Ծիրան եւ семечки: Living and Teaching in Armenia

Unbound Project by

Jonathan Maiullo

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Masters of Art

Humboldt State University

Arcata, California

2011

Submitted May 3, 2011

For Paige and Elliot

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction -----------------------------------------------------------------2

2. Pre-Peace Corps Service (Staging)---------------------------------------9

3. Arrival-----------------------------------------------------------------------13

4. Pre-Service Training (PST)----------------------------------------------15

5. A Host Family-------------------------------------------------------------19

6. Language Classes--------------------------------------------------------23

7. Meeting the Other Volunteers------------------------------------------26

8. The Armenian Education System--------------------------------------28

-a. School Number1 Malishka: A Physical Reconstruction----------31

-b. A Typical Day in the Armenian Classroom------------------------32

-c. Adapting to the Armenian Classroom------------------------------39 9. The Need for an Informed Grammar Translation Approach

to Language Learning in Post-Soviet Republics----------------------46

10. Overcoming Isolation and Integrating into Armenian Life----56

11. Amot: A Concept of Status Quo-----------------------------------62

12. Conclusion: Where I Found my Armenia-----------------------66

Endnotes----------------------------------------------------------------78

Works Cited------------------------------------------------------------79

“You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America it won’t be like it is here.”

Peter Hessler River Town

“Leave the Caucasus,” I said, mock incredulous. “I’ll never leave the Caucasus.

Wendell Steavenson Stories I Stole

Introduction

The railroad ties are unevenly spaced and I have to adjust my gait to them. Each right step is slightly extended, each left is restrained, one large, leaping step, one mincing skip. The early afternoon is bright. It’s not late enough in the year to see lizards, but I can imagine where they’d be along the ties, warming themselves on the steel tracks, throats lifted to the sky if only it were a month later and the air warmer. The grass is a heavy green where it lifts through the ashen rock bed. It reflects the dark and bulky clouds moving in from the west. It is about to storm but the sun is shining brightly overhead. It will shine through most of the rain as well. In Armenia I have almost never seen the rain without the sun somewhere off in the periphery, if not in the very center of the sky, glancing off every drop. Like everything else here, it is a picture of life. The sun and rain are not independent. They occur simultaneously, readied for the apricot orchards, for the wheat and the grey independent streets. It is a place where everything was meant to happen at once.

I pass the first station on the edge of Solak, a village of about 300 people just outside the regional capital of Hrazdan. Years ago, it was the first thing I really saw of Armenia, a village perched on a ledge, above a river valley, beneath the pastures. Solak had the most natural look to it. As a village it looked like something that had sprung from the ground along with the trees. It did not look intentional, but rather like something that had always been there. The people had this in their mien as well, something timeless.

One must view Armenia with the eyes of a poet, because Armenia is as vast and deep as the sea, because she has been carved under the blows of gales and winds, and because she is master of countless invisible currents and tides which one cannot recognize without the loftiest intuitions of spirit (Zarian 24).

In the past there has always been a dog waiting at this station. I don’t know if he lives here or if he was the watchman’s dog. It is not directly in town so few people other than shepherds pass by. If I had a herd of sheep or a few heads of cattle with me there would be no problem, but alone I look suspicious to the sheep dogs, as well as to people. But no one is ever alone here. You may think you’re alone and even feel alone, but there is always someone bumping around just on the other side of the wall, yelling at you to come in for a cup of coffee. There is always someone sitting in that empty looking car giving you a curious glance. There are always some young men just down the street eating sunflower seeds, trying to emulate their fathers who are doing the same thing but with more poise and gentleness. There are grandmothers getting up before dawn, laying plastic beneath mulberry trees, and with them a little boy who eagerly climbs into the tree to shake the branches madly, scattering bugs and the pale, overripe fruit in all directions. Well before dawn the hars has also been awake, preparing the house for the throngs of family, neighbors and friends that will swarm through it over the course of the day. “My house is not mine, it belongs to the one who opens my door—the Armenian version of mi casa su casa” (Petrosian & Underwood 196).

The dog doesn’t like to see anyone alone. The old station has long been stripped of anything valuable, but the dog will protect it anyway, much like the watchman who occasionally shares the porch with him. The dog and the watchman are half-asleep and startled by the sound of crunching rocks that marks my approach. The dog starts up quickly, but the watchman just opens his eyes, and without even adjusting his posture, stares straight into me as if I were a puzzle, a game of blot , that had to be sharply concentrated on. He has almost no expression. His face is neither friendly nor sullen. He doesn’t look angry but he doesn’t look the slightest bit amused. The dog begins to bark and makes to get down from the remains of the old platform where they are sitting. For a moment it seems a very hostile picture.

“Bari luys, axper ,” I greet the watchman by calling him brother. Though he does not smile in reaction his look mellows; his eyes have given up their intense search. He doesn’t say anything but makes a gesture by holding his arm up and shaking his open palm back and forth. He has asked me where I’m going in this gesture, although, in a different context he may have been asking me what I was doing, or perhaps more confusingly, where I was coming from with the same gesture. I tell him which village I’m going to.

“Inchu ?” he asks and I tell him I have to teach a class there today. He begins to wave me over, which he does with his palm down. He wants to ask me questions. If he has some coffee or oghi he will offer it to me. “Tti oghi, mulberry vodka, is the preferred drink of Armenian men to play up their machismo…One serious vodka connoisseur explained, ‘It does not make you drunk, it fills you up’” (Petrosian & Underwood 157). We will drink together while he asks me, roughly in this order:

1. If I am Armenian.

2. If I am married.

3. Why I am not married.

4. Why I have a beard.

5. Why I am not married.

Beyond this nothing is really certain, but if I go over and talk with him he will ask me those five questions. Over the last two years I have come up with some pretty clever answers to them. I use my moments to express levity whenever I can. In a different language and cultural setting it is difficult to joke. When I have a long way to go I usually tell people that I am in a hurry and continue on, telling them to have a good day. Today, I should hurry; I have to be down in the village of Qaritak by four and it’s already two. It’s going to rain soon and I’m not really too sure how far I still have to go.

These are problems that, however, I no longer understand; at least I don’t really consider them. Now that classes have ended for the summer and my projects have all been finished, there is nothing to do but to finally adapt to the exceedingly slow pace of life around me. The pace of life dictated by the dribbling sound of nardi dice on a board, the dull thud of broom handles connecting with dusty, autumn-colored rugs and the Ladas laden with tomatoes roiling the mid-afternoon heat. “Outside there were hundreds of cars jostling, old Ladas driven from the provinces full of tomatoes, or peaches or plums or grapes and marshutkas , small buses, honking like hell” (Steavenson 25, describing a market in Tbilisi).

I take a seat by my friend and begin to tell my jokes. He asks me where I learned to speak Armenian. I don’t answer right away. I take a sip of the gritty, sweet coffee and tell him.

“I’ve lived here for two years.”

“Did you speak Armenian before you came?” he asks.

“No,” I reply, using the informal ‘che,’ “I didn’t know a word before I came here.”

“молодец ,” he praises me in Russian, for having learned his language; he tells me to stay young, a popular idiomatic phrase for “good job.” When our conversation has dwindled down and the rain is nearly overhead I say goodbye and head back to the railroad tracks where the heavy light of the storm has burnished the tracks down to battleship grey.

“Bari janapar ,” he yells out to me.

“Apres ,” I yell back over my shoulder.

Just outside Charentsavan I realize that the village to which I am going is further away than I thought. The rain is still falling lightly through the sunlight and I have to break into a trot. I pass a sign that proclaims the village is three kilometers away and though I feel annoyed I am not really worried. So many times I have run to be on time here and have been the first one to arrive, though I am ten minutes late. Today, however, I am meeting with Americans, and if I am not on time they will be. Since this presentation is the last thing I have to do in this country I would like for it to be successful. I would like the new volunteers to hear about the Writing Olympics contest from someone who has been working on it for two years, from someone who has begged for funding from the British Council and has had to bargain with Yerevan printing companies to produce a booklet that showcases creative writing efforts from all over the Caucasus. In other words, I would like to show them something I have done for this country that has given me so much. I have about five minutes left and am still quite far from the school. The rain is coming down harder now and I am quickly becoming very wet. The village is quiet; everyone has gone in from the rain. In the late afternoon the cows are coming down from the pastures and the shopkeepers stand in the doorways of their shops to watch the rain in stoic silence. The smell of manure is especially strong and the earthy smell of wet stone and mud drifts from the gardens outside every house. From the open doors the fatty smell of lanolin and cooking onions mixes with the heavier smells of the pasture. “Behind each one there is a family, a kitchen table, a collection of beds and relationships; second wives, grandmothers, teenage sons and babies” (Steavenson 89).

A white Lada passes me then quickly pulls over. A man opens the door.

“Ari ,” he yells waving me over and I feel a surge of relief.

Without saying anything I jump in the back of the car and tell them I am going to the school. Over the years I have learned to dispense with unnecessary formalities. Here direct speech is appreciated when it is called for. When I first arrived here, like all the other volunteers, I used to use the modal, asking, “can I sit, eat, etc.,” while I felt extremely annoyed when Armenians would say things in a much more imperative voice. It took a few months to learn that this way of speaking was just much more efficient and that, by comparison, our hesitant, ever-polite English sounds uncertain and balking. Here, one simply stated, flat out, what one wanted, and if it was possible it would be done, no reason to mince words. There would always be time for that later.

So there was. The school was about 500 yards away, but the streets were muddy and potholed. The Lada, like all the others, had no suspension, so every dip and bump had to be taken extremely slowly. While I answered the usual questions about my marital status and facial hair I considered our pace and thought how it may have been faster to walk, but at least this way I was out of the rain, and honestly, no matter how many times I had explained it, I always liked telling people the reason I had a beard was that it helped me think, which I demonstrated by smoothing it over thoughtfully with my hand. It didn’t get too many laughs, but everyone always smiled. At the very least they understood it was a joke.

You can’t take a favor from someone without accepting another. In Armenia, if someone helps you with something they’re probably going to insist that you come to dinner afterward. My driver and his companion in the Lada were no exception. I declined the invitation as I was only going to be in the village for an hour or so. Still, at the very least, I had to take down some phone numbers, just in case I should come back another time.

The school had been recently remodeled, as a few of them had. It smelled of caulk and drywall inside and echoed with the emptiness of any school in July. I climbed the stairs and stopped at each floor to listen. When I reached the top floor without finding any evidence of a Peace Corps meeting I made my way back down to the first floor, yelling this time.

“Guys,” I yelled out in Armenian. “Guys, where are you?” Feeling light-hearted, I didn’t mind being so coarse as to yell while running through a school. I had spent the last two years in different school buildings all over the country. For me, Armenian schools felt like home. The posters of the alphabet (Armenian and Cyrillic) on the walls, the reliefs of Tumanyan or Baghramyan and the drawings of Ararat with rainbows and calligraphy surrounding it seemed to accommodate me. I began to feel the usual sense of purpose and excitement that I would feel before starting a new class. Even if it would only be held once, even if it was to be an informal presentation, even if I was leaving in two weeks and it was to be the last classroom I ever spoke to in Armenia, I could not stray from what two years of teaching had taught me to do to prepare: loosen up, consider how to make the content relevant, and smile when you walk in the class.

“Hey, Jon, stop yelling. We’re in here. You’re just in time. They were just going to start the Writing Olympics presentation without you.” I follow the voice to a classroom down the hall. The door is standing partially open and as I approach I can see a room full of expectant faces turned my way. I open the door.

“Barev, yeghahek. ”

Pre-Peace Corps Service (Staging)

Before I left for Armenia, we had what they call “staging” in Philadelphia, an opportunity to meet the other volunteers who would be going along and to make any last minute decisions in regard to whether or not to go at all, as, according to the Peace Corps Wiki the early termination rate (ET) or percentage of volunteers that leave before the formal close of service (COS) was 29.2 % in 2009. Over the next three days we future volunteers were introduced to the rigorous, mind-numbingly monotonous concept of training sessions, as defined by the Peace Corps. Most of what we did in staging can be described as team-building exercises, novel lessons that were designed to get us prepared for the kind of work we would be doing in Armenia. There was, however, no one on staff that had actually been to Armenia. I believe our primary instructor had never even served in the Peace Corps herself. In a New York Times article on professional cross cultural training, Gretchen Lang writes about the desire for specific cultural information, “While clients are happy to have some intercultural communication theory mixed in, most say they want specific information about the culture they are about to enter and that they are most pleased with that aspect of the program” (Lang).

As can be imagined, we were literally bristling with questions about the place we would be getting on a plane to in the next few days and almost all of the sessions went unheeded as they offered no consolation in the way of specific Armenia-centered instruction. We were prepared for basic cultural differences that would apply to almost any country outside the US. Concepts of time, personal space and folk-beliefs were introduced in sessions that usually concluded with the demonstration of gained knowledge in poster form.

I remember a specific activity in which half of the trainees left the room while the others stayed and were given note cards. Each card had an instruction, a code really, as to how to react to certain types of questioning and body language with unbearably incoherent actions. The point was to make those who had left the room feel alienated and awkward, much as they would when they arrived in Armenia, unable to communicate or understand social norms and mores. The half of the trainees who had left the room were given questions to ask us, without being told that we would not respond as expected. The point of the activity was to introduce all the trainees to the cultural discomfort that we would soon be encountering as a possibly beneficial thing.

To manage cultural discomfort, we must keep in mind that we will always feel some level of comfort or discomfort when interacting with someone of a different culture. The key is to not allow the discomfort to dictate our actions or reactions. Also, we must work towards turning fear into curiosity. Healthy curiosity about cultural differences can lead to cross-cultural dialogue and relationships (Wells).

The scene was not as chaotic as one might expect. When the trainees returned they approached a group of us and asked one of the questions they had been given. We responded through patterns in their questioning: for example, if the question had been a yes or no question we would all nod vigorously without saying anything. If the question had the word “the” we would all immediately frown and stare at our feet. The interrogators were all fairly nonplussed but continued asking questions, trying to understand the pattern, to find a key that would allow them to gain legitimate answers to our questions.

This activity stands out as one of the few relevant exercises that we engaged in while in staging. Mostly, this is because it brought us together. Most Peace Corps volunteers that I was to meet over the years in Armenia and elsewhere all struck me as being independent, self-assured people. Initially, it is difficult for them to mix as they are so caught up in their own ideas of assimilating to the culture they will shortly be joining. I heard trainees remark, during futile “meet and greet” exercises, that they had no need for such activities as they had no plans to spend time with other volunteers once in the country. It may sound like a rude thing to say, but given the prevalence of the idea, often most people agreed. I initially had very similar thoughts and didn’t make much of an effort to make any friends.

The activity that was meant to introduce us to feelings of cultural otherness was unproductive in that it didn’t have any connection to the kinds of difference in communication we would have to come to understand in Armenia; therefore, it had very little bearing on what we needed to know. We all knew that Armenia we going to be different and that people were going to have different cultural expectations of us. Over the course of our staging we were hit over the heads with this concept multiple times.

The cultural discomfort activity was, however, very helpful in that it introduced us to each other. Sitting around a sheet of flipchart paper discussing generic problems Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) face didn’t do much to bring us together. We made what comments we felt were necessary and moved on; all of us were inwardly groaning. The cultural discomfort activity demanded that we have meaningful interaction with each other. What we needed the most was to become a group so that a year later we would feel comfortable talking to each other, sharing ideas and asking for help.

I didn’t expect to become so close to the other volunteers, not only the ones that I began lifelong friendships with over the time that we were in Armenia, but even the ones I hardly ever saw. It was a gradual process. I didn’t come to feel solidarity with these people overnight, but gradually came to identify with everyone through my own experience. Regardless of where we had come from, we all shared a similar background, at least relatively, in contrast to the Armenian cultural milieu in which we all found ourselves after our arrival.

As the rest of the country identified us as Americans it was impossible that we shouldn’t come to think of ourselves in the same terms. It was, interestingly enough, the same feeling that I now have when I meet Armenians living in America. One of the most significant things that Peace Corps does for its volunteers is to take them through these loops of identity. Until I left for Armenia, I had always thought of myself in a static way in terms of how I related to the world at large. Now words such as Nineteen-Fifteen, apricot, Caucasia and even Eurasia produce a riot of emotional identification in me. We didn’t realize it while we were in training, but none of us were going to fulfill the assimilation goals we had set for ourselves. As these goals had been set with little to no knowledge of Armenia, after we acculturated we formed clearer, realistic goals. After all, it was very difficult to adapt to one of the most geopolitically varied regions of the world. “No definition is necessary because the South Caucasus has multiple identities. It is both European and Asian, with strong Middle Eastern influences as well” (De Waal 10).

The night before leaving we were given free rein to go out and say goodbye to the America that most of us would not see again for over two years. Some ventured off together to share drinks and expectations. I, having previously visited Philadelphia years before, decided to roam around and reflect on all that I had taken for granted about my native country and would no doubt come to miss very soon. I remember passing Benjamin Franklin’s grave at one point, which, for some reason, had pennies all over it, and thinking about the legacy of America, how it had formed and its place in the world. I was not suddenly feeling overly patriotic; it was rather a feeling of premature nostalgia. I looked at the lights of the city around me, and glanced into the faces of those passing by, knowing that it would be a long time before I could rest my eyes on such familiar sights again. I felt like I was moving automatically. It was like a scene from Sartre’s Nausea. “I was on the doorstep, I was hesitating, and then there was a sudden eddy, a shadow passed across the ceiling, and I felt myself being pushed forward. I floated along, dazed by the luminous mists which were entering me from all directions at once” (33).

