Areni Wines and the Way Home from Noravank

These are the last of the photos from Noravank. On the way home we stopped at a winery, and they gave us a brief tour of the wine making operations, and then let us attend a wine tasting. Surprisingly, I wasn't a huge fan of most of their "sweet wines", but I did like their "dry white". Both of these terms are in quotation marks, since I think that they must mean something different here than they do back home. Here are some photos from the trip. 

Noravank Pt 2: The Hiking

After checking out the sites that the monastery buildings themselves had to offer, we headed out into the hills behind the monastery for some much needed nature-time. I'm forever grateful to whichever PCV took this amazing photo of Sam and I on the rocks:

Noravank Pt 1: The Monastery

If you want to learn more about Noravank Monestary, read the Wikipedia article. If you just want to look at some awesome photos, scroll down. The visit to the monastery can be divided into two parts: first exploring the monastery itself, and second hiking in the hills behind the monastery. I'll post photos of the former today, and of the latter tomorrow.

Traveling to Noravank

Today was an exciting day- for the first time since traveling to our PST villages 1 month ago, we get to see a different part of Armenia. The region we've been living in, Ararat Marz, is unusual here in Armenia in that it is incredibly flat. Most of the country is mountainous. Today, we got to see this for ourselves as we traveled on a day trip to Noravank, or "New Monastery". 

Because we've got a very limited internet connection, and I took a lot of pictures, I'm going to post the pictures from the over the course of the next several days. I don't think there's a whole lot of explaining to do, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, mostly. Today's photos are  from the van ride to the monastery.

Because I said I had a lot of homework...

I needed to prepare for my practicum lesson tomorrow, so instead of hanging out with our host family in the living room this evening, I explained that I had a lot of home work, and shut myself in our bedroom. About 5 minutes later, there was a soft knocking at the door, and our host mom Alla hands me this:

I am so lucky. 

Genocide Museum & Memorial, Cultural Dinner in Yerevan

This week we were able to visit the Genocide Museum and Memorial in Yerevan. Obviously, this was not an emotionally light day. What struck me most about the museum was that it read not so much as a documentary of what happened, but rather more like a court case. Evidence was presented as if the presenters expected it to be challenged. Newspaper articles published in France, England and the US are highlighted as examples of objective commentary written at the time of the genocide. Every thing is cited. The entire museum feels as if it had been designed to refute some alternative history- which, of course, is true. The museum is designed this way as a response to Turkey's position that the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 was merely part of the Ottoman Empires response to the growing political turmoil within the Empire during the first world war. Jewish people promise to "never forget". Armenians promise to "remember and demand"- demand recognition, demand remorse, demand some sort of response for the atrocities committed against their parents and grandparents. 

This impulse, to demand that the wrongs against their people be acknowledged as such, is completely understandable- but I'm not sure that it's beneficial for the country. There is no real pressure on Turkey to capitulate to these demands- Armenia holds to great political power, they have limited wealth and influence on the world stage- and as long as Armenia maintains this mentality of demand, it seems unlikely that relations with their neighbor to the West will improve. Armenia is bordered by 4 different countries: Turkey to the West, Georgia to the North, Azerbaijan to the East and a very, very small piece of border with Iran to the south. Currently, the borders with Iran and Georgia are open to overland travel. Many Armenians travel back and forth through Georgia in order to find work in Russia. However, the vast majority of Armenia's borders remain closed: they are currently at war with Azerbaijan, and they have never had good political relations with the Turkish state on account of the genocide. 

I can understand why that is. I empathize with the Armenian people when they speak of the genocide, and the frustration and anger caused by Turkey's lack of acknowledgement. At the same time, a smaller, more rational part of my mind can't help but think that life in Armenia would be better if they could just be content to remember without demanding. If the border with Turkey were opened, Armenian people would have greater access to trade, jobs, and tourism. I would open opportunities for towns along the border- towns like Shahumyan- that currently don't exist. The bottom line is that it would make Armenia a more open to every form of potential benefit than it is right now. Every benefit, that is, except the emotional catharsis that would come from a Turkish apology. 

