Sorry, I’m the worst. I meant to write another post before I moved to my permanent site, but …I’M NOW IN GYUMRI!!! I’ve been here exactly a week and things have been really good so far, but really cold. Living in the southeast of the US my entire life did not prepare me for this weather. The highs this week in Gyumri have been in the 40s, but when I go to work at 10am (yep, I know that’s late), the temperature is in the 20s. And it’s only November, not even the official start of winter yet!! Remember in my last post, I talked about the old wives’ tale of how it can get too cold to snow? Well this fun little tale just keeps getting repeatedly reinforced by almost everyone I talk to in Gyumri (lucky me). So I did a little research and figured out that it is partially true: cold temperatures can’t directly stop snow, but they can indirectly stop snow. Gyumri can get so cold that the temperature affects the moisture in the air, causing humidity to drop too low for snow to fall. Doesn’t that sound like fun?? On the bright side, summers here are supposedly super nice!! The countdown to summer starts now; t-minus 6 months!
Backtracking a bit, the end of PST was a whirlwind! The last few weeks were crammed with various practicums and assessments. I did really enjoy our club practicum week, where we conducted an English club for 5th and 6th graders at the school in Artashat. Meghna (a fellow Mrgavan trainee) and I were in charge of 2 club days, so we decided to teach the kids the “Cha Cha Slide” by DJ Casper. The first day, we read through the lyrics with the kids, reinforcing words they already knew (like left, foot, and clap) and teaching them new words (like slide, freeze, and funky; we described funky to the kids in Armenian as “weird but cool”). These Armenian children are amazing at reading and can read almost anything you give them in English, but the catch is they often have a hard time understanding what they’re reading. So I was not prepared for when Ruzanna, one of my best students, began reading the lyrics. Just imagine a little Armenian girl deliberately reading and clearly enunciating, “This is something new / The Casper slide part two / Featuring the platinum band / And this time / We’re going to get funky / Funky, funky, funky.” I almost lost it; I was trying so hard to contain my laughter that I almost peed in my pants. Hearing those ridiculously silly lyrics being carefully read by this adorable Armenian child in English was absolutely hysterical. Anyway, on the second day, we treated the “Cha Cha Slide” as a listening activity so that the kids could learn the dance, and it was a huge success!!
My attempt at a selfie with Vahan (left) and Ruzanna (far right) before the certificate presentation.After club week, we had a week of practicum teaching. This week was just a continuation of us working with the same classes we had been teaching since the beginning of PST, the only difference being our teaching was getting evaluated by our program manager and trainers. At the start of PST, I was assigned to teach ten 5th graders, five girls and five boys, and I just absolutely adored them! Some trainees were frustrated with their students at the beginning of PST, but I honestly always loved my kids; they were always well-behaved and eager to learn. Thanks in part to my students, I grew as a teacher in the short amount of time I spent with them and I am so grateful for every single one of them: Ruzanna, Suzanna, Tsovinar, Lilya, Gayane, Aram, Petros, Narek, Artyom, and Vahan. At the end of the practicum week, our students presented us with gifts and thank-you certificates, and I was so touched when Ruzanna and Vahan read their message on my certificate.
Nelli in an outfit from Gymboree that my mom sent as a present.I’m definitely going to miss my students from PST, but I’m absolutely going to miss my PST host family the most. I was beyond lucky to have been a part of their family for a short while. They were so generous and hospitable, welcoming me into their family and my friends into their home. My host parents, Sasha and Henul, are so cool, and if there was a contest among PC trainees for most attractive host parents, I would win that contest by a landslide. My host uncle, Vahe, is like the chill brother I never had. My host grandma/tatik, Satik, was so unbelievably kind and caring, scolding me for wearing shorts and Chacos when it got cold outside. My host grandpa/papik, Grigor, is just a straight baller, knocking back shots of (potent, 70% alcohol) homemade vodka with my friends when they came to visit. And who could ever forget my host baby sister, Nelli; she’s now 9 months old and is so close to walking! She’s grown so much in the 12 weeks I lived with my PST host family. I’m going to miss them so much, but I’ve already made plans to come back for Nelli’s first birthday, and I hope they come visit me in Gyumri sometimes too! I’m also going to miss their awesome home. The huskies, fresh vegetables (the broccoli and cauliflower rocked my socks!), and wifi modem will surely be missed.