On the eve of my departure I was able to see into the cultural heart of my country, but what I saw there was already just a reflection of what I had known for so long. At once it was who I was and who I had been: a careless citizen who would now, like Franklin, venture out into the world and, perhaps bring something back. Our flight left at 8pm the following night. We arrived in Armenia around one in the morning the 30th of May and began our slow, at times painful, acclimation to our new home.

Arrival

The beginning was a blur, studded with sharp, gleaming points of seminal experiences. In order to lessen, or rather to delay the gran mal culture shock we would soon experience, we were cloistered away in an empty campground upon our arrival in the country. Our first experience with the unpredictability of our host country occurred as we drove from the airport to our temporary lodgings. As the campground was situated, like almost everything in Armenia, mid-way up a mountain, the Uaz soviet-built trucks carrying our luggage began to gasp at the effort, packed as they were. The vans or Marshutkas carrying us made it to the campground without much trouble. We all tumbled out at once in a tired flurry and began to wait for our luggage. It was about 2:30 in the morning, and as excited as everyone was to finally have the process underway, to be, at long last, in the country we’d all been voraciously reading about for the past three months, sleep is not so easily evaded after a 13-hour flight.

It had been warmer in Philadelphia and, in the mountains of Armenia, we were all beginning to shiver. Standing there, looking at each other, barely listening to the welcome team that was comprised mainly of volunteers who had already been living in the country for a year, people who had become accustomed to speaking and listening to Armenian. They seemed to be testing us with their questions, seeking out those who would be new friends, and those with whom they could possibly work together on a grant proposal. Our questions for them were all in regard to the basics of living in Armenia; their questions for us were all personal. The conversation had begun to die out and still our luggage had not appeared. Without our luggage, and with most of us wearing light clothing, we unconsciously began to huddle together in the dark.

I wouldn’t really say that it was an inauspicious beginning to my Peace Corps career to have the truck with all our stuff break down about a mile away from our campground. Rather, it gave us on opportunity to display our ingenuity and commitment on a rather gaudy scale, like something one would see in a Boy Scouts of America commercial. Almost as soon as someone had mentioned the truck had broken down a number of us began rolling up our sleeves and slapping our palms together, thinking, “This is where it begins, from now on everything will have to be done by me; I have to take hold of the situation and forge my way to a preferred solution.” Oh, God, if only we could have realized how wrong we were then, none of us would’ve worried about the truck, we would have left it down there all night, had a drink together and then went to bed, but, we were still in our American mindsets, and, as such, we set off into the dark, eyes and teeth flashing, ready to drag up the whole damn truck if necessary, anything to demonstrate the utility of our Yankee ingenuity. What we didn’t yet realize was that “[working] as a foreigner was a matter of trying to negotiate your way through [a] political landscape,” a landscape that, when we first arrived, we knew nothing of (Hessler 41). Pre-Service Training (PST)

The Pre-Service Training (PST) portion of my Peace Corps service still looks monumental when I reflect on it. For the first three months we were in the country we were kept so busy with our adjustment we scarcely had time for much else. I remember taking short walks on Sunday afternoons and hardly being able to deal with the sheer amount of freedom; I remember it was as if I were going to float away without my tether of lesson planning materials, Armenian/English dictionary and my language and culture facilitator (LCF) there by my side.

The new volunteer is kept busy during PST for a very good reason: it’s about the only distraction from the twisting sickness in your heart after the first few weeks have passed. Initially, everyone roars into the country, unable to contain all their ideas for development and teaching practices. The enthusiasm is such that one can hardly breathe through the air of everyone’s ideas. The conversation is constant. Undergraduate courses are referenced, Durkheim is alluded to and woe be to anyone who had grant-writing experience, because everyone else is “really interested in doing something like that.” This is all fueled by a semi-professional conference air. Every time we all met we were expected to dress well. Instant coffee was available by the gallon and all the IT volunteers would be out smoking during every gap in the numerous lectures we had to sit through.

Initially, yes, it is almost exactly as you’ve imagined it for years: the Peace Corps is no longer a dream. You are in the middle of it with a group of like-minded people. Every dream, every vision that you have attached to the concept of Peace Corps whirs around your head night and day. The language classes are novel and produce results right away, considering there’s seldom opportunity to speak anything other than Armenian after class. You live with Armenians, eat with them, garden with them and fight for turns in the bathroom with them. People you only recently met become your new family very quickly.

The weekly central sessions you attend leave you feeling refreshed, and in possession of all your faculties for another week of dubious battle with an unfamiliar, but enchanting world. And you’re having a great time communicating with your new family. For the first time since you were young you’re living amongst elderly people again and you’re actually really enjoying their company, considering they are much more tolerant of your excessive language errors than the younger generation who never had to try to speak to the Russians. All this has you reeling with excitement over what the next two years are going to be like.

Then, one night, while you’re reflecting on another exceedingly productive day passed, the phrase, nay, the idea of two years sticks to something in the convolutions of your brain. You consider it. Since you’re still in training the two years hasn’t even really begun yet, in fact, won’t begin for another month and a half. I should stress here that at this point you feel pretty well-versed in this new culture. You’ve lived in the most real part of the cultural milieu for six weeks already. You feel situated in it, like you understand it. And as the plane-less night sky reels above and your last cigarette burns down, you begin to wonder how much more there could be to learn about this place. You begin to think about your friends and family back home. Suddenly, you find that someone’s birthday has passed. That somewhere there was a party without you, in which everyone that you used to live alongside had a good time without you. The places and habits of your American life suddenly come whirring out of the void, but between you and them is an abysmal two-year stretch of time.

Luckily, when you surmised that you understood this place and felt situated in it you were dead wrong, and after you get over the idea that the life you loved and left is moving along without you you’ll be able to see this very clearly; unfortunately, this realization is a long way off yet, and, meanwhile, you’re totally alone, listening to goats bleat under the glowering mountains.

The two and a half months in country are spent in Pre-Service Training, or PST. During this period which precedes the swearing-in ceremony, the recently arrived volunteer is termed a trainee and is subjected to fully-scheduled days of language and cultural trainings. Five to six days a week are spent in four-hour language class blocks. These classes are held in the villages surrounding the temporary Peace Corps training office. While the main Peace Corps office is in the capital, a regional office is set up in the provinces or marzer . The purpose of this is to introduce trainees to the level of local life that they will be living and working in for the next two years.

Our training office was in the town of Charentsavan in the region of Kotayk, a region that abuts the capital and is, therefore, slightly more prosperous than farther flung regions such as Syunik or Vyots Dzor. In Kotayk, as in other regions close to the capital, students often commute to the capital for university classes, but, as in the rest of the country, many either leave to remain in the capital or move abroad to work. The result is that although many citizens from this region have access to quality higher education the towns and villages closely resemble those elsewhere in the country with little superficial difference. The esteemed Armenian poet (Y)eghishe Charents wrote about the effects of early industrialization in 1923. “What is to come is the industrial, the dynamic…This is what is to come, what has already entered our lives, already edged into Erevan [Yerevan] and Kumri [Gyumri]. And it will decide whether our country is to be or is not to be, and it will require a new language to define its social character, its new creative impulses” (49).

Peace Corps trainees are placed with families in villages just outside the town. Around Charentsavan we were grouped by sector, or by the field in which we would work. In Armenia there were four sectors: EE, or environmental education; CHE, or health education; TEFL, or English language education and CBD, or community business development. In my last year these programs were cut to the latter two.

Because of the high number of TEFL volunteers, we were grouped in two villages, Bjni and Solak. Bjni, the site of a local spring and, consequently the name of a national mineral water company, was divided between CBD and TEFL volunteers. My village, Solak, hosted only TEFL volunteers.

Although Solak was close to Armenia’s fifth largest city, Hrazdan, and considered to be incorporated into its greater area, the village itself was small and lacking in basic amenities. My host family’s house had some indoor plumbing, but, the water only came on for a hour or two a day. The indoor sinks were used much less often than a spout located in the garden. There was no indoor bathroom and to bathe one used a bucket of water heated up on the stove in a room that was primarily used for laundry. Despite the poverty of the area the people are quite proud and externally happy. Most of the population is unemployed and spends the warmer months between their gardens and tending to the flocks in the pasture just to the north and south of town.

A Host Family

After we had been isolated in the aforementioned campground for a few days we were soon after placed with our new families. I assumed the experience of moving in with a host family was going to be much more difficult than I found it to be. First, was a ceremony in which we all got to watch a local traditional dance troupe, after which we climbed on stage ourselves to receive the traditional welcome of bread and salt, presented to us by the dancers. “Hospitality is associated with bread and salt…Bread and salt offered to guest implies the promise that no harm will be done to them. Salt indicates the preservation of ties just as it is used for preservation of foods” (Petrosian & Underwood 42). Our new host families were waiting in the audience, listening for our names, names totally unfamiliar to them, to see who among this gaggle of foreigners would be the one joining their family.

When we came down from the stage we were introduced to our new families. It was a slow process. We all milled around for a while, many of the volunteers nervously talking together, out of sheer nervousness trying to avoid the flashing gold smiles of soviet –era dental work and soft brown eyes that took in the room under supercilious brows. There was a smaller guy named Danny in our group. He was introduced to two women that had entire golden mouths and huge smiles on their faces. I remember thinking that, as he was taken over to meet them, he had the look of a Hansel who has just seen the abnormally large pot past the threshold of the witch’s house. Danny ET’d (Early Termination) just before swearing in. I remember one of the things he said before leaving was that he was really going to miss was his host family. This is, essentially, what happened to all of us. Initially, we were overwhelmed by the otherness of our hosts. The initial reaction was to consider how these people appeared to be different from us, both in appearance and mentality. But it didn’t take long before their sense of openness overwhelmed us and we came to identify with them, perhaps more than we did with each other.

At some point I was introduced to Zhora, the policeman whom I was going to live with; his son Xachik was there with him. Within an hour I was living with them. Zhora had been a policeman, years prior, in Hrazdan, and still introduced himself as such, when we first met. At some point, a great deal later, I asked him if he thought he would ever return to this job. He didn’t sound too hopeful, but, as he had an ebullient character, he smiled as he said so. My host family consisted of seven people: Ani, Xachik and Anahit, 13,12 and 11 years old, respectively, my host mother and father, Naira and Zhora, and Zhora’s parents, mother Jenik and father Xachik Sr.. Next door to us lived Zhroa’s brother Naver, wife Anahit and their three children. Naira’s family also lived only a short walk away and her sister and brother came over almost daily.

Although my host family and I began to get along very well after my first week in Armenia, there were several instances of miscommunication. We tried very hard to understand each other, but, as we tried too much to anticipate each other, there were frequent periods of total communication breakdown that would leave both parties quite confused. An example of this can be found in the milk I was given for breakfast my first few months living in the house.

Most days were similar in PST. I woke up at eight and stumbled down the outside stairs to the kitchen below. In the late spring, the countryside was breathtaking. I had never seen so much life. Every tree bore heavy fruit, every trellis was festooned with vines and hard little green grapes, and every field was sonorous with the din of sheep, goats, horses, mules and cattle, all eating or lazing around together, depending on the time of day.

Naira was always in the kitchen when I awoke, ready with a sunny disposition and some simple questions to bring me into the day.

“Lav es knetsi ?” she would ask, slowly pronouncing every syllable.

“Shat lav ,” I would reply, wanting to ask her if she had enjoyed the same, but initially, not having enough command of the language to say much besides “yes” and “thank you.”

The first month or so she would have a large glass of warm, probably freshly squeezed, milk waiting for me on the table. I hadn’t drunk milk for about 13 years, but I gulped every glass down, not wanting to be ungrateful. As much as I disliked the milk there was always coffee to look forward to. I found out later that in almost every country where you’d expect people to drink what is commonly called “Turkish” coffee, no one does. In all the Turkic countries I would visit -- Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan -- everyone drank tea. If you wanted coffee it was going to be instant.

In Armenia, I am happy to say the abominable practice of drinking scalding hot tea from tulip shaped glasses never caught on, and everyone drinks a delightfully thick brew, in a demitasse cup. The coffee is usually mildly sugared and is served with a large dish of candy, which you will be ordered to take. “Coffee defines the life of Armenians. It is a common initiation ritual…in some offices a main chore for the receptionist is to make the rounds serving coffee all day long. A receptionist is judged on her ability to remember how sweet or bitter the boss likes his brew” (Petrosian & Underwood 162-3).

While I drank my milk I would keep an eye on the stove, making sure Naira was making some coffee as well. I did what I could to express my immense love of coffee to her in hopes of being offered a second cup. This never happened because it is simply not done, the whole country over. Over the two years I was in Armenia I never once was offered a second cup, despite the small size of the cups they drink from and every time I would order a second cup at a café I would be given an incredulous look.

After several mornings of the milk and coffee routine I eventually noticed that no one else in the house drank milk and often, Xachik, being the boy and the most forthright, would often stare at me while I drank it. I wasn’t sure if he was impressed with the rate at which I consumed so much liquid or if there was something else that interested him. When my language improved I was able to ask Naira why no one else had milk. Despite my poor language skills at the time, I was still able to understand that the Peace Corps, at some point, had told all the host families that Americans like to drink milk. Armenians usually don’t drink it at all. They drink tan and matsun but not milk. For the first month or so, I had been drinking milk against everyone’s better judgment.

I really enjoyed telling her that I also didn’t like to drink milk. Not only was it a funny cultural story we’d both be able to tell, but it also meant I wouldn’t have to drink any more of the stuff. Sure enough, the next day there was just a cup of coffee waiting for me. No milk.

After breakfast, which I would usually eat with Zhora and Xachik, I would grab my language book and go up the train tracks with Jay, another volunteer who lived with Naver, Zhora’s brother. I really enjoyed having Jay around; most of the time he was the only American I spoke with during PST. We would share our opinions and stories on life in our new homes. To counter my milk story, Jay would talk about how his host mother would put food in his room every day, most of it fresh fruit. Initially, he did his best to eat it all but in the end had to start giving it away and, finally, even letting it go bad in hopes that the message would be clear that he simply couldn’t eat ten apricots every day.

Language Classes

PST integrates four components: 1) Armenian language, 2) trainee health and safety awareness 3), cross-cultural adaptation and community development skills, and 4) technical orientation. The training is based on competencies (learning objectives) in each of these areas. You need to achieve a level of competence in all four components before becoming a Volunteer (http://armenia.peacecorps.gov).

Our language classes were held in the local school, a blocky soviet-looking construction. It seemed even in the smallest villages, in the furthest flung parts of the empire, the soviets had managed to build some kind of cultural center and a school. Usually, one couldn’t tell them apart, especially in the summer when both of them would be completely empty.

In class we worked initially from the book that had been compiled by host country national Peace Corps Staff. The book was called Kamurj or Bridge, and it began, as most language textbooks do with the alphabet, number, colors and greetings. The first eight chapters or so were based around three new letters from the alphabet. We had to write them over and over and identify common words in which they were the initial letter. There were matching activities, cloze sentences and a number of dialogues that we would listen to the teacher read or hear on tape. As the lessons were held six times a week, for four hours with the same small group, in our case seven students, our teachers had to do a lot of work to hold our attention. Luckily there was a lot of subject matter to cover to get us conversant in a totally new language in ten weeks, I also like to think that we were eager students, although there were certainly times when our attention waned drastically and our teachers had to resort to emergency strategies.

As I already had some teaching experience, I was able to understand a good deal about the amount of preparation that went into these lessons. In order to keep us interested our instructors had to vary their approach, and they did a great job, using different activities and games to introduce the language to us. Although most of the work we did came right out of the book, we started off every class with a homework assignment that was usually meant to make us interact with our families, using terms and constructions with which we were unfamiliar in familiar situations. One such exercise I remember was to ask at least two family members about their favorite things and other questions that we had designed ourselves. Initially, I found it an awkward exercise, as it seemed to make the conversation seem forced, as I tried to scribble down the answers to their questions. Later I realized how it was through meaningful language exercises like these that I had been able to build up a good amount of background knowledge on my family that may have never entered into our conversations. H. Douglas Brown writes of the benefit of “anchor[ing a new concept] in students’ existing knowledge and background so that it becomes associated with something they already know” (66).

We had a few lessons that incorporated elements of CLT, or Communicative Language Teaching. “[CLT] aims broadly to apply the theoretical perspective of the Communicative Approach by making communicative competence the goal of language teaching and by acknowledging the interdependence of language and communication”(emphasis added) (Larsen-Freeman 121). Since we were living in the midst of the context for our learning it behooved everyone involved for us to make use of this. In addition to the discussions we had with our families we also talked with shop keepers and tried to make a salad while giving each other directions solely in Armenian. This exposure was in turn to be useful in the formation of our own English lessons once we began teaching, as “Language teaching necessarily involves cultural contact” (Parry 665).

I studied a fair amount, but tried not to let it keep me from genuinely interacting with my family. Unfortunately, I initially took to my room to study at night, thinking, with the house quieter, that there wasn’t much conversation going on as everyone prepared for bed after a long day. Of course, in an agrarian society, this was precisely the time when everyone talked the most. During the day everyone was busy. I talked to the children, but I was denied the meaningful conversation from the adults who were all waist deep in weeding, threshing and planting at various times of the year. I later discovered, after I had moved and lived in a different part of the country that everyone got together and talked in the evening.

