitation bird call, something I initially thought amusing, but later came to loathe the sound of. Above the sizzle of potatoes and onions and the insufficient tones of my computer's speakers I would hear it, "SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!" and I would shudder, wait a moment to make sure I hadn't mistaken, perhaps it was the neighbor's, but again, like the sound I imagine an Emu or some other huge predatory bird makes before ripping you open with those grizzly talons "SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEE !" held down longer this time as if he sought to ensure me that no, it wasn't the neighbors doorbell, and, yes, he knew I was in there. At this point I would reluctantly head to the door, peep through the peephole, sure enough, standing there brushing snow off his boots.
"Hello, Hro, What doing?" My Armenian still being pretty laughable at this point. And without answering he would come right into my apartment. When he had gotten settled on the couch he would repeat my question back to me as though he hadn't heard.
"What's up, Jon?" Already rubbing his finger all over the touchpad of my computer and looking for songs to play 10 seconds of and then skip to another and another and another while I went back to the kitchen to finish cooking my dinner, knowing that I wasn't going to enjoy it.
At this point you might be thinking that I'm some kind of rude and secluded bastard who has problems relating to people because he likes to hang out alone and mutter to himself like some kind of latter day Golem, but well I'm quite sure that at one point or another, everyone has taken the sociology class that introduces them to the notion of social distance and how this tends to vary between cultures, how for instance, middle eastern men will lean right into your face when they talk to you, and an American will keep backing up, trying to preserve that little bubble of his or her own space. Although I don't recall anyone rubbing noses when they talked with me in Syria, in Armenia there is definitely a notion that your friend and even your neighbor is supposed be social toward you at all times. If there is some loophole that allows you to say you are busy I never found it; such a thing simply isn't done here, or maybe I just never encountered it because I never just showed up at someone's place. Either way I spent about 3 months in minor irritation. It seemed like every time I was in the mood, after a long day, to just hang around and read and relax, that hideous doorbell would blast through my thoughts again, and I'd spend the next two hours, hoping that Hro would get the drift and that I was not really in the mood to talk, but every time he stayed; I would be reading and he'd just go on playing around on my computer as I read the same sentence over and over again. I wasn't trying to be rude, we just didn't have anything else to say to each other. In twenty minutes, at the time, my Armenian was pretty much exhausted, and yeah, I guess I coulda' pantomimed around, but Hro really wasn't the talkative type either. The result was that when he left in March I was kinda' happy he wasn't going to be around to bother me anymore. I had begun to avoid going home just to avoid him. It was becoming ridiculous. Yet, when he called me from Russia about two months later, well, I was happy to talk with him for a minute, perhaps because he was so far away and I knew he wouldn't come barging in my door, but I was also surprised he hadn't forgotten me. Since he spent so much time at my place with my computer, I had begun to wonder if all I had ever been to him was a warm apartment where no one would bother him and an interesting contraption that played foreign music. He call proved otherwise.
When Hro cam back in October I was happy to see him. He had called me maybe once or twice more during the time that he stayed in Russia, and although our conversations were short I was always happy to receive them. When he returned I met up with him in a place that sells lumps of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with what looks and tastes like a mixture of flour and sugar. They're pretty simple these ponchiks, but they're good with coffee in the morning if you're feeling like going back to bed in an hour or two, as after such a large dose of sugar you will inevitably crash later. I was already done working for the day when I met up with Hro for a coffee and ponchik. We talked a little about what he had done in Russia and about the phone that he had bought that he was absolutely blasting music from, some ridiculously large, boxy-looking thing that had what appeared to be a TV antennae sticking out of it. After our meeting we parted and I went back home both happy and already somewhat disconcerted that he was back in town, perhaps indefinitely, as he had said he wasn't sure if he'd be going back to Russia.
It wasn't long before things returned to their previous state, Hro, again deprived of anything better to do, began dropping by and hanging out in my apartment. The only difference was that this time he no longer bothered to ring my doorbell and dispensed altogether with the formality of even knocking at my door. I remember more than a few times he would come in when I was in the bathroom. I would yell "I'm in the bathroom!" and I'd hear him proceed to my couch and soon the music would begin from my computer, sometimes I thought of staying in there to see if he'd go away. Despite finding myself annoyed again with his presence I always tried to be cordial; I'm sure that at times my weariness wore through, but, in truth, he never seemed to notice, or deliberately ignored it. Once, however, I remember, having just returned home. my friend Henni, had called me and we had decided to make something to eat together. She had been in my apartment not more than 2 minutes when suddenly Hro's head popped in the door.
"Ok if I come in?"
"You're already here" I heard myself reply in some unbearably wry tone that certainly was not my own, but rather the accumulation of months of irritation. But I never really had to feel bad about this rude remark because Hro just came in and plopped down next to the computer as if I had responded by saying,
"Why, Hro old fellow, come in and take a load off, there's my computer, all set for the tampering! Knock yourself out!"
He didn't even seem to hear me, just came in and made himself at home as usual. I never understood how he was capable of that. I know there were other time when he must've seen my impatience, but he never seemed to regard it in the slightest, just acted like everything was fine.
After my outburst, I began locking my door. I didn't like to, but I realized, the next time I might say something worse, and for all the irritation Hro caused me, there was something about it that made it difficult to stay angry with him. Although locking my door helped with the spontaneous visits, and even helped me block him at the door, it couldn't stop the phone calls, coming at least 3 times a day. Asking when I was going to come over to his house. I tried to diffuse this be going over there on a number of occasions, thinking that if I came by he would stop asking about it, but it never seemed to matter. I guess, and I hate to say this, it would've been a different story if there had been something to do over there, like eat dinner or work on something, but every time I went over there, we just sat on the couch, hardly conversing while the TV roared on behind us. And several times when he had invited me over I would arrive to find he wasn't even there. I'd call and he'd say "oh, ok you're there, don't go anywhere I'm coming right now." But 'right now' sometimes took as long as 20 minutes and by the time he came I would be ready to go, to get back to my own nest of solitude to think over my lesson plans for the next day and what I was going to do about that class that never listened to me.
There were also the girls. One of the things that made forging any kind of relationship with Hro hard was that he was interested in all the foreign girls I hung out with. He had told me over and over again that he liked foreign girls, almost mentioning it as some sort of consolation, like, because he understood that I had to hang out with them, that he, contrary to other males his age, actually found them intriguing, when actually ever other male in his age group found that equally, if not more intriguing than he did. Whatever his intentions were it always made me feel like a go-between. It seemed like more and more often the only time I would see Hro would be when I was hanging out with one of the three female volunteers in the Yeghegnadzor area. I couldn't help but to feel awkward in these situations because he was forever doing stuff like helping them out of their coats, taking their arms when they had to cross puddles and paying for their drinks, things that always seemed brazen to me, but then I began to wonder if they were so brazen. I couldn't help but to feel like something of a bastard not keeping up with the protocol myself, lagging behind the group like some kind of third wheel while the guy in front of me was constantly reaching over to help my friend down stairs and around construction area heaps of dirt. I began to wonder, "should I be doing those things?" After all these were my friends he was helping along, I had known them longer, was it more my responsibility than his to offer them my coat if they complained of the cold? Sometimes, I even felt like something of a spurned boyfriend, wanting to just say the hell with it and leave these two to their coddling if that what they wanted to do. My female friends were always telling me that it annoyed them, but it was hard to be sure, and it just felt awkward. Even if they truly were annoyed, what then? Should I intervene? Then I'd like look stupid, but if I knew that they didn't want to be taken by the arm when the ground got a little uneven was it my duty as a friend of both parties to say "hey, she knows how to walk, you know." Not to mention it seemed to me that this wasn't really my place, perhaps if I had been dating one of these girls I would've had a place to say something, but the situation was just so nebulous and ill-defined, really, who the hell were we all to each other.
The months went by and the telephone calls continued on a daily basis, but, strangely, after a while, I discovered that I didn't really mind them. They were usually no more than 3 minutes long, and, though they all ended with an invitation to Hro's house the same day, we seemed to have had come to a tacit understanding that most of the time I wasn't going to be able to make it, ( I usually have something to do) that he understood this and wasn't bothered by it, but had to offer every time nonetheless. Even his visits became much more tolerable, he seemed to expect that I was usually busy with something, and got to be more tolerant of having a quick conversation in my doorway. Within a few months I found that I was actually expecting him to call, and when a day would go by when he wouldn't, I'd notice.
At the beginning of March Hro mentioned to me that he was probably going back to Russia for the summer again but didn't know when. I received the news initially with a kind of relief, although I wasn't really bothered by him anymore, and in fact, in many ways considered him my friend, I was glad that he was going to have something to do for the summer and that I would be able to spend my last few months here without having to continually turn down invitations to his house.
On April 3rd we had a small going away party for Hro. Like I wrote above, we brought some gifts and ate a little bit of food while we were there. At some point Paige called on me to make a toast, something that I'm really horrible at, something about the structure of laudatory speech like that evades me even in my own tongue, not to mention my lousy Armenian. I started the speech by saying how Hro and I had first met nearly two years ago and how he was the first person that I had really met in Yeghegnadzor. I wished him well in his work in Russia and said that I hoped we'd meet again either in Armenia or in the states. I also added, for effect, that he was a great friend. I didn't really felt like I meant it when I said it, I mean I thought of him as a friend, but I certainly didn't number him among my really good friends, but the nature of friendship is an elusive thing. I guess it was hard for me to really think of Hro as a good friend because he did all the work for me. I never had to call him, I never had to stop by his place, he always did these things for me. And, perhaps more importantly, I realize now that Hro actually taught me a lot of the place I have lived for the past two years. As I have few other friends his age and gender here, (the little kids seem to think I'm pretty amusing, my students are all female and everyone else is at least middle-aged) I have learned most of what I knew about the behavior of young Armenian men from him.If it wasn't for Hro I probably wouldn't know when to say 'da vai' [Russian], 'prosta' [again, Russian] or how to light cigarettes for your friend and try to make him smoke yours instead of the ones he has. Sure, these things are ubiquitous in this society and you see and hear them all the time, but there's something akin to an initiation that yo have to go through to really understand them, for me, Hro took me through this initiation.
It wasn't even a week later when I was hanging out with two other young men when he called me from Russia. I was happy to hear from him and we talked for a few minutes about what it was like in Russia. When I came back in the room one of the young men asked me who I'd been talking to, when I told him he kinda; smirked. "I think he just wanted to get to know the foreign girls you're friends with" he responded, and soon I found myself vehemently defending Hro, the same guy who had annoyed me in more ways and on more occasions than I care to count. it was at this point that I realized, like so many other seemingly trivial things, Hro had become a major part of my time in Armenia, although he had nothing to do with my work or how I spend most of my free time, there he was, and probably will be forever when I recount stories from this place.
I should add here too that while I was writing this he called me, the second time from Russia and he's only been gone about four days. Our conversation went something like this.
"Huh? Barev Hro jan , vonc es, inch ka?"
"Inch klini, Jonis, du asa"
"Lav em, inch pes meesht. Inch ka aynter?"
"Ba, voch mi, heto?"
"Heto..yes im, ban, vagha yes kgnam Sisiani im ankroch senund."
"Lav, kzanges, kshnorhvorem"
"Lav, kzangem, heto."
"Heto ban chika."
"Lav, uremen, kzangem yete pogh umen vagha."
"Eghlav,da vai"
"Da vai"
In more ways than one we speak the same language.

Pulling Down the Bill of a Baseball Hat or Sometime Every Spring

2010-03-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

I have had many unsuccessful attempts to write an update. I'm caught somewhere between liking what I wrote last too much and not really having anything new to add. I articulated my feelings of conflict between past and present, here and there well enough last time that I don't feel much more need to go back into it, but, for some reason, every night I sit down and grapple again with the slippery topic of finishing Peace Corps service, or at least the impending feeling of finishing Peace Corps service, despite the fact that it's still something like 4 months away, by no means an indifferent, unimportant amount of time, but considering the length of time we've already been here and the fact that the summers are usually pretty carefree, it's hard not to just pull off the last two months of that and say there's only two months left, only about a month and a half when you count the end of the semester at May 17th. Like I think I mentioned before the weather also plays into this. As it gets warmer outside it becomes summer in my mind and I begin to think about how, before the summer is over, I will be leaving this country, with no real clear destination apart from a trip, by bus and rail, to Kyrgyzstan, which puts me pretty much in the exact middle of nowhere, finishing two years in Armenia and finding myself in a yurt outside Bishkek.
This burgeoning idea has begun to drift into my dreams. Although during the day I feel perfectly content, my nights have begun to be mottled with restlessness. I dream and wake, talking or gasping, and when I fall asleep again I resume the same dream. For months, perhaps even nearly an entire year, my dreams have been nebulous and elusive, fading from description the moment I wake up, but lately, they've stuck fast to my , waking mind, gumming up my reality late at night when the town is totally quiet and my single room apartment almost seems stifling with the air of the dream that just expired there.
I woke up about 3:50 last night trying to talk to someone across the room from me, standing in a back-lit door frame so that all I could see in the darkness was an outline. I was calling to this figure and woke with the inarticulate sounds I had apparently been producing to get this figures attention, somewhere between a moan and a grunt. I've always found it disconcerting to wake up to the sound of your own voice, still numbed with sleep, almost as if a dream persona had actually been able to break a few words (or grunts at least) into your waking world, with you as a mouth piece. When I fell asleep again I was arguing for my sanity. A number of things had happened in my dream that led those around me to declare me insane. Naturally, no one believed my defense, except a cousin of mine that, though now probably about 16, appeared the last way I remember seeing her, years ago when she was about eight or nine; a quiet, shy girl with very light blonde hair. In the dream I had such an incredible sense of love for her because she alone believed me.
Perhaps the symbolism here is not so clear but when I woke up this morning it was clear to me that I had been dreaming about coming back to America after living in a different reality for so long. My insanity was the means of living that I have adopted here and all the socio-cultural aspects that influence it, for example language, and standard of living. It seems curious that I should feel worried about this in my dreams, as I have never really concerned myself with it in waking life. Of course I assume that it will be difficult to communicate so much to the people back home, and that, for propriety's sake, I'll probably have to cease trying to explain after 20 or 30 minutes to most people, as it's probable that most of them won't really care. The language too will have to go. I know that people don't like to hear a language that they don't understand for anything more than a minute or two just to hear how it sounds. If, say after a few beers, I were to switch into Armenian for my sole amusement, I would surely only be harassing those around me. But I have prepared myself, or thought myself prepared for all these pitfalls, so why the daunting dreams? Why am I outside of things so often looking in when I am asleep? It only makes me think that perhaps I have been even more affected by the last 22 months than I had previously thought.
Perhaps the dreams are resulting from the, somewhat coincidental, string of American situations I seem to continually be finding myself in as of late.
A few months ago a guy by the name of Oscar opened up a Mexican restaurant in Yerevan, the capital. When I noticed the sign above the place before it opened, I didn't think to get my hopes up. Usually restaurants in the capital are expensive and too hung up on posh decor and service to really be fun for me. Every time I would chance it and tried out another Thai or Indian place, I would also find myself feeling very uncomfortable at the prospect of having to act like a rich person while I dined there. Apart from hotdog stands there are very few casual-type restaurants in Yerevan, people don't go out to eat much so when they do it's extravagance all the way. Even the summer outdoor cafes are outfitted with plush chairs, almost Laz-e-boy like and 4-dollar coffees, instant but served in a tall glass, not to mention they'll surely come by and replace the ashtray after every extinguished cigarette, bearing the old one away with all the dignity someone engaged in a very important task.
I stopped even suggesting that we go out to eat in Yerevan probably almost an entire year ago, there just didn't seem to be any point in it. It was a little too pricey for the volunteer budget, even when we only did it once every three months or so, and just wasn't really any fun. So, when a new Mexican place was set to open I didn't find myself very excited. I imagined just another knock-off of the good places outside of Phoenix and Baker, California, only the circumstance would be reversed, where before the food was great and the atmosphere dingy, in Yerevan the atmosphere would be immaculate but the food would make you wonder if any of the staff had ever even seen real Mexican food, let alone eaten it.
Luckily, I was completely wrong, the owner, turned out to be from San Diego, and the ambiance of the place is much like the taqerias I remember from Ukaiah to Oxnard. In short, (and to finally get on with my point) sitting in the place, with a company of other English speakers, laughing, vaguely aware that the night is waining on outside the window while peeling the aluminum back from a second burrito can give the immediate illusion of being back in the states.
The last time I was there we sat in the patio dining room, eating and talking and smoking for at least two hours, all the while I was somewhat aware, that for perhaps the first time since I had come to Armenia, I felt like I was in America. I kept having flashes of the realization, the food, the music and the jokes, the city outside, all combined to crystallizations of San Francisco. I would've attributed this solely to the new restaurant and it's ingenious proprietor, if, again later in the night, celebration the Iranian holiday of Chahar Shanbe Soori I hadn't suddenly found myself feeling the same way, holding a beer, listening to the pop of fireworks and staring up at a light-polluted night sky, latticed with the shadows of overhanging amusement park rides, great twisted tracks set darker against the mauve sky and the occasional bright gaudy relief of some kind of roller coaster maidenhead, the snot-green face of a caterpillar that heads the car that's supposed to look like a sectioned caterpillar's body zooming by, the lights from the concession stands, the clanging noise of cash registers, all of it combined to make an Iranian holiday feel like a teenage night at the fair in Springfield, Illinois.
It wasn't only that night. It seems that ever since that time this feeling keeps periodically washing over me. As time goes by I seem to be continually finding scraps of what I remember of America here and there. Yesterday, I played basketball with Paige and Elliot, and before going back home, sat under the late afternoon sun in on Paige's roof, sipping beer out of a jam jar and feeling the kind of contentment that I remember feeling after a Saturday afternoon, spent with my friends after skateboarding across town when I was 16, or taking a bus out to Ocean Beach when I was 23. The kind of late afternoon feeling that required no advance plans for the evening. There's nothing planned and somehow it's better that way. I ended up going home, but thinking about that afternoon for the rest of the night between pages of a book about Afghanistan I was finishing. It seemed that while we played basketball on that outdoor court, with a group of school kids watching us that the three of us had become a moving, living piece of America. We were no longer just a rag-tag group of foreigners, playing some weird foreign game, but actually people from an identifiable place and time, there in the middle of Vyke Armenia. For a very long time I felt uncomfortable doing things that singled us out as American; I did all I could to try to fit in and I think Paige and Elliot did the same. When we walked through town together we talked in quiet voices. When we went into stores the volume of our voices went up when we began to speak in Armenian with the shopkeepers, and we hid our American qualities behind the doors of our houses and felt slightly guilty for watching movies and missing things like city bus schedules and bike rides with friends. But all this time here has changed that. I no longer worry about seeming culturally inappropriate because I know that part of the reason I came here was to share my culture while learning of another one, not to totally try to blend in.
I'm finding America more easily now here perhaps because I've finally begun to feel totally comfortable here. The jeers of young men on the corner don't really bother me the way they used to, and the stares of people who I haven't met don't really cut through me anymore. It's just part of being here. For nearly my entire first year here I secretly longed for the comforts of home, the lack of certain amenities and kinds of food did not make Armenia less interesting, but made it hard to love as I had loved San Francisco and Chicago in the past. But after all this time I've finally discovered that my sense of what is comfortable is totally relative. Good Mexican restaurants and cheap, second-run movie theaters are great, but they don't necessarily define whether a place is livable or not. I know this all might sound really obvious, but for me it wasn't. I came to the Peace Corps to see something different and be challenged by it, so that's what I got, but this perception made it hard for me to let go of the things I loved about being in the states. Armenia was interesting for being Armenia, but it would never have Friday evening kickball games for 20-somethings followed by dinners in pho restaurants where The Pixes would be played on the overhead. I put a lot of stock in these things before because I had assumed that they were my ideal way to have fun, my culturally specific way, and therefore that best suited to me, of enjoying my free time, but now, coming up on the third June of being here I realize these things are relative. I enjoyed kickball games because I felt they were my element. Now that Armenia had become my element, even if I don't fit into it the same way that Armenians do, it feels comfortable to me. So, I've finally been able to put a basketball game in Vyke at the foot of the mountains, with kids and old men alike watching us with curiosity, on the same level as a game of Frisbee on a Saturday afternoon, in Dolores park with bikes and cans of PBR all over the place. It may not sound like much of a revelation, but it's something that I personally took a long time to acclimate myself to, the idea that I could be myself here, just as much as I could there.
The morning sun is warm, but there's a chilly wind blowing down from the mountains as I leave my house with a thermos of tea and a Batman comic book. I walk up the dirt road the borders the cemetery on one side and come to the top where people dump all their garbage down into the ravine below. The wind has kept the heat, and thus the smell of this garbage, down. I walk along a shepherd trail that skirts the rocky hillside. There's little pellets of sheep crap and cloven hoof prints in the soft earth along the trail. The sun warms my face but the wind cuts through my thin sweater. Where the trail ends in a flat clearing, so flat as to look like a putting green amidst all these craggy hills, I find a place to lean up against a rock and pour myself some tea. I take a drink and open my comic book, but before I begin to read I look around and enjoy the view: hills and the rocks that break out of their tops and climb further up into mountains, some with snow still on their peaks. There's a two lane road winding through the Selim pass below and the village of Getap looks like something that grew naturally, in earthen colors, along the river bank. I try to begin reading, but my concentration is stuck on the scenery, and I look back up, although I've seen it all a million times by now, when suddenly it occurs to me that where this was so long my reality and my memory was the view from Alamo Sq. in San Fransisco (that shot in the opening credits of Full House where it showed the four bright Victorian houses with the city sky line behind them) that soon I would back back in Alamo Sq. seeing this backdrop in my mind's eye and before too long it would be somewhere else, until the panoramas pile up over the years and my rheumatic eyes can no longer tell the difference and I prattle on and on about all the places I have sat and watched until they drew themselves into the convolutions of my mind.

