Happy New Year

A word on Armenian Birthday Cakes

I've talked about Armenian birthday parties on this blog before now. But I don't think I've ever addressed the unique twists that Armenians have taken with regards to birthday candles. Here's a photo from a birthday party that I attended recently. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. 

Sisian's Tonasar

New Years preparations are well underway, and the town of Sisian is getting ready to celebrate in style with an enormous Christmas tree being constructed in the center of town. 

Anatomy of An Armenian Bedspread

Our family has been kind enough to equip us with some simply wonderful woolen blankets. Today,the sewer and tinkerer in me couldn't resist opening it up. So, while making the bed, I took a closer look at it. 

Above is a picture of the whole blanket, we were given 2 of them I started by opening up a small corner. (Don't worry, any seams I opened, I closed right up afterwards)

Inside the outer fabric, there was a second layer, made of a rough muslin. 

Inside that, there was lots of raw fleece. It didn't look like it had been thoroughly picked clean of straw and twigs before being made into a blanket. Just washed enough so that it doesn't have anymore lanolin on it. 

The  fleece inside the rough muslin fabric was quilted with large stitches, about 1 inch in length and spaced 2 inches apart. 

Both of the blankets were supplied with duvet covers. Each duvet cover has a hole in the middle, positioned in order to display the fancier fabric on the inner square of the outer layer of the blanket. 

The holes are decorated with embroidery. 

When it's all put together, it looks very elegant- a far, far cry from the raw fleece within.

Properly made, the blankets use folded up to cover about half the bed.

The sleepers each then have their own little sleeping burrito blanket set up.

The final touch is a shiny light blanket to cover the whole thing, with a few decorative pillows. 

And there you have it. The Anatomy of an Armenian Bedspread. It may not be on interest to anyone else, but I was curious...

The View from Sisian's Cemetary

Christmas 2015

We celebrated Christmas this year by taking a hike outside of town- I wanted to take pictures of sunset on the mountains. It was beautiful, windy, and cold. I couldn't have had a happier Christmas.

Merry Christmas

We may be far from home, but we're still enjoying Christmas together.

Bahh Bahh Brown Sheep

We've been taking walks around town to become more familiar with our new home. Today we found a sheep.

I got a New Years Card!

One of the students at the school made me a New Years card. This is the type sweet gesture that seems to be the bread'n'butter of the PCV experience, so I thought I'd post a picture of it for you to see.

It's beginning to look a lot like... New Years?

  Despite the great pride Armenians express at being the First Christian Nation, the major winter holiday celebrated in Armenia is New Years. I imagine this is a hold over from the days when Armenia was part of the soviet union when, in a move strangely mirroring the ancient Romans in England, the secular communist government shifted holiday fervor from local tradition to a winter celebration more in keeping with their preferred ideology. But it's all just speculation, I have no history to back me up on that point. 

What I can report is that school children's preparations for New Years in Armenia look very much the same as Christmas preparations do back home.

Snowmen bedeck the hallways...

Tinsel adorns doorways....

"Tonasarrs" or "Holiday Trees" are located in every classroom...

And balloons, banners, and streamers oversee all the classes...

The last day of classes is December 25th- which has nothing to do with the western Christmas, it just happens to be the last Friday before New Years. Sam and I will celebrate Christmas on our own. and a week later we'll celebrate New Years with the rest of Sisian. But in the mean time, things are looking similar enough that I don't really notice the change.

My new favorite sight

We received our first few packages from home in the mail recently. and each of them comes with this tag to "prove that it hasn't been opened", according to the folks at the post office. I'm not sure how these tags prove that the packages haven't been tampered with, but they do make me happy when I see them.

Vorotan River at Sunset

Sheep & Puppy

So I finally found a purpose for the watercolor photo processing app. Today I saw a puppy attempting to play with a sheep. Needless to say it was adorable, and so I took a picture.

Unfortunately, the picture wasn't quite in focus, and the owner of both the sheep and the puppy was trying to go about his day (a process that was not being made any easier by the puppy's antics), so I didn't want to inconvenience him further with an extended photo shoot. Which left me with one imperfectly focused shot.

