My Alternate Universe

It’s a tad facetious to think that someone as unqualified as myself could summarize an entire culture/people in a few paragraphs on an amateur blog. I’m not pretending to do that... I only took two anthropology courses in college. All of the information to follow is a matter of observation and opinion: don’t hold it against me.
If I were to sum up the people of Armenia in three adjectives, they would be: proud, resilient, and generous. Pride often has negative connotations in religious America- we have the handicap of the English language, which only has one word for pride, be it good or bad. If I were writing in French, the word I would use would be “fierté”. That is righetous pride- pride in family, civic pride, pride for your accomplishments, etc. For example, I have “fierté” that I took some pretty decent pictures when I was 15, so I am not embarrassed to include them here. The Armenians have raging pride in their country and their church: when you step into someone’s home, they immediately search for your Armenian heritage. You don’t have any? No problem, they’ll make you an honorary Armenian. They’ll say “oh, but you have a prominent nose, you must be Armenian.” (I almost got offended at that one) “You speak with such a good accent, you must be Armenian.” “You are such a good person, you must be Armenian.” And so you become Armenian. Some anecdotal evidence: when my brother was a missionary in Armenia from 2002-2004, he was in the home of a family with young children. (Side note: my brother is even blonder than I am.) One of the little girls in the family offered to cut her hair to make my brother a wig, so he could look more like them. Because to them, he is Armenian. A fluid sense of ethnicity helps the matter for us blondies that want to integrate: Armenia was formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, which sent lots of Armenians to Russia, and invited some Russians in. Furthermore the borders of modern-day Armenia are a fraction of what they once were, so ethnic Armenians live throughout the Caucasus region. Not to mention, there are more Armenians living outside of Armenia than there are within its borders.
This pride is a symptom of another characteristic: resilience. The Armenians have been kicked around for centuries. Have you ever heard an old Jewish lady talk about the woes of the Jews? That tirade was nothing compared to what an old Armenian could go on. And rightfully so: Armenia’s Mt. Ararat (now within the borders of Turkey) is traditionally where Noah’s Ark landed at the end of the flood. Armenians are very proud of this history, but can’t just go over and hike this holy mount. Turkey-Armenian relations, for those of you who have been living under a rock, are volatile. Armenia was the very first country in the world to accept Christianity as its official state religion. Christianity has flourished, but between the Pagan invasions and Soviet scorn of religion, the Armenian people had to practice in secret. No matter, Armenian Orthodoxy has survived all of that. There is no wonder that Armenia is the land of many churches... that’s what you see. Everywhere. Carved into mountains sometimes. Literally carved into stone. It’s amazing, and a testament to the ability of Armenian people to flourish under oppression. Take that, Stalin!
I saw a lot of day-to-day resilience too, just in my simple interactions with regular people. Armenia, though once a beacon of scholasticism, has an incredible unemployment rate. When I was there, it was at 74%. We complain during the worst recession since the Great Depression that our unemployment rate is high, but it’s less than 10%. I wonder what the recession is doing to Armenia. People don’t let it discourage them that they can’t get jobs: they go to school, get their PhDs, and do what they can for their country. Teachers in Armenia have a monthly salary of $10, and they rarely get paid. But kids don’t sit at home and do nothing, they still get an education, and they still fight to improve their country. I knew a teacher who went to school and taught every day, but hadn’t been paid in months. Of course poverty is obvious on the streets, with people living in squalor and hoards of children running loose. A rich person in Armenia has running water 24 hours a day. My brother knows much more about the economy of Armenia, as he did research there as part of his Undergraduate Honors thesis. You can get in touch with him for more on that.
Even in the face of unemployment and poverty, I have never been among a more generous group of people. I was regularly forced to eat fresh vegetables and succulent pastries until I was past the point of nausea, even though I had no way of knowing if the family would be eating for the rest of the week. And the food is gooooood. Once, I was writing in my journal at midnight after a long day, assuming everyone was in bed already: “Zara’s mom just ran in very cutely and handed me a plate with 4 apple slices and 4 apricots... it was so cute and kind... how could I say no? I ate all of the apples, which are perishable, and 2 apricots to be polite... AH! She just brought me cake too!!” We were constantly showing up in villages where hundreds of people would be there to greet us, thrilled to see strange faces. We visited a small mountain village, and someone let slip that it was my birthday. I had dozens of roses from strangers by the end of the day, and no idea what to do with them all. They were beautiful.
So, here are some pictures of Armenian people, accompanied by journal entries describing them:
“We again went into the oven to watch the preparation of the lavash, where Joanne got to make one and was absolutely pleased as peaches. I also got to make a cake or two of the kind that we had at Aghod... ohh they’re so good.” (Traditional Armenian ovens are kind of like Indian tandoors.)

