Close of Service Conference

There are numerous milestones in the career as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Completing your Pre-Service Training, Swearing In, All-Volunteer Conferences, Mid-Service Conference, and finally . . . Close of Service (COS) Conference. We just completed the last official conference in our 27 months of service, our COS Conference. This is where we learn about all the paperwork we need to complete before we can leave Armenia. And there is a lot of it. We have a 5-page checklist of things that we have to do, all of which require sign-off by someone at Peace Corps. These include medical, administrative, safety and security, language, program manager and country director signatures. A daunting task to say the least.

As for the conference itself, it was a wonderful opportunity to see people we don't usually get to see, and some we probably won't get to see again. The geography in Armenia makes visiting some PCVs difficult at best--some are a 2-day trip away, assuming everything goes as planned. So we spent 2 days at Arthur's Aghveran Resort near Arzakan, Armenia. It was one of the nicest places we've been to, at least for a Peace Corps-sponsored conference. In addition to day-long meetings on various administrative procedures, we had a visit from the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Heffern (and his wife Libby), learned how to apply for jobs, how to prepare resumes, and had time for an engagement party, karioke, swimming, and just hanging out. We will miss being with these people in ways that we can't yet begin to comprehend.

I have a countdown timer on my computer. Today it says 102. That is 102 days until we are able to head back to the U.S. We still have 5 weeks of school to finish, English language camps, and many, many goodbyes. Plus we'd like to see a little bit of the country before we head home. Fred has discovered a unique way to see the south--he's going to be part of the Border-to-Border walk this summer. His group will leave with the far south near Iran and walk around 300 km to Yeghegnadzor in the middle. Over the course of three weeks, he will go up and down numerous mountains, stop to camp, teach children about healthy lifestyles, and see some amazing sites. I did this last summer from the north, and it will be interesting to see what it's like from the south.

So as we near the end of our service, it has been interesting to reflect on our time here in Armenia. We are the 18th group of volunteers here. We started with 58 volunteers and now are down to 47. Some left during training, some have left for medical reasons, others more recently for new jobs. And now those of us who are left are saying goodbye to each other, to communities where we have lived for the past two years, to children we have taught, and to families we have become a part of. It is bitter-sweet for sure.  It's exciting for us to listen to the plans of the younger (and older) volunteers too. Many will travel or go on to graduate school. One will be getting married in July. And all seem to have big plans for the future. We are excited for them!

What does the future hold for us? Right now, we have no idea. We have few possessions back in the U.S. and no real home. And currently, no jobs or job prospects (although we hope that will change soon). It's both exciting and a little unnerving at the same time. We do get a small amount of money from Peace Corps to "readjust" to our life back in the states, so hopefully we can make that last a little while as we figure out the next direction our lives will take.

Whatever happens, we have had an experience here that has changed our lives in ways we can't possible know right now. We look forward to sharing some of that with you when we get home. We'll try to keep it to 5 minutes or less when you ask us about what it was like to be in the Peace Corps.

In the meantime, here is a photo of our A-18 group at our COS conference.
See you all in 102 days . . .