The language classes I had as a trainee eventually helped me build a decent amount of background knowledge up in Armenian. More importantly, they helped me to become familiar enough with the basics of the language to feel more relaxed when communicating. As I began to communicate more I became more confident in my ability to speak and, thus, became motivated to learn more. The concept of motivation has been held up, almost axiomatically, in TEFL scholarship. “The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the learner. Because the behavior stems from needs, wants or desires within oneself, the behavior itself is self-rewarding; therefore, no externally administered reward is necessary” (Brown 68). The more I wanted to know the easier I found it to learn, and, more importantly, to recall. When I began teaching I used similar techniques to foster the motivation of my students. The largest difference was that my fellow trainees and I were surrounded by an Armenian context, where my students had few opportunities to use English.

Meeting the Other Volunteers

Sometimes we had language classes on Saturday but usually we had to go into Charentsavan for what were called central days. A central day was basically a day-long review of our progress as trainees, peppered with cultural sessions and work in our sectors. The building where we met, Charentsavan’s House of Culture, was just as empty as the school in Solak was in the summer. The obvious reason for this was that it was usually pretty warm in there by the time the afternoon sun hit the western windows. It was also a soporific kind of place that was ill-suited to the beautiful weather outside.

During these sessions we would be briefed on any new developments as far as our jobs were concerned, for example if the Ministry of Education had recently made some changes in the English curriculum. We would also hear from the volunteers that had arrived one to two years before us. Often they were invited in to discuss their daily lives and patterns of Peace Corps regimens to us, but most of them just stood around and talked about how horrible the winter was, when the heat was out and they had to put on all their clothes, crawl in their sleeping bags and continually quaff homemade vodka just to keep from freezing. This was a common sentiment. “In a pathetic way,” Peter Hessler, a PCV in China writes, reflecting on his experience, “drinking became the one small thing that Adam [another PCV] and I were good at, although it was difficult to take much pride in this” (80). The veteran volunteers would also talk about the existentialist dilemmas that arose during the colder months, when most schools, not having proper heating, would be closed and when there would be nothing to do except trudge through the silent, snow-covered streets of the village, question value judgments, and, indeed, the purpose of one’s entire life up that point. I know during my first winter I had a few days like that, and I have often been curious as to whether there is any kind of approximation or analogue to this experience in Peace Corps service in tropical countries. Wendell Steavenson, in her book about living in Tbilisi, the capital of Armenia’s neighboring country Georgia, writes about the difficulty of the Caucasian winter. “’You’re cold eh? Take this blanket and put it around your knees…Jeez, Wendell, I’m sorry, Tbilisi in winter is a bad place for a broken heart’”(154).

Although we met in our sectors (TEFL, EE, CHE and CBD) during the central days, we also met about once a week for an hour after our language classes were finished. In these classes we worked with a Peace Corps volunteer and a host country national. Most of the classes focused on lesson planning. We wrote lesson plans and tried them out with a model school class that we met with for a few weeks in Charenstavan, a class, that most of us later agreed, was nothing like a real Armenian class. Although I believe there was a lot to be gained from the classes, I think we would have been better prepared to experience more of what a real Armenian class would be like. Of course this really isn’t possible with volunteer groups coming for training in the summer when all students are out of school. But the disconnect between what I had been led to expect, especially as I was assigned to a university, and what I actually got was incredible.

I like to think that we were all capable volunteers. Yes, we were young and inexperienced, but most of us had some level of classroom experience. When we met in our sectors, we planned lessons together with a fair amount of enthusiasm and presented different teaching techniques to our peers. When our training ended we left with a large amount of ready-made lesson plans, ideas, resources and even tactics for working with our counterparts. When we left for our permanent sites we wouldn’t see each other again for three months. When we met again at our annual All-volunteer (All-vol) Conference, there was a feeling of apathy and unrealized ambitions in the air. When we were asked to act out some situations from our classes, most of them were negative. We were at our collective low point. During the skits we muttered under our breath. I remember one volunteer began to cry. The next time we would meet, only a few months later, everyone would be much more comfortable. I think most of this disconnect came from our training that didn’t do enough to introduce us to the typical Armenian village school classroom.

The Armenian Education System

UNICEF, after they had begun a project to “develop a rights-based, interactive and participatory educational system” in Armenia, released a statement in which they justify a life-skills curriculum, where students are responsible for their learning contra the teacher-centered structure the country has relied upon since the Soviet period. UNICEF’s statement regarding the need for educational change in Armenia reveals the instability of the present educational system, at once mired in traditional teaching methods and seeking to incorporate recent innovations.

Indeed, an independent report commissioned by UNICEF in 2001[in Armenia] assessed the project positively, supporting UNICEF's opinion that "possessing life skills is critical to young people's ability to positively adapt to and deal with the demands and challenges of life. And such an approach in a country which still faces a long and difficult transformation away from a totalitarian past is of vital importance (Krikorian).

The Armenian educational system is a nebulous thing. It is in such a state of flux that it is difficult to discuss it as static. While I was in the country, I worked through a major change in primary and secondary schools. In 2009, an extra year was added to secondary school education. Prior to this change basic schooling in Armenia went up to 10th grade. Students, roughly, went to school from 7 to 16 years of age. The addition of another year added a “flying” form for all students who were in school, in any grade, at the time of the change. These students all skipped or “flew” over a grade in order to accommodate the extra year that had been added since they had begun school. I was never entirely clear as to why this was necessary. As can be imagined, this made teaching in Armenia very confusing.

Seventeen years after the collapse of communism, Armenia was still using parts of the USSR’s system to inform its structure. The idea persisted that education, in many cases, was perfunctory. Khodzhabekian, in an article published in 2005, reflects on the educational system of Soviet period and the unique setbacks it poses for education in Armenia today, where the Soviet mentality is still extant in many civic areas. “In principle everybody was supposed to receive (often only formally) a school-leaving certificate enabling them, regardless of their level of knowledge, to demand an appropriate job” (5). In addition to this situation, schools, especially outside the capital hardly received any funding and teachers, earning very low salaries, earned most of their money tutoring more advanced students after class to pass the university entrance exams; as a result, classroom instruction was unplanned. Khodzhabekian writes of the effects of the decreasing quality of classes where teachers must tutor to augment their income. “Serious social problems are emerging because of the rising inequality of opportunities to obtain a good education” (5). Such unmotivated teachers would frequently spend the entire period reading directly from the textbook. Nicole Vartanian, a Senior Research Associate in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and a senior international policy research chairperson for Armenia and Roben Torosyan, Associate Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University, both of Armenian heritage elaborate on the issue of the lack of teacher motivation:

The nation decentralized school and community governance in 1997 and shifted control of spending and appointments to local councils to attempt to address financial needs of families. But annual preprimary tuition for a single student now can cost as much as the annual salary of a teacher. Consequently, many children do not enroll in formal schools until age seven [only primary and secondary schools are free in Armenia]. Unfortunately, the teaching profession suffers too, due to decreases in training opportunities, status, salaries, and overall motivation in the post-Soviet era.

Everything was confusing in Armenian schools; both in the university and the school I worked at the schedule was constantly changing. One would arrive to teach a class at 10 a.m. only to be told that the class had been moved to 11. At 11 the classroom would be empty. The students, taking advantage of the confusion, would frequently leave en masse. A large part of the confusion was the transitional status of the educational system in Armenia. The Armenian school system was a hectic place, and I don’t know if I could say I ever came to understand it. After working within it for over two years, I did come to see what major problems enervated the rest of the system. These problems of organization, materials and teacher motivation pervaded every level of the educational system I came into contact with, from teacher trainings to classroom instruction and the fact that so many qualified professionals move. “Too many young people are unable to find their place in life and become unemployed college graduates, which is a major factor of the ‘brain drain…’ Armenia is using its own resources to train cadres or other, more wealthy countries” (Khodzhabekian 4). It seemed to me that the major problem that contributed to all the others was that the republic had yet to really create its own unique educational system. Most of what I saw outside the capital still stood in the shadow of the Soviet legacy. “All too often, diploma-holding specialists simply do not have the requisite knowledge. This is due to the quality of instruction, which is not very susceptible to control in the regions [marzer] of the Republic” (Khodzhabekian 4).

School Number 1, Malishka: A Physical Reconstruction

Three stories tall, the walls are hewn rock on the outside and painted concrete on the inside. The paint is a cheap sort of artifice. It rubs off in chalky whirls on anything that brushes against it. The bathrooms are ill-maintained. There is no toilet paper and often no running water. In each stall there is a rusty bucket that contains soiled notebook paper. There is no mirror. On the second floor there is a teacher’s lounge. In this lounge there is a television which is always on and a stereo which never is. On top of the stereo sits an old Apple computer, also never used, and probably no longer functioning. On the western wall of the lounge is a shelf that holds, among other things, files of student papers, and some classroom materials such as a globe, on which the countries are labeled in Cyrillic, and a section of a human brain in embalming fluid. Among the student papers are various reports, compiled by students, usually accompanied by traced illustrations and meticulously neat handwriting. In the middle of the room is a long table with chairs on either side. At the head of this table is a large office chair reserved for the school’s director and the person in charge of scheduling, the two most revered people in the school.

In the hallways there are student-made posters of various Armenian heroes. The first floor is entirely devoted to military subjects and features Marshal Baghramyan as well as heroes from the recent Karabakh conflict such as Monte Melkonian. There are pictures of modern Armenian soldiers working out and enjoying their leisure time together, all in full uniform with brazen looks on their faces. The posters on the second floor are of great Armenian authors such as Yeghise Charents, Hovhannes Tumanyan and the astronomer Viktor Hambardzumyan. Similar posters are found in each classroom.

The classrooms have a green chalkboard on the south wall with rows of two-person tables facing them. The tables have no room for storage, so even the primary school students must keep all their books and materials in their backpacks. Each classroom has windows on the east or west side of the room depending on which side of the hall it’s located. Down the hall from the teacher’s lounge there is a library that is usually locked. When it is open, its use is limited to faculty. Most of the books inside the library are old soviet textbooks that are no longer being used. Near the front entrance of the school is a closet that janitors use for storage and as a lounge of their own. There is very little in there beyond a few scrappy chairs, a few handmade brooms and the thin bent metal squares that are used for dustpans.

There is nothing soft in the building. There is also nothing colorful save for the few posters that have not been faded by age, chalk dust and sun, hanging from the walls.

Outside the school is a recently paved lot that serves no purpose save to cover the dust that is rampant in the village during the drier months. The lot is surrounded by a gate which is usually open. Just on the inside of the gate there is a water fountain, probably a memorial to a youth in the community, as most of them are, featuring the name of this unfortunate child and a memorial icon such as a broken flower.

A Typical Day in the Armenian Classroom

In an interview for the Caucasus CRS, an online magazine, Armenian community activist Marianna Grigorian reveals the common belief that education in the country is below the international standard.

"We should march in step with the world," said Narine Hovhannisian, head of the general education department at the country’s education and science ministry. "Our educational system does not correspond to international standards” (Grigorian)

I walk up the dirt road from the main road that leads south to Iran and north to Yerevan, the capital. There are cabbage and potato patches along the road. At nine in the morning the farmers are already out with their donkeys tied up and wheelbarrows leaning drunkenly in the furrows of the fields. Malishka is a large village with a population of about 4,900 people, according to the 2001 Armenian census (http://www.armstat.am). In all probability, this number, however, is greatly exaggerated due to unreported emigration.

Almost everyone is working out in their garden plots or cooking eggs for those that will have to walk about 7 kilometers to the plots and grazing grounds south and east of the village. The children are on their way to school. They hang back in groups or rush forward alone. At the top of the rise the school is built upon, there stands an old soviet war monument of a soldier wearing a great coat, holding what looks like a tommy gun with a slightly contemptuous look carved into his face of grey rock.

I walk past the eager children, all trying to give me high-fives. I nod politely, but am unable to reciprocate the warmth of their greetings. Even to nod to them is far beyond what the other teachers do outside of class and I don’t want to meet with any more opprobrium. One of the janitors is standing at the door. I return her warm greeting and think about how much it contrasts with the perfunctory greetings of the teachers. Before going upstairs I stop into the bathroom and hold my breath while using it. The air inside is mephitic although the window is slightly cracked.

Once upstairs I still have 15 minutes before classes begin. I enter the teacher’s lounge and say hello to the teachers assembled there. The men, on one side of the room, return my greeting, the women on the other, merely look up when I enter the room. I have tried to talk with my counterpart here in the past about the lessons of the day, but her manner demonstrated her unwillingness to do so, although she didn’t say anything. On another occasion, I planned to meet with her after classes, but again, she did not show much interest. The lessons are dictated by what’s in the book. National regulations require that the book is presented in a certain fashion, i.e., a certain section is to be completed by a certain date. I have shown her that this approach leaves much to be desired in terms of appropriate teaching by international standards, but she doesn’t see the point in how the material is communicated as long as the material itself is not incorrect. This approach is contra

I better write this now because it's beginning to be obvious that I'm not going to have another chance. I'm giving away my computer away tomorrow and, as I'm horrible at writing anything coherent in internet cafes, the time to conclude this long, rambling, at times incoherent, at times incohate account has come. I wish the last entry I wrote would've been a little more conclusive. I wish I could've just left it off there, because, really, there's nothing else to say. But, as a brief story of an interesting nocturnal encounter would be a lousy way to end two years of thoughts, worries and dreams I'm going to endeavor to write one last note, but I can't promise any kind of closure, I can't promise it'll even be worth your time to read (not that I ever made that claim before.) The last few weeks have seen so much activity it would be exhausting for me to recount all of it. I went back to the camp I worked at last year, saw some familiar faces, played some familiar games and concluded everything beautifully by walking up to the nightly disco after shooting a few baskets, dancing like a lunatic and then walking out, back to my room, to the sound of applause and my name being chanted. Not that this means much, you understand, those kids would chant anybody's name who was brave enough to join in their nightly bacchanalia. Still, it's always satisfying to know that adolescents still tolerate your presence; their praise is somehow more legitimate than that of adults, kids don't humor you, if they clap and yell your name you can be sure that they think you a decent human being.Right now the thunder has reached a tremulous pitch outside my window, but the sun continues to shine and the birds are still singing, unmindful of the possibility of one of those crazy hail storms that spring up here from time to time, threatening to break the sad remnants of my Brezhnev-era windows. I returned from the camp to meet the next generation of volunteers. I remember, two years ago, meeting the departing group and thinking to myself that, quite impossibly, one day I would be in their place, figures of mythical proportions, people who had completed their two years and were now returning home. When I met the two volunteers who leaving I remember being astounded by their worldliness, the way they conducted themselves around, at the time, alien Armenia, was astonishing. Now I understand why they were so effortless, while we (the new group) were still totally encumbered with our thoughts of America, language lessons and uncertainty over the future. By the time we met these people they were finished. They had realized their ambition of coming here, working, making friends and accumulating memories. They knew it was all going to end and now I am able to see from whence the sleep-like placidity arises. Already I have nothing to do but remember and the thoughts crowd my mind to the point that everything else merely happens around me. While I am walking around town, I think of meeting Paige where the bus stop used to be, right before the first snowfall I saw here; when I am buying cigarettes I think of the packs that Elloit and I have burned away discussing Central Asia for nearly a year now; I think of walking through town, amidst the firework explosions for New Year's when I hear laughter, and when I look out my window I see a whole story behind me, the university classes, the homes in which I have eaten and the mountains I have looked down from, into this green valley town, ripe between the dry grass and dusty hulks of rocks. ... Today was a day for goodbyes. I bought some toys, chocolate boxes, bootleg music video DVDs and some bottles of wine and drifted around town distributing them, like some kind of deranged Santa Claus figure. After all the time I've been here and all the meals, vodka shots and coffees I've been served it's felt wonderful to give something tangible back to my community here. I bought a generic Lego set for a little boy I know here who doesn't have anything in the way of toys and to watch him skip lunch and cease to pay attention to any possible distractions in order to try and put the dump truck model together was a wonderful feeling. Occasionally, he would get stuck, staring intently at the vague instruction sheet, and would look up to ask for some help. Not that I was much better at figuring out the zen-like simplicity of the Chinese instructions, but, again, to be useful to kids is a good feeling. When I left, I kissed him on the cheek, something I'd never done before in the states, but suddenly find myself doing a lot with little kids in my last days here. I should add here that the kids of Yeghegnadzor, at least the ones I got to know, have greatly helped me to get through this experience. When my language was still incredibly poor, it was the kids that helped me learn to communicate. I can still remember my forth day here, when I first went to live with my host family, walking around with my little host brother, Khachik, pointing to everything and asking what it was, and my, what must've been quite confusing, rapture over hearing the word 'meghu' or 'bee' for the first time. When I came to Yeghegnadzor, it was the kids around my building that helped introduce me to everyone, as we would often play with my skateboard together, in the fading light, while the parents watched from their places under trees and along low walls where they could sit and talk together. ... I'd really like to write something meaningful here. Something that describes the life I lived in Yeghegnadzor, something that illustrates these mountains, these empty factories and these dusty roads leading out to the nearby villages. I'd like to record the sounds of my neighbors, congragating below my window, the traffic of Ladas and Jigulis and the terse chirping of these birds that occasionally burst from the apricot trees and seem to dart through the sky for sheer pleasure. I like to bring more color into this journal than my pictures can provide to depict the tufa stone buildings, the bright yellow soviet ferris wheels, the single fiery dots of cigarette smoking pedestrians passing on in the night though a town with few working street lights, the milky azure of the afternoon sky, all roped off with steely, drooping power lines. I'd like to recreate the feeling of sitting in a cold January marshutka, riding up to Yerevan, when one's feet and legs go numb but the body is almost hot from the weight of a grandmother on one side, three guys on the other and someone else's bag on your lap. I'd like to give voice to the melancholy of the autumn sky stretching out before one, long and pacific, looking like two blank and mysterious years unfurled and the gloating summer sky that boils and rumbles with the evanescence of storm that will pass over this valley before it has begun.In the end, the only thing to left to add, in case it hasn't been clear, and perhaps in case I am only now realizing it, is that, well, it was worth it. It was all worth it.If you want to attempt to procure a last minute Azeri visa at the land border with Georgia and continue turn to page 451 If you want to do the same thing, but with a little more class and a lot more pictures turn to page 128either way, at some point you're going to have to flip back to the beginning to figure out how to actually finish the book.

