The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Nicole and I have one week of pre-service training left until we “swear-in” and move to our permanent site. Things have become very busy and somewhat difficult for us for several reasons…number one on the list, “model school”. Each sector (business, education, health, environment) has to complete a practicum before the end of training and our practicum is model school. It’s been both interesting and exhausting. Basically, we’ve been teaching English to a group of Armenian students for about three weeks now, rotating age groups at the end of every week. Tomorrow will be our last day. Although I think it’s been pretty successful, I’ll be glad when it’s over. Trying to balance model school with language classes and all the other assignments that pre-service training demands is a difficult task.


Let’s see…what else is keeping us busy. Well, a couple weekends ago we organized a training workshop for English teachers in the area where we’ve been living. I was nervous at first since I don’t have much teaching experience, but I think it went well. I taught a workshop on developing listening skills in the classroom with another volunteer and Nicole taught one on student-centered learning, which is kind of her specialty. Yesterday, we had to present a summary of our workshops to the other volunteers and Peace Corps staff. Over the next week they’ll be some more presentations, along with competency tests and questionnaires…a lot of busy work.


I feel like I’ve hit a slump in my language training that I’m struggling to shake off. We’ve covered a huge amount of information over the last two weeks and I think my brain might be pretty much full at this point. I think another contributing factor might be model school. When you teach English all the time, you don’t get to use much Armenian, especially when all the lessons are planned with other Americans. We have to take another language proficiency test next week before swearing in…I’m a little nervous about it, but I’ve been told not to worry.
Enough about work and training, there are plenty of other interesting things going on in the village. For instance, here’s some good news, I’ve been able to fit in a few soccer games in between all my classes. The bad news is that the soccer field is covered in thorn bushes. It definitely adds an interesting element of excitement to the game…maybe excitement is not the right word.


On July 19th, our village celebrated the “real” water holiday, which I think is called “Vartevar” (I wrote about the phony one in my last blog entry). America needs a holiday to celebrate like this one. It doesn’t matter who you are, you are not safe from getting an entire bucket of water dumped on you at any time during the day. Every village, town, and city all over Armenia participates. I remember having to ring my clothes out and hang them up to dry several times. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures…I didn’t think it was smart to carry my camera with me.


Here’s some more good news, our host family has decided to keep the dog that we’ve been looking after. Nicole has been hinting to people in the village that she’d like someone to take him in before we leave, but I never thought anyone would agree. Then, a few nights ago during dinner, my host father just came right out and said that he’d like to keep the dog, without being questioned or anything. We’re both really excited about it. This way, we know he’ll be taken care of and we’ll get to see him whenever we come back and visit our host family.


Last piece of good news I’ll share…the new group of volunteers, our group, crushed last year’s group of volunteers in the annual kickball game. Last year it was a baseball game and they lost then too. I think they were looking for a little revenge, but they met no such luck. It’s going to feel good to have bragging rights for a whole year.


Now, a piece of bad news to share…well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. Our group had two volunteer trainees leave the program last week. Apparently, they decided that this whole thing just wasn’t for them. It’s a little disappointing to think of all the effort that went into the arrangements for their service being wasted. But then again, it’s not easy to make the decision to leave. I didn’t know them very well, but they seemed pretty confident in their decisions. I’m sure they won’t be the last ones to leave early…although I hope they are.


Like always, here are some pictures. I tried to describe each picture this time, but the formatting might be a little off. It’s difficult to be working with such a slow connection. Anyway, thanks for checking in with us. We hope that you’re all doing well. Oh, one last thing…we’ll be changing the URL of our blog. Peace Corps doesn’t want any of the volunteers to use the word Armenia in their blog names. It has something to do with a request from the embassy. When we think of a new name, I’ll email the link to everyone, so be on the lookout for that.

This is a picture of Sevook looking proudly at Nicole after a hike we took along the gorge near our village…or maybe nervously. He whined the entire time. It seemed like he thought we might just fall over the edge for some reason.

These are some of my model school students. They are the oldest age group that we’ve been teaching. You’ll notice that there is only one boy. Usually there are two more, but even then the class is predominately made up of girls. This is a pretty common trend in Armenia. Men are required to serve in the army for two years at the age of eighteen, so I think many of them shift their focus away from school once they reach a certain age. This is only a generalization however. I have met many well-educated, young Armenian men.

This picture is from our language class. For our homework, we had to create restaurant menus in Armenian and apparently a friend of mine thinks I’ll be restaurant owner one day. If you look closely, you’ll see a drawing of me and the guy beside me, Kyle, next to the title of the menu.

This is my host dad and me preparing a khorovats together. This is a really common way to cook food in the summer. You get a fire started, let it die down, and then grill some vegetables and meat over the coals on skewers. Usually, you use pork, but we’ve also had chicken and beef as well.

This is my host mom and me looking proud after preparing dolma together. Dolma is a trademark Armenian dish…its meat, rice, and seasonings rolled up in either cabbage or grape leaves and then boiled for a while in a pot. We also stuffed some peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes with the meat and cooked them in the same way.

This is a common site in our village. People walk their cows down the main street to graze in certain places. Sometimes, there can be thirty or more cows coming straight towards you at one time. It’s amazing how cars weave in and out of these groups without hitting them. Well, there was one accident since we’ve been here, but I would definitely expect that to be more common.


These are the cans of jam and juice that my host mother has prepared. Throughout the summer, while the fruit is fresh, people spend a lot of time doing this to prepare for the winter; although, we are eating a lot of it now too.

This is an archeological project going on in our village. The mayor was kind enough to take us here and explain what was going on. Researchers think that this is a grave site dating back to the Bronze Age…I think. I don’t know my eras very well.

Here is a picture of Mt. Ararat peaking over the hill in the distance from our village. Mt. Ararat is actually in Turkey, but it has historically belonged to Armenia. In fact, it is a symbol of Armenian history and culture even to this day. Many people believe this is where Noah parked the ark after the flood. Usually, we cannot see it from our village. It just happened to be a very clear morning.

Here are some apricots that my host mom is drying on the porch…she does this with some other types of fruit too.

In this picture, Nicole and I hiked up to the edge of the gorge overlooking our village early in the morning with some friends. That is our village in the background.