So the title of today’s adventure is առնում ներկ Հայաստանում or for those of you who don't know Armenian ‘buying paint in Armenia.’ As you may know I am working with my counterpart organization to open a community cultural house in my village. We received funding for the project at the end of July, but I was very busy working some summer camps so we had to wait a bit to being the project. When I returned from working an environmental camp in Idjevan the first week in August I was ready to begin working on the project. One of the hardest things about working in Armenia is dealing with delays and working in an extremely different work culture. In the United States, we are very focused on being efficient and keeping to a project's schedule, but here it seems as if the timeline for every project or task must be padded because there will always be delays. It feels like everything here takes twice as long as it would in the States. For example, while I was under the impression that we would start cleaning out the project space the second week of August, it didn’t actually happen until the third week. So for an entire week I was waiting around and asking my counterpart when we would start and the only response I ever received was we will let you know.
The cleaning of the room was scheduled to be completed by the 13th, but it was actually completed on Friday, August 20th and when I came into the office that day meet with the mayor and my counterpart they told me that everything was ready and that now they were just waiting on me because the grant money is in my bank account. I made arrangements with the mayor to go to Artashat so we could go to the bank and purchase the renovation materials and supplies on the following Tuesday. However, when I arrived at the office on Tuesday to meet the mayor my counterpart told me that the mayor was in Yerevan! This is not the first time this has happened and I don’t know how to change it. The mayor is a middle-aged man and it is not like I’m all of a sudden going to get him to write down things and remember appointments. It is so ingrained in the culture here that it isn't disrespectful to be late or miss an appointment especially if you are an 'important person' in the community. My counterpart told me she would talk to the mayor and schedule a time for our little shopping excursion and let me know when it would be.
Again after waiting around for a few more days we met on Friday, August 27th to come up with a plan about how we would go about buying everything. Of course the mayor was an hour late for the meeting! So the shopping excursion finally happened on the following Monday. Of course the outing wasn’t exactly the picture of efficiency. My counterpart called me at 11:30am and told me the mayor was ready to go. I made it to the office by noon and the mayor was nowhere in sight. After waiting around for an hour-and-a-half the mayor finally showed up to the office and we were off.
Our merry little troupe included the mayor (Seroyzha), my counterpart (Ruzanna), and the renovation guy (Onik). First we went to the bank and because of the large sum of money I needed I had to go into the bank, rather than just using the ATM. If you think banks in the U.S. are a pain, just come to Armenia! After waiting around for 30 minutes for my turn I wasn’t even able to withdraw all the funds I needed because of the bank’s daily withdrawal limit. So with about half the necessary cash in hand we headed out to the hardware store. It was a chaotic experience – I was trying to follow what everyone was talking about and making sure that everything they were selecting was the same price as what we had put in our budget. It took us about 3 hours to get everything together including all the paperwork for the taxes (the tax system here is crazy!). We finally paid and got everything loaded into the delivery vans and were on our way back to the village. I definitely felt a sense of accomplishment watching the villagers unload the delivery vans, while the mayor proudly took pictures.
Because we were unable to buy everything the first day, my counterpart and I went back to Artashat the next day for another delightful trip to the bank and the hardware store. Now all we have left to buy is the windows and I’m curious to see exactly when that happens. After our shopping excursion last Tuesday they told me we would go in a few days, but again that must mean a ‘few days in Armenian time’ because here we are almost a week later and we still need to go to the store and I've heard no concrete plan. But that is generally the way working here goes and I've started to learn to be a little more flexible and adaptable.