Dilijan is in the middle of a wet, verdant explosion. Davor and I took a walk around though the meager lanes of the town one night, enjoying the cool air and the tintinnabulations of the river moving quietly through the dark. We had just crossed a vacant lot when we were suddenly accosted by a rather large man.

"Do you LIKE to walk...at night?" In perfect English, slightly drawn out and, curiously, without any trace of affect, almost like you would imagine a computer to speak.

"Uh, yeah, you?" I think Davor answered this guy, as I was feeling rather laconic.

"Yes, and to have a fun. Do you like beer?"

Davor answers, "Yeah, shot [which you probably remember is Armenian for 'a lot']" I was kind of annoyed that he answered this way as I knew this would lead to an invitation to drink beer with this guy, which I had no desire to do. And, of course, his response is,

"We can walk around and drink a beer and have fun tonight," which in the dark, in the company of this 2 and 1/2 meter guy who talks like a robot and seems to insist on walking directly behind, rather than to the side of me, does not strike me as being 'fun.' Still, maybe I was being unfair, I decided he, like, well, anyone else I've ever met around here, was probably a decent guy, meant well, but came off a little aggressive.

"So, what do you do here?" I tried, hoping to warm up to this guy a little.

"I don't like to talk about it."

Hmmm, ok I guess that's not going anywhere, still I persisted, "Why, is it boring?"

"No."

I looked at Davor, "Mafioso, KGB," I said, loud enough so that he could he could hear me, hoping this guy would get the joke and realize how weird his response sounded. Only he didn't even acknowledge my comment.

"I'm going to buy some beer for us here," he said pointing at a store. "I'll meet you here later, after you come back from seeing the hotel, under this tree [Davor had mentioned to him that we were going to see a resort hotel (unfinished) at the top of the hill]."

After we left this guy behind we began to joke about him, not in a mean way, just ribbing him for suddenly appearing right beside us in the dark, talking with no affect and spurning any talk of what he did for a living. We weren't afraid of the guy or even unnerved by him, it was just funny to consider the other odd things he might say, should we see him later, in that icy voice of his and as we walked on we lampooned him, for lack of anything else to talk about.

Davor and I walked around the hotel area for a little while, which is actually a really interesting part of Dilijan, there's a mock-Roman amphitheater up there and a promenade (of sorts) with interesting sculptures crowing all the balustrades along the walk.

As we walked our conversation gradually shifted away from the guy we had met earlier and we talked about various things until we forgot all about our new friend, presumably waiting under a dark tree with beers for us. I began to feel bad, which led us back to joking about the guy, we imagined him down there drinking all the beers alone and crying ( I know, not exactly a pleasant thing, but, at the time, it seemed funny, it's not like we wished this fate on him, sometimes exaggeration is just funny in and of itself). We decided to go back down and see if he was still waiting. He wasn't and I could tell Davor, who was getting pretty tired, was not exactly put off by this.

We continued walking back up to the place where we were staying, joking about this and that, the guy kept coming back into the conversation, we imagined seeing him on the bus to Vanadzor the next day, a fierce look of rage in his eye, saying something like "I waited for you all night!"

About the time that we were laughing over this, the subject of our jest appeared from the bushes (yeah, totally appeared, no noise, just a slight whisper of parting branches and he was behind us).

Our friend walked behind us for a while without saying anything. At some point, I remember asking Davor how long we were going to keep walking in this awkward single-file fashion without acknowledging him.

"It's dark," was all Davor said, which I took to mean, 'he doesn't know that we know that he's there and, at this point, it would be weird to turn around and acknowledge him.'

But as we walked on, this guy's presence began to weigh upon me, he was practically looming over me, not saying anything, how could he possibly think we hadn't seen him, and why wasn't he saying anything.

Just when I was about to turn around and say something, he sidled up to me, "Hi, guys, me again."

"Oh hey, man," I said, revealed that he finally said something.

"Here are your beers," he said handing me a plastic bag with cans of 'Botchka' and 'Baltika' in it.

Immediately I felt bad, "Where's yours?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"I drank it already." Meaning, 'I drank it thinking you guys probably weren't coming back.'

I began to feel more talkative, perhaps because I felt bad, perhaps because laughing with Davor for a while had opened me up a little more. "So," I tried, "you sure you won't tell us anything about what you do, not even a hint?"

"No," was his only response and he tried to change the direction of the conversation by asking, "Where did you walk to?"

"All around the main square," I answered.

"I know lots of good places to see in the dark," he said, again in that icy tone, "would you like to go? We could have FUN," as he said this he gestured vaguely toward the wooded area just beyond the road.

I quickly switched topics trying not to laugh, as with Davor right there, I knew we were both thinking the same thing, viz. 'shit, this guy says weird things.'

"Well," I asked, "when you say 'fun' what do you mean? What's fun?" As I finished my question a speeding car flew down the road. "Is that fun?" I said, pointing to the car, "driving fast?"

"Yes," he answered after a minute of stoic deliberation.

"What else?" I prompted.

"To have a walk, to drink a beer," he responded, seeming to take prompts of the things that were immediately around him, before adding, sotto voce, "and of course, to have sex."

I knew we were going to get to this eventually.

Before I knew what I was doing I found myself saying "yeah, but it can't be that easy here, right? I mean this place is pretty conservative." Usually, I don't prompt people like this, but after having to play the audience to a number of stories of sexual conquest I thought maybe I'd finally try to call someone on what could be a bluff.

"Well," he answered, taking time to chose the correct words, "when there's a, uh, human being, that likes that same kind of, uh, fun that I do, than, uh, we can have fun...together."

I didn't know what to say, but I began to understand that life must be kinda' rough for this guy. Davor asked if he liked it in Dilijan. He responded that he'd be much happier somewhere else, especially Latvia, not Lithuania, not Estonia, but Latvia, only Latvia, I guess he must've met someone from Latvia at some point.

I'm sure, by this point, the guy, had figured out that Davor and I didn't like the same kind of fun that he did, but, if he was disappointed, he didn't show it at all. We sat down on a bench together, talked a little more about life in Dilijan and Armenia in general. Davor and I recommended a few scholarship programs that would look pretty favorably on someone who spoke English as well as this guy. He listened half-heatedly, as though he wasn't really interested in applying for them, or already thought it to be hopeless. We sat quietly for a few minutes before finishing our beers and saying good night.

When Davor and I got back into the apartment building he asked, "So, he was gay, right?"