“Another melancholy stop was the deaf school. Miss Karine translated for the principal as he told us all about their school, and how the children come from as far away as Georgia because it’s the only deaf school around. He took us to their sewing classes and their art classes and showed us the students’ work. It was really quite miraculous to see deaf children learning such life lessons from a school that just replaced lip-reading with signing two years ago.”

“A whole bunch of adorable village girls swarmed around us (including three little girls who I referred to as my fan club, for they followed me around waving and blowing kisses for hours) ...”

“Old ladies, I think, were created to bargain. Short, stopped, wrinkled, mangled, toothless, and absolutely brutal. They are absolutely relentless and so hard to haggle with! One would think, what can they do, gum me to death? But oh geez... it’s indescribable. Thus I never get my mother’s tablecloth at Vernisazh market, but I did get two bracelets for myself (from male vendors: pushovers really.)”

“Eventually we got to take showers in the public showers, one U.S. dollar per hour split to 4 people, and it was beautiful to lose all of the grime. Afterwards Will and I played street soccer with the neighborhood boys, who were absolutely nasty! They were so good.”

Finally, a quote that I came across when cleaning my desk, and for some reason didn't throw away (now I know why...): "I should like to see any power in this world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard and whose prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia, see if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert, let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their homes and churches. Then, see if they will not laugh again, see if they will not sing and pray again. For, when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia." -- William Saroyan

My favorite thing to do is travel. My second favorite thing to do is relish in my travels... look at photographs, chat about cultural experiences, and generally brag. I really like maps with the pins in them for that reason. Much to my chagrin, however, I haven't been able to leave the country since my London Study Abroad in 2006. I know I shouldn't complain about that... but I do. Luckily, (and definitely not by chance) my friend Laura was called to serve a mission for our church for 18 months in Armenia. I spent 3 weeks in Armenia in 2002, and so now I get the chance to reminisce, with the excuse that I'm educating Laura about her future home.
The time that I spent in Armenia has meant the world to me. I learned a lot about the world, humanity, and myself in the short time that I was there. I also learned about the way God works when my brother was assigned to serve a mission for our church there in 2004. It seems like it must be pretty common to go on these missionary excursions to Armenia if I know two people now to do it, but to give you an idea: .5% of all missionaries assigned per year go to Armenia. That's right, one-half of 1%. It's one of the smallest missions in the world. And when the church assigned my brother to go there, they had no way of knowing our family's connection already. I will never be able to deny the hand of God in that.
So why the heck was I in Armenia as a 16 year-old? Well, it turns out that one of the cities with the most concentrated Armenian Diasporas in the world is Boston. Growing up, I thought that everyone was Irish Catholic or Roman Catholic, and knew at least three Armenian kids. Boston is a funny place. So a large group of these Armenians in Boston set up a sister-city gig with Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. And the Cambridge-Yerevan Sister Cities Association (CYSCA... don't laugh if you speak Russian, it was an accident) was born. CYSCA is involved in education, outreach, relief efforts, etcetera, and they came to school and made the call for hosts for Armenian exchange students, as well as the opportunity to be an exchange student. Being culturally aware even at such a young age, I eagerly signed up. Our efforts were funded jointly through the State Department, and we were given the aim to promote "Democracy and a Civil Society" through our efforts with our Armenian counterparts. This little program was deemed so important by the State Department that they funded the Armenian students' entire trip to the U.S., and gave them each a computer for their schools. They also funded half of our trips. There were about 30 students in all, I believe: 15 American and 15 Armenian. This was no small endeavor. (Here's a link to the CIA World Factbook information on Armenia.)
Having the students in our home was fascinating. We weren't allowed to take them to normal malls (in Boston, the Burlington mall was forbidden, and Chestnut Hill would have been punishable by death) for fear of extreme culture shock. They came to school with us, lived with our families, and did some fun excursions of their own. My exchange student, Zara Tepelikyan, was very shy at first, but eventually opened up, showing us her sweet, fun personality. I could share a lot about their trip to the United States, but I'd rather focus on the outbound side of the journey, in the name of educating Laura (and her friends and family) and generally bragging about how awesome my life has been.
This has been a very long prologue to my Armenian Tale, and has taken much longer than I expected. So instead of continuing on with Chapter One right now, I'm going to sign off and give y'all a break, transcribe old journal entries, and scan my old negatives from 2002 and make some pretty pictures for the next post. Stay tuned!