Henul, Sasha, & Nelli came to the swearing-in ceremony!Last Thursday, November 12, after twelve weeks of training, I was officially sworn-in as a Peace Corps volunteer! The swearing-in ceremony was really nice and our A23 group got to be the first group of volunteers in Armenia to say the Peace Corps volunteer pledge in Armenian! If you want, you can watch the swearing-in ceremony on YouTube, and if you skip to 29:20, you can hear another variation/pronunciation of my name and watch me walk across the stage! I moved to Gyumri last Friday, and today (Friday, November 20) marks 3 months in Armenia for me! PST was definitely unforgettable, so I can only imagine what experiences my service in Gyumri will hold over the next 2 years.
Wow. I’ve been really bad about writing a post this month. But whereas September was relatively uneventful, October has been jam-packed. My life has been pretty busy and exciting lately, so settle back, grab a pillow, and get ready for a much-longer-than-normal post. Let me fill you in chronologically:
At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I was running my first 10k on Sunday, October 4. Well the race itself was just like any ordinary 10k (nothing to brag home about), but after my race, things got interesting. About 2 hours after I finished my 10k, I started having a hard time breathing. A little backstory: I have exercise-induced asthma, but it has never been a problem; for goodness sakes, I was on a varsity sports team in college, and since I was 15, I’ve maybe casually used my inhaler at most 2 or 3 times a year during spring allergy season. So when I started having breathing difficulties after the 10k, I just assumed it was nothing that couldn’t be solved with a few puffs from my inhaler. Fast forward a few more hours: I found myself on an oxygen machine and ended up staying 3 nights in the medical unit at the Peace Corps office. As there wasn’t much to do while staying in the medical unit (i.e. no wifi), I got well acquainted with the Gilmore Guys podcast series. Anyway, on Wednesday, October 7, the Peace Corps doctors finally deemed me recovered enough to go back to training in Artashat and attend SITE ANNOUNCEMENT!
Site announcement map! I’m near the top, waving my arm :)Site announcement!!! In my opinion, one of the best and most exciting days of PST! If the PC doctors had made me stay one more day in the medical unit and miss site announcement, I probably would have cried and thrown a temper tantrum like a 5-year old. Site announcement is when all the PC trainees find out their final, permanent sites. One by one, we were handed a slip of paper with the names of the province (marz), city/town/village, and school/organization where we will work for the next 2 years. Then we went and stood where our city, town, or village would be on a life-size, chalk-drawn map of Armenia. The life-size map was such an awesome idea and it was so exciting to see where everyone was placed! And drumroll please: I’ll be serving in Shirak marz, in the city of Gyumri, at high school #26! Some quick facts about Gyumri: it is the second largest city in Armenia, but it’s still no where near the size of Yerevan (the capital); it was previously named Leninakan (after Vladimir Lenin, duh); it is the location of a Russian military base; it was one the cities most affected and damaged by the 1988 Armenian earthquake. Additionally, I’ve heard from multiple PC people and Armenians that Shirak marz is the coldest province in Armenia. Woohoo!! Some people have even told me that sometimes it gets too cold to snow there, but this is probably (hopefully!) an old wives tale. I lived in South Carolina my entire life and went to college in North Carolina, so my current definition of cold is laughable compared to what I’m about to experience. Wish me luck!
