School, a mountain

I've now had three days of school.

The picture below is from the opening ceremony of the school year, showing some of the students interspersed with a couple of teachers and parents. Mostly we stood and waited.

This is not like any other job I've had. It's not even close to teaching at the Boston Academy of English, which is where Susan and I got our TEFL certifications. I work with three teachers, including my counterpart, Aghun, whom I'm very grateful for. Having had a couple of volunteers before, she knows what she's doing. I will teach kids from nine years old to 17, absolute beginner to fairly advanced - sometimes in the same class. My focus is conversation, but I help where I can.

One area of opportunity here is that the slow students are abandoned: teachers apparently see no point in making an effort to bring the slow students to a level where they can even follow what's going on in the class. There are reasons why students give up on many classes: they can pick the topics that will get them into university, and they don't see the need to study the other subjects. The slow students are still moved up every year, so there's a huge disparity in abilities in the same classroom.

I know I can't convey what the full experience is like, but I can at least list some of the ingredients, so here goes: the smell of burning trash coming in from the school yard; the oppressive heat of the sun entering in our south-facing room through the plastic sheets that cover the windows because winter will return one day; the once-an-hour rush of children in black dress shoes, neat black slacks or skirts and crisp white shirts; their sense of wonder at this foreign entity in their midst (me); the teachers' room next door full of matronly ladies with long flowery dresses (my coworkers); the barrel of water in the men's room, for flushing the squat toilets; the unfamiliar teaching methods employed by most teachers here; the recycled, outdated, unimaginative text books that are full of cute briticisms and other, less endearing errors; the tired wooden floors, the walls, the old desks...

This picture is from the English classroom. We're fortunate to have one: as far as I can understand, teachers in Armenia usually go from one room to the next. I will eventually take pictures of the students too, but for now I don't want to act like I'm there to see the exotic natives.

Last Sunday our host family took us on a trip way up in the mountains above town: the area looks almost inhabited, covered in forests and small fields, but there are little groups of low shacks here and there that are summer homes to families that come up with their cattle. Some apparently live there all year. Hamest, our home mother, used to live there in the summers as a child. Everyone has a dog, and these are herding dogs, not city dogs, so their temperament is different. Some look like wolves - and there are wolves up there. Hamest's father told us there are bears too in some areas, although I'm not sure there are all that many left. The landscape is incredibly beautiful, with ridge after mountain ridge covered in forest and pasture. It's much wilder-looking than anything in Western Europe. We saw no other roads than the dirt bump ride we were on, and the map doesn't show any either.

We went to the top of a mountain called Mets Gogdagh: it's not that high by Caucasus standards, only 2,000m (6,000 feet), like Lake Tahoe. But the 360-degree view was incredible. At the very top, there was a little stone circle around some carved stones with crosses on them, sort of like a little church without walls; we walked three times around the stones and then lit candles. Hamest's mother in law sacrificed a chicken from her own shack and stuck the feet and head between some rocks. The picture shows Mher (Hamest's younger son, who studies in Yerevan) and Robert (a nephew of Hamest who is in on of my classes). The car in the background is a Lada Niva 4-wheel drive - proof that the Soviet Union could produce some capable, sturdy technology.

From there we went to a spring/picnic area and had khorovats (fatty pork barbecued on the embers of a wood fire) for a few hours. A stray dog came by, but nothing else happened. As always at these places, there was spring water gushing out of a tap nearby. On our way home we visited a family Hamest and her father know and greeted them and their cows. Life for these people is truly reduced to its essentials: Americans on a camping trip live far better than they do. Well, at least the Americans have more STUFF, for better and worse!