That's when I realized that a little bit of blur didn't matter in watercolor. So I put it through the app, and this is what happened:

I'm really rather pleased with the result.

Ravioli!!

Sam and I made our first serious foray into cooking in our new(ish) host-family's kitchen today. We recently received a package from my mom containing, among other things, some dried sage she picked from my community garden plot back in Providence. This was really exciting for me- I didn't really get to garden last summer (I was too busy with the Tiny House to do any thing else), and so the garden plot was a little bit on autopilot. It was really, really cool to think about cooking with something I had grown again.

We decided to make the best sage dish known to man: butternut squash ravioli with a brown butter sage sauce. The problem with this was that we had no butternut squash ravioli- so we started at the beginning with some eggs and flour:

I was in charge of the dough, while Sam was in charge of the filling. While I kneaded the eggs and flour together, Sam started working his magic with spices and a strange-looking winter squash/ pumpkin thing that was the closest we could get to a butternut squash. 

Although time consuming, the process wasn't actually all that difficult. The only tricky part was, once the dough was rolled and the filling had been spooned out onto it in little blobs, we had to seal a second layer of dough over the filling. There is a small handtool that will cut and seal the ravioli for you, but we didn't have one of those, so we just made due with a knife and our fingers. 

As I finished up that process, Sam cooked up the sage sauce, and after a few minutes in boiling water, the ravioli were finished. It was really nice to sit down to a meal that truly a taste of home. 

Lavash

One of the real pleasures of living in Armenia is the seemingly endless supply of the traditional Armenian flat bread, lavash. Lavash is baked in a very particular way, and it seems to require a 3-woman team to accomplish it.

The first woman forms the dough into balls and rolls them out into circular, flat shapes. The circular piece of dough is then tossed to the second woman who- in a move reminiscent of a stereotypical Italian pizza master- shapes the dough into an even larger, thinner disc by tossing it in the air and stretching it with her hands. Then she spreads the thin lavash dough over an oval shaped pillow-come-oven-mitt type device. 

At this point, we must digress from the lavash for a moment to discuss the traditional Armenian oven, in which all proper lavash is cooked. The oven is called a tonir, and it consists of a deep stone lined cylindrical pit. A fire is lit at the bottom and fed until the stone walls of the pit are baking hot. It is next to this fire-well that the women sit while shaping the lavash dough.

Now, let us return to the lavash. The second woman, who has just stretched the dough over a large pillow/oven mitt, uses this mitt to slap the moist lavash dough ontno the vertical side of the tonir, where it sticks to the hot stones. As the thin dough cooks, it dries, and falls away from the stones: a process that takes about 5 to 10 seconds. It is the job of a third woman with a metal hook on a long pole to reach into the pit and fish out the now cooked lavash. 

Almost as soon as she does, the second woman slaps the next piece of lavash against the wall of the tonir. A good lavash team is like a well-oiled machine, with almost no down-time for any of it's members. They will smile and chat with your without even breaking their rhythm. It's fascinating to watch. 

The freshly baked lavash is dry, and as it cools, it hardens into something like a giant, unsalted saltine, or a big piece of matza. I'm told that you can store dry lavash  like this for up to a year. 

The real magic of lavash comes when you want to eat it: you take these large, platter-sized crackers, liberally sprinkle them with water, and cover them with a cloth or towel. About 5 minutes later, the result is wonderfully soft, flexible flat bread, suitable for all type of rolls and wraps. I can highly recommend peanut butter and honey lavash wraps for breakfast, or, if peanut butter isn't available (because most of the time in Armenia it isn't), walnuts and honey makes a good substitute. Both are really enjoyable. 