2010-03-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

The Last Day of February Was a Sunday or Last Sunday Was in February.

2010-02-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

You have to remember that I have no spellcheck anymore.

I.

One thing that's going to be hard to return to (because I have begun to contemplate that) is the notion that doing menial tasks will no longer be an important and valuable part of my day, not because I have gotten lazy and want to occupy myself with such things, indeed, doing housework is quite antithetical in the routine of a lazy person, rather, I have acclimated myself to living in a place where doing the dishes and sweeping the floors are tasks as necessary as writing papers and studying the cantankerous words of aging scholars late into the night.
When my landlady first came to visit me more than a year ago, she was extremely put off by the state that she found her apartment in, not because any irreprable damage had been done, but rather because dust was accumulating here and there and my blankets were all in a tussle and "why, those books are simply haphazardly thrown on that end table!" When I returned home after a long day of teaching classes I was appalled by this woman's list of complaints that seemd to me as more of an attack on my very way of life than anything that was egregious for her apartment. I laughed aloud at a few of her comments. "Books not straightened" this seemed like lunacy to me, after all who was this woman to infringe upon my right to have my books floating in the toilet, if I should chose to keep them there.
I barely escaped being booted out by promising total reform. I swept and dusted and polished for days on end, even inviting two female consultants to view the results (and alternately help me) so that I couldn't miss anything. Interestingly the woman never came back again, but I think her intended effect stuck as ever since that incomprehensible phone call (the only distinct words being "deh gana" [essentially 'get out']) I have been ruling over this small apartment with a broom for a septre and a smock for my rainment.
At least twice a week I sweep this place out. The dishes are done shortly after they are dirtied, the ashtray is emptied with OCD-like regularity and though my books are still disheveled, they are free of dust. I have come to view these menial tasks, or what I thought of as menial tasks before coming here, as absolutely essential. A number of things led to this seachange in housekeeping habits. The obvious was fear of being kicked out and having to live in the sterile student dorms (I have prided myself on never having lived in such a place, even in that endurance test of freshman year), but I also came to accept the necessity of keeping a clean apartment through other social pressures. As a clean apartment is expected here, even amongst single men (though a man living alone is an incredibly uncommon thing here) apartments and indeed everything else is expected to be clean. One's clothes, shoes, car and apartment all reflect one's self respect. Here, anything dirty or unkempt is a remark of one's inability to keep it clean, usually through lack of money to do so. As such, this is to be avoided at all costs. Initially, I naturally rebelled against this. I went through the immense social pressures of high school without ever caving and saw this as only being another test of my sense of individuality. But as time went by, and I became somewhat desperate to be accpeted I began to clean the dried mud off my shoes even when I was going out into muddy streets; I began to brush the chalk dust off my clothes because I got tired of my students constantly mentioning it as though I were covered in anthrax; I began to clean my apartment even when it did not look very dirty. I began to have more resect for my European and Armenian guests because I knew I could count on them to take their shoes off at the door rather than lounging on my couch with some tattered Reeboks smearing mud on the armrest.
In only a few short months what had once been normal became almost reprehensible to me and I found myself picking up the broom and doing a once-over when I was talking on the phone or waiting for the water to come to a boil in the kitchen. As time has gone by I realize that I have become fairly accustomed to spending nearly half my day keeping this one room apartment clean in one manner or another. With only about 5 months left here I can't help but to wonder what it will be like to return to a place where I will be expected to lay aside all other cares to persue my studies. How will I be able to keep a clean apartment, especially living in a cooperative setting, when I've got 6 hours of paper writing to do every day? The question I ask myself is will I be able to revert back to not caring if anyone takes their shoes off in my house? Will I be capible of keeping my shoes on in my own house? Will I spend hours of time that I won't have cleaning the kitchen?
I'm not really too worried about this, especially as I often find myself wishing I had something to do other than wipe off the table for the 4th time in one day, but I can't help but to wonder what reforms I will bring back with me. There is no question that being here has changed some things about me, most of them still dorment, perfectly acceptable now, but waiting for an opportunity to present themselves in the states and render me a weirdo of some kind. I am interested to see how much personality I have adopted from this place. What is immutable and what shifts with one's changing environment? Only time and the reemergence of vacuum cleaners into my life will tell.

II.
I look around my apartment at 8, 9 in the morning and think how far I've come. How different everything looks than it did twenty-two months ago, when I pulled my luggage off a quiet convyor belt and nestled into a 3 am marshrutka seat, filing out past the Yerevan suburbs, dark and fenced and worn. I wake up to my apartment and think of my schedule, who I have to see, what needs to be done for tomorrow. I try to remember dreams, but I seldom do, there's just a feeling of being emotionally spent, as if while dreaming I am nightly running emotional gamuts that I cannot recall in the morning.
At night, I sit in my kitchen, watching the lights flicker under the moonstone snows of the mountains just past the pastures on the edge of town, where I have walked so many times and never returned with clean shoes. I go out, when there is no moon, no stars and its hard to see the streets and the open manholes. I walk the backlanes of the town and remember that here, last spring, there was a bright and beautiful lilac bush. I remember the morning frost that fillagreed my path when the first autumn came and I was living higher up on the hill. I remember the streets and the roads as they looked through all the other seasons. The mud: dark orchre, mixed with sheep manure, cigarette butts, that tepid reddish standing water that accumulates outside areas where there seem to be too many chickens living. The snow: sometimes hard, frozen into the tiretracks produced by a thaw, reticulate windows of ice framed in the iron-hard dirt, some broken. The first snow, the second snow, the last snow: lilies, white danelion froth, eraser shavings on a test-time paper, the pleasant screen of slightly opaque breath before one. The bloom: 3 weeks of green on the perpetually brown, rocky hillsides, a bright and startling spring, the calendar days to which guidebooks show focus all their attention. Summer: dry rippling sun, the mirage waves of a fan heater, the roads empty in the afternoons, the university shuttered, unfamiliar and cool in its closed marble and tufa hallways, quietly seething in dust.
In every walk I confront parts of these things. In my apartment I go to sleep in the same position that I resume when I wake up. Somedays I drink coffee all day long and an hour of reading on the couch still carries me off to the restive slumber of fugitive dreams.
The buildings are flawed, but familair and wonderful. There's a broken house plant pot in the stairwell, dirt tumbling from the place where the plastic has broken. In Vyke, there's a house that's been covered with flat rocks, like the kind that could be flung delicately off waves, in a houndstooth pattern. Where so many perfect skipping rocks came from in a country with no oceans or seas, I'll never know. At a wedding, I saw an entire house converted into a banquet hall. "I love you" on a carpet, hung on a wall, written with pulled cotton. I never heard the bride say a word, although I was there most of the night, smoking cigarettes and nodding, clicking glasses and shouting "Oh-pa!" for no reason.
The glass is faintly flawed by ripples. Looking out onto the cemetary, occasionally the lights of decending cars drift too high up into the corners of the room and suddenly depart, rolling out over the dapples and waves in the imperfect window.
I sweep the floor again and light a cigarette. For a moment I think of Marquette, MI (red-brick downtown, simple bay); Blue Lake, CA (afternoon barroom television very loud and undiscernable through the dust and sun light, my last night in Arcata, drinking an evening, no, a twilight beer here with Mikey) Taco Bells in Missula, MT and Bismark, ND (sodium arc lights everywhere); Tbilisi, Sakartvelo (a palm tree covered in snow); Argentina (not Buenos Aires); Trieste, Italia (like a Venezia with fields that connect it to the land and Sarajevo out there somewhere, statues of Joyce) Samakand (an opium-induced dream of Victorian England); and Mexico with a worn flannel and better shoes than these, drinking Tamarind and smoking a cigarette, Spanish, writing Spanish, speaking it slowly as I walk from place to place, beard either totally neglected and tangled or shaved off a few days prior, red and stubbly. I return to my apartment, to the memories of the first Armenian house I entered, summer kitchen, without a word in my mouth hoping we'd eat soon. A whole summer, not really working, not really studying, not really vacationing. Learning how to say things and then forgetting them, packing a language amalgam into the cavities of my teeth. All the phone calls that have sputtered out over the Atlantic.
There are two and a half month left of the semester. Two months of summer. It took so long to introduce myself, it should take as long to say goodbye. Taking the dry and gnarled hands of shepards, the smell of sheep that I never knew before, but will never forget. Every incidental meeting where I promised to return. I should return to all those places and thank all these people and then go. Try to get a commital goodbye in before it's too late. Not leave quietly in the morning like the volunteers last year. A bright July morning, a few boxes picked up, placed on the plush seats when the trunk was full and, well, here's a hug, have fun back in the states. Two weeks later the empty apartment had computers in it. Even today, I remember it and I don't: the plastic cups, the linoleum floors, America taped all over the walls.
In the end I want to know what all these bucket-flush toilets and bucket baths came down to, all the times I answered the door and the few times I didn't, responding to every insistent bang with a muted sigh from the kitchen where I had just finished cooking my dinner. What did these things amount to? Have I come into something new? Did one of those long walks down by the river change something? Did that dog who bit me last Spring really infect me with something? Have I become mountainous? Are my phone calls more insistent now?
I go out into the grey morning to visit a potential pupil at his father's behest. I don't want to go. I've got enough to do and little time to do it. I cannot teach this kid very much through the medium of my own ebbing and falling apathy, especially not in two and a half months. Still, I make my way through the dispelled myth of Sunday morning to his house.
A white Lada 4x4, a dog in a small fenced-in enclosure barking madly, a cold stone foyer, where I take my shoes off, the walls inside are covered with carpet, as I now imagine they are everywhere. I felt unable to start this again. I asked about 'Y' and it was 'U' [Russian] I asked about 'I' and it was 'E' [addmitedly the sound it usually makes, especially in trasliteration]. I mentioned a few basics of sentence building, describing the arc of the basic English sentence and the sine qua non of the present simple tense. I said study your books. I said I'll come back and check and made a move to find my coat.
When I don't feel much like talking I seem to be better at speaking Armenian. Everything rolled out with practiced ease, which allowed me to point out the importance of actualy speaking the language one is trying to learn. We set up future dates, or tried to, over coffee, the ubiqutous demitasse cup, coffee silt at the bottom, chocolates and fruit: the social engagement laid out to perfection, an ingratiation that I know I will miss when I leave.
I told a painter last night that one of his landscapes will be the Armenia that I remember after I leave, and although I wasn't lying, I realize that the Armenia I will remember will be "confetov ker" [have your coffee with candy, in the imparative] and all the other things that I can't even respond to any more. The things I will mutter to myself in lonely America and smile.
The life of a 20-something American is full of big decisions. Graduate school, moves across the country, engagements, moves to different countries and careers are set and begun in weeks. Life moves quickly so that it may find a course to settle in and flow evenly onward. Here I have feigned at making such decisions. I spoke about going home over a year ago when I knew I wouldn't. I've planned and replanned the trip I will take when I am finished here. I've read books on Ireland and Italy and India and considered moving to all these places. But at the end of every day, I find myself watching the stars from my kitchen window, a modest dinner simmering behind me, knowing that I'm making personal history by just staying in the same place for so long, but having absolutely no idea about the end result of all these thoughts about frozen mud roads, carpeted walls, marshrutkas, how the number '3' looks like the letters 'Y,' 'Z' and 'V' in three different alphabets and the familiar feeling of drinking coffee in someone else's slippers.
How can I possibly share these things with you?
Start by curiously taking one thing out and you end up with a mess.

