View from our house

This is the view from the front porch of our house. It's really nice to walk outside and see the mountains every morning.

I'm really excited for when the trees (pear) blossom and leaf out. We'll have less of a mountain-view, but more of an enclosed space on the porch in which to hang out.

A quarter of the way through...

It's strange to think that we're already 25% of the way through our 27 months of Peace Corps Service, but this week marks the completion of our 7th month of living in Armenia. Thinking about how helpless we were when we arrived in this country compared to the relative independence we have now makes me feel proud of how much we've learned. On our first trip to Yerevan, Sam and I were too unsure of ourselves and our language skills to even order lunch on North Ave- the most English-Friendly street in the capital. We walked up and down the pedestrian route, not straying from its broad paving stones for fear of getting lost in the strange city. Compare that with our adventure of 2 weeks ago when we got into a cab heading for parts unknown (waaaay outside the tourist-centered North Ave district) to negotiate a rental agreement all on our own. Alla didn't trust us to cut our own eggs in Shahumyan- now we cook and clean for ourselves in our own house. It feels good to be an adult again, even if we still get help from Hasmik when our gas goes out or our washing machine needs to be repaired. After 7 months of living like a child, things are starting to get back to normal.

And, at 7 months in, things should be starting to feel more normal. The every-day occurrences here are starting to loose their novelty: waking up to herds of sheep outside my window no longer surprises me, the smell of burning trash that frequently permeates the town has faded into the olfactory background, and while men smoking in restaurants and public buses are still the bane of my existence, their tobacco infused presence is now an expected inconvenience rather than a shocking development.

That's not to say that everything here feels ordinary now- I'm still stopped in my tracks by the beauty of the mountains surrounding Sisian. I'm still shocked and a little uncomfortable when my fellow teachers kick off the week with vodka shots on Monday morning or break out a bottle of wine half-way through the day on Wednesday. I'm still not used to it when people I've met once remember my name and greet me on the street.

Mostly, I still struggle to really understand Armenians. I don't mean language study (although that is a continuing endeavor for both Sam and myself), but rather I struggle to understand the Armenian mindset. What motivates Armenians as a people? What values guide their priorities? How do they view and frame the problems faced by their country? I feel like I'm only now starting to brush against the edges of answers to these questions.

I know that cultural values here are different than they are back home, but it's hard to say in exactly what ways they're different. All I can do is observe behavior and try to extrapolate from that a set of cultural principles and values that I can then use to predict future behavior to see if my extrapolations were correct. As I attempt this, I'm strongly reminded of my own semester of cultural anthropology in college, and wish I had taken the course more seriously. But in those days I was just another pre-med student with very little tolerance for the soft-sciences, so I guess I'll just have to get by with the little anthropology that I've got.

I'm not prepared to write an in-depth treatise on Armenian cultural values, but I can say that, in general and in my experience, Armenians value the collective and the social far more than Americans who tend to value the individual and the professional/impersonal instead.

For example, in impoverished American communities people talk about "getting out". Parents work hard to give their children the opportunity to move to more affluent neighborhoods. Young people are encouraged to study well in school so that they can secure a job and life outside of and away from the poverty of their home neighborhood, town or city. Things aren't like that here. Poverty is endemic in Armenia, with almost 30% of families suffering from or at risk of food insecurity. And yet people here don't hope to "escape" from this economic difficulty by leaving it behind (although many are forced to). Instead people encourage students to study well in school so that they may help improve their village or town when they are grown. The unit for improvement isn't an individual's circumstances but rather the community as a whole. Rather then telling students to 'go out and make something of themselves', students in Armenia are told "Go, study, and come back". It's almost shameful to leave/abandon your home town- which may be why the reported population of Sisian is so much greater than the actual population here: declaring your residence elsewhere is admitting that you've left your home.

I'm still a long way from truly understanding Armenians, and with everything that becomes normalized in my life, every instance in which I demonstrate increased competence, independence and familiarity, I'm confronted with nuances of Armenian culture that I still don't understand. But I am making progress, and this aspect of social collectivism in Armenian culture is, I think, not insignificant. The more things like this I can grasp, the more this country will make sense to me.

Frosty Lada

Not sure why, but the sun coming through the frosty windows of the old beat-up Lada that lives across the street from us really caught my attention this morning.

We're still getting heavy frosts every night so I don't feel too behind on the whole gardening thing... I can't find a "last frost date" for Sisian anywhere on the internet, and asking local people has been met with quizzical expressions... I don't think that its used as a gardening metric here the same way it is back home. So "when is the last time you have frost in the Spring" is the wrong question to ask- but I don't know what the right question is... maybe "when do you plant X?" Would I have to ask that of every single crop though? That seems like a really inefficient way to do things, but then again, this is Armenia...

