First Guest – Առաջին Հյուրը

The first guest to my house arrived on a bicycle, and had just finished cascading down the 2483 m high mountain pass from Kapan to Meghri. His large, brown beard was frozen.

I was startled at about 8pm the day he got here by a knock on my door from some of the men in the village. They explained to me, in pretty excited voices, that a man had arrived in the village, that he didn’t know a single word of Armenian, and that I needed to come out and translate. I walked out my front gate to find a very thin, bearded, spectacled man on a bicycle surrounded by 10 to 12 Armenian men from the village, all trying to help/understand him at the same time.

“Hello,” he said to me in clear English when he spotted me. “My name is Sven, are you a Peace Corps Volunteer?”

I told him I was. He said he’d been travelling by bicycle through Armenia and needed a place to stay. He also dropped the names of Austin and Katie, two volunteers he had stayed with in a town about three hours north (by car), and so between his unimposing demeanor and acquaintance with other people I know, I felt just fine taking him in.

I explained to the other men watching us talk that I’d be putting him up for the night, helped Sven put his bike in my storage room, and started heating the water tank so that he could get a hot shower. The first thing he asked for was not food or coffee or tea, but just straight up hot water. I heated some up on the stove and handed it to him. He guzzled it down, sighed, and said something like “you have no idea how nice that is after biking over that mountain.” His beard wasn’t frozen anymore.

I started whipping up a stew with veggies, lentils and potatoes as well as hot coffee for both of us. This was the official first guest at my new place, and I was really feeling the hosting mood. Could be the Armenian culture rubbing off on me…

We got to talking. Sven, it turned out, had been biking non-stop all the way from his home in Germany. He had crossed through the Czech Republic, the Balkans, Turkey, Georgia, and was now entering Iran through Armenia. His ultimate goal was to reach India, and he claimed with confidence that he would even be biking through Pakistan to do it. He had stayed with at least three other volunteers on the journey in Armenia and Georgia, and likely some other ones in the Balkans too.

Sven was 31 years old, was taller than me, leaner than me, was extremely talkative, had a huge smile and the air of someone who had been alone with only his thoughts for perhaps a bit too long (although this probably had been one of his goals anyway). He said he had worked for an IT firm, crunching data for several years, until he one day had the revelation that what he did was pointless and decided that traveling the world on a bicycle would be much more fulfilling. The people in my village told me later that they thought he was insane. I kind of admired him in a way, if only because I would never have the nerve to do what he was doing.

His first night at my place, after we feasted on stew and black bread and Armenian matsun, he slept on the extra bed in my living room, which, unlike my bedroom, has no wood burning stove and is only heated by a small PC issued radiator that hardly does anything. I felt sort of bad about this, but he said he didn’t mind at all, and that in his sleeping bag had slept in far more frigid conditions.

In the morning, after breakfast, Sven asked if he could stay a second night. I had kind of figured he would want to, and was happy to have him an extra night. He carried his weight just by being good company, and to top it off when I got home from teaching English that day, it was to the smell of a huge pot of borscht that he was cooking up. Turns out he was also an awesome cook. That night was spent eating more borscht, playing speed (a card game I hadn’t played in forever), and playing harmonicas (I have one I brought to country and hardly ever use and Sven travels with one as well).

When he left the next morning, it was kind of a funny feeling. I can’t say I’ll miss him. I only knew him for about 48 hours, but it was nice to have the company. Also, it’s a pretty certain bet that I’ll never see the guy again. We shook hands and he cycled away again, leaving early so that he could make it over the mountain pass just over the Iranian border before nightfall.

While my current occupation is sort of that of a wanderer, I still live and work in this country. I have other Americans living and working near me and I live in a community where I see the same people every day and am recognized. It takes a lot of willpower for sure, but to do what Sven is doing is another level of wanderlust altogether. To go it alone, without planned places to stay or knowing any of the language or people to meet, to be very often dependent on the kindness of strangers and also very often alone with just you and nature, that takes willpower and then something else too.

First Signs of Integration?