After site announcement, we had our counterpart conference the following Friday and Saturday. The counterpart conference was where we met the Armenian nationals who we would work with during our service. My counterpart is a lovely woman named Lucy, short for Lucine. She’s in her early thirties and has been teaching for about 10 years. She is the English teacher for the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades at high school #26 in Gyumri (the high school actually has grades 6-12). The conference was a nice setting to begin getting to know my counterpart, both professionally and personally. Lucy expressed to me her excitement about having a native English speaker in the classroom for her students (I’ll be the first PC volunteer ever at this school), as well as her excitement about improving her own English and making a new friend. That Sunday, October 11, I traveled with her to Gyumri for a 3-day site visit, where I would stay with my future Gyumretsis host family and visit the school where I will be working.
I circled Gyumri in blue.When I first arrived in Gyumri, Lucy took me to my host family’s house, where my future school director met me. He personally knew my host family and wanted to see that I got nicely settled. When I first met my host mom and dad, I was briefly confused because I had been told by the Peace Corps that I would only be living with a host mother named Armine, who had hosted PC volunteers before. But then I thought, “Oh, vochinch (whatever in Armenian). I probably have my information mixed up.” Then after a while, relatives started stopping by to meet me, and I met a niece of theirs who spoke English relatively well. As I’m talking to her and learning more about my new host parents, I started connecting the dots in my head and realized that I was with the WRONG host family. So I called Liana, my PC regional manager, and whispered into the phone, “Hi Liana…I think I’m with the wrong host family…” and she tells me that my real host mother had called her wondering when I would arrive. Turns out there was a miscommunication between my school director, counterpart, and Peace Corps; my school director didn’t know that PC had already picked and approved a host family for me, so he took it upon himself to find a family for me! When my real host mother came to pick me up, I felt so awkward and super bad about leaving because my first host family had been so sweet and had told me that I was welcomed anytime and that I now have two families in Gyumri. But it’s probably better in the long run that I didn’t live with them because they actually run a baking business out of their home, making cakes and cookies for birthdays and celebrations, so I would’ve gotten really fat.
My real host mother is also amazingly kind and sweet. It’s going to be just me and her, and since she doesn’t know very much English, I’m hoping my Armenian will really improve! My new home is also super close to my school; I only have to walk 5-10 minutes to the school. I visited the school on Monday and Tuesday and observed my counterpart teach her classes. On Monday, the vice principal took me around during one of the class periods and introduced me to every single class so that all the students in the school knew who I was and why I was there. As I was leaving on Tuesday, my counterpart told me that all the students thought I was so nice (even though all I did during my visit was smile and wave) and were very excited to have me at the school. Their enthusiasm is infectious, which makes me even more excited to start my service in Gyumri! Another nice part about serving in Gyumri is that because it is a relatively large city, there will be three other A23 volunteers serving there too (in addition to an A21 and an A22 already serving there). Renata, another A23, will actually be living a 2-minute walk from me, so we’re already planning on being workout buddies. On our last night in Gyumri, we all went to watch a dance performance called “Girl on the Moon,” which featured both professional dancers and novice dancers with disabilities. It was a beautiful, moving piece that showed how people with disabilities can be integrated into everyday activities that many people take for granted. It was definitely a memorable ending to my trip to Gyumri.
To wrap-up this post, I also just wanted to mention the cookout we had at the US Embassy in Yerevan last Saturday, October 17. It was a nice get-together after everyone got back from their site visit; we got to just hang out and play around. We did do one team building competition where we were grouped into teams by marz/province. It was a toy truck derby race and we could only use the materials provided to us to make our toy trucks roll faster down a hill. Shirak marz and Lori marz worked together as Team North, and we named our toy truck Honky Tonk Bedonkadonk (don’t ask). We actually barely lost the race and took 2nd place overall, which is really good considering we put most of our energy into winning Most Spirited. Here, I would like to do a quick shout-out to DCSD for “helping” Team North win Most Spirited, as I utilized the VICTORY cheer to help take Team North to toy truck derby glory.
