Hadis

Yesterday morning, Sunday, I took a rundown bus to Abovian from Nurnus. The machine had the appearance of some once proud soviet engineering crossed with a sketch out of the Beatle’s yellow submarine artwork. Large red tanks lined the top of it, containing what was apparently the gas (Benzine, I think) that it runs on. Brown chips and cracks ran along its pale yellow coat. Iron doors creaked shut behind you after entering. The aged machine crawled along the first hill side we took, seemingly about to lose all momentum and begin falling back down. But it was just getting warmed up; soon we were rumbling up and down the mountain sides at a steady pace. The driver wore a face that seemed as aged and yet reliable as the ancient machine he drove. He kept a floral rug over engine hub next to him and had hung a collage of very slutty looking Russian women over the bus’s front entrance. The fact that to my American eyes this bus could not actually be a working, functioning mode of transportation added a sort of magic, surreal element to the whole trip.

We bounded out of my village and I soon found out that the bus also functioned as a traveling market or delivery service as well. The bus was stopping at random intervals on the roads, at which point men waiting patiently on the roadside would exchange empty bottles and a few hundred dram for full bottles of matsun (yogurt) or milk that women who had boarded in Nurnus had brought along. I’d say that’s efficiency for you. Also I’m sure the driver and his superiors could care less that a miniature economy is thriving along their bus lines.

I struck up conversation with the tan-faced woman next to me to get some vital information. What I said I think went something like this: “you know…when….this bus….comes from Abiovian to Nurnus…later today?”

“Amen yerkoo sham galis e,” she responded kindly. Every two hours it comes.

“Very good,” I said.

“Yeah, “she said. “You can catch it at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm and the last one at 7pm.”

“Many thanks,” I told her.

She smiled and said no problem.

The bus clattered on to Abovian’s public transportation hub, a large parking lot filled with white marshutni vans going every which way. I asked the driver of my bus as I was exiting which of these white beauties would take me to Akunk, he pointed to a van and said the number “48.” I spotted her, said my thanks and strode over to the crowded, smelly marshutni number 48. Before boarding, I decided to stroll around the lot and just get some bearings. The driver of my bus, seeing that I was not walking directly into the marshutni to Akunk that he had so kindly pointed out to me, hollered at me that I was going the wrong way. I tried to explain that I was just walking around before I boarded, but I don’t know how to explain that at all, so it got a bit confusing. Anyway, I think he could see that I was alright. Nice guy though…

The ride to Akunk took maybe another half hour. A large Armenian woman in a sun dress sat next to me. Her arm was totally sweating on my arm, which was sweating on her arm. It’s just something you’ve got to get used to if you want to use the transportation around here. Even though I had proudly announced to the entire marshutni that “I’m going to Akunk!” (my way of verifying that we were in fact going to Akunk and not somewhere else I had never heard of), we rolled right past Akunk before I realized about a half mile outside the town boundaries that I had missed it. I hollered some nonsensical Armenian; the woman across from me understood my problem and told the bus driver to stop right away. I got out having delayed myself only a 10 minute walk back into town.

John and Ashley were waiting for me at the Akunk’s center, and we lost no time in heading up for Hadis, which rises up mightily right above the village. We took a food break right before making the final push up the very steep, rocky area right before the peak, but other than that kept up a really brisk pace and summitted in just over two hours. At the peak a surprise friend was waiting for us.

As I clambered up a last boulder and cheered myself on to the peak, I saw a man striding down toward me in sunglasses and an athletic t-shirt. “Hey Tom,” he said with what seemed to me a ridiculous amount of nonchalance. It took me a good 30 seconds to force my dazed, ‘just-defeated-this-mountain,’ mind to remember who this guy was.

“Hey Nick,” I said finally. Nick, one the Peace Corps Armenia staff, was at the peak. We got to talking, commenting on how absolutely beautiful it was up here, and what a coincidence it was that he was up here today as well. It turned out the guy wasn’t just ‘hanging out’ on top of the mountain, waiting for his trainees to summit the peak because he knew exactly where we were at all times and wanted to teach us some sort of lesson, although that was sort of my first suspicion. He was apparently getting ready to go para-gliding off this bad boy with some of his friends. He was helping some friends set up their “wing” and then was going to perhaps have a go at it himself later on. Right on, Nick.

The three of us bid him good luck and had our lunches at the peak and basked in our wicked good success. Wanting to share in our glory but not wanting to deal with the whole hiking bit, another trainee living in Akunk—another Ashley—and her host father drove up in a Russian jeep and met us about a half hour later. The host papa was quite a character, had heard that some Americans were climbing up his village’s mountain and just wanted to see it for himself I think. He had apparently served in the soviet military and had actually been stationed in Cuba way back when. I feel that if we were just one more generation back, we would be pretty shocked, perhaps angry at meeting a man who had been stationed in Cuba near the time of the missile crisis. But now, in 2011 in a tiny Armenian village, our reaction was one of mild interest bordering on “whoa that is really cool.”

