Development Dinner

Two Saturdays ago I had the opportunity to go to Yerevan and have dinner at the Peace Corp Armenia Country Director Lee’s house. This all came about during pre-service training (PST) – through the course of PST all the trainees earned “Lee Bucks” for completing different tasks during training sessions, our language classes, by answering questions, etc. At the end of PST there was an auction where we could use the “money” to bid on everything from spices, movies, hiking trips with various staff members, and a dinner at Lee’s house along with members of the development community in Armenia. My friends Brent and Shannon and I pooled our Lee Bucks together and won the development dinner.

So I polished myself up and made my way to Yerevan. Lee’s house in Yerevan is very nice and the weather that weekend in Yerevan and the surrounding areas (i.e., my village) was amazing – in the 70s during the day and just cool enough in the evening for it to be fall. Lee is also an amazing cook and she made a feast of enchiladas and tacos. I’ve missed Mexican food so much and it was so good. We ate our dinner on the patio and drank wine and talked to some really amazing people. The guests from the development community included people from USAID, OSCE, USDA, and independent development contractors. They all had so many fascinating stories about the places they had been and amazing things they had seen all over the world. We talked about what we had done before Peace Corps, our work here, what we hoped to do after Peace Corps. I got some really great career and life advice from this amazing woman Gina, who has worked in development all over the former Soviet Union. Her husband is Swedish and works for OSCE on issues of gender and women’s rights in Armenia. It was a nice, relaxed atmosphere and it will definitely be a night I remember for a long time.

After the dinner some of us met up with other volunteers who were in Yerevan to go dancing. We went to this little bar called Cocoon which sometimes becomes a dance club even though it’s the size of a closet. We met a diplomat from Argentina and two Armenian girls from California and a bunch of cool Armenians. Usually they just play typical Yerevan club music but they started out with that and switched it over to some latin music and then some old school American classics like the YMCA and the twist, which got all the Americans up and on the floor.

So after a pretty standard week at site teaching my two clubs and working on some lesson plans I made the journey up north to Artsvaberd for Halloween weekend. More to come on that later.