Your daily Armenian lesson

 

Here's some of what we're learning. Prepositions are not as common in Armenian as in English: instead they use endings to show the cases of nouns. We have to focus on progress, not perfection, and most likely that won't change for the next two years.

Mud

Mud had probably been our worst experience here so far, and it could get a lot worse. We have to walk on dirt roads to get anywhere from our house, and when it rains - and we've had dramatic thunderstorms almost every day for a couple of weeks - those roads quickly turn to mud. We end up walking with big globs sticking to our shoes. It seemed at first that Armenians were somehow able to walk through it without getting dirty: our teachers come to school with almost no sign of mud on their little shoes or sandals. But that has probably had more to do with their particular route to school: I suspect they've been able to walk through grass and on small rocks to get from their house, which is on a different street, to the main road, which is more or less paved. Yesterday, however, our host family's shoes were all caked in mud too. Clearly they were unable to get around it too. This is somewhat comforting: at least our mud-walking skills are no worse than those of at least some people who grew up here.

The dog's name is Sevook

We live in the house on the right side of the end of this road. Well, what you see is actually the chicken shack. The name Sevouk comes from Sev (սև), which is Armenian for black. Sevouk is smart and friendly - the latter rare in dogs here.

Brain, milk and World Cup, briefly

My brain is tired from all the learning, all the new words, tastes, people, sights, smells. This will pass, though maybe not until we're done with our pre-service training in early August. Susan is asleep; I've been downstairs playing cards with Heno, the family's 14-year-old boy. I never figured out all the rules, but since I won it was easy to go with the flow. Of course I did get help, first from our majr (the host mom), then from the pajr (host dad).

I also helped carry a huge metal milk bottle - which looked very much like the ones I remember from my childhood summers in rural Finland - from the car into the kitchen. The family is making milk for the next month or two. I hope we get a chance to help.

Our familiar world feels a million miles away, although I've managed to wrest control of the remote a couple of times now to watch BBC World Service. I now know that South Africa played Mexico to a draw. My condolences to Jose Mario and Cesar.

Village Life

We have been in our village for a week. Our host family is awesome-- mom, dad, three girls in their 20s and a son who is 14. Friendly dog, which is apparently unusual in villages. We are being fed three meals a day and all the food is really good and fresh. Our host family has chickens, and the eggs are yummy. The view from our room is of rolling, grass covered hills and we can see a bit of the local town in the distance. Our village has about 750 people living it in, but it does have a school and a few small stores. The main road is paved, but none of the roads inside the village itself. Our school is pretty old, but it gets the job done. The students are out of school except for special exams, so we have the school to ourselves. We have running water except for the main part of the day, so we can do laundry (in a washing machine by the way) and have hot showers. Those are luxuries that some volunteers don't have.

The food is really good--fresh eggs and juice in the morning, and part of each meal includes a plate of fresh herbs, tomatoes and cucumber, bread and lavash, and a cheese that is really good but quite salty. I didn't like it at first, but now am getting used to it. Our family, like most, makes its own yogurt which is said to be really good for you and helps you to avoid the most common intestinal problem here. So far we are fine in that regard.

We are in school six days a week from 9 to 1:30, then home for lunch, and we often have another activity or technical session in the afternoon. Evenings are spent doing homework, and there is a lot of it We try to spend some time with our host family each evening, and that's been nice. All in all, we are adjusting to village life. It truly feels like it's been a very long time that we've been done, but it's just over 2 weeks since we left Massachusetts. We are worlds away. Now that we have internet, I guess we'll try to keep up on what's going on in the world. Or at least Fred will. We miss our usual routine, our families and our friends. We try not to think in terms of years, but rather in terms of weeks or days. So today, we have only 9 more weeks of pre-service training.

That was Susan; this is Fred. I had a mishap with my laptop: we borrowed a USB modem, were told to use it without installing the software, I clicked OK somewhere and it installed the software, I couldn't get on the internet, and the next time I rebooted the machine it was as good as dead. It is now with some Peace Corps guy who'll try to fix it or take it to some Mac store in Yerevan. Our access to Yerevan is limited. I'm hoping that the data can at least be recovered; a new hard drive shouldn't cost too much even here, although not even a fraction of the cost would be recovered by our meager Peace Corps salaries. Frustrating nevertheless. At least we have Internet access, of sorts: right now I'm getting a message saying the contact with blogger.com has failed and this posting may not post, but I suppose if you're reading it I was successful. We hope to stay in touch better in future.

Anyways, we do love it here. It's been sunny every day except two so far, and we've been in the country what, 12 days? It is different, however, as Susan mentioned. It is in some ways a conservative country, for instance when it comes to gender roles. The PC does try to educate us on those things. And it's poor, although our village seems to be a little less so, at least judging from our family. On the other hand, Susan and I have almost nothing to spend money on around here, so the same is probably true for the locals. I suspect appearances deceive.

I'll try to post a picture or two later. Now I should go downstairs and hang out with the family and Susan.