Time Flies

Just looked at our last post and realized it was nearly 3 months ago! How did THAT happen? We've been posting on Facebook I think instead of writing here. It is now officially "spring" here in our part of Armenia. The snow is slowly melting, and quickly being replaced with mud. Lots of it. Parts of our routes to our schools are paved, and others are a treacherous mix of puddles and really gooey mud. Which of course gets on our shoes, socks, pants, etc. You get the idea. But it does mean that the weather is getting warmer, for which we are very grateful.
We were in Spain over Christmas with Fred's mom and sister, which was a really lovely break from the winter cold. Spain was sunny and warm and beautiful. Barcelona is one of the places we might like to live, so part of our reason for going was to check it out and see a bit of the country. We toured Barcelona for 4 days and then drove down past Alicante. It was great. While there, I learned that I had to go to Bangkok on Peace Corps business. That 10-day trip started only a few days after getting back from Spain, so I missed the first two weeks of school. Bangkok was quite a change from Armenia, not only culture-wise, but also temperature-wise. But I got to meet some other Peace Corps volunteers, hang out, and eat Thai food every day. Not a bad way to spend 10 days.
So it is now March and we are about to have our "spring" school break. I have a countdown on my computer which tells me two things . . . first, it's only 20 more days until I am back in Massachusetts (only for 8 days). I'm heading home to bring things we won't be needing during our last few months here (books, winter clothes, etc.). Second, and more importantly, we have only 153 days until our Peace Corps service is over. In some ways it feels like we've just arrived, and in other ways that we've been here forever. In fact, we have been here for nearly 2 years. Hard to believe.
When we think about leaving, we both have very mixed emotions. While we are anxious to see where the next chapter of our lives will take us, we are finally getting comfortable with where we live, the language, customs, and all that is entailed in living in a developing country. Most of all, we hate to think of leaving the community we have built up here--especially the children. We have been in our classes for nearly two years, have learned most of the student's names, been invited to many homes, celebrated birthdays, special events, and so loved the joy that the laughter of a child brings. There is not a place in town where we don't hear echos of "Hello Mrs. Susan" or "Hello Mr. Linden"!! It is beyond sad to think about leaving these precious children.
We toy with the idea of staying for a 3rd year, but we are both ready to come home. Or we will be when August 3 rolls around. Until then, we will try to enjoy every opportunity that comes our way.
Right now, at least for me, that opportunity is to try and appreciate the four roosters who live beneath our bedroom window. This morning is was just before 3 a.m. when they started, and the noise was enough to make sleep (at least for me) impossible. I'm wondering how they feel about soup.

Yeghishe got married

Last Saturday we went to an Armenian wedding, and it wasn't just any wedding - our good friend and neighbor Yeghishe married Gayane, a beautiful, intelligent young woman from Yerevan. Yeghishe is the son of Arshaluys and Anahit, who are dear dear friends of ours in addition to living on the same floor of our building as we live on. They have included us in all kinds of festivities, brought us many gifts and helped us in countless other ways. So his marriage was a big deal to us.

Susan traveled to the ceremony and related events in Yerevan - American weddings are simple affairs compared with Armenian ones - while I just greeted the wedding party with a contingent of neighbors outside our building when the bride and groom drove into town in the early evening.

We then the crossed the street to Noyemberyan's party hall, where we spent six hours eating and watching about 200 people dance, and then eating more. Well, Susan danced up a storm too, Armenian-style. People here definitely know how to party.

I did shoot a video; it's only a few minutes long:

Towards the end of the video, Susan can be seen in several dance floor views.

Needless to say we had a great time.

Marshutni vignette

Marshutnis (marshrutnis, marshrutkas) are how we get around in Armenia: minibuses of various ages and in various conditions, often packed beyond the imaginable. Sometimes they remind me of those old films of 20 or so college kids getting out of one VW Beetle: I once counted 16 people in the two first rows - that's in six seats and what little floor space there is in a minibus. What can I say? We waste a lot of space and resources in the US.

Anyway, the other day I found myself in the back of a marshutni going to Yerevan; Tamara, another Peace Corps volunteer, was going to Ijevan, about a third of the way, and managed to get on the same marshutni at the last minute. It was far too crowded for her to make it back to sit with me or vice versa, but it wasn't insanely packed: at least I didn't see anyone sitting in anyone else's lap.

The picture below is of one of our regular marshutnis to Yerevan at the half-way rest stop, on a day almost exactly like the one when this story took place.

So we get to Ijevan and Tamara hands a bill to the driver to pay for her ride, and the driver doesn't have change. Suddenly all 25 or so people on the marshutni were very concerned, and several heads turned to look at me, wondering if I'd pay for Tamara. I saw her predicament, of course, so I started to dig into my pocket for change to pass up to her. But while I was digging I didn't see what happened up front - someone else was getting off, gave her fare to Tamara and gave Tamara's bill to the driver. Everybody was happy, except I was left to wonder if the driver had just decided that he wanted to take off for Yerevan rather than wait for the $1.30 fare.

Something about that situation was very typical of Armenia; it captured a piece of the country's essence: maybe it was just that the driver didn't have change, or that there was seeming chaos until everything somehow worked out anyway, or that almost the whole marshutni seemed to be involved, in a good way. Or perhaps it was just that I was so cramped I couldn't reach my pocket and therefore didn't come through in time to do my part and pay for my fellow foreigner's ride. Regardless, it was good.

Over the past year and a half of living here, I've made my peace with most of the petty annoyances and inconveniences that come with life on about $300 a month - which is not bad for here. Today I'm just grateful that I'm not subject to the more serious consequences that sometimes result from such limited incomes.

