Leaving Armenia Part One: Tbilisi

Two years…I can’t believe that it has been two years since I left for Peace Corps. I think most of that is because it is ending. It is like when you graduate from college and when you look back on the years you can’t believe how quickly it went by even though during you know there we times when it felt so slow. Leaving Aygepat for the last time did not fell as final as I thought it would be because my exit was so hurried and rushed, just trying to get all my things together and to Yerevan. Once I got to Yerevan I still had paperwork to do, packing to finish up, and goodbyes to say. There was not really time for long, sentimental goodbyes and it is only now really hitting me that I’m done and don’t know the next time I’ll be in Armenia. I spent my last night in Armenia in Vardablur at my friend Robby’s host family’s house. It was nice to spend it with an amazing Armenian family and enjoy a going away feast. The next morning we headed to Stepanavan for the marshootni to go to Tbilisi, Georgia. Tbilisi is so different from Yerevan – it has a more European feel to it and is full of beautiful 19th century architecture. During Soviet times Tbilisi was the cultural capital of the Caucasus, while Yerevan was a dusty cowtown.



This was Robby’s fourth time in Tbilisi so I followed his lead and we spent to day walking around the city. On our way back towards our hostel after stopping for coffee at a bookstore and café we ran into Danny and Mike, two other Peace Corps volunteers leaving Armenia. We all went to dinner, for a walk around the city, and out to a pub with a Georgia friend of Danny.





The next day we took a day trip to the David Gareja monastery complex, about 70km southeast of Tbilisi. We took a marshootni to the town nearest the monastery and then the driver agreed to drive us to the monastery. We were traveling with a German traveler and luckily he spoke a little Russian and he was able to negotiate everything. It took us about an hour of off-roading to get to the complex. The monastery is a Georgian Orthodox monastery founded in the 6th century AD by St. David Gareja, an Assyrian monk. The complex is made up of hundreds of cells, chapels, churches, refectories, and living quarters all carved out of the mountain. The monastery was closed after the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1921 and was restored after Georgia declared independence in 1991.





After we made it back to Tbilisi we went out for an Italian dinner and some Georgian Saperavi wine at one of the sidewalk cafes in Tbilisi’s area known as ‘Old Town.’ Then we walked to a huge new Georgian Orthodox church that was built in an attempt to revitalize the Georgian Orthodox church. Once we got back to the hostel I was all prepared for an evening of reading and relaxing and a quite day of packing the next day before our afternoon flight. Then Robby tells me he got an email from the airline saying confirming our flight at 4:45am, not pm! I do not what my brain was thinking when I booked the flight because I’ve been dealing with military times for two years and flight times are always in military time, but in the stress of preparing to leave I got the times mixed up in my head. Luckily Robby caught it and we were able to arrange for a taxi to the airport the next morning, get packed up, and get a few hours of sleep before we had to leave.



Next stop: Istanbul

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...


Kitchen


Kitchen


Kitchen


Water Storage Bucket


Shower room with old, broken hot water heater


Outhouse


Kitchen is through the door on the left/Garage/The Door on the right is my house


Left Door is Shower Room/Right Door is Kitchen


Bookcase in my bedroom


Bed & Photos of home


Bedroom


Desk/Dining Room Table


Bedroom

Shnorhavor Thanksgiving

I'm behind on my posting so today is going to be my catch up day on all the events of the last couple of weeks, which have been very busy. One of the questions I get most when I talk to my family and friends in the U.S. is what I do to celebrate American holidays here in Armenia. Luckily Armenia is a small country and it is fairly easy to travel around and visit other volunteers and because of this I've been fortunate enough to be able to celebrate among fellow volunteers. This Thanksgiving I celebrated at the apartment of my site mate Pat, who was kind enough to host a small dinner in Artashat. She even went so far as to go to the turkey farm and select our dinner! Together with Pat and fellow volunteers Beckey, Katrina, Katie, and David, I enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pecan pie. We even got to decorate a mini-Christmas tree after dinner!

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.