Basement Horrors or a la recherche du temps perdu

2009-12-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

In order to stem the effects of seasonal flu, or perhaps to justify rumors of its particular virulence this year, the schools in Armenia have closed down for the next two weeks until the official beginning of the winter break. I’m sure the kids have got to be happy about that, but their mothers seem to be keeping them all inside ‘cause I haven’t seen many to ask them what they plan to do with this miraculous 2-week extension of their vacation.
In the meantime the university continues it’s scheduled courses heedless to the menacing coughs and frail looks exchanged by students and faculty alike. Luckily, I’ve already gotten myself sick so I guess I won’t have to anticipate getting sick again, at least not until the current illness abates.
The last few days have gotten slightly warmer, but have produced a particularly nebulous, grey sky, something I’m totally unaccustomed to as this place is classified as semi-desert and is usually very sunny. As a result of the weather and this nearly consumptive-sounding cough I’ve got going for me, I’ve spent the last couple of days hiding in my apartment, emerging only to buy more juice and to run only the most essential of errands. I’ve finished two books in the last two days. This, as you can imagine, complicates the task of writing anything exciting about life in Armenia. I find myself even further perplexed by the sudden appearance of predictability and normalcy in my daily schedule. I haven’t written very much for the last couple of months because it often seems as if very little worth writing about has happened. Sure, a few things here and there, but nothing to make me run home, jotting notes on my hand the whole way so as not to forget the tiniest detail.
I’m content enough, working, or rather, beginning to work on the final projects that will surely wind up my remaining 7 and ½ months in Armenia (Wow!). At present I’m not really even over-concerned with the future, as I have been in the past when suddenly everything became commonplace. Last winter, I spent a lot of time thinking about different places and people I’d like to see again, but it looks as if this winter is going to be different. I don’t want to lose sight of the few changes I’m hoping I can make before I leave, and, besides, I’ve been gone so long now that there doesn’t seem to be much reality left to draw from day dreams of San Francisco or post-Peace Corps trips to Turkmenistan or India. I’m here, and I guess after all this time, in a way, I’ve finally excepted that, until it’ll change again.
However, la recherche du temps perdu does still filter through, things that I’d nearly forgotten only to have them dredged up by a line in a book or a brief conversation, where they settle into reminiscence.
The most recent example came to me today while reading a book where the characters have to drag a damp mattress out of an extinguished house fire. This reminded me of one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had to do. I think now with enough temporal distance between myself and the offending event, I can safely describe it.
Years ago I lived in a typical collegiate house, a big place on the east side of town, a little run down and cold as hell in the winter, but nothing too offensive. Even if it had been some kind of full-blown slum I certainly would’ve minded, but, as it was, the place we used to live on Foster Ave. was ideal for my Jr., Sr. and post-undergrad., pre-grad. days. The house was spacious, although there were not always enough rooms for all the people living there. My old roommate Jon lived on and off again in the attic and I once spent an entire summer sleeping on the couch in a room off the kitchen, awakened nearly every night by someone coming home and deciding to cook at 2 am.
"Oh," barely whispering, "that’s my roommate Jon, I guess he’s sleeping in here now."
"Why," barely curious interlocutor asks, "doesn’t he have a room?"
"I don’t know, who cares, ughh this kitchen is always so dirty, help me clean this pan will ya’?"
"Yeah, ok. Where’s the beer?"
Whereupon the noise would commence until the prepared meal would, thankfully, be taken into a room to be consumed and all the dishes dirtied in preparing it would be left for the next night, so that the same conversation could be repeated for my benefit.
I shouldn’t be so cynical. Mostly it was a wonderful place. I have so many happy memories from Foster Ave. that I really have to stretch to write about it in a negative light. In some way it seems as though I was the freest I had ever been in my life when I lived there. Just out of college, working at a great bookstore, 1st class diner right down the street to sequester myself in whenever I felt like drinking coffee and reading all night, which was frequently. My roommates were also great people. Two guys I had known since Jr. high, one of whom was never around and a succession of various people living in one of the other rooms. I had all kinds of things in those days, and it’s the only time I can remember when I actually had to debate with myself whether or not I wanted to leave. Up until this point and ever since, a move comes naturally. I feel that it’s time to go and I do, and after I leave it usually doesn’t feel as if much has changed, but when I did finally leave that place I did so amidst much internal argument and skepticism. I know that I had no other choice. If I didn’t leave that place when I did for SF I would’ve left it another time for a different place. Essentially, it was just a matter of which bus I was going to catch, not whether I was going to get on one at all. I’m glad I left. Many people I knew there have since left themselves and no one wants to be the last to leave the party (although I usually am.) Still, many of my good friends, in fact both of the guys I lived with, are still there. It’s a great place to go back and visit, to go unearthing old memories of winter nights, summer afternoons and autumn evenings. In fact it seems like every time I sit down to write something really substantial it’s a story that has come from my time in that house. They are the memories near enough to be full and rich without the gauzy covering that comes from memories when life perspective was different, for example those of childhood, or even, I hate to say it, the ridiculous stuff I did when I was 17 is also hard to center on anymore. It was just too long ago to remember without embellishing. Likewise, the most recent events often have a sheen of newness that needs to be buffed off by a little more time and experience before I can claim to be representing them correctly. Four years ago seems like a great time period for the glimmer to wear off, but also to hold the memory against obscurity. For this now we’re going to go into a dimly lit living room that hasn’t been cleaned in months.
I came in from a nice spring night, the kind where the fresh grass and the melting snow blend together on a light, clean vernal breeze, just enough so that a three block walk takes the smell of cigarette smoke out of your jacket. The door was never locked, even at night I don’t think anyone ever really considered locking the door and the familiar, but somewhat stale air of home greeted me on the threshold, a murky light and the sound of a television just out of sight, the atmosphere a mix of evening-quiet library and day-after-a-party frathouse . It was calm.
I walked into the living room and dropped into one of our enormous and battered couches, not bothering to take my hat and jacket off.
"Hey guys, what’s up, how was work?"
"Jon, we’ve got to get it out." My roommate, also named Jon announced, as if I’d been privy to the conversation that was going on between he and my other roommate Eric before I came in.
"It? What it? I…oh that. Do we have to tonight?" After I realized what ‘it’ was my spring ebullience left me.
"Yeah, Nelson (the landlord) came over and said it absolutely had to go before tomorrow. I guess there’s an inspector or someone coming over," Jon said, looking apologetic and even slightly scared.
"Well," I said, remembering that every unpleasant task must be done sometime and thereby letting a little of my former light-heartedness back in, "let’s go down there and get this over with."
There being no just cause for further delay, we slowly got up and walked toward the basement door.
Let me stop here a moment to give a little background for ‘it.’ What I’ve been referring to was a mattress that had somehow found it’s way to our basement. Even if we knew whose it once was no one would dare claim ownership of such a loathsome object. Of course we frequently hypothesized about where it had come from, all of us being sure it was the property of whoever we had lived with over the past three years that we had liked the least. My bet was on a girl who had come to live with us for a thankfully very brief period and who often accused me of plotting against her for very absurd and somewhat schizophrenic-sounding reasons. Jon claimed it came from another roommate that he had thought not very tidy and Eric, if he had any opinions, kept them to himself. Regardless, at some point this mattress had found its way to the basement floor, back behind the stairs, where it had presumably remained quite unobtrusively for some time. In fact I don’t remember ever noticing it until one day it made itself particularly conspicuous by being festooned with condom wrappers a few weeks after a party had been thrown. After this the mattress began to develop a certain repulsiveness. It brooded down in the most mildewed corner of our already filthy basement, providing refuge for all sorts of mutating insects and other assorted vermin. In fact, Jon and I had tried to move it already, about two months prior, but had dropped it and given up when a dark swarm of some spider-centipede highbred had come pouring out at the slightest perturbation.
There the mattress had remained for the duration of something like three spring basement floods, sponging up the brackish basement water and vomiting it up in little putrescent rivulets and breaking out in dark moldy splotches that did not bode well for what it had going on inside. Layers and layers of wet spongy foam, pregnant with abysmal dark terrors and Lovecraftian horrors, living forms of moist and dark filth.
I had never particularly liked going down into the basement before but with the mattress, swollen with its mephitic smell and seeming to wring out nightmares from its once posturpedic convolutions, I only went down when I absolutely had to and each instance brought me closer to the certainty that one day it was going to raise itself up and belch out some sort of Jabba the Hut-esque threat.
‘At least,’ I reasoned as we cautiously descended the basement stairs, ‘at least I don’t have to try to do this alone, so after we all get Ebola they’ll at least quarantine us together.’ It is sad to note that in man’s most lonely and frightened times he often thinks of ways to bring those he cares about most down to his own dark level of suffering.
Although there was a source of light, in the basement it seemed as if the darkness was total, every corner, every crevice all but roared with it. The basement was actually constructed in a manner that seemed conducive to peripheral darkness: strange anterooms and root cellars crept up to the main room from all sides; the single 60 watt bulb was not nearly enough to dispel the ages of darkness that seemed to be festering there. Amidst this backdrop of Chaos and Night the slick and dirty tumescence of the mattress seethed its poisonous dreams.
It seemed that we had tacitly agreed on a surprise capture, because before I was really aware of what was happening, I found myself grabbing a corner of what felt like gelatinous mold and angling it toward the door.
Our attempt with three people was much more successful that our attempt with two had been previously and soon we were already to the stairs, slipping up the wooden slats as quickly as possible trying not to gag or vomit. Our task was not merely the moving of a revolting object but rather, as it soon became apparent to us, an exorcism. As we toted stench incarnate or in-pillow-ate up the stairs we were each subject to reoccurring nauseating waves of stench memory. As they say that the fermentation of the grape is capable of taking on any known flavor due to the molecular arraignment as it becomes wine, the mattress had actually developed nuances of stink that mirrored every putrid thing I’d ever had the displeasure to smell before: summer dog shit, stagnant subway tunnel urine, halitosis, forgotten Tupperware in the back of the refrigerator and endless mountains of dirty socks. The mattress seethed with these smells and bled a thin dark line up the stairs and through the living room, angry that its rest had been disturbed.
I could see from the looks on my roommates’ faces that they were also revisiting their own worst olfactory memories. We shuffled through the house as quickly as we could not daring to drop the dreadful load near any place we actually lived in the house. As the door opened and the smell of the ghastly thing mixed with the fresh air it almost seemed to come to life with stink. We coughed and gagged, no longer able to hold back our horror and total revulsion. The mattress, as if sensing that the end had come at last, almost seemed to squirm in my grasp and I nearly let go my hold in surprise.
Near enough to the dumpster we finally pitched the thing down and immediately ran back into the house in search of quicklime and bleach, anything strong enough to eradicate what was surely septic ooze from our hands.
With the deed finally accomplished we returned to the living room to brag over our accomplishment and bravery while the mattress, now bested and dying quietly in the dark, eked out the last of its mordant juices and killed more than half of our lawn.
Next time I write I’ll try to get back to Armenia instead of writing about old basement horrors, but, unless you’re really squeamish, hopefully you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. It’s funny how such a disgusting memory can fill one with feelings of love and friendship. As I remembered this particular, otherwise uneventful evening, I couldn’t help but picture the three of us squirming up the stairs trying not to let the thing drip on us, laughing and gagging at the same time and, of course, the feeling of relief that followed when it was finally out of the house when we could return to our own peaceful musing brought about by a warm April night, when even the most distant joys seem totally attainable.

A Smile Like Moonlight on a Tombstone or Eating Over the Sink

2009-10-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

I
Sometimes it’s like this:

I woke up, as I always seem to do from an afternoon nap, at dusk. I had slept so long that I was totally disorientated. Even after a three-hour nap I still couldn’t seem to make up my mind whether I wanted to get up or not. I lay in the retreating light for a while feeling like I was about to doze again, when something changed my mind and I kicked off my sleeping bag and swung my legs to the floor in one motion. There was no reason to regret the nap, on Mondays I teach in the village school, something that’s not necessarily harder than teaching in the university, but takes a different kind of stamina, one that I really haven’t built up yet and probably won’t until I’m on the verge of leaving, considering I only go there once a week anyway. I can remember this feeling from substitute teaching in the states, after only 4 or 6 hours of work, coming home and promptly falling asleep, children’s laughter still a flush in your face and smelling of crayons.
Here the smell of school is a chalky, earthy redolence, like wet concrete walls, but it doesn’t cling to you like the way I remember American Elementary School smell clinging to me: brown paper bags and green vinyl floors. Smell or no smell I have woken up to my Friday evening, so I don’t regret the nap, now I’m ready, charged for a long walk in the closing light and then maybe a movie with a beer or something. I was looking for a sweater to throw on when I realized my stomach was aching with no small insistence. I ignored the feeling, dismissed it as some odd post nap thing, grabbed my headphones and set out.
Outside in the cool fall air my mouth felt thick, gummed up inside. My stomach was hurting more than it had been inside and I still felt disorientated, like I could still have been dreaming. On the pavement outside my apartment my shadow, thrown out by a lighted window startled me, as I thought it was some small animal running directly at my legs. Walking to the internet café, I realized that no one had called me. One of the volunteers had mentioned that he would be coming in for a class and would call me when it got out. I had looked forward to this, so it was with some dismay that I checked my phone and found I had missed no calls. I knew there was some excuse that I’d hear the next day or maybe the day after, and some how I dreaded this, dreaded it because I knew that nothing mattered except the present. At the moment I would’ve like to have had some company and I felt slightly abandoned for being denied it. Tomorrow that wouldn’t matter and I’d brush the issue off, but somehow that future conversation seemed absolutely abhorrent to me. Now I was alone, and there was a reason for that, he had some other engagement, but for some reason I almost shuddered to think of the time that would come when he’d explain to me why he hadn’t been able to call, like qualifying exactly what it was that was more important than me.
I left the internet café with a sudden desire to get far away from the center of town, away from all the cloying lights, the husky laughter and the cars. I was feeling thirsty as hell as I walked to the southern edge of town. For some reason my sense of smell felt incredibly heightened, to the point where all the burning and rotting smells of autumn were practically chocking me. I was feeling tired, it wasn’t just sleep I hadn’t shaken off but a deep fatigue, like what you feel when you’ve got the flu.
I watched the stars as I walked, One of them fell but I crowded it too full of wishes for any of them to come true. I then thought what a shame it was that I spent the beautiful scene wanting something more, as if a falling star on a quiet night wasn’t enough. I remembered how my childhood friend and I used to hook pinkies and wish for things after we had said the same thing at the same time (where people usually jinx each other). I had read somewhere that this was a foolproof way of attaining wish fulfillment. He and I spent so much time to together that we said many things at the same time, leading to many wishes. At first they had been long and descriptive but gradually they had been shortened, probably more out of the embarrassment of having to tacitly link pinky fingers as late as 7th or 8th grade after saying something at the same time, only further pandering to the rumor that we were quite gay, or as it was in the parlance back then "gay together," as if one needed a cohort to be gay with, or possibly that it would’ve been ok to be gay alone.
My stomach still hurt and I began to think how nice it is to smoke when things like bad stomach aches present themselves. When you want something to take your mind off the pain that also lends a little composure. I decided that a lemon Fanta would go well with the cigarette I was going to have when I got home. I stopped into a store and bought one, feeling like I looked horrible after a woman nearly shut the door in my face, wheeled around to see what was blocking the progress of the door and actually dramatically widened her eyes when she saw me, like something out of a Hitchcock movie, which I guess made sense considering I felt like vertigo itself, standing there taking in too much smell, too much brightness, feeling too tired with a lead stomach. When I got home I thought about phone calls I’d like to make without actually making any of them while smoking cigarettes and drinking my Fanta.
II. Sometimes it’s like this:
I watched the sun come up this morning from my kitchen window while grinding stale coffee beans by hand. Sometimes, and I couldn’t tell you why, the morning feels rushed even when I’ve got more time than things to do; this morning there was, however, no hurry. I stood on the broken vinyl floor in my bare feet looking out over the mountains without really concentrating on a single thought, just kind of going along with all of them.
After the coffee I heated some water in my living room and bathed by dumping cup after cup over my head in an old bathtub that already needs to be bleached again. With my hair still wet I walked down to the university, wearing ridiculous clothes but not feeling at all awkward.
Over the course of the day I shifted out of various classes and talked about various vocabulary words, the need to learn them and any verb tenses that they could possibly be coupled with. Probably not the best way to teach a language, but so far it seems to be getting me somewhere.
Sometimes I thought of South America, or the southern end of Armenia, or, inexplicably, a late evening coffee in Ann Arbor, Michigan I drank almost two years ago.
At the end of the day a student approached me, as many of them have been doing lately, and asked if I was doing one-on-one tutoring. I told her she was welcome to come after class to a session I was doing with only two other beginners. She seemed to balk at the idea of having anyone else around and asked if I was free at the moment. I was and we met a few minutes later in my classroom to talk about her village and possible travel ideas.
As mundane as the experience was, between the Armenian clarifications and the slow, basic English questioning, I suddenly became aware of a familiar feeling of light-headed, almost transcendent happiness. Like the feeling I remember getting when I was a kid getting my hair shampooed before having it cut somewhere. Even at ten years old I remember sitting perfectly still, while someone worked the coconut-smelling shampoo out of my hair and feeling like I was about to drift into some kind of beautiful dream. Talking about the village of Malishka and Paris today this feeling came back to me, and though the conversation faltered as a result I didn’t mind at all and just smiled when I realized that I hadn’t really been paying enough attention to advance the conversation beyond a certain point.
When my after-school lessons had finished, I went home to a quick meal before going back out for my language tutoring, during which I made my tutor laugh quite a few times, not directly as a result of my incompetence, but rather through my making light of it. As the sun set we had begun to talk of the recent events of our daily lives and the exchange was comfortable, as I both understood and seemed to have little problem in communicating my own thoughts.
I stopped by the internet café again and caught the main market area in the rare window of time after the sun has completely set but none of the shop keepers have closed, in the darkness the lights wash out into the piles of garbage, catch the eyes of stray dogs and flicker in stationary car taillights.
I stood by the window awhile again after I got home, drinking a bottle of half-frozen peach nectar, three-liter size, looking down in the now dark and empty streets. My phone rang and the girl I tutor was suddenly telling me I had to go over to her house. She’s done this before, telling me she has something really important to say only to shove an overstuffed bag of walnuts, tomatoes and peppers in my arms and run back inside. I told her I didn’t want any food, still had enough from the last time I barely escaped getting two sweaters along with my farmer’s market surplus bag, a cornucopia that’s still rolling all over my fridge. I wasn’t bothered at all, in fact I was enjoying the novelty of the conversation, which essentially consisted of her trying to get me to come over, or at least meet her somewhere to take some food under the ruse that there was to be no food involved and that she merely had a question.
"Well, ask me the question now."
"I can’t…it’s important, you have to come over here"
"Why would I have to do that, I’m coming tomorrow, we’ll talk then."
"No you have to come now, right now (first time I think I’ve ever heard anyone say this in Armenian.)"
"I don’t need anymore food (kind of laughing.)"
"Come over! There‘s no food."
I wondered what I was going to find myself carrying back as I set down my apartment stairs, skipping over the steps familiarly in the dark.
I met my friend and tutee in the street between our buildings’ lots. She said hello and thrust a hot pastry at me, my favorite, Zhingelov hots, like southern greens baked in the middle of a loaf of homemade bread.
I went back home to my window and my frozen nectar and a dinner I hadn’t expected to eat a few minutes before.