If you’re still reading this post, I would like to congratulate you on making it to the end. Like I said at the beginning, this post is much longer than normal since the past few weeks have been pretty action-packed. To those of you reading this as a means of procrastination: you’re welcome :) And if you’re reading this last sentence, thank you for reading this whole post <3
This week marks the halfway point of PST, so there’s only 6 weeks left of training! And next Wednesday, I’ll find out my permanent site placement, aka the village/town where I’ll be living and working for two years starting in November. Ahhhhhh so crazy and so soon!! I’m starting to feel both super excited and a bit anxious. The little bit of anxiety I feel stems from thinking about leaving my PST host family and the other A23s. I definitely lucked out with my PST host family; they’re the best host family I could ever ask for, so fingers crossed my permanent site host family is just as awesome. The A23 group is also amazing, with people coming from all different walks of life. There are so many different ages (ranging from 21 years old to 70-something years old!!), states, ethnicities, and life experiences represented in our group. These people aren’t just my co-trainees and colleagues anymore. I already count many of them as my friends and family, even though we’ve only known each other for less than 2 months.
Today, for our cultural training session, we discussed culture shock and its stages: honeymoon phase, culture shock, regression, recovery, and adaptation. Prior to this training session, I was in denial that I was going through culture shock. I thought that culture shock only happened when you’re bothered or annoyed by something in your new country and culture, for example, the food, bathrooms, weather, insects, gender roles, etc. But this training session taught me that people experience culture shock differently. For PST, I really did not and do not have any issues with my new Armenian surroundings and culture, but I have been frustrated with my language learning. At first, I didn’t consider that frustration to be culture shock, as I didn’t blame the Armenian language at all. Rather, I just attributed my frustration to my language-learning shortcomings and blamed myself. I also have been experiencing some serious homesickness and FOMO (fear of missing out). I’m used to talking to my mom everyday, but I’ve been weaning myself off of phone calls to her. My FOMO has also been heightened this week knowing that this weekend many of my Davidson friends are reuniting for Homecoming Weekend and my DCSD teammates are competing in their first swim meet of the season (V-I-C-T-O-R-Y). I now know that language frustration and homesickness/FOMO are a normal part of the regression stage of culture shock. But my Peace Corps friends have been a great support system, as we are all experiencing some sort of culture shock and are going through it together. It’s sad to think about not having these people around all the time once we move to our permanent sites.
On a happier note, last weekend was a blast! On Friday night, the PC staff took the whole A23 group out to a nice dinner in Yerevan. The restaurant was fantastic and I ate so much Armenian food! Afterwards, we went dancing, traditional Armenian style!! Traditional Armenian dancing reminds me a little of Greek dancing. You dance, step, jump while holding the hands or shoulders of the people next to you in the circle. What’s even cooler is that this dancing took place at the Cascades, the beautiful stairway in Yerevan. Dancing at the Cascades happens on the last Friday of every month during the summer and is open to the public. This was the last dance of the summer so there were so many people! The circles of Armenians dancing were amazing to watch. Then you’d see this circle of bumbling Americans trying to follow a dance instructor and mimic the correct dance steps. It was hysterical and tons of fun! I got a good workout too! One friend who has an Apple Watch was actually told by his watch that he reached his exercise goal for the day, which he hadn’t planned on doing. So if you need some good workouts, take up Armenian dancing.
On Saturday, the PC staff took us to Noravank monastery, so I went again! It was just as beautiful as the first time I went, and this time, I climbed the side of a mountain for a bit and got a good photo of Noravank from further out. On our way back, we stopped at Areni Winery and got to do a wine tasting (blackberry and peach wines for the win!). And just a random tidbit: this coming Sunday, I’m running my first 10k!! Woohoo!! Next blog post to come after I find out my permanent site, meet my counterpart teacher(s), and go to my site for a 3-day visit. It’s crazy to think that that’s all happening in less than 2 weeks! Things are about to get very real.