I went to my neighbor's kid's baptism party last night. Here they wait a few years before baptising the kid, possibly so that the child will have some kind of memory of it, possibler as a hold over from the days when the child mortality rate was pretty high during the first few years and the ceremony, which must be somewhat costly, was held off until the child was, essentially, in the clear. I got a ride with my neighbors around 5:30 as I was on my way up to the village where the party was to be held on foot. After all the walking I've done around here, and all the rumors that must've been passed around about me walking half-way across the country, I'm surprised to find that people are still incredulous when I tell them I'm going to walk to the next village. The eastern frame of mind is that there is nothing adventurous or ennobling in walking. It's associated with poverty; it doesn't matter if you're carrying a huge backpack obviously loaded with camping equipment and you're wearing a 300$ North Face coat.I tried to walk back home from the baptism party as well. Tired and sweaty after dancing around for hours on end I wanted to walk back home under the full (or nearly full, I can never tell) moon and think of the score of crazy uncles I had just danced with and the kid who followed me around most of the night, copying my ridiculous dance moves and asking me questions with incredible reserve, rarely observed in little boys around here. I wanted to play some of the Tamada's speeches back in my head before going to sleep, to remember the grandmother who seemed positively overjoyed that I spoke Armenian and, shortly afterword, ecstatically, pointed me in the direction of the bathroom, as if she had just finished the most beautiful work of art and had just been standing around waiting for someone to ask her where it was. There's always a few very attractive girls at such parties too. Most of them, in all possible modestly, cling to the corners of the room and hardly seem to talk to each other, but, every so often, while up-rocking or trying to pull off some incredibly lame break dancing move, they whisper and point and sometimes they smile. Are they humoring me? Suppressing a laugh? or as one girl said to me in the foyer, do they really think I am dancing well? Then there's the young boy, trying to copy my footwork and smiling up at me when I tell him he's learned it already, one of my neighbor's children, continually trying to get me to show her how I did that thing were I spun around on the floor, so excited she's unconsciously hopping around a little, the old men outside who smoke the cheapest cigarettes, holding them up with gnarled hands and waving them around, positing another point about France or Russia or Azerbaijan; the aunts in polyester dresses, hooting and bouncing all over the dance floor, which is the entire room, pausing occasionally to bring in thirty more plates of food, stacking them on top of the previous, as yet, unfinished courses, and there's always one rotund gentleman, who is impossible to imagine outside the party atmosphere, so well does it seem to suit him, who bellows things that make everyone smile, is constantly raising a glass and dancing around in a way so ridiculous it takes a lot of the pressure off me. I wanted to muse over the party for a while, walking through the still night, with little traffic, no streetlights, no bars with doors open, scattering particulate music through the night; in such silence, the voices of the night almost seem to follow one home in the dark, as the sweat and cigarette smoke cling still to one's clothes, what the band played, what the uncle told me about being a bee keeper "you're a language specialist, I'm a bee specialist," the boy's giggle when I told him he had ten minutes and then would have to dance, and that I was counting, the flaring noise of those firework candles they always put on cakes here, my neighbor, who always talks kind of loud, insisting that I do not leave before the cake is cut, all before a car, unnoticed, drives up and convinces me to get in by telling me that one of the children is crying, why this concerns me I do not know, but the walk has been long enough and no one wants to turn down a crying child. I got in the car, turned around and told her not to cry, she was quiet in the dark, probably sleeping, not even dreaming of crying. The ride home was short, we talked about my bizarre penchant for walking places, which everyone in the car praised, seeming to overlook that they had just practically demanded that I get in the car a few minutes before. I told them that a few days before I had walked over to Martuni... The walk takes one through a valley that slowly climbs higher into the mountains that surround lake Sevan, the villages taper off and with every one passed the traffic thins out further until it get so quiet a car can be heard, rattling down through the pass, engine off and coasting, miles away. The sun is bright, the winds that come down from the mountain have an emolliating effect, but the dried sweat has covered me with a thin cast, like the feeling of dried glue on one's fingertips, that seems to spin the wind off me without really letting it in. After dealing with the pack the entire day it's weight seems natural, like it serves as a counter balance, making my movements even more dexterous. Near the top of the mountain pass is the Selim Caravansary. I notice two Persian oil trucks parked on the road just behind it, and in front of them a typical soviet truck probably bringing fruit over the pass. So many hundreds of years later and, in a way, the caravansary is still serving its purpose as a resting and meeting place for travellers from different lands. Noticing the mustaches on the guys standing in front of the stone entrance I nod and test a 'Salaam' and they respond with something that I don't understand and smile. Just behind the caravansary are two old men sitting down with some food spread out on a nearby rock, this scene I've seen so many times that I can't help but to assume these men must be Armenian, especially after I see the food, lavash, tomatoes, pepper, dried fish and white, spongy and humid cheese. I say hello to them in Armenian, but then, just to be sure, I ask them if they are Armenian, to which they respond with such gentility and assurance that there can be no doubt. I am asked over to eat with them and I and my huge backpack saunter over to lean over their meal for a while. The men beg me to take some of everything represented on the oil cloth covering the rock. I take some cucumber and bread, knowing they will not be content with my selection, that cheese, at least, will be proffered as will the bug-eyed fish staring into the sky above, glimmering with a copper sheen. We enjoy a conversation with a little mutual questioning, this being one of the marks of the progress I have made as an Armenian speaker, that I am now able to ask as many questions as I receive, perhaps it's only that now that I'm leaving I find myself more curious about what other people are doing, when before I was comfortable just telling them about myself. The arak (vodka) is offered, but it seems awful to my parched and sweaty countenance and I joke with them, telling them that after living in Armenia for two years I have had this stuff enough times already to know exactly what it's like and that for this reason there's no reason to try and force it on me, as one would do to a tourist who doesn't know the taste of fruit and solvent, introduced to the body from a plastic cup cut from a one liter bottle, slightly filmy, but sharp enough to make the eyes water, no matter how smooth it might be. I part with these two wonderfully common goodwill ambassadors of this country and continue up the pass to where the sun is setting, which seems odd considering that I thought the top of the pass faced east. When I crest the summit there is a cloud-blurred fire smoldering along the horizon, which for the first time all day, falls in a straight line. It feels like I have been climbing all day to see this flatness, and to seeing it as the sun's last rays glance over it brings a feeling of accomplishment and I have no problem making the decision to stop and camp up at the top of the pass for the night. With the sun setting and light wind drifting over the alpine grass, whispering, a feeling of somnolence steals over me and I feel a certain respect for my own position and everything involved in it. Although I had eaten nothing but peanuts and raisins all day, I have no desire for anything but water and sleep, both of which I try to satiate myself with, first gulping down most of the water left and then taking off my shoes and rolling myself up in the meager covering of the sleeping bag liner I brought with me, thinking nothing more would be necessary, as it had been so warm in my own part of the country only a day's walk away. But about an hour later it becomes clear to me while vigorously rubbing my legs and rolling myself into a little ball that I am not going to be comfortable until the sun comes up again. I lie there, in the dark, waiting for the nepenthe of sleep, the sleep of the physically exhausted, that never comes. I try lying in different positions, my hat, hood and sleeping bag liner all pulled over my head, hoping to contain what little heat my body is still generating. I consider getting up and eating something but the effort seems incredible, and as cold as I am I really have no desire to move around, and then the sniffing sound starts. Now, every time I have ever gone anywhere the least remote in this country, there has been a shepard nearby to tell me that the place is "lika gayl" or, literaly, "full of wolves." Since I have gone so many places and never seen a wolf (and very few snakes, which they also constantly warn against) I have always been dismissive of such warnings, but lying in the dark, suddenly aware of how alone I was, out in a massive wind-swept field, the nearest village at least a few hours away on foot, the sounds that began to draw closer and closer to my tent began to disquiet me. It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn't even sure what to do with wolves, I know that some kinds of bears you're supposed to play dead with, others you're supposed to fight, punch on the nose; I wondered if I should attempt to punch a wolf on the nose, if, say, a blazing muzzle, serrated by an open mouthed snarl, induced by the smell of fresh blood were to punch through the thin nylon of the tent, would I even want to get near that? Would it even do any good? I tried to remind myself that wolves rarely attack people and are usually pretty timid in human presence, but, the animal outside the tent was sounding bolder all the time, not at all like a timid and retreating animal. "Sniff-sniff-snort!"--long pause, as if contemplating the smell it just identified, "sniff-sniff." the muzzle of this animal was pressing into the nylon so hard I began to wonder if the tent would hold, surely it could only take so much weight against it. In my exhausted state I could not make a definite decision to do anything. I just lie there, hoping whatever was outside would go away, I was also somewhat worried that any attempt to shoo the thing away would only confirm my presence inside the tent, that, up until then, was not absolute. That is to say, that up until that point the animal outside, thought itself just sniffing around something that perhaps a person had recently been near, but upon hearing some kind of absurd 'yah!' or some such pathetic attempt to drive the animal away, that it would become apparent that something threatening was inside and there would be no other option than to immediately dispatch this foolish person who had been left behind by the heard in the field all night. That is, I imagined my shooing noise being immediately greeted by a fierce growl, and in my last moments, while the wolf readied itself for the pounce, I would have the awful knowledge that I no one but myself to blame. Considering this, I decided on a more subtle approach, shifting around lightly a little at first, and when that proved totally ineffective (there wasn't even a pause in the sniffing) I got out a cigarette, figuring if I was going to have to deal with this I might as well do as comfortably as possible. I never figured out what actually was outside my tent that night. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a wolf, a little later on, feeling a little braver with the passing of time, I opened the flap and tried to see whatever was out there, but, opening the flap and springing out as quickly as possible, I saw nothing, nothing anywhere in the empty, moon-bright field all around, only to get back in the tent again to hear the sniffing return a few minutes later. Curiously enough, the more I listened to it, I began to realize that it really wasn't a sniffing, but rather more of a loose shuffling, as if a large bird with a broken wing was trying to upright itself using my tent as a brace. This sound drifted around the tent's perimeter all night long and nothing I could do would permanently drive it away, batting at the tent where it seemed to be, making noises or smoking cigarettes and muttering to myself. After a while, in the most desperate hours of a long, cold and sleepless night, I was happy to hear the noise return, remarking to myself that 'ol' floppy' was back, and other such nonsense that only someone really tired with nothing to do would say to him or herself. Around dawn, I finally fell asleep, and woke again later to the tent filled with the heat of the mid-day sun, which I felt justified in soaking up for a while and returned to sleep, glad to have warmth back in my bones again. It took until nearly noon to fully rouse myself and upon taking down the tent and trying to breakfast in the open field before getting back to the long road, I was again greeted by the clouds of mosquitos that I had ducked into the tent the night before to avoid. I quickly ate and packed everything up, hoping to put some distance between the offending insects and myself, but after about twenty minutes on the road, it began to be obvious that my walk for the day was going to plagued with that particular whine, that becomes almost unbearable after a long amount of time, especially when one is shouldering a heavy bag that limits how easily one can swat and try to shirk off the pests. I didn't have to deal with it too long though, as it soon began to rain. It started as a light rain, refreshing really, as my clothes felt salty and stiff from the long walk the day before. It washed off the grime that had cow-licked my beard in all kinds of crazy swirls of barbarity and left high water marks on my forehead where my hat had settled the day before. At first the rain was something that was probably necessary before going back to the civilized world, it did the grooming that I was reluctant to undertake since I was just going to get dirty again anyway. But the rain didn't just drift over me like a light shower and then depart leaving the sun to its turn of drying, rather, it steadily increased growing at last to near deluvian proportions; the water running in streams around my feet. Around this time I also began to notice that the warmth I had saved up from the morning in the sunny tent was quickly departing and soon I would be cold again, but as I had no water proof layers to put on it seemed ridiculous to try to alter the situation with clothing, as it would only get wet and would therefore be useless that evening when, once again, I would need every article of clothing I had on hand. (I forgot to mention that the night before in an act of sleep-deprived desperation, I wrapped the two pairs of underwear I had brought around my feet hoping the extra layer would keep them a little warmer.) As I was in the mountains I wasn't surprised to see hail soon coming down with the rain. It hails a lot here, and up in the mountains, in the summer, it seems to be a regular thing. I only hoped that this would be the usual mercurial summer storm, blowing in quickly as it had done, pouring itself out and evaporating quickly under a reinvigorated sun. The hail, however, did not let up, nor did the rain, in fact they mixed together to form a miserable combination of precipitation that sluiced down the back of one's neck, soaked through the socks and, at once, pelted one with marble-sized pellets, as if annoyed that there should be any obstruction in its course between the sky and the ground. There was nothing to do but continue to walk through the storm, now an absolute storm with thunder and lightening crashing all around me. There was no place to take shelter and in every direction all that could be seen was the grey-blue confusion of hail and rain falling fast over the flat terrain. I began to wonder if I had some kind of masochistic kind of streak going on to be doing such things, walking all day long in the summer heat, freezing and listening to odd shuffling sounds all night and waking to a breakfast of mosquitos followed by a walk though a pelting hail storm. When a car came by and motioned for me to get in I realized that I had to take the offer, or be forced to confront what must surely be a self-destructive impulse in my consciousness. The car was brand new, smelled and looked it and, for that reason, immediately felt uncomfortable. The first question was, of course, 'what are you doing up here?' Followed by all the usual stuff that I was not really in the mood to describe. I wondered about the difference between the two young guys that I was now riding with and the old guys the evening before near the caravansary. Why had I felt friendly toward the old guys and felt annoyed that the young man should ask me any questions at all, especially considering the fact that they had been kind enough to stop and take me out of the hail and rain. The conclusion that I came to, somewhat later, was that the old guys and I were on equal footing, we had both stopped to have a rest together going over a long road, there was a sort of equanimity in our conversation, whereas the young man, now totally turned around in his seat, seemed to be interrogating me. I remained cordial and answered all his questions, but after about 5 minutes asked to be let out of the car, after so long outside it just felt really uncomfortable to be sitting in the backseat of a new car. In fact I had been watching the hail outside the minute I got in waiting for it to abate a little so that I could get back on my way, which is an interesting thought, considering that, in the car, I was making much better progress in the direction that I was going than I was while walking. When I noticed that the sharp 'tik, tik, tik' sound of hail had quieted and that the rain was no longer coming down in torrents I had the driver pull over.I wished the two young guys a pleasant journey and they returned the wish. Within five minutes of walking the storm, that I had done nothing but temporarily outpace, caught up with me again and began to pelt me with hail harder than ever, as if angry that I had temporarily escape its wrath. This didn't go on for too much longer. Eventually, the storm tapered off and in its wake large bulwarks of clouds surged up around the peaks of the pass, still covered with the dull crust of summer snow. The sky was leaden but had ceased to precipitate in any way. A cool wind rippled the puddles left on the road by the recent storm. I walked through the lackadaisical weather and soon began to feel despondent. the walking, which up until that point had been enjoyable, became dull. With every passing car I began to think about flagging one down; there seemed no reason to continue walking rather than to prove a point to myself, a point I had already proven the last time I had walked over this pass about 15 months before. Coming down into Martuni didn't help my cause. The same iron sky hung over the town that I had already been walking through for hours. And I couldn't help but to remember a friend of mine who had lived here until he had gotten sick and had to return home. I found myself wishing for good company. A place to take my bag off and talk to someone for a while. The exhilaration of the previous day had passed. I drifted through Martuni, talking with the inevitable group of kids that began to follow me, hanging back behind me, walking single file, like the tail of a comet, the older kids clustered around the walking bulk of myself and my backpack and the younger kids keeping a safe distance behind, looking, big-eyed, from me to their older brothers. It seemed to take longer than it should've to reach the town's center, when I got onto the main street the sun was just starting to come out from behind the clouds and I stopped and bought a few apricots to keep myself going a little longer. Further down the street, I stopped again by an empty shop window and wrote my name in the accumulated dust, then walked out of Martuni onto the main road leading to Sevan. Before long the sun was setting as I passed a gas station outside the village of Yeranos. The gas station attendants hailed me as I walked by. I attempted to wave them off and keep walking but, considering it was already getting dark and I would have to stop and camp soon anyway, I decided to stop and talk with them for a while, see if maybe they had an old blanket they could spare to keep the cold of the approaching night off. I was greeted with the usual questions and answered the men fairly passively at first, not really too interested in their conversation, but as the conversation moved out from the usual, mundane, topics I found myself discussing politics and international positions. I soon realised that one of the men, who later turned out to be the owner of the gas station, was pretty well-versed in the outside world. I enjoyed talking with him and another one of the workers was so ingratiating and friendly that I couldn't help but to gradually become more relaxed in their presence. We stood in the parking lot, talking while the sun went down, I told them I had to find a place to stay for the night since it was getting dark and they declared that I would stay with them at the gas station, as the whole team (something like 6 men) worked throughout the night, sleeping and getting up to provide fuel for the occasional night customer. When the sun went down we retired into a small room where I was feted with cucumber and tomato sandwiches and coffee. One worker offered to have someone bring vodka but I told him I had no taste for it, and after a long day of walking and a sleepless night, wanted nothing more than to lie down. he seemed to understand this and soon dropped the inquiries. I stayed awake for a while talking to the men about their work, sitting up on a spring mattress, smoking and feeling comfortable and drowsy. Soon after the lights went out I feel into a deep sleep. During the night I woke up once with the feeling that someone's large hands were probing my neck as if to strangle me. I awoke with a start and realized it was just a dream. Everyone in the room was asleep and the road outside was quiet with the absence of any traffic. It had gotten cold in the room so I went over to the heater in the corner, turned it on and warmed myself up, letting the heat soak into my sweatshirt as I was sleeping without a blanket of any kind, knowing from the previous night's experience that my sleeping bag liner was totally useless. Soon I fell asleep again and did not wake until morning, when I heard the workers rise with the day's first customer, one of them placing an old and heavy coat over me as he exited the room and saying my name endearingly as he draped it over my shoulders. Around ten, the worker who had been particularly nice woke me telling me someone outside would give me a ride to the next town. I hurriedly got up and packed the few loose articles that I had taken out of my pack. Still drowsy, I said goodbye to the workers, promising them should I get rich in America I would send them money, and jumped in the front seat of a waiting car. The ride took me into Gavar, or K'var as it's locally known, perhaps and amalgamation of the old soviet name Kamo and Gavar, the new name. Within a few minutes I was on a marshutka heading toward Yerevan. The ride took me through the better part of the region, the northern part of the road that's more attractive for bordering lake Sevan. Still somewhat drowsy, but feeling refreshed after a full night's rest, I stared off across the lake over the heads and shoulders of the other passengers in the marshutka. I stayed out traveling around, visiting friends and talking with the new group of volunteers for another day before returning back to Yeghegnazor for the baptism party. As the latter part of the trip was much more comfortable, there's not so much to tell about it. I ate some great meals, had some good conversations, took some shorter walks in more climate weather and met some nice people. I stopped and visited my old host family for an afternoon and sat under the walnut tree where I used to study my Armenian homework when I first came here and talked with my host family grandparents. For the first time totally able to understand my host grandfather whose speech is often difficult to understand owing to his lack of teeth. We spoke of the crops and the weather and the sheep flock that he tends. I talked with the children about how they had done in school that year and joked with the boy for not having done too well in English when he had lived with a native speaker for three months, of course, that had been two years ago, two years ago---so many things I saw over the latter part of that trip reminded me of the time when I had first arrived, how new everything had felt, how strange the weather and the customs had seemed, how a walk to the next village felt so alienating and how I used to take my headphones out into the field in the evening, listen to them, look up at the stars and imagine what it would be like when I returned home, unable to comprehend how one day, returning to the same field would actually feel like returning home. In the same place where I used to sit and re-read letters, pouring over every word, every scrap of information from the states, every syllable from the pens of my friends and family, where I used to listen intently to the music that I had left behind, playing in the hundreds of clubs and bars that I had known from Detroit to San Francisco, where I used to look at the sky and take solace in the fact that it was the same sky that suspended itself over certain American streets and American heads, in this same place, I long for nothing more than to sit quietly and see it for what it is. I want only to keep it as a memory, because I know that unlike so many other things and places I have known, it will not change and some day I'd like to find my way back here again.

At least I was able to come home and eat something warm. That's always the nicest thing to return home to after going camping, a nice warm meal, that and a comfortable place to sleep, but I leave that out because my couch isn't really that comfortable.A one day camping trip, however, doesn't really allow for these pleasures, one hasn't been away long enough, and even after carrying a large pack for something like 10 hours all together, the feeling of personal merit isn't there. But my camping trip didn't end through my volition. When you get too close to a border between two countries that have been at war with each other, and still haven't resolved anything, in fact, talk frequently about starting the war again, you really aren't left with much choice as to whether or not you're going to continue camping. You're lucky if you don't end up in jail or with a permanent rifle but indentation on your forehead.I woke up outside the village of Zaritap where I had camped the night before coming from Vayk on foot. I'd tell you how far that is in kilometers but they confiscated my maps. Early in the morning it was still raining. I lay back down inside my tent and listened to the light rain sound on the nylon. For a while I dozed in and out of consciousness, trying to make up for a night spent sleeping on rocks with a thin sleeping bag. Around 8 I decided that I had not come out camping to lay in my tent all damn morning. I got up, put on my clothes, shook the rain off the cover and began taking down the tent. As it has been more than a few years since I've put up or taken down a tent I was feeling really good considering what adeptness seemed to remain for this work in my muscle memory. And after I get everything packed in my bag I was quick to get on the road and enjoy the morning that was gradually developing all around me.The village of Zaritap was still asleep behind me when I began moving further up the mountain, towards was a profusion and dancing around with color, like those spots that you see before your eyes after rubbing them too hard. I listened to the birds singing and tried to keep my eyes on the ground in case I should cross the path of another snake like the beautiful one I had seen the evening before. With all these sights and sounds around me I practically entered the village without realizing it. I walked through the early morning streets feeling fairly light, but not particularly talkative. Although the village was peaceful, I wanted to get the water I needed and get back to the quiet, shattered concrete of the road that led on to the last village by the border. I stopped and filled up my water bottle at a local drinking fountain and said hello to a guy who walked past. He asked if there was anywhere he could help me in the usual hospitable way that betokens the village mentality here. I told him that if he knew how to find a certain road to a certain village I would be obliged to him and within minutes I was standing in a throng of men, quarreling, jabbing fingers at my map, and occasionally gesticulating wildly toward some empty field, as if the road was somewhere underneath all the weeds that had sprung up out there. I listened to eight people give me directions they had agreed on, the essentially informed me what I already knew; I had to go back the way I came and the other route on the map was unheard of to these men. Since the walk had been so nice the way there I didn't mind going back, but, before I reached the intersection to turn off, I found a weed-choked tractor route and decided to follow it just to see where it led. As I walked the sun had begun to pull out from the clouds and the fields around me reverberated with various insect tones and the skittering of lizards and field mice. Going straight up hill I began to get tired and thought of things to perk me up such as places I liked to eat at in the states. Before long my mind was stuck on an endless loop of visits I had payed to an ice cream place in San Francisco. While I was thinking of a time when my friend Mikey and I had walked there from downtown on one of those beautifully indolent San Fran. Saturdays, I looked up to find myself crossing a road that looked like it had once been paved, although now it wasn't much more than a flat road strewn with rock and clods of concrete. I took this road the direction I thought I should go and continued until I felt my pack beginning to pull my shoulders apart.After a brief rest, that was cut short by flies, literally, piling up on top of me, I continued on my way. The road continued to drag on, rolling over the sides of mountains and down into bucolic valleys where a few scattered trees could be seen along the edges of the dried river. As I was beginning to feel tired again I told myself that I'd try to walk for another 20 minutes to make it to the two hour mark since the last time I'd stopped. I hoisted my pack up a little higher and continued to walk. I was surprised a few minutes later when a sign for a village came into view. I was curious to know which village it was, as, if I was where I thought I was, the village must surely be another hour away at least. I thought perhaps I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere, but, at the time, this didn't worry me at all. I was happy just roaming around, and with the map I had, a village would help me locate where I was anyway. When I got close enough to read the sign I found I was on the right road, and had walked much further than I had thought over the last four hours or so. In fact, if there hadn't been a village there I probably would've walked right through the boarder thinking I was still well in Armenia territory. I was interested to talk to the people in this village and rest for a little while. The walk had been long, unbroken by any shade and as this village is right on the boarder to Nacheijevan (Azerbaijan) I wanted to hear if more Turkic words came out in these people's dialect and they any stories related to living under the shadow of a hostile country. The first person I met in town was a grandmother heaving bricks of manure from one place to another. I stopped and said hello to her, asking if there was a store in town where I could buy some water. She told me just to stop in somebody's house and ask for their water. I asked again if there was a store where I could buy it, not wanting to just barge in on someone and ask where their faucet was. It was difficult to understand her, she had no teeth and spoke dialect very rapidly, she was also down in a ravine and I couldn't hear her very well. I decided to walk further into the village and ask someone else if I didn't just run into the store on my own. I thanked her and walked on. Turning around a corner to one of the main mud and water thoroughfares of the village I was immediately stopped by two men, sitting on a bench with a bottle of vodka between them. I couldn't help but to notice two women in the yard behind them working in the garden, backs bent at 90 degree angles, pulling weeds, while these men, probably their husbands, sat pouring each other shots of vodka, possibly congratulating each other on finding such great, hard-working wives. When they saw me their eyes lit up at the possibility of a third party joining their afternoon debauch. To make it clear that I had other business I asked them where the store was, one of them gestured vaguely to the head of the road and again bade me sit for a minute. Reluctantly, I slipped off my bag ( I had been looking forward to buying a juice of some kind and taking a nice break alone) and joined them. It started with the usual questions, "Where are you from?" "Are you married?" "Why are you not married?" "Do you not want to get married?" "How old are you?" and finally the closing argument "You should get married, you're old." After this perfunctory, but absolutely necessary topic was out of the way they began to ask me what I was doing there, but with slightly more curiosity then people here usually ask, they seemed very interested. I told them I was just strolling around, and that after two years living in this region I wanted to see some of these little-visited villages out by the border. "yeah, but you gotta' be careful they responded, eyes rolling in their heads from caution and afternoon shots, "the Turks are right up there!" One of them got up in deadly seriousness and motioned for me to follow him as he got up and walked to the middle of the road. He stopped there, squinted and pointed at a mountain not far off. "You see that, they're right there!" There was nobody on the mountain that I could see, but I think he was referring to their land. "Wow," was all I could think to say. They laughed a little; we sat back down on the bench and the questions returned to my disconcerting unwillingness to marry immediately. After a few more minutes of this talk I decided I had been polite enough and told them I was going. They warned me not to go up into the mountains and a few minutes later that's what I was doing. I hadn't planed on going up the mountains, the map made it look like the road I needed went straight out from the village, but, before I knew what was happening, I was being led between mud, chickens and running children by a somewhat surely grandmother, who kept telling me how many grandchildren she had. Since the number had been high I wasn't surprised to see her latch on to some boy running by, wheel him quickly around to face me, and declare, "this is one of my grandsons." The kid didn't seem much interested in either her affection or my weak attempts to compliment her on her brood and ran off to join a gaggle of kids crowded around a tumbledown stable wall on the other end of the street. The grandmother continued to lead me along and I continued to actually trot alongside to keep up with her, when she abruptly said, "this is one of my daughter's homes, goodbye," and darted through a gap between two lengths of fence. "Is this the way to the next village?" I called after her. She turned around and made a shooing kind of motion which I took to mean, 'yes'. It didn't take long to get out of the village, and soon I found myself walking down a loose gravel road that seemed to lead to nowhere. There was no one around and as I walked I listened to the sound of donkeys braying all around me. I came to a little stream and dipped my hands down into it, awkwardly trying to keep my balance with my pack on and doused my hair with water. While I was cooling myself off I stopped to consider which way to go as I was at a fork of sorts. From the look of my map the next village was close by on the right, closer than the one that I wanted to go toward on the left and I decided to stop into the nearby village just to try and get the juice or water I was hoping for and take a break, since rushing grandmothers and drunken gardeners hadn't allowed me to linger on in the last village. It was here that I began to follow a road up the mountain. As I ascended I told myself that if I did not see the other village soon, after the next corner, I would turn around and take the other road, rather than risk going too close to the border, where, apparently, they shot first and asked questions later. As I was thinking about the vodka-tinted warning I had heard, I caught site of some soldiers coming toward me. I assumed they were just regular soldiers, coming into the village from where they were doing guard duty. I friendly inquired from a distance if this was the way to the next village, just so they wouldn't worry about my intentions. At this one of the guards took his Kalashnikov off his shoulder and placed it in his hand. No response. I tried again. He cocked the weapon and brought it down, leveling it at me. Shit.The two soldiers continued to advance, one with his gun still aimed at me, and the only thing I could hope for was that they were Armenian, and that I hadn't somehow gotten into Azerbaijan, where I would not be able to talk or explain how I had crossed a heavily guarded border with no hostile intentions. I also began to think about how it would feel to be shot.When the soldier reached me they were laconic, they asked me a few questions, but said very little, I kept repeating my question if this was the way to the next village and received no answer; it became clear that I was to follow them and stop talking, which, upon understanding I promptly did.Luckily, they told me they were Armenian soldiers, so, although I knew I was going to be interrogated, I didn't worry too much, after all I was innocent, I was just out hiking around. Then I remembered that, usually, people here don't hike, and have very little understanding of why anyone would want to walk around and sleep outside when cars and beds were available. We continued up the hill until we crested at a little place that was obviously their base, or lookout point or whatever. "The village you were going to," the soldier with the gun said to me, "this was its school." And with that cryptic remark he gestured for me to go inside.When I walked into the little barracks I keep thinking about all these Orwellian descriptions of soundproof cells, extorted confessions and silent bullets. I began to realize that I had essentially just walked into a war zone. Armenian and Azerbaijan went to war in 1991 and although the war officially ended in 1994 peace talks have come to a total stalemate. Armenia refuses to cede any territory that it gained in the Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan refuses to accept that what was once it's territory is going to remain in Armenian hands. Since no resolution has been reached shots are occasionally fired across the border, just a few days ago some people were killed by fire coming across the border. I have heard that although the western border with Azerbaijan (the Nachijevan enclave) has no boundaries with the war zone, that here the mistrust and disdain runs the highest, perhaps because the Azeris living in Nachijevan are now isolated from the rest of their country. Where before southern Armenia was open and heavily populated by Azeris, it is now firmly closed and all its Azeris gone. Of course the Armenians have cause to be angry in this dispute as well, the massacres in Sumgait and Baku certainly hearkened by to the other historical pogroms against the Armenian people. And, I'm sure there were more than a few people that thought to themselves "it's happening again, 1915 is happening again."What I found in the barracks wasn't quite so disconcerting as all the things I had begun to imagine. I sat down on a bed, trying to decide if I should be light-hearted (after all, I had done nothing wrong, at least not knowingly) or if I should just keep my mouth shut until I found out what was going on. I handed over my camera and asked if I could smoke in the room. While the soldiers went through my pictures I smoked and talked to them about what I'd been doing in Armenia for the last two years. When they asked me if I wanted coffee I realized that either some good cop/bad cop shit was about to go down or that I didn't have much cause to worry about being shot anymore. Eventually, I ended up being driven all the way back to the main army base. When I arrived, It was obvious by everyone's demeanor that they don't get too many prisoners or suspects or whatever I was. Nearly everyone was standing around, all the privates anyway, mouths agape. I had to talk to a few sergeants or generals or whatever, repeating my story and trying to make them understand that Americans often go wondering around with no definite destination. I tried to explain how I had gone many other, less off-limits, places in Armenia, on foot, with the same intention of seeing what was there. No matter how many times I put this response forth it was greeted with "yeah, but why did you go there?" and the whole discussion would start all over. In many ways it was a high point of my time here for me. Since I got here I've always wanted to go over by the border and see what it looked like. Nachijevan is such an inaccessible place I always wanted to see if I could maybe get a glimpse of it from the border. It's be like living about 30 miles away from the North Korean border and not being curious if you could see what was going on next door, if you could only get close enough. I was also quite proud of my language skills that I was actually able to be interrogated in Armenian and respond and understand most of what was being said. In high stress situations usually language skills shut down and I was happy that nearly everyone kept asking me how my Armenian had gotten so good. I never realized, back in my language classes, almost two years ago, that one day I'd have to speak Armenian to the barrel of a gun. It's a point of which I think any volunteer could be proud

