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.
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