It's not really my place to say any of this. It is an issue for the Armenian people to decide. But I worry theirs is not truly a decision. Students are taught about the genocide, taught to "remember and demand" from early childhood. The schools are filled with posters featuring the purple violet that symbolizes the Armenian genocide. I think that teaching students about their people's history is important, but I wonder if additionally students are also taught things which will determine their future, which will hamper them in moving past historical traumas, and prevent them from creating a better Armenia for themselves.

Enough. It's difficult  for me even to write this- never mind go through the day, speaking with different Armenians who care so passionately about the subject, to see horrible images and read horrifying figures. We were all emotionally exhausted by the end of the day, and grateful to escape to a lighter activity- our Cultural Dinner. Partly because of the stress of the day, and partly because this was some of the only free time we had  been able to spend together in weeks, we were all a little silly by the time the food arrived. 

It turns out that Armenian food is ridiculously salty. I could maybe eat 1 out of 3 dishes that were served. But they did have a very good selection of fruit compotes available, and I enjoyed them. After dinner we went to a part of Yerevan called "The Cascades". Once a month in the summer, a large music stand is set up, and as the sun goes does and the weather starts to cool off, traditional Armenian music is blasted into the night air. People come out of the woodwork (or, perhaps in this former Solviet state it's more appropriate to say out of the concrete?), pack into the square, and engage in traditional Armenian dancing. After spending the morning and afternoon at the somber Genocide Memorial, where we saw Armenians at their most desperate hour, to see them celebrating their culture in the streets was a good way to end the day.

Clouds on the Mountain

Teaching Practicum

Last Friday started our PST teaching Practicum, and frankly, despite the picture above of me smiling with 7 adorable schoolgirls, it was a pretty terrible experience. If you look closely, you'll see that I'm not actually wearing my "this-was-awesome" smile, but instead the "why-the-heck-do-they-want-a-picture-with-me" smile. Let me explain things a little bit....

Last Thursday we were informed that "tomorrow, you will be teaching your first class of students here in Armenia". Since no mention of teaching actual students had been made prior to this, I was alarmed at the lack of preparation time we were given. We were told what grade we would be teaching, but apart from that, we were given no direction as to what their English proficiency levels would be, what they were studying in their normal English classes, or what we should try to teach them in the time we were given- although the Peace Corps staff did give us a format for what they called a "successful dialogue". It essentially stated that we should be sure to name the people speaking, use contractions, and make our dialogues 8 to 10 turns long, with each participant given 3 to 5 lines. 

I was assigned to the 4th grade- the youngest group of students involved in our practicum lessons. Students here start to study English in the 3rd grade. Basically, what this meant was that my students knew essentially zero English and I knew essentially zero Armenian. We were scheduled for a 30 minute lesson after school on a Friday in weather that easily soared into the 90s during the day. Fantastic. 

Needless to say, the first lesson was a disaster. Unprepared as I was, I decided to try to do a simple listening exercise with the students. Thursday night, Sam and I recorded a simple conversation on my iphone- it fit the PC's rubric on every point:

Sam: Hello. My name's John. What's your name?

Molly: Hello, John. My name's Anna. How are you?

Sam: I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

Molly: I'm well. Where are your from?

Sam: I'm from America. Where are you from?

Molly: I'm from Armenia.

Sam: Goodbye.

Molly: Goodbye.

These were things that we had heard almost every student in our village shout at us in the streets, so I thought it wouldn't be a difficult lesson for the 4th graders- simple introductions- right? Well, apparently they weren't so simple. What I wanted to do what have the students listen to the conversation (part by part) and translate the simple sentences into Armenian. I started by drawing a boy and a girl stick figure on the chalk board and having them listen to the conversation.

