After 10 long weeks of pre-service training, we were officially sworn in by the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia on Thursday, August 5. We had one last horovats (barbeque) with our wonderful host family and some other volunteers who had lived in our village last year. Then we packed up our belongings for the trip to our permanent site in Noyemberyan, Armenia. Friday morning all 55 volunteers met for one last time in Charentsavan. We loaded up all our backpacks, suitcases, bags and boxes, which somehow had managed to nearly double in size in 10 weeks, and drove off in a variety of taxis, cars and vans. Some faced a 9+ hour drive, others only 30 minutes. We dropped off two volunteers in Sevan, one volunteer and two currently serving volunteers in Ichevan, and the remaining three of us in Noyemberyan.
Our original host family changed when our host mom fell and broke both her legs. We can only imagine how difficult that is for the family as the mom did all the cooking and was an integral part of the family cheese-making business. Hopefully we will be able to visit her at home once she is out of the hospital. They are a wonderful family, and we thought it best not to add to their daily routing by having to take care of two more people.
We now are living in another apartment with a woman who lost her husband to the war in 1991. She has two grown sons who live in Yerevan. She is the librarian at our schools, so all the kids in the town know her. She speaks some English, but we’re trying to get her to speak only Armenian so our language skills will continue to improve. Our living quarters are modest and water is going to be a constant challenge.
Last night we drove up into the hills to a spring and filled all available bottles with water. We still have to filter it through our Peace Corps water filter, but the water is cold and fresh. And a luxury for most people. Our new host mom also took us to meet her mother-in-law. She is a widow and speaks only Russian and Armenian. Her first question to me was “how old are you” and both she and our host mom refused to believe I am 61. They are my new best friends for sure. Our host mom regularly goes to her house to help her, and she has a wonderful garden with beets, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and grapes. Everything here is organic, mostly I think because fertilizer is so expensive.
When we stopped at the bank to get money last night we met some girls who will be starting at university in Yerevan in the fall. They were so excited to find someone to speak English with, and we were delighted to speak with them. It has been a while since there were volunteers here to work in the schools, and now there are two. We expect to be very, very busy both with teaching and then with English clubs after school. Our challenge is going to be not to take on too much as there is much to do here.
School will not start until September 1, and the teachers don’t go back to work until the 17th or 18th of August. We have a little bit of downtime, and plan to use it getting to know our town and the people in it. We are not allowed to leave our site for the first month, so we will have lots of time to get settled.
And now, the journey begins. We will be here for two years. Although we get 24 days of vacation each year, we hope to spend as much time getting to know Armenia and its people. As part of our Peace Corps duties, we will be preparing a travel book for volunteers and their families. We will be working with other volunteers to put together a book of places to go with information on how to get there, where to stay, what to do, costs, food, etc. It should be lots of fun. Tblisi, Georgia is only an hour or so away by taxi, so that is definitely on our list. And the churches around here are amazing both architecturally and historically.
We also will be organizing a hike for other volunteers in our region as soon as all of us can travel. Getting together with other volunteers is going to be especially important, especially once it starts getting cold and dark. We are hoping for another mild winter so we can travel. If not, there are four of us here in Noyemberyan and we can get together for dinners, movies, or whatever. I plan on sharing some of the peanut butter we have stashed away, and getting one volunteer’s recipe for pancakes. Now if we only had some real maple syrup!
We will write more soon. Thanks for reading our blog. Send us e-mails too. We love hearing from family and friends.
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