Border to Border - Սահմանից Սահման

Living in a country smaller than the size of Maryland has its perks. Despite the predominately mountainous terrain that gives the country a wide range of climate zones and makes villages that should be only a stone's throw away from each other actually close to a day's travel away, Armenia is still relatively speaking a compact place. This also means that walking across the country, from one border to the other, is not a totally out of the question, insane prospect. And for three weeks this summer, myself and some fellow volunteers will be doing just that. 

Border to Border is a project started up by volunteers in Armenia last summer, and is now being continued for a second year running. Two teams of six volunteers, one from the Iranian border (that's my team) and one from the Georgian border will walk across Armenia for three weeks until we converge in the country's central town of Yeghegnadzor. Why, might you ask, are we doing this? Well, for some pretty good reasons as a matter of fact:

For these three weeks, we'll be walking for two very important causes in Armenia: children's health and environmental awareness. Lack of responsibility for one's health and for the local environment are two issues among Armenian youth (prevailing examples being garbage routinely dumped into local rivers and streams or the majority of young boys picking up smoking by age 15). And these issues we hope to address with a little leading by example, spreading of awareness, and teaching. Each team will stop in 9 to 10 Armenian towns and villages along the way to hold teaching sessions at local schools and cultural centers. Armenians from different organizations such as FYCA (Federation of Youth Clubs in Armenia) and YMCA of Armenia will be teaming up with us along the way as well, teaching with us and even walking with us at times as well. At the end of the journey, we hope to have taught in upwards of 18 communities, passed through/had contact with countless other villages along the way, hiked nearly 600 K, and given valuable lessons and lasting impressions to a whole lot of children. Wish us luck. It's on!

Oh yes, and we need donations too, so if you're in the position to do so, visit our donation portal here. Just few U.S. dollars go a long way in Armenia, trust me.

Shnorhavor – Շնորիավոր

In Armenia, folks like to Shnorhavor things.

 This word, shnorhavor, roughly translates to “congratulations,” but, as with a lot of cases when trying to succinctly translate something, it doesn’t do the word justice (I suppose this goes especially for translations between two languages as disparate as English and Armenian). You hear “shnorhavor” in Armenia in a lot of the situations where you would also here the English “congratulations,” like during weddings, or when you’ve just moved into a new place. You also hear it in some contexts where someone perhaps could give you a “congrats” in English, but it would ring a bit odd, like during birthdays (I don’t think people say “congratulations on your birthday,” all too often), when somebody in the village gets new windows, or when a grandchild gets new shoes. And then there are the situations where the translation seems to definitely be off, like the first day you wear a tie to work or when the first of a certain local mountain plant this season have grown and are ready to eat. It seems to mean much more than just a simple “congratulations,” is used often and creatively, and is always meant sincerely and to express good will (you don’t hear a lot of sarcasm around here, if any). A few of my favorite Shnorhavors I’ve experienced in country so far are as follows. 


Նոր Կացին Շնորիավոր - Nor Katsin Shnorhavor – Congrats on the new axe

 To stave off the cold during the brutal Armenian winter, I chopped a pretty substantial amount of wood toward the end of last year for my wood burning stove. I used my landlord’s old axe that I found in his storage area at first, but it didn’t last long. I’m no expert lumberjack, my form is probably laughable (at least to Armenians) and I take wild swings sometimes that dig into knotty portions of the wood that dull the blade and weaken the shaft. After a few days of using it, I had broken my landlord’s axe, split the shaft right in two. My neighbors tried helping me fix it, but it was bound to break again, so I started looking for something a little stronger/safer. I headed to Meghri, the nearest town, bought myself a new shaft and blade for a total of 4,000 dram. I was then told that I should bring the parts to a man named Hamlet, who lived in my village and apparently was the local master craftsmen of sorts. I brought the two parts to his house, and his daughter told me that in a few days he’d have it all fixed up and ready for me. About three days later, as I was getting ready to leave work at the school, I was called into the teacher’s lounge. There, resting in the middle of the room on a table usually dedicated to class textbooks, notebooks of lesson plans, and cups of coffee was a shinning new axe. My schools art teacher had written “TOM” in blue sharpie on the shaft, so that it was perfectly clear exactly who this tool of destruction belonged to. Hamlet had not simply attached the axe head to the shaft for me. The blade was razor sharp, and behind the axe head he had installed a small iron plate, reinforced with bolts, to make it super secure and more or less indestructible. Walking out of the school with this deadly thing, I was immediately swarmed by the 3rd, 4th and 5th grade boys hanging out in the playground. They gathered in a circle around me, jumped up and down, tried to come up to touch it, and gave me many a sincere “shnorhavor” on my new acquisition. In Armenian villages anyway, it’s not really looked down upon for teachers to walk out of schools with big, razor sharp axes.