No matter how far away you roam...
My sister Alexandra is coming home from the Middle East tomorrow for Christmas break (we're all basically peeing our pants in excitement) and my brother and his wife are coming in a little over a week from Boston, so I've been thinking about my most exciting journey home. It's too good a story not to tell.
In 2005 I spent 2 months in Senegal, West Africa on a BYU Study Abroad with the French department. I could write a book about the experience, like how to turn down marriage proposals politely (especially when they're asking you to be the second or third wife...) but one of the most adventurous parts of the whole trip was trying to get home. After the 2 months, a lot of my fellow students and I planned a 3-day stopover in Morocco, kind of a last hoorah before leaving the motherland for the good old USA. We flew from Dakar, Senegal to Casablanca, and then took a 3-hour train ride to Marrakech. Marrakech, by the way, is a very fun place to visit for a few days. We spent lazy hours by the pool of our hotel in the nice weather, walked to some cool mosques and other buildings, and spent a good chunk of our time in the souq (marketplace commonly found in Arab countries) drowning ourselves in the most delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice known to man, narrowly escaping death by crazed henna artist, and even being assaulted by domesticated monkeys (that's a whole new story for another day.) Well, after our pleasant sojourn to transition from third-world conditions in the villages of Senegal to iPods and malls, we had to get from Marrakech to Casablanca to catch our flight home. No problem. Our plane left some time in the mid-morning... maybe 9 or 10:00 am? so we took the earliest train out of Marrakech (around 4 or 5:00 am) to make it to the airport with enough time to check in and board. With a 3 hour train ride and then the hour minimum for international flights, we were cutting in close, and there was no room for egregious errors. But we had no choice, the trains didn't run all night.
So... we got our butts on the train with our 2 months worth of Africa-smelling laundry and souvenirs. No problem there. We had to switch to another train line in the middle of Casablanca to get to the airport, so the train stops, and we all start getting off the train. Here's where the fun starts: half of our group is off the train, half is still on. We're trying to negotiate baggage. The train starts moving, leaving the station. Panic. Our connecting train comes into view, further panic. After the last of us jump off of a moving train, we realize that we have to go down a flight of stairs, under the track, and up another flight of stairs to get to the other platform. Our connecting train is already at the station... we have seconds to make these trips, which would have been a feat with ourselves alone, forget about our baggage! Luckily, Africa is full of friendly, helpful people that contradict our inherently chaotic way of looking at things. A bunch of guys just jumped off the train, looked both ways before crossing the tracks, picked up our bags and walked across the tracks (totally illegal, I'm sure) and got us on the train. Thanks guys! You saved us!
(this says never get on or off the train until it's made a complete stop...)
For some of the travelers, the excitement ends there. Chrissie Tsaturyan can tell you the story of being detained in Salt Lake with a sword herself... as for me, I got to JFK and split from the group continuing West to Mecca (aka SLC) and I just had a short hop to Boston. Funny thing was, it was raining. My flight was canceled. So here I am in JFK, smelling like mother Africa (sweat, dirt, body odor, fruit...) and completely out of money in anything but obscure African "francs CFA" with no cell phone and no way to get home. Hilarious. So, I eavesdrop into what the other passengers are doing. Before I continue, I should note that I'm the person who gets really really stressed out about little things, but things that should worry me don't bother me a bit. So I walk straight up to a group of young professionals, and say "hi, I couldn't help but overhear that you're going to rent a car. Do you think you could drive me to Boston too? You could drop me off anywhere, if I can just use someone's cell phone I'll arrange a pick up." I'm sure I looked like hell, all haggard and unkempt. Luckily for me, someone who looked even more like hell also wanted to solicit a ride (the guy was freaky, I'm telling you) so they took me as the lesser of two creepy evils. Yay! I heard "Holla-back girl" for the first time on that car ride--these accountants on a business trip were amazed at how culturally behind I was. Bah. They dropped me off at the car rental place at Logan, daddy picked me up, (I saw his Jag for the first time) and I got home and took a serious shower.

Mucking around in a spice stall in Marrakech