Leaving Armenia

So I've resolved to update this blog once a month. It is fitting considering "Amis" means month in Armenian. I wrote this essay a long time ago but I want to repost it here since I will be leaving Armenia for the second time in a few days. My next post will reflect on this most recent trip but for now... here's a reflection on my first experience:

As I walked through London Heathrow Airport to catch my connecting flight from Yerevan to Chicago, I couldn’t help but think of how drastically different this experience of leaving Armenia was to entering Armenia. I thought back to four months before when I took a taxi on my own to the Prague airport, had a traumatizing and lonely airport experience and finally boarded a plane at 11p.m. I sat down amidst the largest group of Armenians I’d ever been exposed to in my life. I began asking people around me if they were Armenian, a silly question I know—considering the flight I was on, but it was an instinct I’d had my whole life as I sought out connections to the people with whom I shared my identity. On that flight, had I not been subdued down into my seat by those brutally-honest, no-BS Armenian glares, I probably would have sought out Armenians who shared my understanding of Armenian history: genocide, diaspora, tragedy, Anatolia, etc. When I arrived in Armenia I desperately clung to a conversation with a diasporan from L.A. and hung onto every last word of English I could get until I found myself languageless and alone at the Yerevan terminal.

The flight home couldn’t have been more different. I arrived at Zvarnots with a host of Armenian mothers who’d adopted me during my time in Armenia. First, my host-sister/mother, Liana—my rock. Living with her couldn’t have been more perfect… an inspiring woman, wise, hard-working, who loved her country and yet dealt daily with the pain that it inflicted upon its young, ambitious citizens. Ruzanna, whom I had worked for at Manana Center, but who also took up the job of caring for my like my own mother, who is her dear friend and truly treated me as her daughter. Her hugs, her food and her commitment to the children of Armenia made me want to stay forever. Margarita, my dear friend Elen’s mother who cared for me as her daughter was off studying in London. A woman with whom I could share few words due to our languages, and yet spoke everything through her smile and energy. And my friends Armine, who had so generously taken my mother and I on a wonderful adventure in Lori and shared her home, family and art with us. I left Armenia gazing back at this sea of love that I longed to stay with. I knew then that I’d have to return.

I felt Armenia being pulled briskly away from me like a comforter in the chilly morning as I left my first flight and walked towards the generic mix of people traveling from London to Chicago. I heard English all around me and I couldn’t hear people calling each other “jan” and it was in walking through the airport that my departure hit me and I broke down. As I was walking towards my connecting gate I noticed a man wearing a deep 5- o’clock-shadow and pointy shoes and I said to myself: “I don’t care how you do it, you are sitting next to that man on the flight home.” I caught up with him and began to speak Armenian with him. He was so thrilled to have someone going to Chicago to speak Armenian with. When we boarded the plane we switched around seats so we could just talk with each other. I refused to speak anything but Armenian with him and even busted out my dictionary (in vain) to communicate everything that I loved about Armenia. He was a former army officer who had left Armenia and was working for an Armenian rug company in Chicago. He seemed lonely in Chicago, but I was so thrilled to know he was going to be there.

Less than a week after I returned from Armenia I had my (Armenian side) family Christmas. That day I prepared a whole presentation of photos of Armenia to show my family. I thought about how I wanted to present Armenia and I figured they’d all be so curious that I’d just be able to roll with anything they wanted to know. I’d got all of my cousins presents from Vernissage and I was determined for them to all understand exactly where they came from. But as the night went on, I realized that only a year before, I hadn’t really ever thought about Armenia “the country” that exists today. Though my family was glad to hear that I had had such a great experience, I didn’t get the impression that any of them were so desperate to share it with me and plan their big trips to Armenia. All of my little cousins picked up on the word “ha” and said it throughout the rest of the night, but that was the only word. The running joke became that all their presents from Armenia were made from the “tears of Armenian orphans” as I tried to explain that every single gift I got them was hand-made and so special. They loved their gifts. I hear the boy cousins still wear their leather “I <3 Armenia” bracelets and are very proud of them. I don’t mean to make them sound uncaring… they loved their gifts and they were so proud that I’d learned Armenian, but I just forgot how much the Armenia that I’d come to love so much is not a priority for so many Armenian descendents today. Wonderfully, my brother developed an obsession with Armenia while I was there and can’t wait to join me for my next trip.