I wrote this story almost 4 years ago, but I really enjoyed reading it again so I thought I'd pull it off Myspace where it's been moldering, unread, for quite some time now.

Apologies to those who have already read it and didn't like it the first time.

"Damn!"

The kid's looking at me like I've got leprosy.

"What do you mean 'damn'? How bad is it?" I ask, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice.

"Man you've got a hole in you chin!" The kid lets me down gentley.

"Fuck." At this point it's all I've got. It's all I know: fuck. "Fuck."

I'm about an hour subway ride from home out in the middle of nowhere sitting on a bench trying to keep my blood from running all over the place. My shirt is covered with gore and hair from my unshaven face. Well, unshaven until now when the concrete did it for me. Taking just a little extra and only in one place. I've got no map or anything so I hardly know how to get home despite the fact that I did a bang up job of getting down here. Also, when your bleeding as much as I am now your thoughts tend to jumble around a little. The blood splatters down on your shirt making new red lines in the cloth. On your shoes the blood coagulates in the dust and forms little beads. When it hits the sidewalk blood looks so remarkablely red and opaque that it has all the visual power of a bright yellow wasp or one of those poison dart frogs, bouncing around the rain forest like fire globules. Stop signs are dramaticaly red for a reason, the color makes you pay attention. It's a warning and right now I've got warning spalshed all over me, from my chin down to my shoes.

"Do you know where there's a hospital?" Suddenly it occures to me that I should probably get moving.

"It's like a BIG hole, man" I've apperently impressed the kid with my injury but as flattered as I am I'm starting to get a little nervous. I lift the edge of my voice a little higher.

"DO YOU KNOW WHERE THERE"S A HOSPITAL?"

"No man, I have no idea."

This kid's been a great help. I'm starting to walk away when he suddenly snaps to.

"Those guys might though," he says pointing to a group of surly looking kids in the corner of the park.

Immediatley I'm walking up to the kids trying to control my steps afraid I might fall again. Everything feels numb. My finger tips are tingling. A trail of blood is following me around the park.

"Hey guys," I butt into their conversation trying to look as relaxed as possible, you know like I bust myself open everyday.

"Do you know where there might be a hospital around here?"

"Not really." The surliest looking one says without even looking up. And I can't help but to think about grabbing him, shaking my head and screaming like Tyler Durden did to his boss in Fight Club, flinging my blood all over the place, mostly on him.

'Not really?'

What kind of shit is that either you know or you don't. Look at me for shit sake. Do I look like I only kinda' need a hospital?

Another one takes sympathy on me, or maybe he just doesn't want any blood dripped on his new Emerica shoes.

"I think there's on on Valenica, like Valencia and 19th."

Ok that's enough I have a vague idea where that might be and I don't want to stand around anymore leaking like a faucet. I thank the guys and skate off in the direction I came.But the skating is slow under my wobbly feet. One of my shoes is all ripped up and the blood pouring down my shirt is taking my concentration away from everything else. After about three blocks it's all hills and I've got to get off and start walking. The kid's words keep echoing through my mind.

"There's like a big hole. Your chin. Big Hole"

It just keeps playing over and over again. making the injury in my mind worse with each repitition . By the time I'm out of the hills I'm seeing half of my face hanging off. I start thinking about debilitating scars and and amputations. My mind is abuzz with staples and stiches. If I do get out of this I'm going to end up looking like Frankenstein's monster. All the while my shirt is growing darker and darker with the blood its taking on.

After about 10 blocks of intermitant skating and running I begin to realize I realy have no guarantee there's going to be a hospital at the end of this road. Those kids didn't sound very sure and it seems like I would've seen a sign by now.

"Fuck."

I'm back to that again now. Cursing my self for my exteme penury that won't even allow me to get a cab at a time like this. I've got blood all over myself but I can't stop thinking about how expensive cab rides are. It's a good thing I've got insurence or I probably wouldn't even go to the hospital.

After about half and hour of searching I'm moving up the lower Mission. I see a man at the bus stop who looks like he might know where things like hospitals are and, hesitating no longer I ask him.

"Well what kinda' hospital you looking for? There's quite a few. They got St. Luke's up on Chavez St. there's the General on...wait where's the General again? I can never seem to remember that one or maybe you want a clinic there's a shit load of 'em around here."

The man continues to drone on seemingly oblivious to the severity of my situation, as if he sees blood streaked guys around all the time. I finally cut him short and ask which hopital is closest.

"Well," He begins seeming kind of offended at my impertenence. "Well this bus here'll take you right to one of 'em." He gestures to a bus coming, about a block down the street.

"Thanks," I tell him fumbling for my change hoping I have enough for one of the costly San Francisco buses.

The Number 17 Valencia pulls up in front of me and I wait for everyone else to get on so I can speak to the driver.

The bus is packed. The seats are all filled and the people standing are all packed in like sardines. The windows are all up and the air inside is stiffeling, at least 20 degrees warmer than it is outside.

When I reach the bus driver he's yelling in Spanish for everyone to move back further,despite the fact that everyone is already shoulder to shoulder, even head to head, childern and elderly people are squashed in the middle of the crowd. I don't know what these people are breathing but it isn't air. I think air technically has to have some oxygen left in it and there's none what so ever in here.

"Dude, you got like a hole in you chin!" Ahh fuck. The kid's words again. Why did I ever ask him what it looked like? I should have just gotten up and walked out of the park to the donut shop down the steet and asked one of those nice old folks how bad the wound looked. Shit, they probably would've offered to drive me to the hospital too. Instead I...

"Come on kid get moving!" Oh shit almost forgot what I'm doing must be the loss of blood. the bus drivers scowling at me, either because I havn't payed my fare yet or because I look like I just robbed a liquor store and didn't quite make it out before the shotgun went off.

"Hey are you going by a hospital?" I stammer, no time for formalities now.

"Which one?" He asks looking at me from under his bus driver visor. A green plastic thing that makes his face look even less inviting.

"Anyone." I'm getting tired of this run around so I answer blankly hoping he'll get the point.

"Well if you get off at 16th and walk about 8 and 1/3rd blocks clockwise from the five-way intersection there's another bus that'll be coming by, you don't want that one but you want the one after it. you take that to..."

This seriously went on for about 10 minutes. Someone in the back starts to yell, babies are beginning to cry.

"You got that?" he asks, almost pleased as if hes been enjoying the convoluted directions hes been giving.

"No," I tell him. But I'll try." I don't know what else to say.

"It's easy!" He tells me closing the door and slamming down the gas. Sending my stumbling toward the back, blood and all.

As the stops go by I begin to notice that no one is actualy getting off the bus. Riders get on but none get off, there is no counter measure and within a few short moments I am engulfed by the crowd. They swarm around me edging by, stepping over the seats, hanging from the safety bars and crawling beneath the seats. Normally I wouldn't mind but I'still bleeding all over

the damn place! Doesn't anyone notice? I've got my shirt brought up around my chest trying to catch all the blood that seems loosened by the warm, fetid bus air. My shirt, is sticky with blood, it's all over my hands and running down my chest. A man is standing right in front of me with a brand new white button-up shirt on. The bus rocks and sways going over the bumps and around the bends. I am doing everything I can to stay far away from that white shirt, straining my muscles to compensate for the movements of the bus. I hear someone near me say 'Sangria.' I look up but no one is looking over at me. I'm trying to hold the bar with one hand and mop my face with my shirt with the other. The bus stops again, more people get on and the guy with the white shirt is even closer to me now. I notice a few mothers pushing there kids past me, quickly. A group of kids are learing at me. My skateboard falls and when I reach down to steady it five or six drops of blood splash on the floor. I pretend not to notice but I'm afraid that they've splashed on someone. The bus is getting hotter by the minute more

people get on. I feel like I'm saturated in blood, light headed, beginning to wonder why the hell I got on this damn bus.

"It's like a HOLE, dude!" Shut up, kid. I hardly even care anymore. I'm resigned to dying on this bus now, The Number 17 Valencia. I'll fall down, collapse in a pool of my own blood and these people probably won't even notice, if they do they won't care, probably just take my wallet or something.

"Hey Hospital Guy?" The bus driver is suddenly yelling at me over the din of the 3 thousand people on the bus.

"Hospital Guy, get off here ok?"

"Thanks" I stammer out shaking with excitment of finally getting off this terrible bus.

"Yeah," he adds. "Get off here and get on the bus behind us."

Great another bus probably packed even tighter than this one, everybody wearing brand new white shirts.

When I go to get off the bus everyone clears a path for me. I almost feel gratefull that they finally seemed to have noticed.

The next bus is almost empty. The bus driver is very cordial and there's even a place to sit. After about five minutes she nforms me that we've reached the hospital.

I walk in, check in, wait in the waiting room, still bleeding all over myself.

The nurse calls my name and I follow her to the preliminary room.She runs through all basics asking me how it happened, where it happened etc. while taking my blood pressure. I've got gauze packed in the wound now and I'm waiting for here to tell me they'll have to amputate or do a graft.

She doesn't say anything so I ask.

She looks at me, smiling like nurses do. "Oh you'll probably just need a few stiches, nothing major."

I practically collapse in relief.

"We'll have to do something though," she smiles " I mean you've got like a big hole in you chin."

I.

There's a mania taking over. It's not really a bad thing; I haven't lost any ability or sense as a result and I wouldn't even say that anything has been dulled, still, I'm living with thoughts that vacillate so quickly I usually have a difficult time gauging my own opinion on anything, especially issues of importance. The problem here is that my service here is almost over. This brings a cascade of thoughts that have been building up for these last two years down on top of me. The stretch of time that separated the day I arrived from, say, today, often seemed interminable. I realize now that in my listless, day-to-day musings I was thinking about eventually leaving in such an abstract way that I had nearly blocked the possibility from my mind. Now, just two months from some kind of departure, I find I am not at all prepared for this drastic change. In part because I anticipated it far too much, and in part because I took my anticipation to be indulgence and not really connected to reality or worth my time.

The question I seem to be continually asking myself is whether or not I want to leave. Of course I don't want to stay here for ever, in fact even the idea of staying here another year is really not appealing at all. There are things I miss, things that I feel entitled to miss. Yet, the idea of returning to America does not fill me with enthusiasm either. I know I've built up a ridiculous picture of what America is in my mind. Two years of exaggeration have taken their toll. And when I really look through the memories the only relevant and worthwhile thing I can find are my friends and family. Yes, I desperately want to eat avocados, fake cream cheese, bagels and all sorts of crap again, but, really what is appreciation of such things? Am I going to savor the flavor of these things for months on end? Am I going to thrill every time I get on my bike (Which I've been without) for years? Yes, there's going to be an immediate, probably overwhelming shock of readjustment, but later, when these things again become normal, I know that my mind is going to wonder back to this place, the people I met and the things I did, and I already know that I'm going to regret not having done more of a great many things.

So I find myself in a kind of limbo. Stuck between the incredible contemplation of a realistic return home to all the things I have ever known and my last two months in Armenia, a place that I will not return to for many years, if ever, but none-the-less, a place where I have left an indelible mark of persistence, of will.

I know that I will continue to relive this place for years, much in the same way that I still remember what was happening in California right before I came here. Sometimes, what was two years ago seems like it was only a few months ago. For example, my last night in America, in Philadelphia, before catching a plane from NY the following evening,I walked around all night, past Ben Franklin's grave, down by the river, up to the north side, which seemed more hood than the west side. I remember walking through this city thinking over and over to myself that this was the country that I was going to be leaving the following day, that all the things I found familiar here were soon going to cease to exist except in memory.

I had my headphones on most of the night, I remember listening to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" a lot and finishing a letter to a girl, shortly before trying to call her from eight different payphones and losing something like 6 dollars in quarters on old drugdeal AT&T coinslots. I went to a bar later on where other volunteers were meeting each other. I felt pretty numb to the whole thing, trying to remind myself that it would be a long time before I heard live rock music again.