Rooftop to Rooftop Transfer!

2009-08-24T02:13:00.000-07:00

Books to Read and Homes to Read Them in or Bleat out the Dusk

2009-08-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

I wonder how the last group of volunteers, the one’s that just went home, felt when they first met us last year? Did they have the same hope, the same desire to connect with different people? Did they have the same difficulty trying to hide their excitement and anxiety? If anyone from the previous group was feeling these things and exhibiting signs of bewilderment or reluctance last year I never would’ve noticed. Back then I didn’t care. Armenia was still a new experience, and after two months off daily training our first occasion to really meet these volunteers at a softball game struck me as completely unimportant. They waited there on the field, aware of the significance of this first meeting, trying, as we did this year, to find the correct way to usher us in, to make us feel comfortable with them and still fresh from the states, from training in Philadelphia and still getting to know each other we brazenly turned around and left the game to find a café to relax in.
I remember my apathy from that day, one year ago. How the softball game and the senior volunteers seemed so unimportant to me and how walking into town to have a beer instead sounded much more enjoyable. This year, after so many winter afternoons dragging along under banks of grey clouds and long spring evenings watching the sun set through my windows and all the countless hours spent alone, the new volunteers were like a miracle. Almost 50 people about to endure much of the same things we had already endured, living with the same families that we had lived with the year before: new people to discuss our experiences with, to share, to complain and to plan with.
At the same time I almost didn’t want to meet them at all. I wanted to have the opportunity to meet them on an individual basis. The groups here are no good, or at least they’re not for me. I can never seem to find anything meaningful trying to interact with over seventy people. I knew their feelings at the game would be similar to my own the year before. They would not feel much excitement about meeting us, rather they would be happy only for the opportunity to take a break from the incredibly rigorous and often monotonous training schedule. They would stay in their own group, occasionally looking over at us, possibly trying to read something of their future here in our faces. I wonder if they could see the shadows of depression, the smiles of accomplishment, the year of students, broken conversations, piles of books read. Did our faces betray us? Did we arch our eyebrows too much? Did we stand too still or pace too often? Did we look the sum of a year of alienation, triumph, uncertainty and hope?
Immediately I wanted to be loved by all those new faces. I wanted them to know me and to know them so that we could have earnest and fruitful conversations. To some degree I wanted to find a reason to stay another year in the crowd. I wanted to see a reflection of my own face a year ago and remember the deracinating passion for travel and discovery that had pulled me up from San Fran. and brought me to this country, this town and this playing field.
But at a sports game people stand on two different sides of the field, what’s more they intentionally heckle each other, they engage in what’s pretty much the exact opposite of warm, friendship building conversation. They joke, argue and insult, all in fun, all in sport, but all prohibitive to what I wanted to find out there. Of course I joined in the game, rooting for my own team, the people I’ve been here with since the June before last. I argued, I threw up my hands with relish when we scored, shook my head in disappointment when we struck out. And I felt closer to my teammates. The guys that had stayed, the 35 of us left from a group of 50. I let them know that I cared about them after all the text messages they had sent and books they had lent, these people I never thought I would be close to looked like old friends to me. They deserved my support, they deserved to kick the ball over everyone’s heads and get to third base, to run home. But so badly, under the cheers, I wanted to go over and thank the new group just for coming, for continuing the tradition of coming here and working and learning that has occasionally seemed impossible to me.

II.

Despite what everyone said there was no early transportation to Yerevan. Of course there was a marshutka waiting there, but a parked marshutka is really just a bus shelter until all its seats have been filled, and in the morning this is usually a slow process. That particular morning was no exception. I waited, sitting patiently in the back seat, for about an hour and a half until there was no other place to squeeze anyone. I had been hoping to get to Yerevan by 11 in order to catch the marshutka to Tbilisi where I was due to meet someone the following day. If I didn’t make it I would miss a week of work at a camp in Georgia that I had been looking forward to working at since March.
Yerevan is about and hour and a half away from Yeghegnadzor. We left at about 9:15. At first I tried to read but, as with all rushed travelers, I seemed to think that there more attention I paid to the road the faster we would go, like if I looked frazzled enough and stared intensely out the window the driver would take the hint and drive even more rampantly and manically. It didn’t work,. We went the usual pace until, after about 20 minutes we came to a total stop. I groaned. The men all got out to look over the engine and see if any of them could identify would needed to be fixed to get us moving again. After about 15 minutes I noticed they were beginning to light second cigarettes and drift away from the engine, without getting back in the marshutka: a bad sign. I leaned my head against the window and let out a long weary sigh. I had left the house at 7:45 and now at 9:45 I was barely a twenty-minute walk from my front door.
After some deliberation we were routed to another marshutka that passed by, or almost all of us were, I alone was left after a great jostling effort to drag goods and children into the limited open seats of the replacement. By the time I reached the other marshutka I found myself staring into an open door of a full van, no sympathetic face to be seen. I pleaded to sit on the floor, but what is usually a valid request was denied me and the marshutka sped away, leaving me alone with a sullen driver and no foreseeable way to Yerevan. I asked him what to do, despite the fact that I already knew the answer. He shrugged and said I would wait for the next one. Of course. Of course I would.
For a while I paced back and forth, hoping that a passing car would pick me up along the side of the road, but almost every car that passed looked completely full, either with people or tomatoes, of which some cars were so full that it looked as if they had no driver, just happy piles of tomatoes piloting Ladas down the road, taking themselves to market.
Eventually my relief came, by that time I wasn’t sure it mattered, but regardless of whether or not I’d make the Yerevan-Tbilisi marshutka I was happy to be moving again instead of imagining things about tomatoes by the side of the road.
At times I thought, “maybe I’ll still make it, we’re making pretty good time, it might be possible.” I had been told that the last marshutka left either at 11am or noon. My hope was that I’d still be able to catch the noon departure, if it existed. I clenched my teeth when we stopped for one of those unpredictable smoke breaks that some drivers indulge in and that others never bother with. Luckily these are never very long and soon we were on our way again, the mood a little lightened by the cheap tobacco mirth the men had all brought back into the marshutka with them after the break. Children turned around to peek at me and out the windows from their mother’s laps, while the mothers talked quietly about food prices and the men stared stoically ahead or rested their foreheads and the back of bouncing jump seats. We were getting into the swing of the journey and this relaxed me a little. If nothing else I thought I’d go into Yerevan, beg for some sort of Tbilisi passage, find nothing and resign myself to an afternoon stroll through the capital and maybe a cup of coffee somewhere and some letter writing. The trip, I decided, wouldn’t be for nothing, regardless of what happened. Than the engine stated sputtering and we pulled over, still not even half way there.
It quickly became apparent that there was nothing that could be done, after a look at the situation no one made any movement to act, in fact I think I even saw a few looks of total resignation pass over the faces of the crowd the moment the hood was opened. Other cars that slowed to see if they could help were quickly and curtly waved away, as if they had been onlookers to something far more disturbing that a broken-down engine. Still in the marshutka, but diligently observing the scene outside, the women and I began to discuss our impending fate as the oft seen, squalid and desperate looking party along the side of a broken down vehicle. Like a scene from The Grapes of Wraith, we would bow our heads against the dust and the weight of our mental anguish while awaiting some kind of miracle, hollow-eyed and hungry.
To pass the time I went out to smoke and soon found myself trying to converse with a fellow passenger who did not seem to share my desire for conversation. After trying to figure out what was going on and when we could expect to leave (tomorrow, next week, when the first snows fell) I made the brutal mistake of lamenting my fate to the guy standing next to me.
“This is second time this thing to happen to me today!” I whined piteously.
“So what?” but the way he said it doesn’t really deserve a question mark. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. ‘Shut up, I don’t care’ was what he was really saying.
My cultural adaptation may not be so far advanced to prevent me from saying certain stupid things, but after a year here it has reached a point where it allows me to immediately see the folly of what I’ve said before I’ve finished saying it. This was just such a case. I wanted to erase the idiocy of my feeble complaint by saying something, but nothing was going to work, apart from saying” well, enough of this bullshit” and promptly walking over and fixing the engine with a single deft blow to the hood, like the way one would imagine The Fonz would fix a car. Only by doing something so gracefully cool would I be able to salvage some kind of dignity.
I knew it was bad when the driver just started walking away. I mean everyone there had cellphones and even in remote areas, Armenia has really good reception. The guy could’ve called anyone, anywhere, instead he slowly, not at all confidently, began walking down in the road. In curious manner that suggested that any minute he might change his mind and start off on a different course, though the weeds or toward the distant mountains. I imagined if we were in Japan he’d probably be kneeling on a mat and unsheathing a sword by now, that’s how dejected he looked. I wanted to run after him and get my money back and start walking to Yerevan, rather than apparently just resigning myself to death as it seemed most of the people around me had done. I started out to catch up with him, but after a few minutes of jogging my own apathy kicked in. It was still a long way to Yerevan, but busy enough on the road where hitchhiking would be difficult. I lit another cigarette and blinked into the blinding sun.
After a while the driver turned around and started walking back. Worst of all we could see he didn’t even go anywhere, just walked down the street for a while and turned around. Our spirits sunk and some began to listlessly drag their stuff off the marshutka to hitchhike or walk. But, as if sensing the hardship and heartbreak, an empty marshutka, blasting duduk-laden festive music, suddenly pulled over and stopped. The driver pulled open the door with a big smile on his face, we smiled in response. A little bit of room is cleared and in no time at all we’re all getting in and finding our seats, laughing, and happy to be saved. Best of all, I noticed there was something novel and carefree about the marshutka, the driver didn’t seem at all serious, like he was just out for a drive and decided he wanted some company right when he saw all of us on the roadside. The music continued to play and as the people get on I hear them all laughing about something, something beyond their own thankfulness, something inside that’s actually funny.
I pulled myself into the marshutka, ‘whoa,’ I thought, ‘who peed?” “Who peed all over this thing?” Because no doubt someone had. The smell was like one of those urinals in a high school basement that the janitor has apparently decided is not worth his time.
“How good this smell is that is coming!” I found myself remarking to my happy travel companions, hoping that they will appreciate my joke. An old woman smiled at me and pointed to the back seat, “look there.”
I looked under the seat and saw my own curious expression reflected back to me through the benign and peaceful eyes of a sheep and before I could even sit down we were tearing down the road again.

Neighbors, Answer Your Phones! Children, Answer Your Mothers! or "Salutations"

2009-07-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a huge American map on my kitchen wall now. Patti, my sitemate who’s leaving in a week, gave it to me after cleaning out her apartment. Of course there was probably little question as to who would get the thing since nearly every time I went to her apartment at some point I would approach the tapestry of states, union, south-west, Maine, and travel the roads for awhile in my imagination, imaging routes that I would take when I returned home, Montreal, through Vermont, back to California along the ten, changing to the 8 after Phoenix to finally see San Diego. While everyone else talked in the background about the snow falling outside, or what happened on the marshutka I traveled those roads, revisiting many of them. Dawn in Wyoming, almost five years ago, traveling by van. I wrote a postcard to someone at a gas station about the gas station itself and, as a result committed the scene to memory; Queens from Jamaica Station after a rainy layover at JFK; Memphis looking like something from a 1950s TV show, like Cuba without all the fedoras and white walled tires; Missoula, still hot late at night after a long summer afternoon, smoldering with casino lights; gauzy visions of early April morning in Vancouver, BC; Fox theatre in Detroit at 16, at 23; a bowl of coffee in a service station-cum-café as persuasion to spend the afternoon walking through Denver in February, where snow etches out faded graffiti; the European obelisk in Indianapolis; somnambulism: Portland; driving barefoot through Nebraska, like walking through warm summer fields; and a coyote skulking carefully down a suburban cul-de-sac in the hills above Los Angeles, where the moonlight dissipates into the city’s carmine glow; three-day old coffee spilled in the cup holder, cigarette butts between the seat cushions, CDs loosed from their sleeves and rolling along the dash, halogen rest stops, I’ll love you by Reno, and run out of things to say by Arizona, by mining towns, the water running out on the long stretch between Death Valley and Las Vegas.
And still so much that I haven’t seen between Kansas and Alaska, South Carolina and Florida but I know people that have come from these places and gone back to them since I have been here. I’ve listened to people talk about the places that they’ve come from and why they have to go back to them, people who don’t want to go back, people who have moved. “The last volunteer was from San Francisco, too,” my last host family asked, “why are you so different than her?”
I wonder how much I’ve begun to embellish America over the last year away from it. I’ve always been curious about the various corners, the small to medium-sized towns where, perhaps some new movement is fomenting. What are they doing in Brownsville? Biloxi? Is something about to happen in one of these places? Could I be a part of it if I move in time? I’ve never really understood exactly what it is I’ve expected to find on the edges of America. I’ve looked up pictures of Boise and Las Cruces on the internet, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that will indicate an ideal, but even if I did chance upon a place full of 24-hour taquerias and dive bars with punk rock records on the juke box I know that in the end such things would not hold me to a certain place. I’ve already lived in places that have had such things. In Chicago most taquerias are open all night, but the burritos are better in SF, in Minneapolis there are a number of dive bars where you can listen to Dillinger 4 records, but they’ve got those internet jukeboxes all over the place now where you can listen to anything you want.
In the end you’re left with the people. Surely it’s the people that make a place worth living in. At least I can say that every time I’ve moved the people are missed well above what ever conveniences and incidentals the place itself actually offered. Sometimes I miss walking down Dolores in the afternoon with a cup of coffee by myself, but I miss talking over the cover of my book to my old roommate Mikey a hellovalot more. All the places I uses to go were populated by certain people and, inevitably, my memories of those places are tied to the people that I experienced them with. If I didn’t have the people all my memories would be of ghost towns. But then why move at all? I’m not really the type to suddenly find myself at odds with my friends, especially not to the degree where I’d want to move away. But here again it comes back to the abstract of a place, just a name, just an idea, an abstract on the map. Maybe it’s the mystery behind it all, or maybe it’s still the people, not the great friends that you share your daily life with, but rather a new crowd, that’s into different things and speaks Spanish or something. Of course there’s a recurring note here, namely that one who moves frequently is really only seeking out the same experience over and over again. It’s an approximation but basically the same: friends, favorite places to eat, drink, walk, listen to music, be alone etc. In every place I’ve ever lived I’ve had these things.
I think it’s really just a youthful desire to feel like you’ve looked, so in the end, when you end up somewhere you feel like you got the best deal around. Even though you are vaguely aware that the differences between places are actually quite marginal.
So the slow summer wind pulls up the corners of my new map in the kitchen, the papery flapping sound jumbling all the Midwest, Southeast and Key Wests together.

