Far Away, By My Side: My Kinda New House...(since November)

I am a bad blogger. I'm pretty sure one of the first rules of blogging is to update your blog often to keep your followers following and I haven't posted anything since Thanksgiving. So I'm going to use this post to catch everyone up on my life in Armenia (and a little bit in the U.S.) for the last four months. Everyone November we have a conference call the All-Volunteer conference in Yerevan. This conference is the only one where all the volunteers from both the old group and the new group get together at the same time. We have a Thanksgiving dinner with the Peace Corps staff, which is a great way to celebrate the holiday when we are all so far away from our friends and family in the U.S. A few days before the conference this year I received a phone call from Stepan, my program manager, letting me know that I was going to have to move out of my house because my landlady's little sister needed to move back to the village. I had about two weeks to find a new house and move, but this would all have to wait until after I returned from a week in Yerevan.

Because I live in a village there are a limited amount of empty houses available for rent. The first one I looked at was house that was previously unavailable the first time I moved last April. It was pretty nice - it even have an indoor shower with a hot water heater, but it turned out that the landlady, who lived in the village with her son used this house to escape to when she fought with her son and wanted to be able to have keys to the house once I moved. This is against Peace Corps policy and something I have to battle at my last house, where my landlady was overbearing and always just showing up at my house and calling me when I wasn't home saying she need to come over for some reason (to clean, to fix something, etc.) I loved my last house, but after dealing with that I wasn't excited about the prospect of another nosy landlady. Stepan called and tried to talk to the landlady, but it was a no go. At this point the only other house available was one that I looked at last April and had passed on. It's a nice house, but because no one has lived in it for many years it doesn't have a function hot water heater or wood stove or gas heater to heat the house. It was my only option so I moved in at the beginning of December, just time to get settled in before my trip to the U.S..

It has it's problems, one hour into being plugged in the refrigerator stopped working and while my landlord has tried multiple times to fix it - it is still broken. They have also been unable to fix the hot water heater. Peace Corps gives every volunteer money to fix up their house once they move out of their host family's house, but of course since I had moved out 8 months earlier that money was long gone. I making due though - I have become an expert bucket bather and since my kitchen is in a separate building from house during the winter the lack of a fridge wasn't a problem because it was the same temperature it was outside. Luckily I have an awesome site mate who lives in Artashat (the town nearest to my village) who has an amazing apartment with a hot shower and once a week we get together for what we call Dinner/Shower/Knitting/West Wing night. We get together and make tasty food, I get a hot shower, and then we relax and knit while watching the DVDs of The West Wing. Because Pat has a small agitator for washing clothes I know also bring my laundry over to wash every couple of weeks.

I was skyping with my parents last weekend and my dad mentioned that he had only seen the walls of my bedroom and wanted me to post pictures of my house. So without further ado here is my kinda new house...