The view from above Sisian

Nighttime Visitor

Jako's been fairly good at walking us home from school this week, but since it's Sunday and we haven't walked past his house over the weekend, we hadn't seen him in a few days. Which is why I was surprised when- as I stepped out our front door to take in the laundry- I found that we had a guest hanging out on our porch-couch.

We have no idea how Jako got there- the entire house and garden is surrounded by chain-link fence and 6' high stone wall. But it's good to know he wanted to check in on us. We gave him some of the pasta sauce Sam cooked and sent him home. I'm happy we have a dog-friend in Sisian.

I don't think that's right...

So, I don't read Russian but all the internet browsers at school have Russian as their default language. So, I was clicking around on Google Translate, trying to find Armenian as the target language using the guess-and-check method, when this came up as a translation:

I don't know which languages are involved, but I'm almost sure that isn't correct....

Flowers in the Garden

The first flowers in the garden are starting to peek out at the world. Is spring really coming now? We've had so many fake-outs that I don't even know anymore.

We made a friend.

We don't really interact with the groups of people in Armenia who would be our peer demographic in America. Most of our coworkers are woman with children, who (regardless of age) are in a very different stage of life than we are, and we just don't interact with that many people outside of our students, our coworkers, and our host family. So we haven't made very many friends since moving to Sisian- that is, until yesterday, when we made bestest friends with one of the dogs that lives at the Basen Hotel in town. 

His name is Jako. He walked with us all over town, and is the friendliest dog I've met so far in Armenia. I think that hanging out with him will make not adopting a dog while we're here a lot easier. 

Mountaintop

It's interesting: religion don't play a large role in people daily activities here. Although I'm sure some people go to weekly masses, its a small minority which does so. And when people do go, usually it's just to light a candle, say a quick prayer, and leave. Major holidays are almost entirely secular in their celebrations. Really, the only things I've seen churches being used for- apart from tourism- is wedding ceremonies. And yet, despite this, Christianity infuses almost every part of the Armenian landscape. From the many crosses (like this one) dotting the hills surrounding Sisian to the fact that every village- no matter how small- has a church (however little it's used), to the multitude of religious pieces of art that are hung in public spaces and private homes. It's an interesting contrast to they way religion is often practiced back home.

A Kitchen of Our Own

In the brief time that we've been living on our own in Armenia, it's become clear that the most significant impact on our lives will be having a kitchen of our own. It feels so good to be able to eat familiar, healthy foods that aren't accompanied by the customary dosages of oil and salt found in traditional Armenian foods.

Sam also really enjoys cooking. Me, not so much- I'm more about the eating stage of things. But fortunately, I married myself a guy who loves to cook, so I'm rarely called upon to make my own food these days. 

Sam happily chops, sautees, boils and steams away in the kitchen while I eagerly anticipate whatever wonderful meal he's been inspire to attempt for that particular meal. 

But if we're being honest, eating food that's more to our tastes isn't really the best part of our new kitchen. It's the control that it allows us to have over our lives and our bodies. 

Now I get to eat when I want (or, at least, when Sam wants to cook, and when I can be bothered to heat up leftovers). I get to have a say over the ingredients I decide to put in my body. It feels like it's been a very, very long time since we've been able to make these types of basic decisions for ourselves.  

And for now, I'm deciding to eat a fritata.

Independent Housing

Ok... so... The past several days have been so hectic and intense I don't even know where to begin. Let's start with moving our stuff into the house:

On Saturday afternoon we loaded all of our stuff into a car that Hasmik sent to help us with the move. She's incredible awesome- I don't know how we'd get by in Sisian without her help. The driver- who works at Hasmik's hotel- was also great, and manage to get all of our bags into the car in one load, and have enough room for both Sam and I to fit in the car at the end of it. It was a little like a clown-car full of luggage, but still, we got all of our things from Hasmik's house to our new house in a single car ride, which was pretty awesome.

The house was freezing when we got there, and it took us a few tries to figure out how to light the gas heater reliably. But soon the living room was comfortable, and we turned on the electric radiator on in the bathroom, which made it pretty comfortable in there too. That just left the bedroom and the kitchen in the cold, but both of those things were okay with us. After we got our stuff inside and had figured out how to work the heat and hot water, we cleaned the kitchen enough to cook in and went grocery shopping.