II. I’m not really sure where to begin with this. So much has happened in the last week or so that I’m just going to have to begin with the most absurd points and work my way into the more serious stuff.
A moment ago I came to the conclusion that internet dating is right for me. Based mostly on the notion that inevitably my ability to relate to a person is what ultimately attracts me to them. That’s not entirely a blanket statement, sure there’s other things about a person that make them attractive, but almost everything else, I mean every other quality fades after a while except the feeling that you can open yourself up to that person, that you can rely on them to listen and, what’s more, to actually understand your garbled thoughts. Certainly, we’ve all realized this before, but, I think, what we haven’t realized, is that internet dating, no matter how vapid and sterile it might seem, is actually a well-spring of like-minded people, who believe in communication, why else would they be on the internet? Also, when you think about it, on the computer, all you can do is communicate, it’s like the greatest foundation for building a relationship on communication because it doesn’t allow for anything else.
Then again, what is communication without personality? So much conversational minutiae is lost between the keys of an online conversation. There’s no sarcasm, no body language, only smiley face icons and ellipsis. One could probably carry on an internet conversation with someone for years and still be surprised when they finally met them by how they really acted and who they really were.
Then again, if internet-based communication bars the emotional basis of face-to-face conversation what does the say about all texts, notes, letters or even literature, certainly there’s something more than 900 pages of chatroom antics to be found in Les Miserables.But I guess I can’t say that one lacks something the other has, based on format when they are of the same format. If we can come to love the Fantines and Remedioses through a few chapters, perhaps the same can be said of real people. In fact maybe life can truly imitate art this way, all the better, life becomes art when people date on the internet.
Yeah, I don’t really buy any of that either. It still seems to awkward to me, and there’s a lot of heroines I’ve liked but I don’t know if I’d really want to meet any of them.
I have also recently discovered what seems to be a near permanent link to the internet which is soaking up my extra time. I really didn’t want to get the internet for this reason. When I’m not doing anything I end up looking at my aforementioned map for about twenty minutes and then going off and looking up mid-sized American towns on Wikipedia, trying to get an idea if I’d like to visit El Paso or some place, perhaps even live there. I don’t really seriously consider the latter, but anything uncertain is open for consideration and so come the thoughts about living in National City, California. It seems Tom Waits lives there and there’s a high enough crime rate to make me think I might be able to afford it. I’m not entirely sure where it is, south, or south-east of San Diego, probably just a scattered suburb in the desert, but in the languor of a hot afternoon I imagine it’s some last bastion of cheap, fun and friendly living in southern coastal California, yet another place with cheap Taqerias and bars where everyone comes up and introduces themselves if you’re sitting alone.
Perhaps I am misusing the internet, maybe it’d be better, more constructive, if I took up internet dating.
The other day my friend Raman died. It was sometime in the late morning when I found out. My friend Ben was visiting from his site in Jermuk. The weather was late-morning-hot, the kind of heat that makes you feel like you’ve already wasted a whole day sitting around even though it’s only ten o’clock. I was expecting two couch surfers to come that day, later on the evening. As Ben arrived via the earliest marshutka he had woken me up at 9:30 or so. I was still sleeping as I had not been able to make myself comfortable enough to sleep the night before amidst these damn sandwich bag pillows that have no yield, and my reasonably decent couch that I kept trying to roll off for some reason.
For some reason I like being woken up by visitors, provided I enjoy their company. It reminds me of college. It nice to just wake up and have your day start off with a friend who wasn’t around when you went to sleep. I can remember a few instances of waking up late, sometime in the afternoon to someone sitting on my bed.
“You’re still sleeping, man? C’mon we gotta’ go! The lake/Oregon/Minnesota/the local diner awaits!”
In fact, I remember sometimes almost intentionally sleeping in to wake up to such an event, of course in the morning it doesn’t take a lot of effort to keep sleeping, but when you feel like you’ve got an incentive, that’s good living.
Feeling pleased and tired I decided to make pancakes. Of course coffee goes great with pancakes so I made a few cups and, while it was boiling some potatoes fried with onions and peppers sounded like it would round everything out well enough so I began making that as well.
The sun shone through the window, Ben and I were talking across the kitchen about graphic novels and the general art of story telling. The pancakes didn’t rise very much but with syrup they were still really good. Fried potatoes are always good.
The dishes were easy enough and we moved back into the living room to finish our conversation. I gazed at the sunlight that drifted through the dust motes above my couch and listened to Ben alternately talk and type on my computer, as he checked listings for apartment rentals back in Austin where he’d be moving when he went back in less than two weeks. I felt happy for him and I felt happy for myself. The first year had fully passed; the volunteers from the year before were returning home. I had completed something, and felt confident enough to do it again, maybe even make it better. Ideas bounced flitted through my mind for the coming year and ways to make more of an impact in the university, and Ben and I talked about the last year in Armenia
When Ben left to go fax some papers I decided to take a turn at the computer. Happily, I noted that I had a message from my friend Mikey. It was brief. “I got your letter. Call me, it’s important.”
“Sure, why not?” I thought to myself. “It’s been a good morning and a phone call to a good friend would only strengthen that impression, enhance the morning.”
I have a thing about making phone calls to the states. I really only like to make them when I’m feeling really good, otherwise I worry that I’ll complain too much or not be able to think of anything to say. I’ve developed this practice through experience. After having moved many times over the past couple of years I find calls to people no longer in my vicinity can leave me feeling very disappointed if I don’t time them right. Sometimes, a call can succeed in making one feel incredibly far away from people if not handled correctly. I can recall a few instances of this from when I was living alone in northern California. Making lonely 2am phone calls back to San Francisco and being greeted with the din and excitement of a familiar bar, something that clashed so desperately with the sound of frogs peeping outside my quiet, mildewy northern Pacific apartment. Even worse, having little or nothing to say can make one feel as though one has grown apart from good friends, that there are no common interests or that one’s life has become so boring that no events are worth describing. I hate that feeling, so I make it a point to call people when I’m feeling good, ebullient enough to chat about nothing for a while and appreciate it.
Usually every time I try to call Mikey he doesn’t answer the phone. Who knows what the hell he’s always doing. His voice mail message only furthers one’s sense of curiosity.
“Hey, this is Mike, I’m doing something that involves me not answering my phone right now, so if you’ll leave your name and number I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.”
In my case “as soon as I can” is whenever I try to call him again, as calling Armenia is pretty expensive from the states.
I called an got the message after a few rings.
“Hey…Jonny?”
A pleasant note of happiness and uncertainty. It wasn’t the message, but the “hey” part sounded exactly the same and fooled me for a second.
“Hey, Mikey, what’s going on, man?” for some reason I always say “what’s going on” when I haven’t talked to somebody in a while. I guess it sounds a little more elaborate and celebratory than “what’s up” to me.
“Nothing, man, how are you, it’s good to hear from you.”
“Good, man I’m good, I’m good. What’s going on?” I say again to further the impression of my jubilation at having made this phone call.
“Well, I’ve got some bad news.” I can’t really remember if he called it bad news or not. What’s important is that I got the impression that Mikey was going to tell me about an author’s death. He always seems to find out about them before me and usually reports it first thing, perhaps so that the conversation that follows will be a fitting discussion of the author’s works. Something of a fitting tribute to the life of anyone who dedicated their life to letters.
“Raman died, Jonny.”
“…”
“…”
How the hell do you start talking after someone says something like that on the phone?
“How’d it happen?”
That’s probably the most moronic way, but usually the first thing that comes to mind, the first sorta’ feint at real grief the mind comes up with.
“Car accident, somewhere in Nevada, he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.”
At this point one’s verbal skills are reduced to:
“Fuck.”
Which I continue to say, pretty much after everything else Mikey says for the rest of the conversation. Sometimes varying the tone, drawing it out like a sigh, sometimes sighing before I say it and adding it after like some kind of punctuation mark. Because the only thing you really can’t do with this word is request more information, I mean you can’t say it like a question, it would sound absurd. Because of this I occasionally add “really?" to the end
“Fuck, really?”
It still doesn’t sound very coherent, my end of the conversation lags on like a sputtering tire, gradually losing its air, flapping off the highway and into a rest stop.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Like a locomotive regularly pumping the wheels back and forth with burst of steam, slowly, between words.
Mikey talks and I puff. I flap.

When the conversation is over and I’ve gotten the basic details, I notice that Ben has come back from faxing. He seems to have understood the gist of the conversation despite only being able to hear my laconic responses.
“You ok, man? Do you want me to go?”
I honestly didn’t know.
“No, it’s ok, man. Hang out, it’s ok.”
I had absolutely nothing to say. I told Ben what had happened, somewhere in Nevada. I tried to keep talking to avoid any kind of awkward silence. Ben, not being able to know anything about my relation to Raman or who he was at all, probably had no idea if I was going to collapse and rent my clothes while screaming and dumping the ashtray on my head or if I’d just shrug and say well, you know, the only guarantee in life. Want some more coffee?
I told Ben a little about Raman, how he and I had been friends through my later years of college. How we never really called each other up to hang out , but were always glad to see each other at all the social events we attended in common. I told him about how Raman was a beautiful kid with positivity and energy to spare. How I couldn’t remember if I had seen him after we met in Phoenix a few years ago. That he lived in a very energetic way that was at least some consolation, that he had gotten a lot out of the short life he had. That he and I used to spend Tuesday afternoons sitting in in front of this used bookstore he worked at and acted as caretaker to. How one of the most romantic encounters I have had with anyone was in the bookstore after the bars closed.
I didn’t tell him about how Raman had been the last person I said goodbye to when I moved away from the city I went to college in and, as a result, passed some of the best years of my life. I didn’t tell him how Raman had me do a mural on the back wall of the bookstore that as far as I know is still there. How he had me design a recycling bin for the bookstore, that I stared at, painted and repainted over an entire July, sweating like crazy in my old basement. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t remember what Raman’s last name was, despite the fact that I knew he knew mine, as I heard him say it a good number of times. I didn’t mention Beggar’s Banquet, nor Mac’s nor Dagwood’s, the name which just occurred to me after not being able to remember it, attempting to find a hint of it on the internet and only drudging up a bunch of old memories by finding listings for a bunch of other places I had forgotten about, but not Dagwood’s, the name of which occurred to me after finishing the search. All the conversations we shared all over the place, agreeing on all kinds of things, most of the time proposing ridiculous ideas for local change at three o’clock in the morning and drawing up basic plans for their implementation.
When Ben left, I found myself sitting in a local café, not wanting to be there and trying to read Charlotte’s Web, which I had checked out from the library only a few days before, unaware of the pending significance of my selection. I got the feeling that Raman would’ve liked to find his friend reading a child’s paperback classic, with a notepad nearby ready for notes and beginnings to letters that probably wouldn’t be finished. So much of what we had often discussed was based on the mutual enjoyment of this vaguely aesthetic way to whilie away of the hours. I decided to write a letter to Raman, telling him what I was doing after I heard he died, how I thought he’d like it, but after a while I gave up, the café was hot and I felt guilty, given that I had never written him a letter before, it seemed stupid on my part to start now.
The couch surfers from Hungary came a few hours later. There was nothing I could do, I’d been telling them for months that I would be available. When they arrived I tried to excuse myself by hinting that there’d been some bad news from home, but I guess I was too vague, because they only proceeded to ask me what I was doing in Armenia and how I liked it there and what were some things to see around town and whether or not it was hard to learn Armenian.
The next day I had to leave for camp in the evening. I woke up feeling despondent, not so much from the news itself but from the unreality of it. I wanted to talk to someone, I wanted to remind myself that this had really happened, because Armenia was closing in around me. I had work to do for the camp, I had to clean up my apartment, my window broke, actually fell out onto the entrance stairs to the apartment, it could’ve killed someone. Like Raman, Raman died. I had to practice break dancing if I was going to try to use it to teach some English to the campers. Had to get this damn trash outta’ here, this damn trash that’s been piling up for ever, making the hall way look like a damn dump, just take one minute to get this bullshit pile of trash outta' here. then to the university, then maybe lunch.
In the evening I called Colleen. It was early in the morning Michigan time. I had to leave to catch the camp bus in 20 minutes, an escape in case the conversation didn’t go well.
“Uhh, Hello?”
I woke her up.
“Hey what’s up. Sorry if I woke you up. I knew I’d be able to get a hold of you if I called early enough. What time is it there anyway?”
“Hey, uhh, nine thirty.”
“Nine thirty!? Wow you should be up anyway, I don’t feel so bad now.”
“I had to close the bar last night.”
“Oh, you still work there? The place I visited last time I was in town?”
“No that place closed, this is a different bar, but I’ve got a new job, I’m going to start teaching in the Fall.”
Everything changes. Only a week before my friend Jules had had a baby. Now Colleen is going to be a teacher and Raman has died. A great friend and a great kid, a reunion that would never take place, someone I shared things with that I will not be able to reminisce with anyone else about, because no one was around. Someone I created memories with that I’ll always have. Someone who sent me a clipping from an old Sci-Fi magazine, an advertisement for the Peace Corps from circa 1967 that made me feel happy to be here. Here, Armenia, where I got the news that my friend had died just before going to work at a summer camp and tried really hard to reconcile these two things.
I called from camp the next morning. My friend’s voices greeted me talking from and about the list of bars I wrote about above. Everyone sounded good. They were remembering. I hung up the phone and remembered with them for a while, then I went into breakfast.

Take Me to the Movies or Post-Visegrad

2009-07-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

I. In Armenia they begin giving final exams shortly after the official last day of classes, but unlike the US university model, these exams are slowly meted out over the course of about 5 weeks. So while the last day of classes was back in May, I’ve just returned from a month long vacation to give a final exam, which I’ll admit was slightly bewildering. Not that I had any problems, in fact everything went pretty well, despite the fact that I was slightly still in vacation mode and showed up in an un tucked shirt and jeans with holes in them, thus spoiling my dapper appearance record. Well, maybe not, but I’m sure no one appreciated the fact that I looked like I’d just cruised in off the free bread line to proctor a pedagogical exam. I can tell you they don’t have the reverence for the archetypal scruffy professor that we’ve been so indoctrinated with in the states. Quoting Walt Whitman and leading a gaggle of students off in poetic exploration wouldn’t impress anyone around here they way they make it out in Hollywood. But Hollywood isn’t really a representation of anything, fevered dreams of mad people, really.
Despite the slight hang ups of reintroducing myself to this conservative country, I’ve actually been having a good time since I’ve gotten back. Leaving the country for a while has really helped me to understand how much I like about it. Along the route between Tbilisi and Sarajevo I saw many beautiful landscapes, quite scenes carouseled past train windows: heather blowing in the twilight, shining afternoon cobblestone streets, minarets lifting eastern Turkish cities up toward the moon, and all the pastorals sung by bus engines, desperate street merchants, cicadas and river valleys alike, but, despite the grandeur that was the Western Ottoman empire at one point, I’ve returned to Armenia to find that nearly everything I enjoyed on vacation is available here to varying degrees. All the beautiful scenes of the Turkish Orient and the brigand-green hills of Bosnia have their approximations in Armenia. In the evening there’s no call to prayer, but there are the bright notes of kids playing under my kitchen window. There’re no palm trees, but all the former stumps along the main streets of Yeghegnadzor (stripped for wood in the winter) have sprouted incredible green tufts that make them resemble something from a Dr. Seuss book. There’s not quite the same sense of exploration and adventure that results from sleeping on the ground at border crossings and being in a different country with only ten dollars, but there’s still the effects of an entirely different set of mores and standards, which at times can become complicated but always feel like something different. Finally, there’s no sea, no collision of two blue horizons, nothing that could be the Pacific as seen from Ocean Beach, or the spit that comes out over the Humboldt bay. There’s nothing here that you could really cast your imagination into like the black sea, but for imagination I have the help of my friends that supply me with different ideas while encouraging my own nonsense. And or course that’s the only thing that really makes anyplace habitable: people you like. It was great to come back here and talk with these people again, other volunteers, the people who put up with my horrible Armenian in Yeghegnadzor: grocers, university faculty, the dude who loves Deep Purple down at the cultural center and all the people who even after a year don’t know what I’m doing here and stop me in the street to ask me.
So while I still find myself standing in front of the map, tracing out new routes and pinpointing new border crossing to sleep on, it’s good to be back in a place I can kinda’ understand.

II.
I would like to have an opportunity to get to know all these great people better, though. I find my life is crowded with so many temporary positions here. For one thing I’m only a volunteer in Armenia for two years, I could extend that if I wanted, I could even stay indefinitely, but from the very beginning one always feels both the beginning and end of the two year term. From the day I arrived I knew I’d be here two years: a verifiable date two calendars ahead. Usually the stages that make up life aren’t so clearly defined. It seems this has an interesting effect on the way one chooses to interact, like an orbit, or a season, there is a goal to be found at its completion. All the other volunteers (Peace Corps, EVS and other assorted international NGOs) are also functioning in shifts. All the people one meets, all the different relations one develops, are confused by all these different lengths of time. One meets locals, with a two-year near-guarantee, other volunteers come and go. I’ve missed more going away parties here than I’ve attended in my whole life, all for people that I hardly knew, but would’ve liked to have gotten to know better.
Travelers come though, stay a few days, share their life perspective and leave a comet’s tail of e-mails off into the future, until the day when distance and time find one at the keyboard with nothing to say, meanwhile there are all kinds of new people to meet.
Walking through my first night in Yerevan with a girl from Lithuania, drinking beers and discussing past relationships with a journalist from Scotland, sitting in the candle light at my sitemate’s apartment during a power outage, eating out of Tupperware, sitting in on parties where at least 5 different languages are being spoken and within a few days people have moved on and others have come. With all these great people going back to Iran, France, Delaware or traveling on to Indonesia, I find myself occasionally wishing we could all just work in an office somewhere, just so we’d have time to get tired of each other, or fall in love or build up enough reminiscences to keep the e-mails coming for a little while longer.

