Tsnoond Shnorhavor

I’m another year older…sometimes it is hard to believe that the last three years have gone by so quickly. There are times when it feels just like yesterday, but then I think about all the things that have happened in the last three years and then it seems like a lifetime ago. Three years ago on my birthday I was in San Marcos, TX finishing up college. I was preparing to live it up in my last summer there, studying abroad in Mexico, and trying to decide what I was going to do after I graduated. During this time I was applying to graduate school and thinking about joining the Peace Corps. Since that birthday three years ago I have graduated from college, moved to Denver, gone to graduate school, joined the Peace Corps, and moved to Armenia!

So here I am celebrating my 24th birthday in Armenia, miles from home and my friends and family, but with my many new friends. The last couple of months have been pretty frustrating and I’ve been struggling with work getting very busy and one year fatigue plaguing me, so it was a great relief to have such a great birthday. Some of the other volunteers came to my site to visit and we had a little party at my new house. I made strawberry mojitos, chicken enchiladas, Spanish rice, refried beans, chips and salsa, and a delicious cake. We feasted, listened to music, and played games. Even though I miss all my friends and family in the U.S. I couldn’t have asked for a better party or a better birthday!

A Home of My Own

I moved out of my host family’s house on April 1st and into my own place. The rules regarding how long a Peace Corps volunteer varies by country – all volunteers in Armenia are required to live with a host family for the first four months they are at site, but my friend in El Salvador only lived with the mayor of here community for a few days before moving into her own place. I decided to stay with my host family through the winter because they were already prepared and because I had been warned that the first winter is usually a hard time for volunteers here. I was really lucky because my host family is amazing, but in the end I was ready to move out and have a little more control over my daily routine and my own space. As much as I love my host family and I was at a point in my life before I left for Peace Corps when I was ready to live alone so living with a family of five could be overwhelming at times.


My Living Room


My Kitchen

Because I live in a village there aren’t any apartment buildings so my only option for finding my own place was to look for an empty house. The mayor helped me find a couple of places to look at and when I picked the one I liked best he helped with all the details before I moved in. He even helped me move my things in his car. The family who owns the house live in Belgium now and their relatives have been looking after the house and they are my landlords. My house has one really large main room that is the dining room and living room, two bed rooms, and a kitchen. It’s really big, but that because a normal Armenian family usually consists of 6-8 people not just one! I’m only using one of the bedrooms and the extra bedroom will be like my bunk house for when I have visitors. Off the kitchen I have a little balcony that over looks the backyard, which will be great to sit on in the summer and read. The backyard is a big garden full of trees and plants, which my landlords care for, but I get to eat from which is awesome. There’s a walnut tree, pear trees, cherry trees, and peach trees. Right now the only thing that’s ready is the green onions and greens.


My Bedroom


My Dining Room

I love that my house is big because that means I have plenty of room for visitors. In fact, I had my first visitors last Friday. Four other volunteers came to my site to help me finish moving in and to celebrate my new place. I made a great dinner and had a great time hanging out. One of the hardest things about living with a host family was that I couldn’t have friends come visit my site and if I wanted to see people I either had to go to Yerevan (which means spending a lot of money) and traveling to other people’s sites, so I’m excited to finally be able to have people come visit me.


My Extra Bedroom


The View of My Backyard from the Balcony

New Project

I’m starting a new project at work, well actually I started back in February after I went to a project development and management conference with my counterpart, but we haven’t made much progress in the last two months. The project is to renovate an unused auditorium in the village hall to create a cultural house for the community. To finance the renovation my counterpart and I are writing a Peace Corps Small Project Assistance (SPA) grant. The way the grant works is that 25% of the budget must come from a community contribution, which can be a financial contribution or a labor contribution. My village is going to provide the labor for the renovation as their community contribution. I have about a month and a half until I have to turn in the completed grant proposal so I’m really trying to kick start the process, which is quite difficult. The work culture here is very different and much more laid-back here than in the U.S. and I feel like I have to remind people of things multiple times before they actually happen. I mean if I was writing this project in the U.S. it would be done by now, but in the last two months all we have been able to accomplish is one community interest meeting and many discussions about what we need to do, but with little of it actually accomplished. If all goes according to plan and I get the grant money, work will start in July and hopefully the renovation will be complete by October so that it can coincide with the harvest and we can hold another harvest festival, but this time in the brand-new cultural house.

International Women's Day

March 8th is International Women’s Day and it is also an Armenian holiday called Womanhood and Beauty Day. In my village I celebrated at the village hall at a celebration thrown by the mayor’s office.





Children from the school sang and read passages about how wonderful women are and everyone danced. There were champagne toasts (cheap Armenian champagne is really bad!) and we ate fruit and chocolates. I was trying to get out of dancing by taking pictures, but the mayor and the women who work at the mayor’s office got me and made me dance.

Coming out of hibernation...

I know it has been a few months since my last posting, but there hasn’t been all that much to catch you up on. Things for me here really slowed down in the winter and it was definitely the period in which I felt the most isolated and lonely. After all the holiday parties were finished life in the village slowed to a crawl from its normal meandering pace. To be honest I live in a village of 700 people so it’s never going to be life in the fast lane here, but there were a few times when I had to really think to figure out the last time I had left my host family’s house. I mean other than going in the backyard to get to the shower room or the outhouse there were times when I didn’t actually leave my house for three days! Work really slowed down because I wasn’t holding club meetings while school was closed for the holidays and I worked from home a lot which was nice because I had the luxury of working in my pajamas, but eventually it got to the point where I needed to put on some real clothes and do something. It’s like I fell into this hibernation state and my world really didn’t extend beyond my room – I had my computer, magazines, books, snacks from America, movies. Now I should have known that this was going to be my biggest challenge with winter because succumbing to this sort hibernation isn’t exactly new to me. I mean during finals in grad school I only left my apartment to go to the grocery store and when I did I prayed I wouldn’t run into to anyone I knew because I looked a hot mess! I’m a nester – but after too long my nest gets messy, cluttered, and a little gross.