So now we had a little party on top of this mountain. Nothing major, but pictures were taken, we cheered a bit, we sat in a cozy, cool cave for awhile to get away from the heat. When it got a bit later and the crew wanted to head back down, John and I decided to stay a bit longer on the peak and walk back down the old-fashioned way. The Ashleys and host papa bid us adieu and roared back down to Akunk in the black Russian jeep. John and I spent the next couple hours just talking nonsense and baking in the sun. Pretty great.

Making the trek back down, I realized that my body was altogether wiped. The 2 hour voyage back to my village of Nurnus via Marshutni and taxi went by in a blur, I felt more or less like a zombie, and I arrived home to a tateek that was very concerned at the now very visible sunburn I had acquired over the course of the day.

“Come, come,” she beckoned to me as we entered the kitchen. Apparently she had some sort of cure or remedy waiting for me. Aloe? Probably not…

I watched as my wonderful tateek pulled a giant bucket of matsun out of the refrigerator, which is Armenian yogurt. I loved eating the stuff, but had not experienced it being rubbed on my body just yet, believe it or not. Wasting no time, she began lathering in on my arms, and neck, and face. I figured it couldn’t hurt, and I spent the entire two or three minute long experience sort of outside of myself just trying not to giggle. A very old, kind woman was rubbing yogurt on me. After eating, I went to bed smelling like dairy and was out in seconds.

Week One

I’ve now been in my ‘training village,’ just shy of a week, and it is indeed a village – with every charming, rustic stigma that you could attach to it. Roosters crow throughout the day. Cows come home at night. The roughly 700 residents here know exactly what one another are doing at all times, and they especially know what myself and the other seven volunteers, who have so briskly descended on their otherwise much more predictable lives, are up to. If I go on a walk with a girl from the village, the rumor mill will begin churning away at full speed with speculation. Already this has happened, caught me a bit off guard, and is something I’ll need to be wary of. But our goings on are monitored on a much more mundane level as well. If another volunteer is taking a nap, a Tateek (Armenian for grandmother) will go over to another tateek’s home for coffee and share this news as if it were quite imminent. Soon enough the whole village is aware this person is taking a nap, and by the time the napping individual wakes up, wherever he/she goes people will ask how the nap was. This has also already happened at least once.

This is not to say that the folks in the village are all gossips and voyeurs. I’ve been trying to take the experience of being spotlighted in stride so far, seeing it as more endearing than rude in any way. These people are genuinely interested in what we do, and I suppose it’s understandable. If I had grown up in a village of some 100 residences in the middle of the mountains, with only one pot-hole ridden road connecting me to any form of civilization, I would be deadly curious about eight individuals from an ostensibly super-rich nation who suddenly decided it was a good idea to live little old Nurnus.

My first day here, my host father Andranik – a very kind, powerfully built man with a rug of grey hair on his arms and chest who offers me at least one shot of vodka every time we eat dinner together – showed me his garden and orchard, something that I think is not just a point of pride but also a tangible symbol of how life works here. Our crude communication of pointing and broken Armenian eventually revealed to me that he has – among other things—apricot trees, apple trees, tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries all growing back there. My host family has cows, chickens and goats as well. They also keep bees. As far as I can tell, nearly everything that I’m eating comes right from the backyard. Cheese, eggs, honey, tomato and cucumber salad, bread from hand rolled dough, barbecued chicken roasted above a toonirh (a fire pit in a small enclosed area), it all seems to have come from right next to me, and I’m pretty floored by it. In these ten weeks of training we are expected to learn a lot about the Armenian language and about teaching methods for non-native speakers and how to be an effective and credible volunteer, but a lot of other lessons will be instilled just from being immersed in this culture of an Armenian mountain village. I feel pretty lucky right now, and I already feel my perceptions of wealth shifting a bit.

During our first few days of orientation, another volunteer shared a quote that had been passed down to him before he and his group went out to serve: “go out and live wildly uncomfortable lives,” it went.

It’s a great line. I walk up and down winding roads to school every morning, dodging cow shit and glancing nervously at the stray dogs or occasional herd of cattle or sheep that may accost me on the way. In the past week I’ve had to rely heavily, almost completely on people I’ve only just met. I can’t speak with them hardly a single word every time we eat together, which is three times a day, yet they feed me ridiculous amounts of food. Andranik offers me “oghi” (vodka) every dinner time until I make it totally clear to him that I’m done toasting. We manage to communicate one way or the other, and despite my slight discomfort, each night before I sleep I look out from my house’s balcony and see Mt. Ara staring back at me serene and gorgeous beyond the deep valley that the village sits on. While I can’t yet fully communicate with the people I live with, they manage to make clear how much they accept me and see me as their own. This is already kind of fun.