Fall in the Noy

The last grapes of the season are the sweetest. This vine I found climbing up a tree outside Lisa's house in a nearby village when all seven of us Peace Corps volunteers in the region got together last weekend.

Click on the pictures to see larger versions.

After almost two months of school, we're now enjoying a week off. I thought it would be good to fill in some gaps in what we've shown of our life here and update with more pictures than before. So let's jump back two months in time to "first bell," the opening ceremony of the school year.

The mayor (suit), the school director (white shirt), teachers (in the distance), parents (in the foreground), all hail the first-graders! The kids won't look this good again for a year.

Kids with mothers.

Kids, no mothers. Fifth grade. Still in their "first bell" clothes.

Boys of the fourth grade, five days into the school year.

In late September, Susan I went to the village of Dsegh to meet with a few other volunteers.

Susan in the ruins of Surb Grigor, an old church that collapsed in the Spitak earthquake.

Greg, Amy, Susan, Mary and Martha at Surb Grigor.

Amy, me, Greg and Martha doing what comes naturally when Peace Corps volunteers gather.

Scenic Alaverdi, the heart of the Debed Canyon. Copper mining and processing.

Every fall, my whole school goes on a hike up in the hills above town, into these fields. There's a lonely farmhouse up there, but other than that it's just the cows and us - and the shepherd in this picture, driving his sheep and goats further up.

Hanging with Mher, Artyom and the rest of the ninth grade during our school's excursion day. They can be difficult, but they're also wonderful and I love them.

Artyom borrowed my camera and this is the result.

Some of my school's teachers on Teachers' Day.

Some of Noyemberyan: our building is the third from the left, but we live on the other side. Beyond the hills lies Azerbaijan and somewhere in the distance, visible only on clearer days than this, are some Georgian and Russian peaks of the Caucasus Range.

Two women praying at Haghartzin, which Lonely Planet calls "one of Armenia's masterpieces of medieval architecture."

Thord at Haghartzin. A good friend since 1966.

Makaravank: the oldest building is from the tenth century, but the main church was built in 1205.

Makaravank: Armenian Rococo?

The village of Gosh in early October. We - Susan, Thord, Marci and I - visited Goshavank, the monastery where Armenian law was first codified.

Mother Armenia outside Ijevan.

Somewhere near the village of Dsegh.

Susan and I with Marci and Thord at Haghpat, much of which was built in the 11th century.

So I went on a little hike up the local hill a couple of weeks ago, and as I was leaving the last houses behind, these kids, including a couple of my third-graders, spotted me and decided to find out where I was going. I couldn't have asked for better company.

Danelle in Lisa's so-called kitchen one Sunday ago, when Lisa had invited us all to a wonderful little party.

Mexican food: Lisa in the distance, a blurry Barb, Trent on a mission, Susan reaching for some tomato.

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My life with Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Two caveats. First, this blog post has next to nothing to do with Armenia, unless you count Avie Tevanian's peripheral involvement. Avie - the guy who created OS X - is of Armenian descent. Second, this blog post is not about Steve Jobs. It's about me, Fred, and the role Jobs played in my life. I believe that the greatest tribute I can give to Steve Jobs is showing how my life, like the lives of countless others, has been permeated by what he created.

I do want to mention one thing about Steve's overall influence. People today think of Jobs largely in terms of the iPad, the iPhone and maybe the iPod, but these weren't really his historically most significant technological achievements. In 1976 and 1977, Jobs and Wozniak (who probably deserves most of the credit) created the first marketable table-top computers in his parents' garage, the Apple I and the Apple II. The machines were the first to provide a video interface, a keyboard for input, onboard read-only memory (ROM, which enabled it to load programs from an external source) and other user-friendly improvements. In effect, Steve and Steve created the first truly personal computers, years before the IBM PC. The iProducts are more than extensions of those early machines and Steve has had a part in creating countless other products, from the first laser printer to Toy Story, but no forward leap has been as great as that of the Apple I and Apple II.

But when I saw my first Apple II in 1978, it didn't hold any great attraction for me.

Steve Jobs was born only a few months before me, and as Apple Computer turned into a giant success, I couldn't help compare my non-life with his. I was a recent college dropout and my life was going nowhere, while my brother hippies in Cupertino were conquering the realms of business and technology and were well on their way to multi-billionairehood and immortality. Fellow dropout Bill Gates, meanwhile… well, who cares?