Horse

Host Families: Benefits and Challenges

There are many, many benefits to living with a host family during your first few months in country and at site as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Some of these benefits are really mundane. Living with a host family, you don't need to figure out things like where to buy toilet paper in your new community, or how to work strange new appliances in the kitchen right away (or, how to cook over an open fire, if that's something you've never done before), or how to pay for utilities (if you have them). On a more  significant level, living with a host family gives you a community of people you can bring your most sensitive cultural questions to without jeopardizing your work relationships. And because these people have been placed in a familial role, they can be comfortable telling you things like "that's actually really rude here" or "if you go to work  dressed like that, every one will think you're a prostitute". These are things that you, as a volunteer, need to know, but are really better coming from family than a work acquaintance.

There is, however, also a downside to the host family relationship. Being placed within a family structure like this, in some ways makes the host family responsible for your well being. In an effort to live up to this responsibility, sometimes the host family takes a more active role in the  volunteer's life than would be appropriate in the States. In our own host family, there are several different fronts in which our very caring host grandmother has wanted more control over my decisions than I was really comfortable giving her. Of course, this has sometimes been true of my grandmother back in the US, so in some ways it makes me feel right at home.

As a grown-a** woman, it chafes the soul to have my food choices decided for me: if I'm not to cook for myself, then I at least want to be able to decide how much of each dish I'm going to eat and how I'm going to season my food. However, in our home, it's quite common for our host grandmother to add more food to my plate if she feels I haven't eaten enough, or to add salt or garlic to my food if I haven't seasoned my portion to her standards. Similarly, if I haven't dressed in clothes she feels are warm enough, she expects me to go upstairs and change into something warmer. I suppose that this isn't different than my grandmother at home, but I feel much more comfortable ignoring my own grandma when she gets too pushy (sorry, Grammy.)

I try to explain that I am an adult and I can make these kinds of decisions for myself, but it is difficult to stand on this principal, since in Armenia, there are many things I actually can't do for myself yet: I can't reliably navigate public transportation. Sometimes I can't read street signs or storefronts. I don't know how to buy many food staples in the supermarket (for example, the supermarket stocks only sugar cubes on its shelves. I learned last week that if you want granulated sugar, you need to go to the counter and ask for poshi-shakar, or 'sugar dust' instead). Furthermore, I know that my host grandmother makes these choices for me because she is trying to take good care of me. In the end, I have to weigh my own need for independence with the fact that in many ways I am her responsibility- and so I try to  comply with as many of her expectations as I can, although sometimes I have to draw a line in the proverbial sand and to what's right for me.

So far, this line has mostly been drawn at food. These days, I only eat the things that I serve myself, and I've had to rather firmly decline her attempts to season my food for me on a few occasions. It distresses our host grandmother- who will continue to put food on my plate long after I've explained that I'm full or don't want to eat a particular dish. I don't want to upset her, but I also don't want to make myself sick. It's a balancing act, to be sure, but when it comes to food, I've decided that my own well-being has to come before what our host grandmother thinks is best for me. On the other hand, I've started dressing with an eye towards what our host grandmother will think is appropriately warm for the weather.

Striking a good balance between our host family's beliefs about what is best and our own judgments is difficult, and I suspect it will continue to be difficult for us as longs as Sam and I live with a host family. But the benefits of having this wonderful group of people looking out for us and making sure our lives here start out successfully is well worth the difficulties that come with it.

Christmas Party

This week I made my first visit to Yerevan since swearing in 1 month ago. I came in on Friday for a Volunteer Safety Council meeting, but stayed in town an extra night, because Saturday was the Volunteer Christmas Party. (We celebrated as a group a little bit earlier than you might have expected because many of the A22s are going home for the holidays this year.) Sam also came up to the capital on Saturday for the shindig

The party was held at the Envoy hostel, where we were staying. The Envoy is a defacto home-away-from-home-away-from-home for many volunteers, and most stay there whenever they come into Yerevan. It's easy to see why- the Envoy is clean, comfortable, in a good part of town, it's got fast wifi, hot water, and good water pressure to boot. The staff there are kind, obliging, and work really hard to keep it all going strong. After our first stay, we're big fans of the place.