Բոխի Շնորիավոր - Bokhi Shnorhavor – Congratulations to Bokhi (??) 

 The other day at work, my school’s principal, a white-haired, stout, severe but also mischievous kind of man, told me that I need not go to the third grade during the upcoming class period, because we had something important to do in his office. Per usual, he didn’t tell me what this was, but I obliged without any sort of complaint because, well, if the school head says I don’t have to teach next hour, then I’m not. I walked into his office to see the small table all set up with sausage, cheese, lavash, fruit, and a mysterious, green, limp, celery-looking vegetable on a platter in the center. “Tom, this is called Bokhi,” he explained to me. He said it was the first Bokhi of the spring, fresh from the mountains, and we had to celebrate a little. Two of the other male staff at the school, Karen and Aram, joined us, and we spent the next 45 minutes chowing down and sipping my director’s homemade vodka with many toasts of “Boki shnorhavor.”

 Փողկապ Շնորիավոր - Poghkap Shnorhavor – Congratulations on the tie 

 Last Friday, the American Ambassador to Armenia paid a visit to my school. I’ll have more on that whole ordeal in another post, but overall it went great. Among many other preparations for the visit, I decided I’d put on a tie for the occasion, which is the first time I’ve worn one at the school (despite the fact that for some reason I packed about 5 of my favorite ties when I left America last summer). One of my 7th grade students, a boy named Roler, said to me when I walked in, “Mr. Tom you are wearing a tie!” I responded in the affirmative. “Shnorhavor,” he said to me sincerely.

 Ձեր Տոնը Շնորիավոր - Dzer Tone Shnorhavor – Congratulations on your holiday 

 On pretty much any Armenian holiday, you’ll hear shnorhavoring going on all around the village. On Nor Tari (new year), everyone shnorhavor’s everyone, saying what would translate to “congrats on your holiday!” and then the response, “yours too!” On other holidays, people are shnorhavored who have a connection with the holiday, so for instance army veterans are shnorhavored on WWII victory day, which Armenian’s do in fact celebrate. One thing that’s confused me a bit though is that on just about every Armenian holiday, I’ve been told “your holiday shnorhavor” by my students, regardless of if I have a connection or not. I’ve of course been told “shnorhavor” on big holidays like Nor Tari, but I’ve also been told “congrats on your holiday” on holidays like Women’s Day, Armenian Army Day, and Russian Army Day, which is still celebrated widely since many Armenian men served in the Russian Army, and also sort of serves as an unofficial “Men’s Day,” here as well.

March 8th - Մարտի ութ

On March 8th, Armenia celebrates “International Women’s Day,” along with many other countries around the globe (I think some people observe it in the U.S. but I don’t remember ever hearing about it until I got here). Armenian takes the holiday seriously, and folks take off work and toast to the women in their lives. Here the day also sort of marks the focal point of March, which is “Women’s Month.” The day before the holiday arrived, excited third-graders at the school exclaimed “dzer ton shnorhavor” to me, which is a standard Armenian phrase said on special days that basically means “congratulations on your holiday.” Why they wanted to congratulate me on Women’s Day I’m not so sure, but either they weren’t thinking that hard or they thought it was funny. My students have also congratulated me on Teacher’s Day, Armenian Army Day, Russian Army Day, and just about every other holiday that has come, so I guess they just like saying it.

To commemorate the day and enjoy the time off, Arevik — a woman of 22 from the village, the school’s art teacher, and a good friend of mine — her three friends Hakob, Victoria and Satenik, and myself went for a hike in the mountains surrounding the village. Arevik and her crew showed up in front of my house in Hakob’s old Lada at about 11am, we drove out to a dirt road that led into the mountains slightly until reaching a steep valley, got out where the road ended, and began our quest. The goal of the hike was to find an old abandoned church (Armenian’s have a serious penchant for visiting the old, abandoned Christian churches of their ancestors). Only one of us, Hakob, had been to this particular old church before though, and he hadn’t been there since he was thirteen years old, so he was a bit fuzzy on the exact location somewhere in this vast space of rocky slopes, valleys, brambles and pine. Also in tow we had skewers, raw chicken, goat cheese, coffee, lavash, potatoes, pickled vegetables and a beat up Russian history book for starting a fire, so a traditional Armenian Khorovats (basically barbeque) was in order at some point in the day as well. I wasn’t at all aware at the time, but we wouldn’t be coming back down to the village until some 8 hours later.