It’s the ultimate goal of just about all of us expat volunteer/worker types – to become fluent in the language, the culture and the very spirit of the place. To know and be known by everyone you see, to be respected in the community you live in and perhaps most importantly to have people from the host country that you can truly consider family. I’m not fully integrated, at least I wouldn’t say I am, but I am starting to feel more and more at home around here.

While visiting my training village, Nurnus, over a break recently, my host father from last summer, Andranik, gave a toast (one of many) exclaiming: “Menk ko arrachin hai untanik enk,” – We are your first Armenian Family. This is very true, and something I won’t ever forget,and not just because he also told me repeatedly not to forget it. They were the first Armenian family I got to know and lived with, and also the first people to care for me in this country. By “caring for me,” I mean truly caring for me. Over the summer, they did everything from doing my laundry for me and making all of my meals to putting homemade yogurt on my sunburnt arms (an apparently common Armenia remedy) and during my first few weeks there even cutting my own food for me during dinner time. Most importantly they made me feel like I was part of their family. Unfortunately, they are also far away from where I live and work now – a good 9 hours by crowded minibus or taxi over mountainous and outrageously bumpy roads. Such is life when you sign up for a large, bureaucratic service organization and tell them that you will go work literally wherever they tell you to.

On my way home from break, I was retelling what Andranik said during this toast to Hrach, my landlord and friend, as we were travelling on the way to my village. I was travelling back south, and he needed to stop by there and gather his dried persimmons, or “chir,” that he had stored there at a relative’s house, so he gave me a ride. Also in the car were his wife, Anahit and 5 year old son, Mikael. He paused when I retold the story, chuckled a second, and then said “We are your third Armenian Family, then (including of course the family I lived with before I got my own place in the village).

Once I arrived in my village with Hrach and his family, I had, for the first time, a sensation of this village really being my home, and of being happy to be back. It had been a mildly long break filled with conferences and seminars with the Peace Corps staff and other volunteers, and I had honestly missed the place a bit. I stopped into my neighbor Karen’s house, whom I had left the keys to my house with, and he immediately uttered “Ari hats enk utum,” or basically “come over here we are eating” (a favorite phrase in Armenian households). I joined Karen and his family at the table, ate an odd oniony dish I hadn’t tried before and which I forget the name of, and had an obligatory toast or two with them as well. After this I stopped over at my friend Artak’s store. Artak, who is 22 years old and has recently finished serving in the Armenian army, has a roadside store where he buys and sells everything from beer and cigarettes, to dried fruit and walnuts, to gasoline. He’s a good guy, and also knows lots of people traveling to and from the area that stop at his store and so can sometimes hook me up with a ride heading north. I popped in to say hi, had a couple cups of coffee with him, and ended up going home with a plastic bottle filled with oil that he gave to me for free for starting fires in my wood-burning stove.

I got home, started myself a fire to warm the place up, brewed some tea and kicked back. I’ve already been living here in this village for four and a half months and I can hardly believe it.

New Place - Նոր Տեղ

Doing favors for people whenever you can is usually a good idea. Awhile back I helped out my friend Hrackik Markaryan, a local English tutor/translator here, on a project he’s working on. We subsequently became pretty good pals, I told him I’d been looking around for a place of my own to move into in the village, he told me he had a summer home that his family never uses, and a few small hurdles later (agreeing on rent/buying wood to keep myself warm for the winter/fixing broken windows with my neighbor/knocking down thousands of cobwebs within the home) I've now found myself with a reasonably comfortable pad, which I’ve been living in for already around two weeks.