And the classroom went wild. I don't know what went wrong, but I couldn't get them to pay attention to listening at all. Perhaps it was because a listening activity was an entirely new idea for these kids, or perhaps it was simply because it was after school on a Friday afternoon in the summer time.They kept shouting "boy" and "girl" at me and pointing to the chalkboard. They jumped out of their seats. One boy kept jumping out of his seat and purposely falling over when I told him to sit down. It was basically a 30 minute long zoo. At one point, I was so overwhelmed that I tried to find someone who spoke Armenian to help me get the kids in order, but there was no one there to help. (This became a very contentious point- our training director insists that there were teachers in the hallway if we needed help, but my experience was that there were none. I looked. Many times. There were none.) 

About 25 minutes into the class, one adult did stick her head into the classroom to tell us that "since we started late, we should go for an extra 10 minutes".  Before I could tell her that we had not in fact started late, I absolutely did not want to go another 10 minutes with these monsters, and for the love of God, please don't leave me here alone with them- she was gone. 

In the grand total of 40 minutes, we successfully identified the names of the two people in the conversation. That was it. I ended up keeping the students for another 5 minutes after the surprise 10 minutes because no one came to stop me. I kept waiting for someone- these kids teacher? maybe a parent? Some responsible adult to come and take responsibility for the room of 9 year olds. But no one came. Eventually, since I had no idea what else to do, I just let them go and hoped they all got home okay. (Well, hoped most of them got home okay, there were one or two who I hoped stepped in dog poop on the way home.) I felt like crying.

I seriously considered leaving the program that night. What am I doing here? I wondered. I'm not a teacher. I don't even like kids. I never wanted to do this with my life. I applied to be a health sector volunteer. Why did the Peace Corps tell me to teach? I think that if it weren't for Sam, I might have left. Fortunately, we've been together for a while, and he's seen me through a few rough patches. He reminded me that every time I get a new job I have at least one complete and total melt down in which I'm utterly convinced that I am completely unsuited to the position, that I'll never be able to learn the new skillsets necessary, and that I'll be a total failure. He then reminded me that eventually I pretty much rocked every one of those jobs that I agonized over not being able to do. It took a while for me to listen to him, but eventually it started to sink in.

Once I stopped panicking, I started to think critically about the experience I'd just had, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't so much that I'd failed as it was that I had been given an impossible task with insufficient support from the Peace Corps. I had been given minimal time to prepare, thrown to a group of students with whom I shared no common language, and who had every reason to misbehave (they were hot, it was beautiful weather outside, it was after school on a Friday when they should have been starting their weekend), and given no leverage with which to enforce good behavior (it's not as if I can give them bad grades or detention). In the week that's followed, I've also realized that the idea of an auditory dialogue is completely alien to these kids: I doubt they've ever been forced to listen to spoken English (without supporting text) before in their lives.

All of this made me feel very unsupported by the Peace Corps training program, and very frustrated by the experience. This frustration grew when I confronted our training manager about the lack of support, and was essentially told "oh, yes, you were supported". "No," I tried to explain, "I wasn't". "Yes, you were," was the response. We continued to have a rather unproductive conversation for several minutes before deciding that one of the Peace Corps staff and the students' teacher would be present for my next lesson. I felt marginally better, but not much.

We had our second class today (after which the photo above was taken) did go better than the first- for several reasons. First, the PC staff really did deliver on the promise to have some one in the room this time: the students homeroom teacher, the headmaster, and a member of the PC training staff all sat in the back of the  classroom and observed- with all these real authority figures from their lives present, the students were on their best behavior. Second, the worst-behaved student, the one who seemed intent on purposefully disrupting the lesson, wasn't there today and as a result, the other students who had trouble concentrating due to his shenanigans last class were much better able to focus. Finally, having thought long and hard about how Armenian students are normally taught, I abandoned the PC's instructions on the use of dialogues in the classroom, and instead focused the class in a different, more familiar direction. 

We spent the first half of the lesson today going over our two classroom rules (focus on the lesson only, and speak on your turn only) which I had written in both Armenian and English on a large piece of paper and posted to the blackboard, and the three Important Words of the Day: Quiet, Please; Sit Down; and Listen Carefully. I had taken the week to memorize the Classroom Rules and the Important Words in Armenian, so I that I was able to ensure that all the students understood what these expressions meant, and so we would all be on the same page for baseline behavior. That was really my only goal for the class. 