 We set out from Hakob’s Lada and Victoria, or “Veek” as everyone was calling her, immediately started showing off her prowess in mountaineering, shooting up the slopes in incredibly fast spurts and then waiting for the rest of us patiently at intervals as we summited behind her at a more reasonable, out-of-shape person's pace. I tried my best to keep up, every now and then coming around a bend or getting over a boulder to see her sitting back propped up against a tree waiting for us to reach her so that she could continue. Before getting up to run ahead and disappear again, she a couple times paused to hand me some sort of herb that she had picked while waiting and told me to eat it. It was green, looked like grass and tasted sort of sour, but not bitter. I figured I could use whatever amount of energy it held inside and ate it up.

 As we reached the top of the first slope, Hakob, who had been staying behind with the other girls so far, now began showing off a bit too. He passed me up, disappeared as he started descending into the next valley, and what seemed like only 5 minutes later when I looked up I saw him already a kilometer or so out ahead and climbing up another slope. I was stunned by how fluidly a person could move through these mountains and also a bit put out that we still had to hike at least as far as he was. After catching up to Hakob and descending down into another valley, we came upon the stone foundation of an old barn. Maybe the church was nearby. People had lived here at some point anyway. Hakob seemed unsure. We followed a stream into a very shady and still partially snow-covered area for a little while longer before deciding that we’d have to eat before going on any further. We gathered wood and twigs, tore apart the old Russian history book and got a fire roaring. We skewered the meet, laid out the cheese and lavash, and got the khorovats roasting over the open coals. The potatoes were cooked simply by burying them under excess ash and hot coals, which I had never seen before but worked fine. Within a half hour we had a feast on our hands, and I sat amazed at Armenians’ ability to do a good khorovats literally anywhere. During the meal I felt great, not only because grubbing out after a long hike is really satisfying, but also because I was actually having a great time with Arev and her friends. I was understanding their Armenian almost perfectly, exchanging stories and jibes with them, and for one of the first times actually feeling connected with people my age in the country that are not just other Americans.

 After eating we decided to call it quits on the church hunt and just head back to the village. It would take awhile as it was. We cleaned up, burned our garbage (better than just throwing it in the creek, which actually is the more common method of picnic disposal here), and then put out our fire.

 Filled up on goat cheese, grilled chicken and potatoes, we took a steeper but more direct route back home. About halfway up, I looked back and spotted our elusive goal. Over one peak, across another valley and halfway up another lay a small, rectangular stone building that must have undoubtedly been the old abandoned church Hakob had been to when he was thirteen. I pointed it out to him and he confirmed it. Rather than let down, we were excited that we now knew where it was and could venture out to see it another time. It did make a very mysterious and almost taunting sight out there in the middle of nowhere, and we agreed make it out there soon.

 A few hours later we were back in the village and exhausted. I got a free meal at Larisa’s (Arevik’s mother) of borscht, bread and cheese, strolled home, at more food there, and then let my tired bones hit the bed. I was asleep in seconds.

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.

Road to Kuris - Կուրիսի Ճանապարհ

Your mood and energy can shift unsettlingly fast in a place like this, and usually it’s got a lot to do with perception. Massive questions like “why am I here,” and “will I actually have a reasonably positive impact here,” and even more mundane (but still very important) ones like “will my host family serve me a heaping bowl of greasy, bland soup again for the 7th or 8th night in a row” can fill mind until you just feel tired. Another level got tacked onto that already mounting fatigue recently because my counterpart, the Armenian woman I teach English with every day, left very suddenly for a two week stint, leaving me to teach 20 classes a week, grades 3 through 12, on my own. I felt up for the challenge, happy that they trusted me enough to do it and daunted as hell be the task of teaching all of these kids using a language I’m still just learning (their English is still not nearly good enough for me to rely on that entirely).