III.
One of the most troubling thing about Peace Corps service, is the constant refrain of self doubt that one feels as a volunteer, working without any kind of direct supervision. Sure we’re collectively under the auspices of a greater organization, we have people to answer to concerning our performance, but despite the bureaucracy and organization one could probably quite easily spend the entire two-year period doing the bare minimum, or even nothing at all.
The situation is further complicated by the numerous job details, the standards by which we try to gauge our performance. I mean to beg the question: what is the ideal volunteer? Should language and cultural adaptation skills be considered above all else? Do the volunteers who write the most grants deserve the laurel? Or perhaps those that try to bring their particular skill to as many people as possible?
I have just recently returned from my training village, the place where I was first introduced to Armenia a little over a year ago now. While staying with my first host family, I saw many locals who commented on my advances in Armenian. They praised my efforts, saying how great it was that we could now communicate better with one another.
I also met a group of the new volunteers, and recounted with my former site mate Jay how much we had changed from the group we were that closely resembled the new group, still stumbling on basic phrases.
But, in some cases, you never really stop stumbling. Maybe some do, but I think any volunteer would be able to describe a number of situations in which they found themselves suddenly almost completely without the acquired language skills. Almost any adverse comment leaves me faltering for the most basic words, as if I had only arrived a few days ago. I can so quickly be brought back to the level of trainee that I can’t help but to wonder what real advancement has taken place since my arrival.
These doubts are thoughts that I live with from day-to-day. As I sit in my apartment and read, or talk to friends back in the states who are undergoing life-changing events (pregnancies, marriage, etc.) or stare out my window, or dribble a basketball all afternoon at a camp I’m working at, I still wonder what I’m really doing here. I wonder what I’ve really done and if my time here has been worthwhile.
I’m sure that I have made impressions on at least a few people. But what kind of impressions? Have I done anything beyond what any other foreigner could have done given a month or two and a set up in a decent organization? Does talking to the woman who I buy produce from count for anything really? Everyone, all the supportive staff at the office would have you believe that it does. In fact almost any effort we make is usually highly praised because so many volunteers get discouraged and need some ideological reinforcement. And, at times, such reinforcement seems to come from many angles at once. All of a sudden you find yourself almost mired in people’s positive comments, but when I try to match those comments to my actual performance, well there seems to be a gap. But I can’t be sure, maybe I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. Many people would tell me that only I know the answer to that question, but it’s truly my opinion that given the disorientating nature of being a first-time worker in a foreign country, I’m no longer sure what I’m capable of, at least not yet. I know my way around well enough by now, but I couldn’t tell you if all the recreation I take is absolutely necessary in regard to my work as a volunteer or if I am just being lazy. In fact I don’t think I’ll know this answer to this question until I leave Armenia.
This self-probing monologue is probably the culmination of a number of things, but I think it’s mostly due to the fact that my friend and initial sitemate Jay, is leaving. After a year of toughing it out and doing his absolute best, myriad extenuating circumstances have forced him (nearly) to return home.
I went back to my training village recently to say goodbye to him in the most fitting place. The time worked out well too, as it was the 4th of July and the new volunteers in town were hosting a party and hatching plans that sounded a lot like ours last year.
“Hey so what’s going on after this?”
“I dunno’, should we meet up later”
“I think I’m probably just going to go home,” a comment which is greeted by at least four of the volunteers saying,
“Awww c’mon, it’s the Forth of July! We should do something.”
“Maybe we could watch a movie. Did you guys ever finish watching…”
And so on, pretty much the same conversation I remember having with my group the year before, five now remaining from the original eight of us.
So I’ve made it this far, apparently following in the footsteps of so many volunteers before me. And as I agknowledge this I wonder,
“Well then what’s the difference? What have I done that’s been unique? Have I been a good volunteer? Would it matter if I went home tomorrow?”
I can say that it would absolutely matter to me. In fact the more I think about how comfortable I’ve become here the more I worry about going back to the states. The same subject I used to fantasize about is becoming somewhat disconcerting. Not finding work, or finishing school, or basically having to return to a fixed routine, but the idea of leaving this, uncertain if I’ll ever return or not. When people leave the Peace Corps it’s quick. In fact in almost every case I never knew a certain volunteer was even leaving until they have already gone. One day someone, usually Paige in my case, who knows a lot more about what’s going on with people here than me, somehow, tells you that someone left. There is talk of a few vague rumors, a review of some memorable things this person did, some more speculation as to why they left and then that’s it. Gone. They’re already back in America by the time you here the news. Back to the old life, back to the way things were before we all met in Philadelphia about 14 months ago. Only, well, you know that most of that is all gone too. At this point we’ve all been away for a long enough time that some things are bound to have changed. Whatever we boarded a plane and took off from last year is not exactly there as we left it. And we’ve changed too, but it still only takes 18 hours or so by plane to totally reintroduce yourself to it. Just like that, back there in the JFK airport, dragging a suitcase through crowds and booming audio security warnings. Only this time your alone, and not in the company of 49 other excited people ready to take the trip with you. You’re just standing there alone after all that, wondering what home you have to return to after purposefully leaving it behind two years ago.
So what makes it worth it? When I find myself standing again in SFO, looking around in amazement, what am I going to remember? Will it have been worth it? Did I do everything I could? Or did I just sorta’ kick around until it was time to go back. Back to…? What exactly will I go back to? The whole situation is vaguely reminiscent of Nintendo games I used to pause as a kid, having made it, or so I thought, to a near-completion level, but having to go somewhere, say to my Grandma’s for a weekend. I remember hoping on the ride back home that the haphazard grey box hadn’t frozen up on me, and that I’d be able to walk into my room and unpause the ninja in mid-summersault, as though I’d never left. Inevitably, almost every time I would return to a gray and orange flashing screen or something, any trace of my advancement being wiped completely clean.
I know that I can’t walk directly into the life I paused before leaving, but I hope that something I’ve done here will make the lost game seem like a necessary sacrifice.
People have told me I’m doing a good job, but I question the value of this statement so often, as I seem to frequently find myself holed up somewhere reading a book, not really paying attention to what’s going on around me. Can someone who escapes into books and movies and long meandering walks so often really be such a good volunteer?
But things are going well. I guess it’s just important to remember that sometimes advancement is imperceptible here, not to be felt or noticed until long after one has left and is hastily throwing a scrapbook of Peace Corp photos onto a bookshelf in a recently rented apartment somewhere that betokens the beginning of an entirely new stage of life. Perhaps only then will I be able to see what my volunteerism meant and whether or not I was truly a decent volunteer or just someone who bummed around Armenia for two years.
The camp has been going well. I’ve been having a good time messing around with all the other councilors, playing team-building games in the evening and eating scant breakfasts in the morning: typical camp stuff. I had to take off a few days from the camp training to go back up to the training village to see Jay and my host family. The journey, though somewhat arduous was actually a welcome break from hanging around the same building for the last four days, listening to everyone speak in Russian.
Unfortunately I was not able to interact with the new volunteers as much I had hoped. For one thing, it was hard not to feel somewhat pretentious talking to them, as I wanted so badly to tell them how training had gone for me in that village and what to expect, but didn’t want to start pontificating unless they asked me for it, and no one did, except the volunteer staying with my host family, and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk with him, seems like a nice guy though.
Most of my time was taken up strolling around the village with Jay, reminiscing, talking about his decision to leave, what he was going to do when he got back and how things had been going for us. Of course this dialogue was subject to numerous interruptions from the local young men who seemed to be out in droves that particular evening. Some of them welcomed us, and were quite happy that we, having now been in Armenia for a year, were able to communicate with them better than the new group of volunteers. Some of the groups were actually quite warm and receptive, were others were just as crass as I remembered them being last year, but we expected this from the onset, and nevertheless still had a good time walking around the dusty streets that we had shared over a year ago.
Essentially, I spent the entire time talking with Jay. At times people joined in our conversation; my host Dad; the new volunteer Danny, staying with my family; Jay’s host family, who had decided not to host another volunteer. It was both great and sorrowful to sit with him on his host family’s porch, as we had done so many times in the past, knowing that this would be the last time we would look off into the distant fields and swap typical volunteer complaints. This is what started me thinking about the whole “what is a good volunteer thing” as, essentially Jay’s volunteer experience was ending right there, while my host family talking about the improvement in my language skills and how they were excited to listen to me after another year of being here, we listened to Jay speak Armenian, knowing that was as far as he’d go, that for him the experience was over. Only for me the experience was different, in that this time I was privy to his leaving before he actually left, unlike all the other volunteers from our group who have taken off. Jay wasn’t to be just a name and a few anecdotes, already living back in the states, but someone who was still in Armenia, still living as though he had another year left, speaking Armenian and complaining about his landlord, despite the fact that within a week or so all of this will just be a memory for him, and I can already hear other volunteers, further off talking,
“Did you hear Jay left?”
“Really, when?”
“Like last week, he’s already back in the states.”
“Wow, just like that.”
“Yeah.”

Rainbow Through a Battered Window or La Turista nella Verde

2009-05-18T00:59:00.000-07:00

I.
I was talking with a friend of mine a while ago who asked me why I hadn’t written any thing on this thing in a while. Other than “because no one reads it besides you” I really couldn’t think of a sufficient answer. That was over a month ago and I still haven’t even attempted to organize my thoughts into anything coherent just in case anyone is reading this thing from time to time. It’s odd, I guess, this business of writing blogs, where you sorta’ pour yourself out to an audience that you can be entirely sure of. I like to the experience of talking on the phone when you’re not sure if the other person is still on the line, which happens a lot here. When calling the states there’s a short relay period, so every point of call and response is given a neat set of ellipses, this also cuts the sound on the other line too, so it always takes a few seconds to be assured you’ve still got someone on the line. This used to bother me, but I’ve gotten used to it and am as inclined as I ever was to drone on endlessly, assured that who ever I am talking with is still there. A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine, telling a characteristic long-winded story when I suddenly realized I hadn’t heard any kind of assent or phatic confirmation in a while. Sure enough the line was dead and I had been talking to myself, in my kitchen for at least 7 minutes.
Writing things and pasting them on the abysmal internet is something like the experience of talking on the phone when you’re not sure if the connection’s been dropped. In order to keep the conversation fluid you continue but, every so often, you have to pause and wonder if you’re talking to yourself. It’s like the moment when you realized you haven’t heard any kind of response in a while.
Now, I’m not writing all this as an exercise in self-pity. Really, I realized a while ago that, although I usually write with an audience in mind, I’m always writing for myself. I write long e-mails and letters because they feel therapeutic, when there’s no one to talk to it’s nice to confide in an empty room. To some extent everyone does this, I guess we all just have different mediums for it. It helps to understand a situation if you can turn it over in your mind through some physical activity.
I haven’t written anything in a while because I guess I’ve found enough people who are willing to listen to my attempts to understand things in tête-à-tête conversation. Lately, I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time mulling over my thoughts with various people in earshot. I was inclined to write more when I didn’t have this outlet, now that I do I guess I tend to use up most of my stories around them.
Another important factor, that I just considered is that of familiarity. Initially, I found this place interesting to write about because something new was constantly happening to me, something I wanted to write down before I forgot it. To this day interesting things continue to happen around here, but, I guess, they’ve become commonplace to me. Making a half-cooked vegan cake with my student and her mother that turned out to look like an illustration of pathos, while the birds chirped in the blooming trees outside in the growing twilight or discussing the geography of Damascus with a kid from Syria over a few Armenian beers or wandering the streets at night with a few stray dogs in tow and explaining to the local police why I was out at 1 am nosing thorough the trash, have just become normal enough events that I don’t come home and feel like to recounting them.
But, like I said, we, or at least, I, write because I like to examine certain feelings and occasions through some kind of concrete expression. A few minutes ago, I wasn’t too sure why I hadn’t written anything, having just written about it, I now have a better idea why that is. It would seem the process is still working.
In about a month, I’m going to cut out for a while, after having been here for a year I’m going to take a trip west to Bosnia, or possibly Croatia. As you can imagine I’m immensely looking forward to this opportunity. I’m glad that I’ve hung around in one place as long as I have now, but I think in order to find the impetus to work for another year, I’m going to have to get on and off a few buses and see a few palm trees, like those stocky ones, all bunched up down Guerro, or those lanky things that you can see from the BART, growing in people’s backyards in the East Bay, tangled up in a landscape of telephone wires and liquor store signs.

II.

I went down to Goris a few days ago to visit a friend of mine on his birthday and to observe a poetry competition he was putting on. As usual, when I look back upon the overall experience, which only occupied the space of about two days; I see how the journey, both to and from southern Armenia, was the most memorable aspect of the trip.
My friend Paige and I had reservations for a marshutka (van taxi, overcrowded airport shuttle bus with no suspension, no heat in the winter and no windows to roll down in the summer) that was coming down from Yerevan. As all transportation here is routed through the capital it’s really hard to get a ride starting from any other point, there’s no official stops anywhere and the only solution is to try to flag down a passing marshutka that’s heading in your direction. They are, however, almost always full and remarkably unconcerned to your plight as a rain-sodden pedestrian trying to get a ride.
The best way to avoid this scenario is to get to know some of the marshutka drivers, call them, and ask them to hold a seat for you when they leave Yerevan, I’ve never bothered to do this, but luckily I’ve got some friends here who are a little more forward thinking than me.

I was hanging around my apartment, thinking about mailing a letter. The phone rang and the driver told me I had about ½ hour before he arrived, enough time for a few more songs, a few more absent looks out my kitchen window, the rest of the coffee and the post office (if there’s anybody there.)
A half an hour later, my letter mailed, I took my wayward place along the highway, standing at the end of a row of people waiting for their respective rides. The day was overcast so I decided to put my headphones on; the birds weren’t singing much and I got tired of listening to the roar of Iranian oil trucks barreling down the road.
About 20 minutes went by when I noticed a foreign couple getting out of a marshutka that had stopped about 50 feet ahead of me. Here, especially outside the capital, foreigners are especially easy to pick out, usually because the often have backpacks, which Armenians never wear, or they have light Northface jackets, which are about as tell tale as the fanny packs and Hawaiian shirts of yesteryear. After they got their stuff together they began talking with their driver. I could see there was some confusion so I headed over to see if I could help.

Now, since I’ve been here I’ve probably only seen a handful of tourists come through. There are almost none in the winter, except for the occasional round-the-world-on-a-bike type, and in the summer most people don’t make it too far from the capital. But the few groups of people who have come this far have been a great solace to me. For one thing, it’s great to be able help these people out, as many of them know no Armenian and little Russian. Plus, you get to hear all their stories about their experience in Armenia, not to mention whatever other countries they’ve visited. In this way, I’ve gotten a good deal of information on Iran without having ever been there. I’ve made some friends this way too, but unfortunately, friends that are very difficult to keep up with, as they often leave after a day or two for places too far to visit. But the best thing about meeting tourists is the realization that it brings about my own position in this country. The contrast between their level of interaction and my own helps me to realize how far I’ve come in terms of cultural integration. I’ve become a local foreigner, as opposed to the visiting foreigners and through this distinction I am able to see what I have gained from being a long term volunteer, even if my community relations are somewhat tenuous, I am at least reminded that they exist when strolling around town with someone who is traveling the world. For that I am able to see the benefits to staying in one place to formulate a better understanding of the culture, rather than trying to glut up as much traveling experience as possible (which I often want to do). Of course it also makes me wonder where the hell the balance is between sedentary and itinerant lifestyles. I don’t know if there’s any place I’d want to stay in forever, but, at the same time, its hard to really touch anything unless you stop moving for a while.
The tourists were looking for a local hotel. I don’t know where the got the name of the place they were looking for, but it either never existed, or existed only for a very short time, or possibly was the self-styled, elaborate name of someone’s homestay. I mentioned that we only had one crumbling, soviet monolith hotel in the middle of town, and given the price, was probably their best option, not to mention their only option. I’ll never know if they found it though, because I was trying to explain where it was my own ride pulled up and the driver didn’t seem to willing to wait for me to give clearer directions. Shame, they seemed like really nice people and I would’ve liked to hear more about their travels.
I crammed myself in between two guys and a frayed nylon bag that was taking up the entire aisle, realizing there wasn’t going to be enough room for me to take out a book comfortably. After a few minutes my seat companion began to ask me the usual questions about where I came from and such.
Perhaps it’s an indication of my weak Armenian, but I love getting these questions, mainly because I can answer them with alacrity, rather than stumbling through a bunch of obtuse phrases. I also feel comfortable enough with mundane topics to attempt a joke or something here and there, which makes the experience seem so much more authentic. Not like I’m just blundering my way through something but as if I actually had something to say.
We pulled into Vyke and Paige got on. As she’s a little more adept at talking to people she took over most of the conversation and I happily gazed out the window, watching the surprisingly green scenery pass by.
It was one of those occasions when you feel genuinely happy, though it’s hard to say why. Perhaps there was the element of doing something new, going to a different place and going to meet different people, or maybe it was just the weather, which was cold and rainy for most of the early spring and is only now beginning to look appropriately decadent. Either way, as I conversed intermittently between Paige and the guy sitting next to her, I felt a great lump of happiness in my chest. The kind of feeling that makes you want to laugh after everything you say, just to punctuate everything with a little bit of mirth.