It’s a very good thing that spring time is beginning to emerge because it has given me the motivation to emerge from my winter cocoon and engage with the world around me again. The people in my village have also begun to emerge from their self-imposed winter hiatus – the children can be heard laughing loudly as they play outside at the school and everyone is beginning to go out into the fields and orchards to prepare for the spring planting season. I’ve started walking back from town to my village after my class instead of taking the bus to spend some time in the fresh air and sunshine.

With the changing of the seasons my work has also begun to pick up. At the beginning of February I attended a Peace Corps conference on project development and management with my new counterpart, Ruzanna. This was the first thing for us to work on together and it was a great experience. It allowed us to discuss what we wanted out my service and what the community’s needs and desires were. She works in the mayor’s office and has lots of useful connections and experience working in the village. She is a middle-aged widow with two teenage children. She works very hard to support her family and even though she already has so much work to do she has graciously volunteered to work with me. She had already become an invaluable resource to me, helping me further integrate into my community.

Noor Tari

In Armenia, Christmas (or surb tsnund, Սբ. Ծնունդ) is celebrated on January 6th and it is mainly a religious holiday that marks the kind of unofficial end of Noor Tari and coincides with the Epiphany. Traditionally on Christmas Armenians refrain from eating meat and the traditional Christmas meal consists of fish and Christmas pilaf (rice with raisins).

Now you may asking yourslef then what is this mysterious holiday called Noor Tari you speak of if it isn't Christmas? Well it is actually a holiday that is many days long and begins on December 31st. In Armenian Noor Tari literally means ‘New Year’ and it is best described to a foreigner as the secular parts of Christmas in the States plus New Year’s Eve with a twist. The weekend before my host family decorated the house with lights and a little Christmas tree. In the days before the 31st my family prepared a food for our Noor Tari table. The tradition is that every family prepares a table at their house with all kinds of food, including a turkey, pork, dolma, blinchik, kufta, fruit, mixed nuts, dried fruit, assorted cakes and candies, wine, vodka, cognac, juices and sodas. On December 31st everyone sits at home at waits for midnight. My family got the table ready and watched a special on TV. Then Dzmer Papik (literally Winter Grandpa but his like our Santa Claus) came to our house to see my little brother. We shared a toast with Dzmer Papik and when it was midnight my brothers went outside and shot off fireworks. The tradition is to go around to your neighbors’ houses after midnight to eat, drink, and say many many toasts.




I was really supposed to wait and give my host family their presents the next morning when they opened their gifts from Dzmer Papik, but I could not wait so I played Santa Sarah. My parents sent gifts for my host family from the States and even though they weren’t expected to arrive until January the post office gods smiled on me and they arrived on Christmas Eve.






I was not feeling that great on New Year’s Eve and my host mother has been sick so we stayed home. A few neighbors came over while I was still awake, but I went to be around 1am and apparently the mayor and his family came over and were sad I only made it to 1am. On New Year’s Day my host sister and I went to the mayor’s house and her aunt’s house to sit, toast, and eat. That is pretty much what Noor Tari is – going to people’s houses sitting eating, toasting, and talking. However, when you are an outsider it is mostly being told to eat a bunch of food even though you are full from eating exact same things at the previous houses and questions about how you celebrate in the U.S. and if you like Armenia. People continue to go visit their friends and relatives as well as have people visit their homes over the next week or so. I didn’t go visit a bunch of houses, but every time someone new came over to my house I got paraded around and introduced to everyone as “Our Sarah”. I'm glad I got to experience such a big holiday with my host family and they were glad that I was there. However, next New Year's I hope to be visiting the States!

Christmas in Kapan

Because this was the first Christmas many of us had been away from our families we decided to have our very own Christmas in Kapan. Kapan is only about 200 miles from Yerevan, but to get there you must drive through a ton of mountains passes so in takes about 6-7 hours in good weather to get there. Therefore, the volunteers who live there don’t make it to Yerevan often and they don’t get a lot of visitors outside their marz so it's become a little tradition to have Christmas in Kapan.

There were quite a few of us traveling from Yerevan so some of us took shared taxis and others (i.e. my group) had to take the marshootni. Now the marshootni takes about an extra hour and the three volunteers I was traveling with and I got the last four sets in the back which meant our knees were pressed into the seatbacks in front of us and we got to sit on hard marshootni seats for seven hours. But it was worth it because once we arrived in Kapan everyone met up at one the PCVs, Barbara’s apartment for some Christmas Eve chili. There were 22 of us there and it was so much fun! We had chili and cornbread, played charades, listened to Christmas music, and just had an awesome time.

I stayed at Shannon’s apartment with Danya, Rani, Amanda, and Bryan and Christmas day we sat around her cozy apartment drinking coffee and eating gingerbread cookies while we all knitted and listened to Christmas music. I got to talk to my family on my Christmas morning (their Christmas Eve) while they were snowed in at my grandma’s house. Of course my first Christmas away from Wichita Falls and there is a blizzard and no snow here for a white Christmas! Later on Christmas Day we all head out to Sue’s village Vachakan. We had a Christmas feast, exchanged Secret Santa gifts, and watched ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’. Even though I was far from home it was an amazing Christmas spent with tons of new friends.


Amanda and I were Christmas!


Watching 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'


Opening Secret Santa Gifts