The staff seems to be fans of ours too- although they were probably decorated for the holiday season anyway, it felt like the decorations were for us, and they did get us all a cake for our party. Even through the Envoy has a great kitchen (where they serve a simple breakfast each morning) Sam and I were a little done with Peace Corps Cooking for a while- having (it seemed) just finished the apple turnover and roasted root vegetable dishes for Thanksgiving. So we didn't cook, and instead mooched off of desserts that other people brought. It was a really fun evening.

The next day we had time for brunch before taking a shared taxi home to Sisian. Sam had his first taste of bacon in country at Crumbs cafe where we ate (awesome brunch place, by the way), and that made him happy. All in all, the party was fun and I'm glad I went, but the 5 hour ride to and from Sisian makes even a 3 day weekend feel like a really short trip to Yerevan. 

Mountains at Sunset

Playing around with mobile photography

One of the things I've been working on with the free time I have now that PST is over, is improving my mobile photography skills. You see some incredible iphone images on the internet, and it's not like Sisian doesn't provide me with some amazing source material, so why shouldn't I be able to take some of those amazing photos? 

In addition to working on improving my actual photograph subject choice and composition, I'm also looking into expanding my image processing capabilities on my phone. Today I've been playing around with an app called "waterlogued", which takes your picture, and turns it into a watercolor. It seems a little gimmiky to me, but also kinda cool... I'll keep playing around with it and we'll see what happens...

Differing Priorities

There is a fundamental different between the goals of education that I see here in Armenia and the ones I experienced as a student back home. At home, a common saying amongst my teachers was that the journey was more important than the destination. Here, priority is given to product over process. In other words, getting the correct answer is more important than the thinking which lead to that answer. This results in some very different teaching styles.

For example, test taking is very different here. When I was a student, almost every test I took required me to "show my work"- or explain my thought process- in addition to giving an answer to the test question. Even if my answer was correct, if I didn't show my work, I would not be given credit. The reasoning behind this was that the thinking that lead to the correct answer was at least as important (if not more so) than the answer itself. In Armenian classrooms, on the other hand, having the correct answer seems to be all that is important.

Back home, in order to study for an exam, students would be presented with practice problems that required similar thought processes as the questions which they would later encounter in the test itself. Studying for a test here in Armenia often involves going through the actual test booklet and reviewing the correct answers to the problems. This isn't viewed as "cheating" as it would be back home- but rather as the most effective way for students to learn the material they need in order to pass the exam. If a student is able to 'learn' (read: memorize) an answer to a particular question from his or her teacher and then later replicate that answer without assistance, then the student is genuinely considered to have mastered the material and the teacher to have done her job.

Obviously, I'm making generalizations on both sides here. I draw from my limited experience as a student in the US (restricted to small, wealthy private schools with strong liberal-arts tendencies), and my even more limited experience observing a small number of lessons in an even smaller number of schools over just a few months here in Armenia. It is only reasonable to assume that there are teachers here in Armenia who require more of their students than mere memorization, just as there are teachers in America who do not prioritize thought process as my teachers did. But I think that, as generalizations, my observations still hold.

I have been wondering what might have lead to this fundamental difference. I think that it is probably a combination of many things, which can be summarized by saying that as access to information becomes more widely available, accumulating knowledge of facts becomes less important than the skill to synthesize conclusions from a set of facts provided for you. In an environment where people have easy access to libraries or the internet, critical thinking skills (knowing how to ask good questions, how to efficiently search for answers, and being able to generate one's own answers from the information available) is far more important than simple knowing any given piece of information. However, in an environment where information resources like libraries or the internet are not available, critical thinking skills (while still important, of course) are not seen as the main thing to be learned in schools. In these sorts of environments, students attend schools in order to absorb facts and data from their teachers, who serve as walking libraries, since there is no other source from which students can obtain their information. Although libraries and internet access is becoming more and more readily available in Armenia, there is no denying that they are less easily accessible here than back home. Thus, Armenian teacher still fall farther towards the "information resource" end of the teaching spectrum than US teachers, who ought to be more like "critical thinking coaches" than walking reference materials.