Amenities include:

1) Wood burning stove in my bedroom, which equals fast, easy heat for the winter(maybe not the easiest ever, but I'm into the rustic-ness of it, plus there's just something great about falling asleep next to the sound of a fire going)
2) Bookcase full of Russian books that I cannot read (maybe someday?)
3) Large living room that I’ll probably never use (too big to heat efficiently) except when I have guests
4) Three extra beds (the Armenian style that sag hardcore in the middle)
5) Sketchy electrical outlets
6) Some cookware, and Armenian Khorovats skewers (fully intend to use these)
7) Large balcony
8) A toilet that flushes (serious bonus)
9) A hot water tank that can heat water to a comfortable temperature in about 3 hours
10) Other things I have not yet discovered, be they good or bad

And here's a picture of all the wood 60,000 drams can buy, which will be keeping me warm this winter, and which I'm currently in the process of chopping on my own, a fact which is blowing the minds of some of the villagers around here.



To give a little more background, I met Hrach, the landowner, very soon after I got to Lehvaz in August. He showed up to the school one day, unannounced, on one of my first days there. I’ve since come to find out that he is very fond of arriving at places without telling anyone, or at least does it all the time. He introduced himself and told me in fluent English that he was a translator in Kadjaran (a mining town to the north of me that we volunteers are actually prohibited from staying in due to certain environmental/health hazards). He told me that he was excited I had arrived, and wanted me to help him with a project he was working on later. I said of course I would help however I could. He took me up on it pretty quickly.

A few weeks later he showed up at my host family’s house, unannounced, with a laptop and voice recording gear, asking me to help him make some recordings for the English language learning website that he was building. I hesitated a moment, more just taken aback by the nonchalance of his arrival than anything else. Also, I had just finished having a few toasts with my host-father, and so wasn’t sure if I was in the right state of mind to work at the moment (this time I think his reasoning for the toasts had been that his grandson had gotten new shoes, and I of course had agreed that we had to throw back a few). Anyway after a second or two I told him I’d be happy to help, and all it really involved on my part was reading from a script he had already written while he recorded my voice, so I can’t say it was a large request by any means. I read from the script, he recorded and saved it to put on the site later. With my voice and the voices of a few other volunteers, he’ll have a variety of native speakers speaking on the site, which should be a really nice feature. The website will also be free, and he’s making it without any pay of course. The man even taught himself flash and html in order to build it, which is impressive given that Hrach, at an age close to 50, has already worked as an accomplished engineer, English teacher, translator and private tutor. And that’s just to my knowledge.

After recording, we spent the rest of that night sipping tea and I listened to Hrach and my host father reminisce about the old days, or rather the soviet days. Both men grew up in the village. Arto talked of his time in the Russian military when he was posted in East Germany. Hrach talked of working as an engineer in Russia during soviet times as well. They talked of the soviet-built train that used to run from our village all the way to Yerevan, how they used to be able to hear it whine every night from their homes. The train’s now defunct because its tracks are cut off by the currently hostile borders that it used to unite. Since the war with Azerbaijan, folks now have to go by car to get to Yerevan or anywhere north of here for that matter. There’s only one road, and it winds up and down two huge mountain passes that often get snowed or frozen over during the winter. Armenians talk highly of soviet times often, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s fact and what is embellishment, but there’s no question that a train, running daily, would have done wonders for the economy of the villages around here. The basic reality seems to be that their quality of life was better back then, and so naturally they wax nostalgic at times.

After that night, I ended up helping Hrach record a couple more times, and found out his family had a summer home in the village that they hardly used. I worked up the nerve to ask if I could stay there, indefinitely, and after a bit of persuasion, mostly directed at his wife who was the big hold out, I was given the go ahead. Hrach also later told me that my neighbors were calling him at odd hours imploring him to let “Mr. Tom” live next to them. Nice to know that my neighbors wanted it as much as I did!

So yeah, my days living with an Armenian family have drawn to a close, possibly for the rest of my service. It’s a bit more lonely, and I have to do things like chop my own wood, hand-wash my laundry, and cook for myself, but the independence is fantastic. We Americans, we love that stuff, myself included. Also, since I’ve been moved into the place, neighbors and other teachers at the school have been giving me stuff like pickled vegetables (not a huge fan), Armenian yogurt and even a lamb stew (huge fan), as house warming gifts or perhaps because they are still not sure that a man of 23 can cook for himself.

I feel I’ve reached an in-service milestone here.