On the way back from Goris I wasn’t feeling quite the same way. The weekend was over and everyone had gone much earlier in the day. I stayed behind to attend the poetry competition and missed the last marshutka running back to Yerevan. I was going to wait until the next morning to leave, but it seemed there was no way to make it back in time for my first class. The only other option was to catch a solo taxi ride, which is an incredibly expensive option. Rather than miss my classes I found myself riding back with a young man who spoke a heavily accented Armenian. I wasn’t very excited about the idea from the beginning, but seeing no other option I stayed in the car.
Our conversation never got very far. I was able to understand most of what he said, but I could never seem to think of an interesting response to anything. For most of the ride I just stared out the window. It felt rude to read, and I didn’t feel much like it anyway. The road in that part of the country goes through some pretty beautiful mountain passes and I decided to take the opportunity of not being balled up in a marshutka to actually get a good look at some of it.
The driver and I talked a little about the weather and the beauty of the scenery, but most of the time we just listened to the arrhythmic pop music he had playing. The car smelled like BO and I couldn’t tell if it was coming from him or me. I wonder if he was thinking the same thing. We passed nondescript towns and villages that he pointed out to me, saying their names and nothing else, as if they might mean something to me.
Not quite half-way we stopped to get some gas and, as tradition and probably safety demands, I got out of the car while he filled the benzene tanks. I walked over to the waiting area where a few other passengers stood and watched the rain that was beginning to drizzle off the roof overhang above us. The area that we were waiting in didn’t have doors, just gaps between the low concrete wall to let people in. A woman was cleaning the tile inside the shelter and this little dog kept infuriating her by continually slinking back in when she wasn’t looking and getting paw prints all over her floor. She was probably enjoying the extra work through, I doubt she had had much to do all day in a place like that. But you could tell the dog was confused, every time she swore at him and raised her mop he seemed to think she was calling him over, and began to cautiously approach her, getting the floor even dirtier. It was pretty comical for a while, but I felt bad for the dog so I pulled a half eaten sandwich outta’ the trash and called him away from the cleaning lady to give it to him.
Behind the building I noticed the first perfect rainbow I’d ever seen in my life. I wish I coulda’ seen it the day before when I was in a better frame of mind, but I guess you don’t really get to chose when you’re gonna’ see stuff like that, unless you live in Hawaii; I have the impression that place is more rainbows than land for some reason.
Back in the car, with the pop music and BO I couldn’t remember the Armenian word for rainbow [tseat-tsan] so I didn’t say anything about it; even if we had turned around I don’t know if we could’ve seen it. The rain had ended pretty quick.
A few miles down the road the driver asked how old I was. I told him, and he told me he was a year younger than me. I didn’t know how to respond to that, as when I first spoke to the guy I wasn’t sure whether to address in the formal or not. I was sure he must’ve been a few years older than me, at least, though I was not really consciously thinking about this. I only realized it after he said how old he was. Inevitably, I began to wonder if I looked as old and, to some degree, tired as he did, and as we drove on the rain clouds entirely lifted and in the grass around the mountain villages glowed an incandescent green, like algae, or that bright moss that grows on everything in the pacific northwest.
When I got home I invited the driver in for coffee. He told me he had to get back, but that he’d take me up on the offer the next time he drove me back. I wanted to tell him that it was far too expensive and that I’d make sure I never missed the last martshutka again when in Goris, although I had enjoyed the ride with him, but instead of trying to manage all that in Armenian, I just agreed and told him that sounded good, giving the customary wave one gives to an acquaintance, feeling somewhat awkward, standing back on my own street.

III.
Today was the last day of classes for the week and next week will be the last week of the semester. It’s already been an entire year of classes. I can remember sitting on my 2nd host family’s porch sometime back in September or October, probably at the peak of my disenfranchisement, and thinking how great it would be if Peace Corps only lasted a year, that a year would be so much more manageable in terms of comprehension than 27 months, a total amount of time that just seemed reckless at the time, like an arbitrary sentence for an uncertain crime. I remember sitting up there, as I did every single night, watching the lights of the town drop off and the lights in the sky brighten, smoking and thinking how after 5 months I had still only just arrived. I still knew very little about the place I lived, I still hadn’t done much in the way of work, I still had a long way to go before I came to resemble a respectable Peace Corps volunteer. Of course, to this day I probably haven’t done much to deserve that title, but I no longer feel like someone who’s been dropped into something they don’t understand. I feel capable of understanding things well enough, although I occasionally lament that it seems I rarely have anything to say. I feel more like a part of where I am today, but it’s still a distant, and even slightly off-kilter part.
I still think back to that balcony quite frequently; all the time I spent out there reading, pondering and wondering what the hell I was going to do in Armenia. I remember exactly what it felt like in October, with the diner-plate moon coming up over the mountains, like something perfect to hide under and forget all the pressures of the day. I was always in someone else’s way, or at least in their space back then, before I had my own apartment to go to and I used that porch as an escape; a place to go to listen to my headphones and quietly mouth the words. I also used to sit up there and think about what it would be like now, when the school year ended and summer came again. Unfortunately I don’t really remember what I thought about it, only that I thought about it. Maybe it was some kind of goal of mine, to stay here for at least a year, maybe it was just interesting to consider what such an anniversary would be like. But since I don’t remember exactly what these thoughts were the only thing they succeeded in doing was connecting the present with the past, in a way that makes me wonder where all the time between the two occasions went. Also, now that the length of my time here really only is a year, as I used to consider, I find that it doesn’t necessarily make it feel more manageable.

IV.
Tomorrow is my last day of school, which ever since I was a kindergarten student, has been my favorite day of the year. No matter what my plans for the summer are, the end of the school has always felt like something monumentous. It also feels like it always comes just in time. I guess it’s the expectation. Kinda’ reminds me of the feeling of having to go to the bathroom and how it increases when you’re trying to get your apartment door open, even if you’ve been enduring it for hours, right before that door opens it seems unbearable. Also, the door always seems more difficult to open in these cases. Luckily, I’ve had a lot to do lately so the time has been dragging by too slowly. The nights away from work are, however, somewhat drawn out by my endless vacation planning, not really even planning but fantasizing. I lie on my couch thinking about riding on a train, hearing different languages, in the company of my friends, opening warm beers and drinking from them as the wind rushes in through the cracks of the old soviet manufactured couches and the dim lights blink on and off. Waking the next morning to the window’s filmy light, looking out on places I’ve never seen before, people I’ve never met.
It’s horrible though, in a few days I will have been here exactly a year and I can’t seem to drum up any valid reflective notes. Sometimes I almost feel like I forgot how it was when I came here. Lately I think of where I was at this time last year back in the states. Driving across the country with my friend Mikey. I think tonight we would have been in Minneapolis. But back then I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I still don’t, but it’s hard to compare that vacant expectation with anything that I now know here. Now Armenia is a very concrete place, with a distinct character that I’ll probably never be able to forget. That’s something I didn’t really expect from the Peace Corps, I guess I didn’t expect that I would be remembering these things forever. I can’t definitely say that I will, but some of these occasions burn pretty bright, effulgently even.
The most interesting thing is the obvious comparison I have to my trip out here last year and my up-coming vacation this year. Except this time I’m sure as hell not anticipating going into any intense training sessions, just one long dive of the peer of the Yerevan train station.
Your hand in mine, a ringing bell, the sea, jump.

2009-03-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

Laughing Out a Mouthful of Smoke or Filmy Grey Iris

2009-03-11T08:18:00.000-07:00

I.
International Women’s Day is based on an American occurrence, or rather tragedy, yet only the Europeans and the soviets seem to celebrate it. As it stands all the former soviet republics still celebrate this holiday, with no small amount of reverence, in fact, it seems to be one of the most important holidays around here, albeit not as a recognition of New York garment industry worker protests, but rather as something like Mother’s day and Valentine’s day rolled into one.
Whatever historical event brought International Women’s day to Armenia, it got me two days off that I used to walk around the country a little.
About 10 o’clock on Monday morning, the sky was cloudy, but the air was mild and was redolent with the light smell of melting snow, a beautiful smell which has always puzzled me, considering melting snow usually revels a lot of nasty things, bleached and buried over the course of the winter, horrible anemic looking things in beds of tussled yellow grass. What is it that makes that stuff smell good? I suppressed the images floating before me of what was being uncovered out there in the mountain junkyards and started out for the Selim pass, uncertain if I would actually attempt to walk all the way through it, or just have a look and turn around.
Getting up to the mountain pass from where I live is nearly an all day walk. I left around 10:30, and even with the help of a short ride, didn’t get to the base of the mountain until about 4. Undaunted, and probably quite unwisely, I began to climb up the road that looped back and forth in switchbacks over the mountain. I can’t really say what it is that pushes me into doing such idiotic things, somehow, I always feel like things’ll work out somehow, that even if I have to sleep in a cave or walk all night, at least it’ll make for an interesting story. So, with the sun setting into what was obviously some kind of storm in the west I began to climb up one of the highest mountain ranges in the country, still having at least 5 hours of walking ahead of me after I made it to the top. I began by climbing straight up through the switchbacks, where it was possible, rather than taking up unnecessary time by walking all the way around. Of course, I slipped a lot in the snow and mud around the base of the mountain and got myself pretty dirty before I had gotten too far, luckily there was almost no traffic up on the mountain, so my resemblance to a wildebeest wasn’t so great a concern for me.
Not even halfway up the mountain I could no longer ford the switchbacks, and had to take to walking all the way around, through hewn passageways that moaned forebodingly in the rising wind of the storm. The sky was darkening, to the east and, to the north, it actually looked dirty, a dark yellow color like the air over the coal plants in northern Indiana. I found this slightly disconcerting, but at the same time I was incredibly impressed with the sublime beauty of the scene I found myself apart of. The warmth had caused some of the snow to melt, but nothing of the melting snow could be seen from the surface, hard white crusts still covered the mountain, but rivulets of melt water and detritus could be heard creeping toward the valley below where they would become turgid, muddy rivers, flying through the backyards of the villages below, villages I could barely see now. A rock outcropping might come into view, where the water could be seen cascading down, from one snowy covering to the next, briefly visible until a gust of wind would pick up and pull the water from the rock face, scattering it all across the road. Amidst the sounds of running snow and splashing water, the wind was also pushing bottles down the mountain, so that every so often a faint rattling would become audible. Way up on the mountain, where I had not seen any traffic for at least an hour, these sounds echoed and swelled. Bottles bouncing down empty culverts, cups rolling down the light grade of the rough asphalt, clumps of snow dropping down short precipices, all the while the sickly patch of yellow light fading into a bruised color and the dark clouds spreading further in the east.
In my total solitude the mountain became haunted with its particular music, the wet and staccato sounds of being followed in the dark came to life, cemetery gates swung on rusty hinges, basement pipes leaked into dark, vermin plagued corners, old village walls darkened with a shapeless form momentarily blotting out the gas lights, dusty attics groaned and small weird lights grew in the sky. Perhaps it was the altitude, but I didn’t watch any of this in panic, but rather with awe and fascination. I knew there were much more real dangers than the phantasms that were chasing each other over the snowy cliffs and down the narrow two-lane road.
Usually people are pretty good about stopping to offer rides here, especially when you are in what looks to be a hopeless situation. Usually people don’t walk much, around the villages people can be seen walking, but never, or vary rarely on the long winding roads that connect them. When I walk around I’m constantly being offered rides, and depending how I feel, I’ll either hop right in or decline them. Sometimes when I’m purposely trying to walk somewhere, the proffered rides can become almost annoying. There’s something of Murphy’s Law here in that whenever I want a ride there’s no one around, but whenever I’m happily walking around I’ve practically got to fend off people stopping, in the middle of the highway and waving me over. That’s the thing, they never just yell out the window, nothing like the American, “Hey, need a ride?” Here, they just stop and wave you over, obviously its because they want to know what you’re doing, but after crossing the street ten times in one hour, you begin to feel inclined to make some sort of dismissive hand gesture and just keep walking. Of course that’s going to make you look really antisocial so you go over and again inform the driver, where you’re from (both where you live now and where you were born) where you’re going, why you’re going there, why the hell you’re walking, how long you’ve been here, how long you’ll stay, etc. etc. Even after you’ve gone through the rigmarole, you still have to convince this person that you’d really rather walk, which is not very easy, since, I’ve got a notion that it’s considered somewhat shameful to walk here, because it connotes poverty in the same way that dirty clothes of shoes with holes would. So, in order to walk anywhere you have to be prepared for this, as well as nearly everybody that passes honking at you, the reason for which I still haven’t quite figured out. This is perhaps something to keep in mind the next time you read about “One man’s harrowing journey through the wilds of [someplace in central Asia] on foot!” I can guarantee that person had to turn down about a thousand rides to make it through any of the countries here completely on foot, and as such, probably offended a lot of people.
As I neared the top of the mountain, I began feeling more and more cautious, the storm was beginning to break and some rain was beginning to fall, rain that I knew would begin to freeze soon at such an altitude and with the sun setting. Still, I was determined to at least make it over the mountain to see what lay ahead. I kept telling myself that I really hadn’t come that far, that I could still turn back and make it home before it got too late if I got to the top and it was mountainous as far as the eye could see.
I only had about two more switchbacks to go when a car came down from the mountain, going back the way I had come. When the young men in the car saw me, way up there, miles from any place, they practically slammed on the breaks. Once the car had stopped every door opened at once and I was immediately surrounded by about 6 young men in their twenties, ranting, gesticulating and pleading with me in Russian. There is something incredibly funny about this kind of bombardment and it’s somewhat difficult not to laugh, when you find you’ve inadvertently shocked a whole group of people to the point where they feel a need to jump out and accost you all at once, especially when you can’t understand a word they’re saying.
After a few seconds of raving, I explained to the young men that I didn’t speak Russian, whereupon they switched to an excited Armenian that was just about as difficult to understand. I tried to explain what I was doing to them, but they simply wouldn’t have it; the idea that I was trying to walk to Martuni was absolutely preposterous to them and from their attitude I could tell they would probably physically escort me down the mountain if I didn’t agree. For a moment I was in a certain quandary. The guy down in the village had also gone bat shit crazy when I told him I was going to walk to Martuni, saying over and over again that it was dangerous and telling me that the mountain range I’d have to go over was the highest in the country, which I knew for a fact was not true. Now, here I’d like to at least intimate that I am not as crazy as all this is making me sound. I did not tear up into the mountains with a string of people hanging from my coat tales, pleading with me not to commit suicide. Many people from the villages around here can be quite unreasonable about things they consider unsafe. As I’ve mentioned before, fresh air blowing through an open window can be quite unsafe, as can a number of other things that seem quite ridiculous by western standards. One of the complaints I hear expressed most often is that any area which is not populated by people, is, more than likely, a haven for wolves, snakes and scorpions, and if I attempt to go up that little hill I’ll probably never make it down. Stung, bitten and mauled to death before ever getting up the first few boulders. I’m not saying these ideas are completely devoid of reason, some, like always going places with someone, are actually great ideas, I just don’t they are always necessary. Which brings me back to the young men, bounding around outside their car, looking about as crazy to me as I must‘ve looked to them.
I could think of no solution, for one thing I didn’t really want to keep going if, as they told me, it was nothing but mountains all the way to Martuni. I wasn’t dressed to walk through fifteen miles of mountains in the snow, nor, after walking all afternoon did I really want to walk that far. However, I also didn’t want to go back down to the first village and try to find a way home, which would no doubt result in arguing with a flock of con-artist cab drivers. I was considering my options, which were decidedly few when, to my salvation, I spotted a car coming up the mountain, going in my direction. It was beginning to rain hard now and the snow was quickly turning to slush and crowding the narrow street. I pointed to the car going up the switchbacks below and told the young men that I’d try to get a ride with them, going the other way. They looked at me skeptically and got halfway back in their car, obviously not planning on going anywhere until they had made sure I was not going to continue on alone, which made me feel happy especially when I considered that the approaching car might just pass me by, leaving me at the top of the mountain, in the rain, facing a long walk through the stormy mountain night. It was nice to have an out from that, no matter which direction it was going in.
As the other car approached I swung my arms up over my head, hoping the idling car next to me and the international signal for distress would make enough of an impression on them to stop. The car pulled up alongside me and the window rolled down.
“I want to go there, can’t walk,” I tried to explain.
The driver was cordial enough and invited me in, after exchanging a words with the car headed down, probably to get a better picture of the scenario. I got in the back seat next to another young man who seemed over eager to figure out what the hell I was doing way up on the mountain in the rain. I began to explain the best I could and the four us, two in the back, two up front, started off.
At first I was getting all the usual questions, which was undoubtedly gracious because I knew these questions so well I could understand them even in the heavy Martuni slang they were being put forth in. After a few minutes the driver and the back seat passenger had exhausted the repertoire of questions and we settled into a comfortable silence, while I relaxed for the first time after 6 hours on the road. This silence did not keep long before my backseat companion began to ask me why I was going to Martuni. I explained I was going to visit a friend of mine, another American volunteer, like myself, who lived there. From this topic a few more harmless questions arose that I did my bet to answer and then, as sometimes happens with young men, the topic turned abruptly to sex.
After asking if I was married, if I had a girlfriend and finally what I thought of Armenian girls my companion in the back started to proposition me for solicited sex with someone I guess he knew in Martuni. I did my best to calmly tell him that I had no desire to pay anybody to have sex with me, but he persisted, eventually coming to question my manhood in light of my refusal. The puzzling thing was that there was an older man in the front seat, probably well into his forties, who, though he didn’t join in the discussion, didn’t tell the younger kid to shut up either as he proceeded to badger me through what would’ve been a very enjoyable ride through the mountains.
I was becoming increasingly annoyed with the banter, but tried my best to be cordial, while dissuasive, by giving terse answers and looking out the window, it was also necessary to keep my head turned away from the kid, not only to show my disinterest, but to avoid his halitosis, that was almost beginning to fog up the car windows in his unctuous stream of sex talk. Usually there is no way to retaliate against such talk, but, suddenly the older man in the front turned around and offered me an opportunity, by asking my back seat companion to speak in English since he was always talking about how he spoke it so well. Usually, I am not one to take advantage of such scenarios, and I just humor people even if they don’t know a damn thing, but I have learned from my interactions with the young men in this country, sometimes, making fun of someone is the only way to regain respect for yourself after you have been divested of it.
“Oh, you speak English?” I offered.
“Da,” was the kid’s inevitable answer. Which he quickly followed by asking, “Vat is your name?”
In Armenian I asked what “Vat is you name” meant in Armenian. Unable to think of a response the kid told me, in Armenian, that he could count quite well in English and began doing so. He stumbled at 7 and 9, and I let this go but when he stopped abruptly at ten, I decided to antagonize him a little for all the sex talk he had given me earlier.
“Heto?” I asked in Armenian, “and then?”
“Tenty one?” he offered, I shook my head, “Eleventy?” he tried again, and I gave it to him, it was, after all, close enough.
“And then?” I asked again.
“Eleventy two” he said matter of factly.
“No” I said, and the two guys in the front, who I was beginning to like more and more, started laughing. Maybe I should’ve felt bad, but I didn’t, the guy was being a jerk and he should’ve known it. It wasn’t my fault he told everybody he could speak English when he couldn’t at all.
“Yeah, well, I stopped studying so I could have more sex.” He told me, as if this were some perfect argument. I just told him to do whatever was more important to him. Seeing that he was beaten in this area he began to speak Armenian quickly but I just nodded and grunted at every pause; I really had no intention of listening to him anymore.
When we got into Martuni, I thanked the driver and said goodbye, as the two men in the front, although quite silent, seemed to be pretty nice people. I said goodbye to the pervert with bad breath, too, just to show there were no hard feelings. The car drove off, and again I was alone, in the rain looking around the town of Martuni. Luckily, I was standing in front of a café so I went in to get a cup of coffee and call Jay, to figure out where his village was in relation to Martuni.
The proprietor of the café was a nice guy who, at first, declined payment for the coffee. Having been made quite happy by the warmth and the coffee, I tried to force some money on him until he eventually accepted half of what I was offering. Thus emboldened, I set back out into the rain, walking down the length of road I was told would take me to Zolakar, Jay’s village. It was a miserable walk, the wind was whipping off Lake Sevan and the rain was already beginning to flood the street, but I was feeling strangely happy until I came to a beautiful German shepherd mix lying dead by the side of the road, his coat pelted by rain and his eyes staring up, unseeing into the sky. This sight isn’t so abnormal here as it is in the states, but it never really makes you feel good or anything, usually you see dead animals, dogs and cats, on garbage piles, but to see them on the side of a narrow road makes the impression even greater. I walked on, and only about thirty paces later came to a pair of dead dogs, lying right next to each other. In the rain and through my fatigue the experience was becoming quite melancholy, walking through garbage, mud and dead animals.
When I got into Jay’s village I came across another dog lying in the gutter, right between two gutted buildings and the sound of rain blowing through the trees. Everything here looked so much more unkempt than it did in my region, perhaps because it was wetter and colder here year round. When it is sunny and the air is warm, even tragic scenes are rendered bearable. Like something in the desert atmosphere bleaches scenes of their emotional quality, makes them seem more abstract and removed. In wet and cold places, a dead dog’s eyes are filled with the reflection of a leaden sky, and his fur is stirred by cold winds. In short, he makes the world around him pitiful for allowing him to die in such a place.
In Jay’s empty windy house, I took my wet clothes off and put on a random assortment of Jay’s clothes, as well as an old woman’s coat I found on the floor. The whole ensemble had quite a hippy look to it, flip-flops, frayed blue jeans and an orangish maroon pea coat with a white fur collar. After the long day, and with the rain quickly turning to snow outside, I was happy to be warm and dry, no matter how absurd I looked.
The next morning I decided that I would again make the effort to walk over the mountain pass. The weather was much clearer than it has been the day before and now I knew the road. I knew the mountains began almost right where Martuni ended; if I began early enough I would be able to clear them before it got too late.
It was cold and windy when I started off, and immediately I felt as if I’d made a mistake by walking. The wind cut right through my jacket, and even though I had borrowed another layer from Jay, it didn’t look as if I was going to be warm enough.
It took me a while to thread my way through all the villages between Zolakar and Martuni and it was already almost one by the time I was up in the mountain pass. Surprisingly, the weather was warmer up in the mountains and the reflection of sunlight off the oceans of snow all around me was nearly disorientating. I walked for hours and hours through white expanses of nothingness, where there was no wind, no traffic and no sound other than the periodic crunch of my boots on the thin layer of snow that covered the road.
I walked on and on, rounding corners only to find another long road, winding ahead of me for miles, with nothing at all on either side expect snow. Every so often a car would pass me, out there in the wasteland, and most of them would offer me a ride. Some would become rather upset by my refusal, making a hand gesture that implied that I was crazy, while others would just smile, nod and drive on as if they understood well.
There really wasn’t much to see for the 7 hours or so that I walked through the mountains, I passed by a few ghost towns, and at some point I passed a parked car where two guys had a snack, replete with a bottle of vodka, of course, arraigned on the hood of the car. I had about half a shot with these guys, that I immediately regretted, knowing that it would only dehydrate me, and was therefore not really worth having on such a long walk.
I was beginning to near the end of the mountain range around 4 o’clock, when a car passed me, and for the second time since I had left the day before, I was immediately accosted by five young men, all of which, practically leaped out of the car, before it had even seemed to have come to a stop. All the men were wearing some kind of uniform, which never bodes well, and they all seemed propelled by the emphatic Russian they were speaking as they approached me.
I knew I still had a long way to go, and as such didn’t want to stop and chat with these guys, I was tired, hungry and, most interestingly, my legs actually wouldn’t seem to stop walking. I had been walking without a break for so long, (there’s no place to sit when the snow is at least 5 five high on either side of the road.) I tried to be polite but, as always, one guy wanted to clown around a little more than I felt comfortable in allowing him. He tried to persuade me to stay, practically yelling in my face (as people often do when they can tell you aren’t fluent in their language) and trying to grab my arm to prevent me from walking further away. I did what I could to explain that I just wanted to walk and, since I had a long way to go, was really in quite a hurry. As usual the event ended with the leader yelling things after me while I gave monosyllabic answers to questions I couldn’t understand, as I walked further and further away. When the guys finally got back in their car and continued down the road, the complete silence resumed immediately, as if it had never been broken.
About half an hour later, I crested the mountain, that, the day before, had brought me over to this part of the country. I was nearly overjoyed to see the peak of Mt. Vartablur in the distance which is near my site and a significant landmark to me since I climbed it once in another all day hike.
It took a lot longer than I had expected to walk back down the mountain, even cutting across the switchbacks by sliding through the mud, I still didn’t get down to the valley floor until twilight had fully fallen, and the sky was mottled with orange and purple clouds. The weather was still very mild, and finally away from the solid reflective sheet of sun shinning on miles of snow, I could finally open my eyes and look around in the comforting dimness of the light.
I walked on through the villages, and refused several more rides, trying to suppress the voice in my head that told me I was still a long way from home and that it was almost dark. I wasn’t worried, I knew this road, there was no sign of approaching storms and, at long last, I was finally out of the mountains.
I walked on, until the sun set completely and the full moon began to rise behind an outcropping of cliffs. I was beginning to feel very tired, dragging myself along after walking constantly for more than ten hours. I hadn’t taken a rest at all, but I began to worry that if I did, it would be very difficult to get up from. I didn’t want to sleep outside, after the distance I had gone, I wanted to have a nice meal, and sleep in my own bed.
I limped on, under the full moon, trying to estimate how much longer I had to go, staring up at the moon in the sky and trying not to trip. I was probably about an hour away, when a car full of young men stopped, and choppy Russian began to issue from its windows, along with eager hand gestures and I thought to myself, “oh what the hell” and got in.