And then, like that, it's the next summer and I'm standing in a bar in Novi Sad, Serbia listening to a decent rock band, with vague memories of a year in Armenia. After I left the country for my first vacation after a year, it was almost like I'd hardly spent more time than a month there. If I really pondered it I could pull up all kinds of memories from training and subsequent site placement, my first host family and moving out on my own after 7 months of living with families, but, usually, I didn't really ponder it, I just experienced it in waves of vertiginous dreams.

It'll be like that again, too. I'm going to lose a lot of this experience just by leaving. It's collapsible somehow. When I really want to think of it I will, but not without regret, but mostly I'll just remember the tunes to Armenian and Russki pop songs, the swallows outside my window and the sound of the recording on the Yerevan Metro, warning passengers that the doors are closing.

"skushasek dnera pakvum en--hajort gayarana yeritasardakan"

but that one I'll keep until I'm old, shuffling around a retirement center, mumbling it to myself through a trick of Alzheimer’s.

II.

I haven't been writing much because I can’t help but to feel like these posting are becoming fairly formulaic. I try to elucidate on my internal struggle, my new dual identity as someone who lives in Armenia, someone who hasn't seen his friends and family in years, someone who has changed with none the usual people around to witness the change and, well, the kid who graduated from Jackson high in 2001, moved to Chicago, moved back to Michigan, worked in a bookstore, took road trips to Minneapolis and Pittsburg a lot because he knew people there eventually moved to San Francisco after discovering it to be the most beautiful city in the US, one February evening after driving all day up from LA, to the Richmond and getting out of a van that smelled like Red Bull and socks on 19th Ave and something, watching the light from the setting sun run up the street car rails that cut the streets out there. The kid who grew restless even in SF and moved up north and, eventually left for the Peace Corps, by again driving back across America for the forth time.

I write and try to reconcile these identities by talking about what I miss about America, indulging that character for a while, but this always seems kinda' fake, not that I don't miss these things, but I often find that I hardly have the attention to give full description to what I miss and why, mostly because my life here is continually hammering at my door. The kids who live in my building are coming in and bring their English homework, or their just coming in and asking me what I'm doing while sorta' drifting around my apartment, as kids are wont to do. If it's not that, someone's calling me asking me when the hell I'm ever going to come back over, people I met once, months ago are still calling me with this question and it's not unusual to me at all anymore. Even if nothing is deliberately intruding on my American musings Spring here is just too lively to ignore. In the evening the crickets chirp in alternating waves of somnolence, a sound at once so beautiful and bucolic that I listen to it and wonder why I ever enjoyed living in cities so much. During the day my neighbors are outside working on cars, revving the engines, yelling out their windows to each other, walking their babies, who have been imprisoned inside all winter, around the building. There are at least 5 different kinds of bird song that I can differentiate outside my window, all of them enchanting. When the kids get home from school they seem to just run frantically back and forth under my window, switching their aim every three minutes but always running, running and yelling. With all that going on I try to reflect on my time here, I try to think about what I left and what I'm going to return to and I'm not really there at all. I get fleeting glimpses of things, American things, that I try to write down, but can never seem to mold into anything substantial. I think about food and I mention that I miss certain food but no one, besides perhaps my mother, would care at all that I miss certain foods, to tell the truth I don't either. I write those kinds of things and I think to myself, "you're writing about avocados again, aren't you tired of writing about that?"

This all, of course, begs the question what the hell am I trying to express? If I'm totally acclimated to being here why do I keep trying to reminisce about things that I've obviously drifted too far away from to say anything interesting about. If my Armenian life and my American life can't be reconciled why do I continue to write about them in the same post? The only solution I have is that the two, for me, are totally intertwined. My Armenia doesn't exist without American fantasy. I can't really think to any time period that I was here when a certain facet of American living wasn't in the back of my mind. The first six months I was here it was the people. I just missed the raw material behind the people I knew in the states and wished I could somehow conjure up analogues to this in Armenia (I also didn't really have any friends here at that time.) Then, as I began to meet more and more people I began to miss the specific entertainment options. I would meet the people I had come to know and wish that we had something better to do than smoke cigarettes and talk, I wanted a background to the conversation like I'd always had at home, a bar, a bike ride, a to-go coffee and a beach-side bench. In time, I found this as well, cafes replaced cafes, mountains replaced the ocean, kitchens replaced bars, marshutkas replaced subways and bikes. As I became more and more acclimated I began to miss the little things, like sounds and flavors, things that are hard to replace, things that do not often play a very auspicious role in one's life but are constant. This began the long lament over foods and ephemera of life in America. But now I feel even this is fading, the little specific things have lost their import, they just aren't important enough and I can't hold on to them forever; I like the foods and the smells and the sounds of life here now. These things have become my life, and as they too are ephemeral I'm taking more time to appreciate them. So what does that leave me with? Just when it seems like I've gotten over every American fantasy my mind could conjure up, a new theme presents itself, probably the most troubling theme of all, that of pure fantasy. What now prompts me to write about America at all is nothing that comes from my own experience, but things I imagine I may be able to obtain when I go back, things that I have no familiarity with heretofore not because I've never done them, but I've never experienced them the way I think I will after having been away from them for years. It seems odd to say but this category of pure fantasy is probably the most mundane longing or nostalgia of all because it takes the most commonplace things and converts them into nearly limitless experiences. Let me give to an example to illustrate my point.

I was listening to This American Life today and there was a segment where two people talked about watching TV together and singing the theme song to a new TV show that they liked. A married couple singing along to a sitcom theme. When I heard this I was immediately transported to a reality where I was sitting next to someone after a long day of work and awaiting the start of our favorite new TV show. The between-shows commercials ended and the theme began, we began to sing lustily in anticipation of the continuation of a story we had come to appreciate and identify with. There was really nothing else to this fantasy, but while I was considering it I felt inexplicably happy, especially for someone who, back in the states, hadn't had any kind of network TV connection since 2002.

That's it, that's what I think about now when I think about going back to America. That's what makes me happy. The really boring parts of life that are probably the hardest to appreciate anywhere. I don't like TV, but the idea that it could really mean something to me and play a background role to the relationships I would have with other people is novel as hell. That's what entertains me now, the prospect that the things I used to reject as dull and unimportant will now be reinvigorated with a sense import, a sort of background potential I was never able to see before.

The only other thing I really think about, fairly frequently, are the cups of coffee I'd like to drink with different people in different places, some of them don't even make sense, that is, the cafes I'm putting these people in are thousands of miles, in some cases, from where they live. Sometimes my vision of America can almost be totally reduced to a handful of people and cafes, indeed there's really little else I'd want from it at this point, permitting a job.

There are about 14 weeks left. I'm going to travel around the country, work at a summer camp or two, finish all my paperwork and try to get a final project finished, then I'm going to Iran and onward to central Asia through Turkmenistan. My somewhat sedentary period is coming to an end, so the focus of this record is probably going to change. There's a lot to anticipate in returning to America, but I'm not going to write about it anymore, I think I exhausted it tonight. It would seem, just 20 days short of a full two years, I've finally used up all my desire, which should make this summer incredibly interesting.

I wonder how the last group of volunteers, the one’s that just went home, felt when they first met us last year? Did they have the same hope, the same desire to connect with different people? Did they have the same difficulty trying to hide their excitement and anxiety? If anyone from the previous group was feeling these things and exhibiting signs of bewilderment or reluctance last year I never would’ve noticed. Back then I didn’t care. Armenia was still a new experience, and after two months off daily training our first occasion to really meet these volunteers at a softball game struck me as completely unimportant. They waited there on the field, aware of the significance of this first meeting, trying, as we did this year, to find the correct way to usher us in, to make us feel comfortable with them and still fresh from the states, from training in Philadelphia and still getting to know each other we brazenly turned around and left the game to find a café to relax in.

I remember my apathy from that day, one year ago. How the softball game and the senior volunteers seemed so unimportant to me and how walking into town to have a beer instead sounded much more enjoyable. This year, after so many winter afternoons dragging along under banks of grey clouds and long spring evenings watching the sun set through my windows and all the countless hours spent alone, the new volunteers were like a miracle. Almost 50 people about to endure much of the same things we had already endured, living with the same families that we had lived with the year before: new people to discuss our experiences with, to share, to complain and to plan with.

At the same time I almost didn’t want to meet them at all. I wanted to have the opportunity to meet them on an individual basis. The groups here are no good, or at least they’re not for me. I can never seem to find anything meaningful trying to interact with over seventy people. I knew their feelings at the game would be similar to my own the year before. They would not feel much excitement about meeting us, rather they would be happy only for the opportunity to take a break from the incredibly rigorous and often monotonous training schedule. They would stay in their own group, occasionally looking over at us, possibly trying to read something of their future here in our faces. I wonder if they could see the shadows of depression, the smiles of accomplishment, the year of students, broken conversations, piles of books read. Did our faces betray us? Did we arch our eyebrows too much? Did we stand too still or pace too often? Did we look the sum of a year of alienation, triumph, uncertainty and hope?

Immediately I wanted to be loved by all those new faces. I wanted them to know me and to know them so that we could have earnest and fruitful conversations. To some degree I wanted to find a reason to stay another year in the crowd. I wanted to see a reflection of my own face a year ago and remember the deracinating passion for travel and discovery that had pulled me up from San Fran. and brought me to this country, this town and this playing field.

But at a sports game people stand on two different sides of the field, what’s more they intentionally heckle each other, they engage in what’s pretty much the exact opposite of warm, friendship building conversation. They joke, argue and insult, all in fun, all in sport, but all prohibitive to what I wanted to find out there. Of course I joined in the game, rooting for my own team, the people I’ve been here with since the June before last. I argued, I threw up my hands with relish when we scored, shook my head in disappointment when we struck out. And I felt closer to my teammates. The guys that had stayed, the 35 of us left from a group of 50. I let them know that I cared about them after all the text messages they had sent and books they had lent, these people I never thought I would be close to looked like old friends to me. They deserved my support, they deserved to kick the ball over everyone’s heads and get to third base, to run home. But so badly, under the cheers, I wanted to go over and thank the new group just for coming, for continuing the tradition of coming here and working and learning that has occasionally seemed impossible to me.

II.

Despite what everyone said there was no early transportation to Yerevan. Of course there was a marshutka waiting there, but a parked marshutka is really just a bus shelter until all its seats have been filled, and in the morning this is usually a slow process. That particular morning was no exception. I waited, sitting patiently in the back seat, for about an hour and a half until there was no other place to squeeze anyone. I had been hoping to get to Yerevan by 11 in order to catch the marshutka to Tbilisi where I was due to meet someone the following day. If I didn’t make it I would miss a week of work at a camp in Georgia that I had been looking forward to working at since March.

Yerevan is about and hour and a half away from Yeghegnadzor. We left at about 9:15. At first I tried to read but, as with all rushed travelers, I seemed to think that there more attention I paid to the road the faster we would go, like if I looked frazzled enough and stared intensely out the window the driver would take the hint and drive even more rampantly and manically. It didn’t work,. We went the usual pace until, after about 20 minutes we came to a total stop. I groaned. The men all got out to look over the engine and see if any of them could identify would needed to be fixed to get us moving again. After about 15 minutes I noticed they were beginning to light second cigarettes and drift away from the engine, without getting back in the marshutka: a bad sign. I leaned my head against the window and let out a long weary sigh. I had left the house at 7:45 and now at 9:45 I was barely a twenty-minute walk from my front door.

After some deliberation we were routed to another marshutka that passed by, or almost all of us were, I alone was left after a great jostling effort to drag goods and children into the limited open seats of the replacement. By the time I reached the other marshutka I found myself staring into an open door of a full van, no sympathetic face to be seen. I pleaded to sit on the floor, but what is usually a valid request was denied me and the marshutka sped away, leaving me alone with a sullen driver and no foreseeable way to Yerevan. I asked him what to do, despite the fact that I already knew the answer. He shrugged and said I would wait for the next one. Of course. Of course I would.

For a while I paced back and forth, hoping that a passing car would pick me up along the side of the road, but almost every car that passed looked completely full, either with people or tomatoes, of which some cars were so full that it looked as if they had no driver, just happy piles of tomatoes piloting Ladas down the road, taking themselves to market.

Eventually my relief came, by that time I wasn’t sure it mattered, but regardless of whether or not I’d make the Yerevan-Tbilisi marshutka I was happy to be moving again instead of imagining things about tomatoes by the side of the road.

At times I thought, “maybe I’ll still make it, we’re making pretty good time, it might be possible.” I had been told that the last marshutka left either at 11am or noon. My hope was that I’d still be able to catch the noon departure, if it existed. I clenched my teeth when we stopped for one of those unpredictable smoke breaks that some drivers indulge in and that others never bother with. Luckily these are never very long and soon we were on our way again, the mood a little lightened by the cheap tobacco mirth the men had all brought back into the marshutka with them after the break. Children turned around to peek at me and out the windows from their mother’s laps, while the mothers talked quietly about food prices and the men stared stoically ahead or rested their foreheads and the back of bouncing jump seats. We were getting into the swing of the journey and this relaxed me a little. If nothing else I thought I’d go into Yerevan, beg for some sort of Tbilisi passage, find nothing and resign myself to an afternoon stroll through the capital and maybe a cup of coffee somewhere and some letter writing. The trip, I decided, wouldn’t be for nothing, regardless of what happened. Than the engine stated sputtering and we pulled over, still not even half way there.

It quickly became apparent that there was nothing that could be done, after a look at the situation no one made any movement to act, in fact I think I even saw a few looks of total resignation pass over the faces of the crowd the moment the hood was opened. Other cars that slowed to see if they could help were quickly and curtly waved away, as if they had been onlookers to something far more disturbing that a broken-down engine. Still in the marshutka, but diligently observing the scene outside, the women and I began to discuss our impending fate as the oft seen, squalid and desperate looking party along the side of a broken down vehicle. Like a scene from The Grapes of Wraith, we would bow our heads against the dust and the weight of our mental anguish while awaiting some kind of miracle, hollow-eyed and hungry.

To pass the time I went out to smoke and soon found myself trying to converse with a fellow passenger who did not seem to share my desire for conversation. After trying to figure out what was going on and when we could expect to leave (tomorrow, next week, when the first snows fell) I made the brutal mistake of lamenting my fate to the guy standing next to me.

“This is second time this thing to happen to me today!” I whined piteously.

“So what?” but the way he said it doesn’t really deserve a question mark. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. ‘Shut up, I don’t care’ was what he was really saying.

My cultural adaptation may not be so far advanced to prevent me from saying certain stupid things, but after a year here it has reached a point where it allows me to immediately see the folly of what I’ve said before I’ve finished saying it. This was just such a case. I wanted to erase the idiocy of my feeble complaint by saying something, but nothing was going to work, apart from saying” well, enough of this bullshit” and promptly walking over and fixing the engine with a single deft blow to the hood, like the way one would imagine The Fonz would fix a car. Only by doing something so gracefully cool would I be able to salvage some kind of dignity.

I knew it was bad when the driver just started walking away. I mean everyone there had cellphones and even in remote areas, Armenia has really good reception. The guy could’ve called anyone, anywhere, instead he slowly, not at all confidently, began walking down in the road. In curious manner that suggested that any minute he might change his mind and start off on a different course, though the weeds or toward the distant mountains. I imagined if we were in Japan he’d probably be kneeling on a mat and unsheathing a sword by now, that’s how dejected he looked. I wanted to run after him and get my money back and start walking to Yerevan, rather than apparently just resigning myself to death as it seemed most of the people around me had done. I started out to catch up with him, but after a few minutes of jogging my own apathy kicked in. It was still a long way to Yerevan, but busy enough on the road where hitchhiking would be difficult. I lit another cigarette and blinked into the blinding sun.

After a while the driver turned around and started walking back. Worst of all we could see he didn’t even go anywhere, just walked down the street for a while and turned around. Our spirits sunk and some began to listlessly drag their stuff off the marshutka to hitchhike or walk. But, as if sensing the hardship and heartbreak, an empty marshutka, blasting duduk-laden festive music, suddenly pulled over and stopped. The driver pulled open the door with a big smile on his face, we smiled in response. A little bit of room is cleared and in no time at all we’re all getting in and finding our seats, laughing, and happy to be saved. Best of all, I noticed there was something novel and carefree about the marshutka, the driver didn’t seem at all serious, like he was just out for a drive and decided he wanted some company right when he saw all of us on the roadside. The music continued to play and as the people get on I hear them all laughing about something, something beyond their own thankfulness, something inside that’s actually funny.

I pulled myself into the marshutka, ‘whoa,’ I thought, ‘who peed?” “Who peed all over this thing?” Because no doubt someone had. The smell was like one of those urinals in a high school basement that the janitor has apparently decided is not worth his time.

“How good this smell is that is coming!” I found myself remarking to my happy travel companions, hoping that they will appreciate my joke. An old woman smiled at me and pointed to the back seat, “look there.”

I looked under the seat and saw my own curious expression reflected back to me through the benign and peaceful eyes of a sheep and before I could even sit down we were tearing down the road again.