I'll admit, we overindulged on this shopping trip. We bought crackers and cookies, tea and coffee, meat and eggs, and vegetables- so many vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, green onions, parsley and - to my delight- we even found some really fresh, crunchy, green broccoli! We feasted. We ate dinner on the couch, watching TV in our pajamas, drinking wine from actual glasses instead of sharing it from a single mug. It was amazing.

At the end of all that, we were exhausted. And because the house didn't come with any sheets, we pulled out our sleeping bags, tossed them on top of the bed, and went to sleep. It wasn't until half way through the night that I woke up to an unpleasant discovery: all of our bedding smelled like mildew and cigarettes. I made it through the rest of the night by throwing my pillow onto the floor and trying not to breathe too deeply, but neither of us slept well. We woke up exhausted the next morning.

The first order of the day was to collect all the removable fabric from around the house (blankest, pillows, mattresses- which are more like large, firm pillows than what you think of as a mattress back home, sort of like a futon mattress- the fabric covering the couch and armchairs, the cushions to the couch and arm chairs, etc) you name it, if it was fabric and I could move it, out it went. I had wanted to hang them all outside, but unfortunately were were in the middle of a massive snow storm, so instead I stacked them all in the hallway.

After this had been accomplished, we needed a new sleeping situation, so we set up the tent in the living room, laid down our sleeping pads, and decided that until we got the bed situation sorted out, we'd do some indoor camping.

The remainder of the day was spent cleaning every dish in the house, and unpacking bit by bit as we clean new rooms and spaces in which to put things. There's still a long way to go, and we're exhausted, but despite all of the challenges it continues to entail, We're really very, very happy with our independent housing.

Movin' Out

So, one of the things on which we've been working very hard over the past two months has been finding independent housing for ourselves in Sisian. We love our host family to pieces, but it just doesn't feel normal to live with a family. Heck- I wasn't a huge fan of living with our actual family back in the States for the 6 months before we left (sorry, guys, it's not you, it's me: I just like my space is all...), so we're very eager to move into our own place here in Armenia. 

Well, today we got the keys! 

Keys!

It's actually been quite a challenge to get to this point. First, finding the place was no picnic: we knew early on that we wanted to have a large garden here, and that meant renting a "sepakan toon" (a private house), rather than an apartment. While apparently it's easier to find an apartment for rent in Sisian (or so we were told), private houses for rent are in short supply. We had a few potential houses fall through when the owners decided they didn't want to rent them out after all. We found one lovely couple who would rent the top floor of their home to us and live on the ground floor, but they would have to come into the top floor to wash and hang their laundry, and they were already using their garden. Finally, we found this house, the owner of which lives in Yerevan, and the garden of which hasn't been tended in years. 

Molly standing in front of the gate

Coordinating with the owner was a little tricky: she lived in Yerevan, so we needed to wait until she was in Sisian to visit the house and see if it would work out for us. When we did get to talk with her, it was great. The house was in really good shape, the owner was super kind, and said we could use a lot of the things that were there like dishes, cookware, and- most importantly to me- gardening tools!

View from our front door

The next challenge was to arrange for the owner to meet with a member of the Peace Corps staff so that they could fill out the rental agreement form. It turned out that this was going to be super difficult, and so in what I think is the most impressive use of our Armenian language skills (as well as the most significant assertion of our independence) in country so far, we arranged to meet with our landlady on our own while we were in Yerevan last weekend. We brought all the necessary forms (in both English and Armenian) and filled them out together at her home over coffee. It turns out that at least one of the Peace Corps staff usually skips the rental agreement form, as some of the things included in it are actually considered a little insulting/unreasonable in Armenian culture (for example, there is a clause stating that the volunteers may change the locks on the house and the landlord may not demand copies of the keys, and another clause that says the landlord may not enter the premises without the volunteer's permission except in cases of emergency- apparently both of these things are overly formal and indicate a lack of trust/respect/sociability in Armenian culture...an equivalently inappropriate request back home might be if a tenet required that all communication with their landlord be conducted only via notarized written correspondence) But fortunately, our landlady didn't seem to feel that anything on the form was either insulting or unreasonable. Or if she did, she kept it to herself and signed the forms anyway. I think it may have helped that we explained that these forms weren't for us, but were required by the Peace Corps. Bureaucratic paperwork is a commonly understood phenomenon here. We left all the form in the Peace Corps Office before returning to Sisian on Sunday afternoon.

