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.