There is also another thing,  I think, more specific to Armenia, which has influenced this trend in educational priorities, specifically relating to test taking techniques. It is the extraordinary prevalence and use of low-quality standardized tests. At home, with the exception of a few standardized tests for admission into high school or college, the tests we were given when I was a student had been written by our teachers, and had been tailored to test those things they felt were most important for us to learn. Here, there are booklets with tests already written in them that each student must buy at the beginning of the school year. The tests in these booklets only very loosely corresponds to the material in the text books  (which themselves are extraordinarily bad), but teachers feel they are required to teach from the text and test from the booklets. Additionally, these test booklets are filled with horrible questions: multiple choice questions with multiple correct answers (or no correct answers at all), fill-in-the-blank questions with ambiguous sentences, where multiple words could be grammatically correct with no contextual support. With questions like this- the content of which may or may not have been taught to the students previously- it's no wonder that the only way to help students pass the test in the time available during class is to give them the answers to the questions and hope they are able to remember as many as possible.

Honestly, it seems to me that Peace Corps Volunteers can advocate for more progressive teaching practices as much as they want, but that the only way real positive change can happen within the Armenian Educational System is if internet access is improved (along with computer literacy) or the teachers are unshackled from these horrible text books and allowed to create their own assessments.

First Day of Winter

Today was the first real wintry day Sam and I have experienced in Armenia. We got a few inches of snow overnight, and woke to find Sisian transformed into a Winter Wonderland. A slippery Winter Wonderland, as I soon found out- I started my walk to work by falling flat on my ass when I hit a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow. From the sound of spinning tires that echoed around the town, many drivers found themselves in similar situations throughout the day. 

View from School #4

There are few places in Sisian without spectacular mountain views, but even given this, I think that the view from School #4 is particularly nice.

It's really wonderful to walk into the teacher's lounge in the morning and look out the window to see the mountains looking back at me. 

The Food Room

In School #4 there are two teacher's lounges. The official lounge is large, a little chilly, and doesn't see much use. The real teacher's lounge is a small storage closet just next to the official lounge, that I have taken to calling the Food Room.. In the Food Room, there is a long table, some chairs, and- most importantly- a teapot and a fire hazard. I mean a hot plate.

In between classes, teachers come to the Food Room to make themselves and each other cups of Armenian-style coffee on the hot plate (which, and I cannot stress this enough, is a fiery death just waiting to happen), and eat snacks. Everyone brings something: some fruit to be cut up and shared, or walnuts, or candies, all of which are left on the table and eaten over the course of the day. The teachers lives seem to center on this room.It is where they snack, socialize, and decompress between classes. It's also a place of commerce: many teachers bring clothing or makeup that family members in Russia or the US have mailed them to sell. Several times a week, I'll walk into the Food Room and find that it's been transformed into a little khanute (an Armenian word meaning "store" or "shop").

I like the Food Room in general- dangerous hotplates of death not withstanding- but it does pose one significant challenge in my life: because it's purpose is so social-centric, it's not a very productive space in which to work. Conversations about lesson planning are constantly side tracked by the necessary social rituals of coffee, snacking, and chatting that are so important in Armenian culture. Unfortunately, because it is warm and there are snacks, the Food Room is my counterparts' preferred space for lesson planning. Which means we get about 5 minutes of actual work-related discussion accomplished over the  course of an hour. This is difficult for a task-oriented American, but makes complete sense to a relationship-oriented Armenian.

I think that eventually, I'll want to move our lesson planning out of the Food Room and into the official teacher's lounge, but I'll participate in the social aspects of the Food Room a little while longer. If they are so important to my counterparts, I feel I should make an effort to appreciate their significance before pushing them aside in favor of my own priorities.

Besides. The official teacher's lounge will be warmer in the spring. I have a complicated, love-hate relationship with that hot plate.

Storm Clouds

The weather here is generally still holding to a brisk autumn, with occasional brief snowfall. But today I had to rush home from work ahead of an afternoon rainstorm, which rolled into Sisian from the southeast. The sun was low in the sky, so its rays snuck beneath the storm, lighting up the town in stark contrast to a backdrop of dark storm clouds. I made it home just in time to take the laundry off the line, before light drizzle turned into real rain.