Hello my name is Sarah and I am a knitting addict

Now I’m sure all my friends and family in America have this image in their minds of what exactly it is I’m doing here as a Peace Corps volunteer (saving the world one person at a time and all), but one thing I bet you don’t picture is the vast amount of free time the average PCV has in any given day. When Peace Corps is looking for our job placements the school/office must be able to provide 15-20 hours/week of meaningful work. I’m lucky and there is plenty for me to do at the mayor’s office, but coming from the U.S. where I was in class 12-15 hours/week, working 20 hours/week, and attempting to read about a 1,000 pages/week for grad school it is a huge difference. Many volunteers also find themselves with free time because of the differences in the work culture here compared with the hyper-efficient, always on the go nature of working in the U.S. Volunteers develop many interesting hobbies as a way of filling this new free time including reading, playing music, blogging, watching television and movies on our computers, hanging out with friends, and knitting.

A powerful cult of knitters has developed here in Peace Corps Armenia and volunteers are learning every day. Now I’m not sure if this happens in other Peace Corps countries in the Eastern Europe/Central Asia region, although I’m sure it does. I recently learned how to knit and I now must admit that “Hello my name is Sarah and I am a knitting addict.” I attempted to learn last year, but I only ever ended up with scarf fit for a mouse. My new site mate Pat is an avid knitter and when she moved to site she began teaching me again and I was hooked. This fall we would meet up at the outdoor cafe in Artashat (the town near my village, where Pat lives) and knit and drink a few beers. We were quite a scene! So far I have made six scarves, three pairs of arm warmers, and now I’m working on my first hat! Now in the evenings I sit in my house and either listen to music or watch a movie and knit. The contingent of knitters in Peace Corps is so strong that when we have our conferences and meetings you look down the conference table and there are probably ten people knitting while they listen.

So here are some pictures of my creations…

Բերքի Տոն 2010 & The Grand Opening of the Aygpeat Cultural House

On Thursday, November 11th I celebrated the grand opening of the Aygepat Cultural House, the community development project I have been working on since the spring. We planned the completion of the project so that the grand opening coincided with the annual Բերքի Տոն Harvest Festival. This year the festival included a khoravats (Armenian barbecue) feast following the traditional singing, dancing, and a sampling of the local fruits and vegetables of the harvest, along with homemade wine and cognac.







The Marzpet of Ararat Marz (the regional governor) attended along with his entourage of regional officials, which judging from the reaction of all the villagers and everyone who works in the mayor’s office this was a big deal, because it is the village’s way to stand out to the regional government. Apparently all our work is paying off because during the ceremony the Marzpet told the village mayor that the cultural house would receive chairs from the Parliament.




The staff of the municipality with Mayor Petrosyan

The Finished Product

The renovation of the Aygepat Cultural House is complete! Not only is it complete, but the project was finished on-time and on-budget. I'm so proud of everyone who worked on the project and now it's time to begin working on creating new community programs for the village. The first will the annual Berqi Ton Festival, celebrating the harvest. This year's festival will take place this coming Thursday - so more pictures to come!

Community Cultural Center Project Update

The renovation of the cultural center in my village is a month under way and is going really great. I had a status meeting with Stepan - my Peace Corps program manager - and Seroyzha - the mayor of the village - and according to the mayor the project should be done on schedule at the end of this month! I cannot believe that the renovation will actually be finished on schedule. I had already prepared myself for it to be at least two weeks behind schedule, if not a month. The mayor and the whole village has done an amazing job and the room already looks incredible. So without any further ado...here are some photos of the renovation process over the last month.

Առնում ներկ Հայաստանում

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.

My SPA Project

You may have seen some random postings on Facebook and mentions of something called a ‘SPA project’ and in case you thought I was writing a project to get a jacuzzi put in my village or something, I wanted to clear the air of the lovely Peace Corps acronym alphabet soup (SPA, PCVs, CD, PMs, etc.) and let everyone know what I’ve been working on lately.





As you probably already know, I work for the mayor’s office which is located in a building called the գյուղապետարան (gyuhapetaran) or the village hall. In this building is a rundown auditorium that hasn’t been used since the Soviet times. It was full of old furniture and radiators, the window frames don’t have any glass in them meaning that birds are flying around inside the room, and the walls and floor need a good paint job. In April and May, I worked with my counterparts and the mayor to write a Peace Corps SPA grant (which means a Small Project Assistance grant – a program that gets money from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) to make small grants to Peace Corps volunteers and their community partners). We found out we were approved for funding at the end of June and the grant money was transferred into my bank account at the end of July.





The project work actually got underway the third week of this month with the cleaning out of the room. After the room was clean, we began making plans to purchase all the materials and supplies needed for the renovation: spackle, primer, paint, window glass, paint brushes and rollers, cement, plaster, and cinder blocks. Now the materials have mostly been purchased and the renovation work will begin soon. The plan is to have the renovation complete by November and then we will have a great ‘grand opening’ celebration. We are also purchasing a projector, microphone, large speaker, and a dry erase board/flip chart easel that we can use for club meetings, trainings, and community celebrations.





More pictures to come as we make progress on the renovation!

Finding My "Cause"

As August approached I began to think about the fact that a year from now I will be finished with the adventure that has been my Peace Corps service and heading back to the U.S. and for the first time in my life I have no idea what is next for me. I’ve always had a plan so that when one phase on my life has finished I was prepared to move on to the next big thing. I know you would think that someone who joins the Peace Corps is a carefree hippie who just floats from one adventure to the next not worried about what tomorrow holds, but that is not exactly my style – I am a little too Type-A for that! So being my Type-A self I started researching possible next steps and how exactly one begins a career in the mystical field of international relations. Through this research I found two career guides on jobs in international affairs and development in hopes of finding some guidance. I was hoping to find maybe some advice on how to figure out what I want to do and so far both of them have said that the key is to find your “cause” or your “purpose.” They say that you should think about what tasks you want to do every day and their advice on how to figure out these very important keys is to do a little soul searching. So far these guides haven’t been overly helpful in this area. While they have nice lists of all the possible careers that expand the possible options as far as helping me figure out what in the world I want to do I’m not finding them all that helpful. Trust me I already know that if you want to have a meaningful career you should do something you love and are passionate about (I’ve heard all the cliches before), but when their only advice for figuring out these things out is soul searching I’m stuck. I’ve been soul searching and I still don’t know what my “cause” is or what kind of things I want to be doing. I feel like I’ve spent the last year soul searching and I am not getting very far. Now I feel like there are a million options and different cities and I don’t know where to start. So if anyone has any advice on how exactly one goes about finding their purpose I would love to hear it.