I’ve got a huge American map on my kitchen wall now. Patti, my sitemate who’s leaving in a week, gave it to me after cleaning out her apartment. Of course there was probably little question as to who would get the thing since nearly every time I went to her apartment at some point I would approach the tapestry of states, union, south-west, Maine, and travel the roads for awhile in my imagination, imaging routes that I would take when I returned home, Montreal, through Vermont, back to California along the ten, changing to the 8 after Phoenix to finally see San Diego. While everyone else talked in the background about the snow falling outside, or what happened on the marshutka I traveled those roads, revisiting many of them. Dawn in Wyoming, almost five years ago, traveling by van. I wrote a postcard to someone at a gas station about the gas station itself and, as a result committed the scene to memory; Queens from Jamaica Station after a rainy layover at JFK; Memphis looking like something from a 1950s TV show, like Cuba without all the fedoras and white walled tires; Missoula, still hot late at night after a long summer afternoon, smoldering with casino lights; gauzy visions of early April morning in Vancouver, BC; Fox theatre in Detroit at 16, at 23; a bowl of coffee in a service station-cum-café as persuasion to spend the afternoon walking through Denver in February, where snow etches out faded graffiti; the European obelisk in Indianapolis; somnambulism: Portland; driving barefoot through Nebraska, like walking through warm summer fields; and a coyote skulking carefully down a suburban cul-de-sac in the hills above Los Angeles, where the moonlight dissipates into the city’s carmine glow; three-day old coffee spilled in the cup holder, cigarette butts between the seat cushions, CDs loosed from their sleeves and rolling along the dash, halogen rest stops, I’ll love you by Reno, and run out of things to say by Arizona, by mining towns, the water running out on the long stretch between Death Valley and Las Vegas.

And still so much that I haven’t seen between Kansas and Alaska, South Carolina and Florida but I know people that have come from these places and gone back to them since I have been here. I’ve listened to people talk about the places that they’ve come from and why they have to go back to them, people who don’t want to go back, people who have moved. “The last volunteer was from San Francisco, too,” my last host family asked, “why are you so different than her?”

I wonder how much I’ve begun to embellish America over the last year away from it. I’ve always been curious about the various corners, the small to medium-sized towns where, perhaps some new movement is fomenting. What are they doing in Brownsville? Biloxi? Is something about to happen in one of these places? Could I be a part of it if I move in time? I’ve never really understood exactly what it is I’ve expected to find on the edges of America. I’ve looked up pictures of Boise and Las Cruces on the internet, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that will indicate an ideal, but even if I did chance upon a place full of 24-hour taquerias and dive bars with punk rock records on the juke box I know that in the end such things would not hold me to a certain place. I’ve already lived in places that have had such things. In Chicago most taquerias are open all night, but the burritos are better in SF, in Minneapolis there are a number of dive bars where you can listen to Dillinger 4 records, but they’ve got those internet jukeboxes all over the place now where you can listen to anything you want.

In the end you’re left with the people. Surely it’s the people that make a place worth living in. At least I can say that every time I’ve moved the people are missed well above what ever conveniences and incidentals the place itself actually offered. Sometimes I miss walking down Dolores in the afternoon with a cup of coffee by myself, but I miss talking over the cover of my book to my old roommate Mikey a hellovalot more. All the places I uses to go were populated by certain people and, inevitably, my memories of those places are tied to the people that I experienced them with. If I didn’t have the people all my memories would be of ghost towns. But then why move at all? I’m not really the type to suddenly find myself at odds with my friends, especially not to the degree where I’d want to move away. But here again it comes back to the abstract of a place, just a name, just an idea, an abstract on the map. Maybe it’s the mystery behind it all, or maybe it’s still the people, not the great friends that you share your daily life with, but rather a new crowd, that’s into different things and speaks Spanish or something. Of course there’s a recurring note here, namely that one who moves frequently is really only seeking out the same experience over and over again. It’s an approximation but basically the same: friends, favorite places to eat, drink, walk, listen to music, be alone etc. In every place I’ve ever lived I’ve had these things.

I think it’s really just a youthful desire to feel like you’ve looked, so in the end, when you end up somewhere you feel like you got the best deal around. Even though you are vaguely aware that the differences between places are actually quite marginal.

So the slow summer wind pulls up the corners of my new map in the kitchen, the papery flapping sound jumbling all the Midwest, Southeast and Key Wests together.

II. I’m not really sure where to begin with this. So much has happened in the last week or so that I’m just going to have to begin with the most absurd points and work my way into the more serious stuff.

A moment ago I came to the conclusion that internet dating is right for me. Based mostly on the notion that inevitably my ability to relate to a person is what ultimately attracts me to them. That’s not entirely a blanket statement, sure there’s other things about a person that make them attractive, but almost everything else, I mean every other quality fades after a while except the feeling that you can open yourself up to that person, that you can rely on them to listen and, what’s more, to actually understand your garbled thoughts. Certainly, we’ve all realized this before, but, I think, what we haven’t realized, is that internet dating, no matter how vapid and sterile it might seem, is actually a well-spring of like-minded people, who believe in communication, why else would they be on the internet? Also, when you think about it, on the computer, all you can do is communicate, it’s like the greatest foundation for building a relationship on communication because it doesn’t allow for anything else.

Then again, what is communication without personality? So much conversational minutiae is lost between the keys of an online conversation. There’s no sarcasm, no body language, only smiley face icons and ellipsis. One could probably carry on an internet conversation with someone for years and still be surprised when they finally met them by how they really acted and who they really were.

Then again, if internet-based communication bars the emotional basis of face-to-face conversation what does the say about all texts, notes, letters or even literature, certainly there’s something more than 900 pages of chatroom antics to be found in Les Miserables.But I guess I can’t say that one lacks something the other has, based on format when they are of the same format. If we can come to love the Fantines and Remedioses through a few chapters, perhaps the same can be said of real people. In fact maybe life can truly imitate art this way, all the better, life becomes art when people date on the internet.

Yeah, I don’t really buy any of that either. It still seems to awkward to me, and there’s a lot of heroines I’ve liked but I don’t know if I’d really want to meet any of them.

I have also recently discovered what seems to be a near permanent link to the internet which is soaking up my extra time. I really didn’t want to get the internet for this reason. When I’m not doing anything I end up looking at my aforementioned map for about twenty minutes and then going off and looking up mid-sized American towns on Wikipedia, trying to get an idea if I’d like to visit El Paso or some place, perhaps even live there. I don’t really seriously consider the latter, but anything uncertain is open for consideration and so come the thoughts about living in National City, California. It seems Tom Waits lives there and there’s a high enough crime rate to make me think I might be able to afford it. I’m not entirely sure where it is, south, or south-east of San Diego, probably just a scattered suburb in the desert, but in the languor of a hot afternoon I imagine it’s some last bastion of cheap, fun and friendly living in southern coastal California, yet another place with cheap Taqerias and bars where everyone comes up and introduces themselves if you’re sitting alone.

Perhaps I am misusing the internet, maybe it’d be better, more constructive, if I took up internet dating.

The other day my friend Raman died. It was sometime in the late morning when I found out. My friend Ben was visiting from his site in Jermuk. The weather was late-morning-hot, the kind of heat that makes you feel like you’ve already wasted a whole day sitting around even though it’s only ten o’clock. I was expecting two couch surfers to come that day, later on the evening. As Ben arrived via the earliest marshutka he had woken me up at 9:30 or so. I was still sleeping as I had not been able to make myself comfortable enough to sleep the night before amidst these damn sandwich bag pillows that have no yield, and my reasonably decent couch that I kept trying to roll off for some reason.

For some reason I like being woken up by visitors, provided I enjoy their company. It reminds me of college. It nice to just wake up and have your day start off with a friend who wasn’t around when you went to sleep. I can remember a few instances of waking up late, sometime in the afternoon to someone sitting on my bed.

“You’re still sleeping, man? C’mon we gotta’ go! The lake/Oregon/Minnesota/the local diner awaits!”

In fact, I remember sometimes almost intentionally sleeping in to wake up to such an event, of course in the morning it doesn’t take a lot of effort to keep sleeping, but when you feel like you’ve got an incentive, that’s good living.

Feeling pleased and tired I decided to make pancakes. Of course coffee goes great with pancakes so I made a few cups and, while it was boiling some potatoes fried with onions and peppers sounded like it would round everything out well enough so I began making that as well.

The sun shone through the window, Ben and I were talking across the kitchen about graphic novels and the general art of story telling. The pancakes didn’t rise very much but with syrup they were still really good. Fried potatoes are always good.

The dishes were easy enough and we moved back into the living room to finish our conversation. I gazed at the sunlight that drifted through the dust motes above my couch and listened to Ben alternately talk and type on my computer, as he checked listings for apartment rentals back in Austin where he’d be moving when he went back in less than two weeks. I felt happy for him and I felt happy for myself. The first year had fully passed; the volunteers from the year before were returning home. I had completed something, and felt confident enough to do it again, maybe even make it better. Ideas bounced flitted through my mind for the coming year and ways to make more of an impact in the university, and Ben and I talked about the last year in Armenia

When Ben left to go fax some papers I decided to take a turn at the computer. Happily, I noted that I had a message from my friend Mikey. It was brief. “I got your letter. Call me, it’s important.”

“Sure, why not?” I thought to myself. “It’s been a good morning and a phone call to a good friend would only strengthen that impression, enhance the morning.”

I have a thing about making phone calls to the states. I really only like to make them when I’m feeling really good, otherwise I worry that I’ll complain too much or not be able to think of anything to say. I’ve developed this practice through experience. After having moved many times over the past couple of years I find calls to people no longer in my vicinity can leave me feeling very disappointed if I don’t time them right. Sometimes, a call can succeed in making one feel incredibly far away from people if not handled correctly. I can recall a few instances of this from when I was living alone in northern California. Making lonely 2am phone calls back to San Francisco and being greeted with the din and excitement of a familiar bar, something that clashed so desperately with the sound of frogs peeping outside my quiet, mildewy northern Pacific apartment. Even worse, having little or nothing to say can make one feel as though one has grown apart from good friends, that there are no common interests or that one’s life has become so boring that no events are worth describing. I hate that feeling, so I make it a point to call people when I’m feeling good, ebullient enough to chat about nothing for a while and appreciate it.

Usually every time I try to call Mikey he doesn’t answer the phone. Who knows what the hell he’s always doing. His voice mail message only furthers one’s sense of curiosity.

“Hey, this is Mike, I’m doing something that involves me not answering my phone right now, so if you’ll leave your name and number I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.”

In my case “as soon as I can” is whenever I try to call him again, as calling Armenia is pretty expensive from the states.

I called an got the message after a few rings.

“Hey…Jonny?”

A pleasant note of happiness and uncertainty. It wasn’t the message, but the “hey” part sounded exactly the same and fooled me for a second.

“Hey, Mikey, what’s going on, man?” for some reason I always say “what’s going on” when I haven’t talked to somebody in a while. I guess it sounds a little more elaborate and celebratory than “what’s up” to me.

“Nothing, man, how are you, it’s good to hear from you.”

“Good, man I’m good, I’m good. What’s going on?” I say again to further the impression of my jubilation at having made this phone call.

“Well, I’ve got some bad news.” I can’t really remember if he called it bad news or not. What’s important is that I got the impression that Mikey was going to tell me about an author’s death. He always seems to find out about them before me and usually reports it first thing, perhaps so that the conversation that follows will be a fitting discussion of the author’s works. Something of a fitting tribute to the life of anyone who dedicated their life to letters.

“Raman died, Jonny.”

“…”

“…”

How the hell do you start talking after someone says something like that on the phone?

“How’d it happen?”

That’s probably the most moronic way, but usually the first thing that comes to mind, the first sorta’ feint at real grief the mind comes up with.

“Car accident, somewhere in Nevada, he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.”

At this point one’s verbal skills are reduced to:

“Fuck.”

Which I continue to say, pretty much after everything else Mikey says for the rest of the conversation. Sometimes varying the tone, drawing it out like a sigh, sometimes sighing before I say it and adding it after like some kind of punctuation mark. Because the only thing you really can’t do with this word is request more information, I mean you can’t say it like a question, it would sound absurd. Because of this I occasionally add “really?" to the end

“Fuck, really?”

It still doesn’t sound very coherent, my end of the conversation lags on like a sputtering tire, gradually losing its air, flapping off the highway and into a rest stop.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Like a locomotive regularly pumping the wheels back and forth with burst of steam, slowly, between words.

Mikey talks and I puff. I flap.

When the conversation is over and I’ve gotten the basic details, I notice that Ben has come back from faxing. He seems to have understood the gist of the conversation despite only being able to hear my laconic responses.

“You ok, man? Do you want me to go?”

I honestly didn’t know.

“No, it’s ok, man. Hang out, it’s ok.”

I had absolutely nothing to say. I told Ben what had happened, somewhere in Nevada. I tried to keep talking to avoid any kind of awkward silence. Ben, not being able to know anything about my relation to Raman or who he was at all, probably had no idea if I was going to collapse and rent my clothes while screaming and dumping the ashtray on my head or if I’d just shrug and say well, you know, the only guarantee in life. Want some more coffee?

I told Ben a little about Raman, how he and I had been friends through my later years of college. How we never really called each other up to hang out , but were always glad to see each other at all the social events we attended in common. I told him about how Raman was a beautiful kid with positivity and energy to spare. How I couldn’t remember if I had seen him after we met in Phoenix a few years ago. That he lived in a very energetic way that was at least some consolation, that he had gotten a lot out of the short life he had. That he and I used to spend Tuesday afternoons sitting in in front of this used bookstore he worked at and acted as caretaker to. How one of the most romantic encounters I have had with anyone was in the bookstore after the bars closed.

I didn’t tell him about how Raman had been the last person I said goodbye to when I moved away from the city I went to college in and, as a result, passed some of the best years of my life. I didn’t tell him how Raman had me do a mural on the back wall of the bookstore that as far as I know is still there. How he had me design a recycling bin for the bookstore, that I stared at, painted and repainted over an entire July, sweating like crazy in my old basement. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t remember what Raman’s last name was, despite the fact that I knew he knew mine, as I heard him say it a good number of times. I didn’t mention Beggar’s Banquet, nor Mac’s nor Dagwood’s, the name which just occurred to me after not being able to remember it, attempting to find a hint of it on the internet and only drudging up a bunch of old memories by finding listings for a bunch of other places I had forgotten about, but not Dagwood’s, the name of which occurred to me after finishing the search. All the conversations we shared all over the place, agreeing on all kinds of things, most of the time proposing ridiculous ideas for local change at three o’clock in the morning and drawing up basic plans for their implementation.

When Ben left, I found myself sitting in a local café, not wanting to be there and trying to read Charlotte’s Web, which I had checked out from the library only a few days before, unaware of the pending significance of my selection. I got the feeling that Raman would’ve liked to find his friend reading a child’s paperback classic, with a notepad nearby ready for notes and beginnings to letters that probably wouldn’t be finished. So much of what we had often discussed was based on the mutual enjoyment of this vaguely aesthetic way to whilie away of the hours. I decided to write a letter to Raman, telling him what I was doing after I heard he died, how I thought he’d like it, but after a while I gave up, the café was hot and I felt guilty, given that I had never written him a letter before, it seemed stupid on my part to start now.

The couch surfers from Hungary came a few hours later. There was nothing I could do, I’d been telling them for months that I would be available. When they arrived I tried to excuse myself by hinting that there’d been some bad news from home, but I guess I was too vague, because they only proceeded to ask me what I was doing in Armenia and how I liked it there and what were some things to see around town and whether or not it was hard to learn Armenian.

The next day I had to leave for camp in the evening. I woke up feeling despondent, not so much from the news itself but from the unreality of it. I wanted to talk to someone, I wanted to remind myself that this had really happened, because Armenia was closing in around me. I had work to do for the camp, I had to clean up my apartment, my window broke, actually fell out onto the entrance stairs to the apartment, it could’ve killed someone. Like Raman, Raman died. I had to practice break dancing if I was going to try to use it to teach some English to the campers. Had to get this damn trash outta’ here, this damn trash that’s been piling up for ever, making the hall way look like a damn dump, just take one minute to get this bullshit pile of trash outta' here. then to the university, then maybe lunch.

In the evening I called Colleen. It was early in the morning Michigan time. I had to leave to catch the camp bus in 20 minutes, an escape in case the conversation didn’t go well.

“Uhh, Hello?”

I woke her up.

“Hey what’s up. Sorry if I woke you up. I knew I’d be able to get a hold of you if I called early enough. What time is it there anyway?”

“Hey, uhh, nine thirty.”

“Nine thirty!? Wow you should be up anyway, I don’t feel so bad now.”

“I had to close the bar last night.”

“Oh, you still work there? The place I visited last time I was in town?”

“No that place closed, this is a different bar, but I’ve got a new job, I’m going to start teaching in the Fall.”

Everything changes. Only a week before my friend Jules had had a baby. Now Colleen is going to be a teacher and Raman has died. A great friend and a great kid, a reunion that would never take place, someone I shared things with that I will not be able to reminisce with anyone else about, because no one was around. Someone I created memories with that I’ll always have. Someone who sent me a clipping from an old Sci-Fi magazine, an advertisement for the Peace Corps from circa 1967 that made me feel happy to be here. Here, Armenia, where I got the news that my friend had died just before going to work at a summer camp and tried really hard to reconcile these two things.

I called from camp the next morning. My friend’s voices greeted me talking from and about the list of bars I wrote about above. Everyone sounded good. They were remembering. I hung up the phone and remembered with them for a while, then I went into breakfast.