Did you see that first Mac commercial in 1984, with the 1984 theme where the woman smashes the image of Big Brother? Ever since then, I've liked watching Superbowl commercials. Yep, Steve Jobs changed my life.

And I started using Macs.

Then came the dark years when Jobs was ousted, started NeXT and bought Pixar, Windows 95 was ascendant and Apple was considered doomed. Irrelevant. As good as gone. Corporate America wanted Compaq, Dell and white boxes, and consumers followed. I remained a Mac fan and Mac buyer, eagerly awaiting every glimmer of hope from MacRumors.com and Guy Kawasaki that the collapse of the Wintel monopoly was imminent. Remaining one of the faithful at a time when Apple-bashing was as common in the media as Apple veneration is today was made easier because I lived in San Francisco (the city has many creative professionals and already lived in the shadow of Silicon Valley), but it still wasn't easy. Apple got no respect. Nor was Next a realistic option for me. As for Pixar, I did buy some software it created for manipulating type, and eventually I went to see some of their movies. That made me happy for Steve: he deserved some success after being so rudely rejected by his first child.

It was clear that Apple Computer was not whole without Steve Jobs, and when he was brought back and eventually became CEO in 1997, it seemed like things at Apple were falling into place. I happened to be selling a business I'd had for ten years and spent $1,000 of the windfall on some Apple stock, which then cost a little over $5 (adjusted for subsequent splits). I wanted to put my money where my mouth had been for a whole lot of years. Just a few minutes later the stock tanked again. So much for me being a smart investor with astute market timing.

I could not, by the way, have sold that business if it hadn't been for my Mac. It helped me create original new products (postcards), keep books that conformed with professional accounting standards, and draw up the financial statements that I needed to show prospective buyers.

Owning Apple stock did, however, allow me to go to a shareholder meeting at the headquarters on Infinity Loop in Cupertino. I remember Jobs as being focused on business - not the rebel of yore whose idealism and temper got him to pursue pie-in-the-sky projects and waste everyone's energy on useless drama. I could have walked up to him - this was before he became a big star again - but I truly had nothing to tell him. I saw the showman in him come out in full force only at a keynote speech at a MacWorld expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco ca 1999, and back then Steve's 'reality distortion field' was strong: maybe not as subtle and effective as it became later on, just full of raw power. Even the journalists cheered announcements of new features. I don't know exactly how he generated that distortion, but I know it had something to do with not shying away from using strong words: "the best ever," "fantastic," "insanely great," "a computer for the rest of us." From anyone else, it would all have sounded as hyperbole.

Those Think Different years really were great. Susan and I had been married not long before and had bought a house (at an affordable price, I may add). I got a godson, Charlie. Having returned to college, I found I was capable of doing school after all, and eventually I graduated - but only after a lot of late-night essay writing on my Mac, of course. Those were also dot-com boom days, so Apple's stock had its ups and downs, but on the whole it did OK. I got my first 'real' job and found my career - at the tender age of 45. Somewhere along the road I stopped comparing myself with Steve Jobs.

Then came the iPod, which woke up the world to what Steve Jobs was doing; the rest of this history is fresh enough. In 2005, he gave a speech at Stanford University that with some superficial changes I would have been happy to have given when I was the student speaker at my commencement: "Stay hungry, stay foolish," he concluded, quoting the Whole Earth Catalog. Apple's stock climbed and climbed again: no one foresaw that in 1997. I bought Susan and me iPhones the day after they hit the market in June 2007. Today we're Peace Corps volunteers with MacBooks.

Few people who never knew me have had as much direct influence in my life as Steve Jobs: Bill Wilson, Bob Smith, George Orwell, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are the only ones who come to mind.

So here’s to the crazy one. The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. The round peg in the square hole.

The one who saw things differently. He was not fond of rules. And he had no respect for the status quo. You could quote him, disagree with him, glorify or vilify him.

About the only thing you couldn’t do was ignore him. Because he changed things. He invented. He imagined. He healed. He explored. He created. He inspired. He pushed the human race forward.

Maybe he had to be crazy.

How else could he have created works of art from chips and code?

I am grateful that you were around during my life, Steve.

Rest in peace, crazy one.