Our balcony and pear tree

Then we had to wait until our Peace Corps Regional Manager (RM) came to inspect the house (we passed the time by packing up all our things at the host-family house). The Peace Corps requires that all houses undergo a safety inspection prior to volunteers moving into them. Frankly, we had pretty much already decided that we were moving into this house, though, and if our RM hadn't approved it, I think we might have moved in anyway- I'm not sure what would have happened then. Fortunately, we didn't have to find out. Yesterday afternoon our RM visited Sisian for the first time and checked out our house. She was thoroughly pleased with the security of the place, and told us that she would submit the house for approval from our Safety & Security Manager (who needed to have the GPS coordinates of the house on file before we could move in) and apply for a variance from our administrative staff- the house costs 5,000 AMD more each month than the Peace Corps was willing to pay for rent in our town. But 5,000 AMD (10 US dollars) isn't a huge amount of money- in terms of buying power, it will get you one night in a hostel, or a dinner for one at a fancy restaurant in Yerevan. So we can make up that difference from our monthly discretionary budget. Especially if I can save us some money by growing a large portion of our food in the garden, which brings me to....

My Enormous Garden

My ENORMOUS GARDEN! It's got a pear tree, several apple trees, maybe a few walnut trees, some things that look like bushes but have remains of what look like dried plums hanging from them, raspberry brambles, strawberry plants, some feral garlic and onion plants, and TONS of SPACE. The largest open space in the garden is pretty gravely, which at first was slightly disappointing, but when I thought about it some more, and considered how much heavy clay there is in so much of Sisian's soil, I actually think that it's a good thing. If we add a few wheelbarrows of manure (which is easily available in large supply here- and apparently people will just give to you if you ask for it) we'll have some well drained garden beds, which would be difficult to accomplish if we were working in clay.

We're supposed to wait until we have confirmation from the Safety & Security Manager as well as approval from the admin office, but we decided against that, sent our first bank payment to our landlord this afternoon, and immediately afterwards picked up our keys from a neighbor. We couldn't be more pumped right now. Tomorrow, we'll ferry all our bags across town, and then we can finally settle down. After this, we'll have moved 4 times in the past year. I am so, so, so ready to unpack for good here.

Spring is on Temporary Hiatus

So, it snowed all day yesterday, and then continued to snow (even harder) until around 3 o'clock today. No one seems particularly concerned, they just say "This is the weather in Sisian, it snows and it melts, it snows and it melts"... To be fair to them, the weather is warming up considerably now that the clouds have blown over and the sun is out, and a lot of the snow on the paved roads was melting already- I don't have any problems believing that as long as it stays sunny, most of the snow will be melted by tomorrow morning. But until then, this is what the gardens of Sisian look like:

Betrayed!

And here I was, thinking it was springtime. This is the view from my window this morning: 

We've had maybe 3 weeks of solid springtime weather. I had stopped wearing long underwear all day every day. I had changed out my thermally insulated winter boots for my mud-ready-platform-heels spring boots. And then *bam* Sisian hits me with this. Uncool, Sisian. Uncool.

Zorats Qarer, again.

I'm realizing that I posted flower photos from my hike up to Zorats Qarer last week, but I completely forgot to post any pictures of the stones themselves! They were, as always, stunning. I brought my kindle, and spend an hour or so tucked between two of them so that I was in the sun but out of the wind, and finished reading Fruitless Fall- which, if you're looking for a good book about bees, you should totally read. In any case, it was a really nice way to spend a spring afternoon, and here are some photos:

Sam gets a haircut

Well, we're in Yerevan again for the weekend: I had training events on Thursday night and all day yesterday, but Sam came up to the city yesterday afternoon, and we took today to get some errands done that you just can't accomplish in Sisian. We got ourselves a big bag of broccoli from our favorite fruit khanoot (fruit stand) and Sam bought his guitar! We also trialed a hair dressers so that Sam can look sharp in a month when we go back to the US for a wedding. I think this may be the most relaxed he's looked in months. 

It's odd: it feels like we're always coming up to Yerevan for some sort of training event, but apparently we're here far less than other volunteers for whom the travel isn't nearly as arduous. There are also volunteers with much longer/more unpleasant journeys than ours, but some of them still manage to make their way to the capital more frequently than we do. I think a large part of it is that we're a couple, and so staying at site isn't nearly as lonely for us as it is for other volunteers. While it's nice that we're saving a ton of money by not going traveling to Yerevan when there is no training (PC reimburses travel expenses when you're there for training events), it also means we miss out a lot on the group social scene which is too bad, because we really like the other volunteers here. Hopefully, when we find independent housing, we'll be able to invite other volunteers to stay with us and that will help.