II This morning I did my laundry by hand, listening to Billie Holiday, the hue of the water coming to imitate that of the overcast sky outside through the dirt and cheap soap.

III
I left the house around 9. There was a birthday party going on underneath my apartment, that I could hear even clearer from the empty lot in front of my building. I heard the same yelling and bumping sound that had been muffled by my floor, unbridled under the clear sky as it drifted from the window out into the night. The children took up a round of the Birthday Song in English, it was surprisingly good, somewhat startling and left me with a feeling I found myself at a loss to express, a feeling I took with me as I walked on into the darkened town.
I passed the usual anonymous groupings on the corners and the soft window lights filled with shadows where apartment blocks abut the sky. I didn’t consider anything. I had no where to go and, really, didn’t want to go anywhere, so I walked through intersections, turning right or left at the last minute, finding no new streets to walk down.
On, what I think is the northern end of town, I climbed up a little hill and stood in the wind for a while, trying not to feel too indulgent or romantic, as solitary hills at night often make me feel. The lights went on and off for a while and a few cars looped slowly through the town, as if they were looking for each other in a maze. Before I walked down, a light went on in a nearby house that I could see well, and a little boy’s shadow spilled out into the street, his arms folded over the window sill, quiet and contemplating.
When I came down, I found myself next to a woman standing alone. She asked me a few questions about what I thought of Armenian girls and when I was going back to America. I didn’t want to talk to her, but I did anyway, answering her questions softly while looking up at the sky. It didn’t have anything to do with the woman, I just didn’t feel like talking, but I also felt listless enough to stand there talking to her all night as long as she kept asking me questions I understood. We said goodnight after a few minutes and I continued up the street, in the direction of a barking dog, who I came to see was behind a fence in the most comical position. The fence had a solid barrier about a foot up from the street which stopped about a foot further up, the rest was bars, as a result of this oddly designed barrier, the dog had to lower its head significantly to see what was going on in the street. At this angle the dog was unable to bark, so, as I passed, he kept quickly lowering his head to check my progress and then raising his head to bark for a second, before again stooping to again see where I was. The constant back and forth motion made me laugh a little, as the dog seemed to have the manner of a really nosey neighbor, rather than a dog, behind a fence at night.
When I got back home the birthday party still hadn’t ended and the sound of laughing and the sudden slapping together of hands (a very characteristic gesture of mirth here) continued well past midnight.

IV
They say you learn things about yourself in the Peace Corps, that, in fact, many people are motivated to join the Peace Corps out of the motive of self discovery, rather than helping their fellow human beings. I would be inclined to agree and add myself to this camp, although I do like to be helpful, when I walk through the relatively crime-free streets of the Armenian capital and see very little homelessness, agony, or spent syringes, I have to own up to the idea that it probably would have been more helpful for me just to stay where I was in the states and try to help that lady on my corner who was always screaming or that guy by the taquaria who could never seem to get his pants pulled up all the way. No, I came to the Peace Corps looking to help, but, moreover, looking to temper myself in the bright crucible of life outside the occidental world.
Along the way I’ve learned a few crucial things about myself, and though I usually don’t go in for such self aggrandizement, lately one thing has been so prominent I cannot help but to mention it here, as I feel it sheds no little light on the learning experience of a Peace Corps volunteer. This is, namely, that I apparently really enjoy baking and consuming cake.
Here in Armenia most village stores are quite limited in the selection of foodstuffs available, especially in the winter when you’re not going to get much produce other than those dirty, subterranean vegetables that can be grown when everything is buried under three feet of snow. I don’t know if I could ever really get sick of eating potatoes, but I’ve never been too crazy about cabbage and I probably never ate more than a single entire beet before coming here. There are also some crazy-looking radish things that I am almost entirely indifferent to and carrots make everything taste like its supposed to be a stew. Nonetheless, I passed a fairly enjoyable winter here, preparing these items along with onion and garlic in different ways until I became tired of eating and began to subsist on cigarettes and aimless walks. It’s not that I ever stopped getting hungry, but after months of eating the same thing my stubborn American palate began to revolt, and faced with a cold evening in the company of potatoes, I chose to stay where I was on the couch and smoke another cigarette, or make some coffee and drink cup after cup until I began to feel that anxiousness that can be converted easily into anticipation, and after a few pots I was tracing my finger all over a map I have hung in my kitchen and dreaming of a million possible trips and accomplishments that the coffee had brought to life. A few times, late at night, I even considered immediate departure, walking down the rain-macerated roads, following the Iranian trucks into Tabriz and Peace Corps Armenia history, as the kid who just up and left one night. I also spent inordinate amounts of time thinking about the minutiae of my life in the states, trying to reconstruct a Peet’s Coffee café near the 19th street BART stop in Oakland from memory, even though I only went there once, thinking how I’d sit in there for days once I got back.
Sure, I guess I was learning about myself through all these experiences, but I already knew I liked coffee and travel before I left, I mean I must’ve started and named this blog right after I got here and I guess that’s probably testament enough to these two influential stars of my existence, in fact I probably didn’t really even need to go into most of that. However, I never knew baking cakes could be so much fun until I was forced to do it through my boredom and nicotine addled nerves.
One bright Wednesday morning (which is my Sunday in my current schedule) I woke up and felt a keen desire to cook something, but as it was still early I was repulsed by the idea of making some lavish beet and cabbage dish, and found myself pining for the days when I used to be able to go out to a café that had vegan pastries and spend the morning eating donuts, drinking coffee and reading comics. I took stock of my situation and realized that I had some comics that my mother mailed me for Christmas and, as always, there was plenty of coffee just waiting to be brewed in the kitchen, but the sugary keystone was missing from this tantalizing fantasy, and I was about to just roll back over and go back to sleep when I realized that I could probably make a cake.
The day before I remembered seeing powdered sugar and vanilla packets at the local store and I had some arrowroot powder (for eggs) and plenty of powdered soy milk. (Thanks again, Mom!) I also had a stove that would probably be capable of baking something and a whole day with nothing to do other than my laundry. Immediately, I launched myself out of bed, driven by a furious desire to bake, and later eat, cake.
One thing I have figured out about cake, or at least regarding my own attitude toward it, is that cake is no good unless there’s a lot to eat. A little morsel of cake only fuels the desire to eat more and when you’ve got nothing else to do and you’re feeling haggard and worn out from teaching and writing lesson plans, eating an entire cake can actually be quite salubrious, both mentally and physically. But the first great gift of the cake lies in its preparation.
Everyone should enjoy listening to music early on a Sunday morning. No matter what your musical tastes everything sounds good on Sunday morning, but, I have always preferred to do something while listening to music and I have since found that baking is probably the ideal thing to do while listening to Sunday morning tunes. Other Sunday morning activities such as writing letters and doing the dishes can also be enjoyable when accompanied by music, but something about a mouth full of cake batter, the warmth of the oven and Smashing Pumpkins kinda’ trumps cold dishwater, bits of scrubbed off leftovers under your fingernails and Smashing Pumpkins. So while I am whipping a bunch of ingredients together, the music rolls through the Sunday-bright kitchen and I’m looking forward to an afternoon with a cake in it.
There is a bit of a lull after you put the cake in the oven and clean all the dishes, but the anticipation of the cake, soon to be borne into your meager, peeling-paint kitchen, makes this period easy to ride out with a few hurried paces around the room and a couple of good long stares at the map on the wall, also you could always, I dunno, call somebody, I guess, but me, I like to let the suspense hang like the rich notes of cake that accent the late February, almost like spring, air.
Soon enough you’ve got the thing out of the oven next to a pot of coffee and a good book, and I guess these are the moments when our experience in a foreign country really opens our eyes and we see that deep down we’ve always wanted to spend a day baking and eating cake, we just never realized it in the midst of American cornucopia. Sometimes it takes a grey cloud and an unfamiliar country to bring out the cake obsession in all of us. They should probably include that somewhere in the goals of Peace Corps.