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.