I’ve just come back from visiting my site, or the village that I will be living and working in for the next two years, and I can say I’m not totally let down. In fact, I’m downright giddy about it. Let me begin…
This particular adventure began last week when they took the 41 of us volunteers-in-training out to the large local community school/current PST headquarters and led us to a large, freshly painted map of Armenia on the parking lot blacktop. Red dots with corresponding cities written in Armenian were marked like coordinates waiting for their payload. We gathered around the map, names were called out, applause filled the air, and volunteers began occupying the dots one by one. This was how the Peace Corps – after at least a year’s worth of work culling volunteers-to-be, choosing appropriate work sites, and double checking on the safety and suitability of each location—had chosen to reveal the results to us. It was quick, a bit messy and came with an intense rushing sensation that left me pretty dazed or excited or something else I’ve never felt before. My name was called last, as the fates had it, and I found myself in a very small village that is very close to Armenia’s southern border. For safety and protocol reasons, I’ll be referring to my site as “the deep south” in this blog from here on out.
So the countries that will be my close neighbors in the deep south may be mildly shocking to some people. It certainly took a good deal of reflection on my part for me to get a bit more comfortable with the idea. The night after the announcement, I lost substantial sleep for the first time in a long time (I don’t mean to brag, but I’m normally very good at sleeping). I called a good friend, a fellow trainee, and felt loads better.
What’s frightening about this placement is that it’s extremely close to a border that our country is not on any sort of good terms with. There’s also that horror story of those hikers who recently got mistaken for spies and abducted after accidentally crossing the border. The village itself is also remote, around 600 or so people live there. I’ll be the only American in town for sure.
What’s good about this placement is that Iran is actually one of the friendliest, if not the friendliest border Armenia has. With Turkey and Azerbaijan being closed off, hostile borders (particularly the latter), Armenia apparently relies on their southern neighbor for the trade of just about every sort of good imaginable. This placement also means an adventure in every sense of the word, sort of the essence of the vague ideas I had in the back of my mind when I first decided to apply to be a volunteer abroad. It’s a tiny village, it’s a totally foreign place, it’s a dramatic landscape, it’s on the edge of the map, and so I think it suits me just right. It’s also beautiful.
After receiving the news, I had about 24 hours to digest it, pack my bags and prepare for a weekend-long visit to see what it was actually like. Departing on a Saturday morning, it took us about seven and a half hours to get from Yerevan to the deep south, which is actually very, very good time. Our cab driver hauled ass the entire way, passing cars in a two-lane during tight bends, seemingly playing chicken with trucks far more massive than us in the oncoming lane of traffic, and just pulling generally insane moves whenever possible. Anyway he had an air about him that made me trust him completely, that all great drivers have I think. The landscape changed drastically and often. After passing through large iron gates marking the beginning of Armenia’s Syunik Marz, we went from the relatively flat and arid fields laying in front of Ararat’s gigantic peak to rolling alpine meadows. I had a cold, and the frequent elevation changes were making my ears build and release pressure like mad but the view made it all alright. As we went deeper into Syunik Marz, we passed treeless meadows filled with wildflowers, then lakes, then forests, all while climbing up one mountain and then coasting back down into an adjacent gorge more times than I can remember.
Myself and Hannah, the other volunteer who actually got placed a bit farther and closer to the border still, bless her, chatted excitedly and ran the conversational gamut of where you went to school, how many significant others you’ve had, why you decided to be a volunteer in the middle of nowhere etc. for just about the entire time.
Finally arriving in the southern extremity of Armenia, the landscape now resembled semi-desert, with green shrubs and trees coloring the dry, rocky hills and valleys. We pulled into my village and I exited the cab to find my new host-father, Arto, waiting impatiently to meet me.
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