So yeah, my counterpart had to leave to go take classes in preparation for some state mandated test, since she will be replacing comrade Mirzoyan as the school’s director next year. The lovely people giving these required classes gave her about two days notice when they were taking place, which meant I found out the day before she was leaving. I headed over to her house after school on the day I found out. She was already packing her bags and her hair had been newly soaked with a large quantity of red dye, which was starting to seep down onto her forehead a bit, which made her look, well, very funny. She brewed a pot of coffee, sat down across from me, and, in her obnoxiously unfailing calm tone, gave me two pieces of advice. “Teach them reading...[pauses to sip coffee]…and just have fun.” I decided I would take the latter portion of her advice in particular to heart.

That was it, no time for laying out what subject matter I would cover with the students for the next weeks. Without leaving me with even a modicum of a game plan she was gone. The upside became apparent to me pretty quickly. Two weeks of being able to teach English the way I think it should be taught. I could use the poorly written Armenian English textbooks as often or as little as I like, and I didn’t have to worry about another teacher doing stuff in the classroom that I wasn’t really a fan of for the time being. The chance to work on my own a bit sounded great…

The experience had its trying moments for sure, like the 12th grade taking the new teaching situation as a sign that they could pay even less attention than normal, or when all of the boys in my third grade grappled onto my arms one day as the end of class bell rang, jumping up and down and yelling “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Mr. Tom” over and over and not allowing me to move an inch let alone attempt to leave the classroom (this was actually just more hilarious/ sort of cute than difficult).

Overall the experience went well and helped me get some more credibility at the school, which is always good. The hard days were, well, damn hard ones though, and by the end of the first week at it I was wiped, stressed out, sort of fuming… So I went for a walk. I had heard there was an old abandoned 17th century church about a 40-minute hike from the village, and the weather was gorgeous on this particular day, so I decided to find it. I headed up the winding, upward climbing road that runs through my village, past the cemetery which marks the village’s outer limit and continued through a path that runs between the village’s grape vineyards for some time. After this the path continued along the mountainside and I just continued to take it, not really sure if I was going the right way or not. Eventually, I ran into the paved road to Kuris, a mining town west of my village that lies high, high up and right on the border with Nakhidjevan, the Azerbaijani territory that, although cleanly separated from Azerbaijan by Armenia, is still somehow an Azerbaijani territory. I passed a few camping sites and eventually was stopped by a family eating khorovats on the side of the road.

They hailed me in the usual, extremely warm Armenian fashion. Already in a better mood from my hiking, I obliged when they asked me to come and sit with them. Realizing that I could speak decent Armenian, they started hitting me with dozens of questions about who I was and where I was from. I was introduced to the whole family: Henry, a man of about 35, his two brothers, his wife and son, and his mother. They told me that I should stay in this country and marry an Armenian woman (this is actually an extremely normal thing for Armenians to say to you). They also told me that I should eat lots of the walnuts they had out, because if you eat lots of walnuts you get married sooner (these sorts of superstitions, especially dealing with marriage and children, are also super common). They started piling fish and chicken onto my plate and asking me about America and about why I work here and also if I could tutor their daughter English. Answering their questions between mouthfuls, I was reminded of one of the things I love most about this country. The people are disarmingly kind and warm to strangers. It makes it that much easier to be a foreigner and also to connect with people.

After chatting with Henry and his family for a good hour, he told me he’d take me to the abandoned church I was looking for, which was just another few minutes up the road. Walking would have been fine, but Henry insisted we took what he called his “jeep,” which was really more like go-cart, could seat two people comfortably, had a crossbar running along the top of it and no ceiling, had to be push-started to run, and was painted an appropriate camo-green. Where this thing came from I have no idea, but I was happy to now be riding to my destination in style. We reached the church in less than two minutes (really, walking would have taken just about the same amount of time), and Henry showed me the entrance and, once inside, a secret passage that Armenian Christians used to use during wars and times of persecution. As he explained to me, the passage was no longer open, but used to run under the mountains and, if I understood correctly, the entire 40 minutes back to my village.

We took the jeep back to their picnic site, and I decided to say my goodbyes and head home. They told me that I was welcome to visit them in Kuris anytime, and that if I did, they would “show me a really good time.” I told them I’d take them up on it, and I really do intend to do so eventually.

I headed back home feeling worlds better. For whatever reason this family from Kuris had made me really happy to be in this country again.