We spent the remaining 15 minutes reviewing colors. I mostly chose colors because I had some colored construction paper at home and was able to make flashcards for the students easily. We used reviewing the color vocabulary (which- it turns out, they already knew) as a structure through which we could practice the classroom rules and the important words. Things actually turned out rather well, I don't know that the kids learned a lot of English during the lesson, but  that was also true of last weeks class, and this week I didn't feel like crying afterwards, so I'm going to go ahead and say that it was an improvement. And the girls in the class all wanted a photo with me afterwards, which I guess was cute. 

I absolutely think that the only way to learn how to teach is to actually practice teaching, but it still strikes me that there must be a better way to go about organizing a teaching practicum than this. I'll have to think on it some more, and probably wait until I have some more distance from the problem to really be able to offer any solutions, though. 

Our House

Finally got around to taking a few pictures of the home in which we're living.

This is our street...

Grampa George likes to sit out front, eat watermelon, and spit out the seeds. The result is that the flowerbed in front of the house is filled with volunteer watermelon plants.

This is a view of the family's barn from the street.You can see that our 14 year old host brother Goqor has helpfully labeled it "Gom" ("barn"). 

Just inside the front gates there is a car port, large enough for two vehicles. In the summer, the family spends most of their time here. They wet the concrete floor down with a hose, and enjoy the relatively cool, damp air in the shade.

As you walk into the house from the car port area, immediately to your left is the kitchen. The small kitchen table is where almost all of the family's meals are eaten.

Continuing through the house you come to the living room. Sam is sitting next to our bed room, the door to which is open.

Looking back at the living room from our bedroom door.

This is our room, the window to which opens out onto the fig tree in the garden. 

And finally, the magnificent garden, from which you can see the beautiful Mt. Ararat. The garden here is huge, and amazing, Really, I hope I can have a garden just like this one day.

A trip to the zoo?

Early this afternoon, Grampa George started talking about bears. At first, we didn't really understand what was going on, but after substantial pantomime and not a few misunderstandings, we figured out that he wanted to take us to see some bears. A few more pantomimes and some of my very best broken Armenian assured us that the bears were in cages and not very far away, and so we agreed, figuring we were going to some kind of zoo...

I guess we weren't all that far off, as long as your definition of 'zoo' is somewhat flexible. About a 10 minute drive from our house is an abandoned bus depot. In once small corner of the parking lot, there is a cage. In that cage, there were two bears.

It seems that the man who owns them (and possibly the bus depot?) breeds them and sells the cubs to zoos... or at least we think that's what happens. It's really hard to tell without adequate language skills. It was also a little hard to concentrate on what we being said while attempting to keep a friendly smile on my face- the cage was very small, and I don't think they bears are ever allowed out of it. Realistically, they're a good source of income for this man- which is important in a country where the unemployment rate is is close to 20%- but their living conditions were really distressing to me.

After watching the bears for a little bit, we were walked through the cavernous interior of  the  bus depots large warehouse. It looked like it might have once been a mechanic shop to service the large vehicles. On the other side, we found the man in question also had a deer. The deer had a larger pen than the bears, and had both indoor and outdoor space (it, at least, didn't have to walk around on concrete all day), but it still looked as if this animal wasn't meant to be kept as it was. 

I think the lesson to be learned here is not to go to zoos in developing countries. I want to simultaneously acknowledge that these animals helped put food on this man's plate, and that that's important, but also disagree completely with the conditions through which they suffer. Being torn in different directions like this is very uncomfortable. I don't have any solutions to offer. 

We smiled, took photos, piled back into the car, and drove home. I hope we played the appreciative tourist well enough. Certainly, our host family expected this of us. There are such different conceptions of animals here than at home- and perhaps rightly so. Annually, we Americans spend more on our pets than we do on foreign aid- a figure which is crazy no matter how you look at it. But still, looking at these animals, I think that there must be some middle ground between Paris Hilton's doggy palace and its like and the way that animals like the ones we saw today live.