Happy one-month in-country anniversary, A23s!! A23 is the name of my group of Peace Corps Armenia volunteers, as we are the 23rd group of Peace Corps volunteers to serve in Armenia (Peace Corps has been serving here since 1992). We have now officially been in Armenia one month!
Yep. I know. It’s been a while. I haven’t been very diligent about writing new blog posts. Every time I think, “Oh, I should probably write another blog post,” I end up inventing excuses for myself to actually avoid writing one. Obviously, I’m continuing to hone my cache of procrastination skills I developed at Davidson; my professors would be so proud. But in my defense, I haven’t had much down time. PST is exhausting!! I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my life, not even in college when I would juggle doubles (two swim practices a day) and all-nighters or during finals. But even though I’m exhausted, it’s a good kind of exhaustion. The rewarding kind.
A typical day for me starts off with 4 hours of Armenian language class in the morning, followed by 3 hours of technical teacher training in the afternoon. Then I go home to my host family and hang out with them in the evening. But “hanging out” also requires a lot of hard and honest effort, because not only am I attempting to communicate in a language that I’ve only been studying for one month, but I’m also trying to integrate into my host family and their culture. Before I go to bed, I also do my language homework for the next day, as well as a little bit of extra studying. Depending on the day, I might have some variation. Some days, I lesson prep for my practicum English class of Armenian 5th graders. On certain days, I have technical training all day, with sessions on safety & security, medical care, Peace Corps foundations, and Armenian culture.
Long story short, I’m tired a lot. The recurring question I receive from my host family (which I now recognize and understand with 100% accuracy because they ask it so often) is “Hognats es?” which is the Armenian equivalent of “You tired?” So I must also look pretty tired. But like I said earlier, it’s a rewarding tiredness. I know it sounds cheesy, but I’m honestly learning something new and applicable everyday. I love being able to actually apply what I learn in teacher training to my practicum classroom. I love learning a new word, phrase, or even grammar structure in language class everyday, then coming home to my host family and trying it out. I love discovering more and more about Armenian culture from technical training every week, as well as directly from my host family. Hence, regardless of how tired I am, I feel so #blessed to be doing what I’m doing.
And don’t get me started on my host family. I could talk about them forever; I’ll probably end up writing an entire blog post about them later. Up to this point, they have definitely been the main highlight of my time in Armenia. So to wrap up this blog post, there are two particular adventures I’ve had so far with my host fam that I’m going to share.
First adventure: Today, my host family took me to the beautiful Noravank monastery (which I’ll actually be visiting again in a week with my Peace Corps group). Afterwards, we had a picnic along the Arpa River! My host dad made a fire and we had a mini barbecue, roasting vegetables over the fire and cooking khorovats (Armenian barbecue). It was so great! I originally had no idea that we were picnicking and got super confused when we kept driving slowly along the shoulder of the road and looking down at the riverbank. I didn’t figure out what we were doing until everyone started getting out of the car and my host grandma turned over to me and said, “Peekneek.” That’s when I finally got clued-in.
Second adventure: one time when we were going to visit extended members of my host family, my host dad got pulled over by a cop for speeding. My host dad proceeded to get OUT OF THE CAR before the cop had even come to a complete stop behind us, went to the cop’s driver-side window, and just talked to the cop for like 10-15 seconds and THAT’S IT. He came back to the car and just drove off. NOTHING. NADA. Armenia’s rules of road travel sure are something else.
part to my students, I grew as a teacher in the short amount of time I spent with them and I am so grateful for every single one of them: Ruzanna, Suzanna, Tsovinar, Lilya, Gayane, Aram, Petros, Narek, Artyom, and Vahan. At the end of the practicum week, our students presented us with gifts and thank-you certificates, and I was so touched when Ruzanna and Vahan read their message on my certificate.
Ariane in Peace Corps Armenia 