Gyumri, Gilmore Guys, & Honky Tonk Bedonkadonk

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 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th 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 2^nd 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