Snowdrops

While many people celebrated with chocolate or flowers, I spent Women's Day walking up to Zorats Qarer: Armenian Stonehenge. Well, I didn't spend the whole day doing that: it's only about an hour's walk outside of town. But, I did spend the afternoon walking out, reading among the rocks, and heading back. 

You might remember that our site mates Sasha and Andrea took Sam and I out to Zorats Qarer to welcome us to Sisian. It was  beautiful then, but I think that there's an extra special something to the place in springtime: Dnstsaghikner.

Dnztsaghikner, or Snowdrops, are the first flowers we see here in Sisian. They don't grow in the Vorotan river valley, but a few hundred feet up the mountains they speckle the landscape like small purple dancing fairies.

I think that photographing them might have been my favorite part of the entire day.

Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day- which isn't a widely celebrated holiday back home Here, that's hardly imaginable. Schools and businesses are closed. Women greet each other on the street with declarations of "Congratulations on our holiday". The town of Sisian has decorated it's bridge in honor of the day.

It's also interesting to me to watch the different ways in which the holiday is observed. Here in Sisian, it's something akin to an expanded version of Mother's Day back home. Women are given cards, chocolate, or flowers, and pastel colors seem to rule the decorating schemes. In Yerevan, it's treated more like a Cancer Awareness Day, with movie screenings and gathering which explore the challenges faced by women in Armenian society today... plus flowers and chocolate, because who doesn't love an excuse to get chocolate?

I was a little bit torn- on the one hand, the simple approach to the holiday taken in Sisian does give the women here joy, and there's not a whole lot of opportunity or impetus for social change the way there is in the big city, so why not just enjoy it? On the other hand, I feel like true gender equality will play an important part in this country's development, and the public awareness events in Yerevan contribute to that cause. 

In the end, I skipped most of the day's festivities in favor of going on a hike- it was beautiful weather, and I had been stuck inside for waayy too long. It was also the first time I've been alone for more than 20 minutes at a time since we arrived in country. It was a good day.  

Livestock on the Mountainside.

They've been grazing livestock on the mountainside behind our house for the past two weeks or so. Today I decided to take a picture, but you couldn't really see the animals because all I have is an iPhone with a dinky digital zoom. Lamenting my lack of opital lenses, I remembered the pair of birding binoculars that were given to us by my Aunt Jeannie (for watching Armenian birds, of which there are many- my favorite are the magpies, but that's a story for another day...). It turns out, they're not half bad as an iPhone lens. 

Host Grandma's Sewing Machine

Our Host Grandmother has an old hand-cranked sewing machine from the soviet-era that she still uses pretty much on a daily basis. I posted this photo of the machine of to the Vintage Sewing Machine Subreddit (yes, such a thing exists), and got a fascinating story back:

According to Redditor PAPPP: 

For those who have never heard it, assuming I'm identifying that machine right, those have a really cool story behind them. It looks like a Singer because it is... sort of. repeatedly.

As I understand the story, Singer set up a factory in Podolsk Russia starting in 1900, which was producing machines by 1905, and made sewing machines until it was mostly converted for munitions work during the first world war. After the revolution in 1917-1918 it was nationalized (Singer was apparently compensated some token amount in the process) and returned to sewing machine production under the names "Gosshveymashina" (Which is, AFIK, more or less "National Sewing Machine Factory") and later "Podolsk" - these machines were similar to but not exactly Singers, because under Singer the plant was mostly set up for major castings and finishing work, and many of the small machined and unfinished wood parts were imported, so they had to improvise/redesign for local production. (Hilariously jingoistic account of that part here.)

After the second world war it was updated with equipment and plans stripped from the more modern Singer facility in Wittenberg as war reparations, and produced machines under the badges Podolsk Engineering Plant (PMZ), and later as Kalinin Sewing Machines (ZIK). Then, in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Semi-Tech, who at the time owned the Singer brand, bought the old factory and put the Singer name back on it until it was closed around 2000 (Source for the relevant bit of the Semi-tech part of Singer history here, the whole James Ting holdings scam fully collapsed less than a year after that article). Ref with most of the details but no sourcing of its own for the overall story here- I've read accounts that differ in some details elsewhere.

I'm not an expert (in fact I just barely know what I'm talking about) but that looks like one of the post-WWII approximately 15-91 machines from the PMZ era; the shape and decals match other examples I've seen pictures of, though the badge is a bit different.

Maybe you have to be a little bit of a sewing machine geek to really appreciate it, but to me, this is a really cool piece of history.

Sunset

Now that the weather is slightly less frigid, we've been trying to walk around Sisian more than we did during the winter. Today, we found ourselves at the Sisian Church at sunset, and it was a beautiful view.