Now that I’ve explained to you where I was coming from and where I came back to before and after my experience with Birthright Armenia, I can tell you about my time in Hayastan.

I had a bit of a crash-landing in Armenia. My first day was a little stressful. I had just ended a long relationship back home. I couldn’t say “Hello” in Armenian. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was homesick (for the first time in my life). I thought I’d landed in the Soviet Block and I was stuck here for four months. I’m an adventurer, but I just didn’t feel quite up to it in my first couple of hours.

I began to relax as I joined Liana on walks around Kentron in the evenings, went out to the countryside with Birthright Armenia, met some English speakers, saw some great concerts at smoky little clubs in Saryan. On one of my first nights, Liana’s friend asked me “Do you feel more Armenian here?” and it didn’t take long for me to respond “No.” I actually felt that being in Armenia pointed out how glaringly American I was. The way I talked, thought, looked, smiled, and particularly, I was self-conscious of how little I knew about Armenia. This will no doubt horrify some of you but I barely knew what Karabakh was before I came to Armenia.

Things picked up though. When I started my language classes it was a sigh of relief. The ability to communicate with people is my top priority wherever I go and I relished in learning “my language”. I’d studied many languages throughout my life but I can’t tell you how blissful I was when I learned to write the Armenian alphabet. When I’m sitting in class back at NYU now I will write Armenian letters and words and sometimes the entire alphabet in the margins of my notes. I really think its one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and been able to do.

Everything changed again when I went on the Karabakh trip with Birthright Armenia. On our way there we stopped at Tatev and my breath was taken away. I sat in the small rooms looking out over the ravine and wished for the group to accidentally leave me there forever. When we went out on the ridge to the small lookout I felt like I’d found the most beautiful place in the world.

Karabakh shook me. In a profound and, I think, very positive way. Growing up in the country where war in engaged at a distance and from an intensely anti-war community, Karabakh made me reevaluate my understanding of war. It didn’t make me like war, but it made me think twice about the things that people will fight for… will die for. As I stood in the trenches, where my future-friend Asqanaz stood for the past two years of his military service, and looked through the cracks at the Azeri soldiers on the other side, I felt strange and foreign feelings of patriotism, defense, and pride. Later I would have very interesting conversations with my teenage students about war, peace, service and more. I can’t express how deeply conflicted and confused the whole situation made me, but what I can say it that it certainly gave me a new perspective.

Birthright Armenia encourages us to find our own place in Armenia. A few weeks after I arrived I was pulled up onstage at a small bar on Pushkin called Calumet to play what would turn into a 3-hour long jam full of musicians, jams, instruments, and voices. That night I met and played with a young man who would become my best friend in Armenia, Sasha. This was the start of my 3 month long love-affair with the music scene of Yerevan. I couldn’t stop playing, writing, performing. It seemed like every night I met another unbelievably talented musician and heard new and exciting music. This part of my experience in Armenia, though incredibly sleep-depriving, made me sink deep into Armenia.

The more time I spent with local musicians, the more attached I became to Armenia. While Birthright had provided a wonderful source of friends and collaborators for me, I found myself connecting deeply with people who’d grown up and lived in Armenia their whole lives. It was hard too though. It never left my mind nor the minds of my friends, students and coworkers, that I could and would be leaving Armenia eventually. At the end of my trip I was actually in complete denial of leaving because I’d felt so much that Armenia had become a home for me. And for me, home is a place that you can leave often, but always return to. This idea comforts me as I sink back into my life in America.

I loved to walk around Yerevan. It was common for me to walk between Pushkin Saryan khatchmeruk, Haraparak, Matenadaran, Vernissage, and Lover’s Park numerous times a day. Sometimes while I’m walking around the streets of New York I close my eyes and imagine my walk to work in Yerevan. It actually still baffles me that my time there, for now, is in the past. It’s hard for anyone to understand this feeling that hasn’t just left a place that profoundly changed their life.

Whether is was Karabagh, Lori, Sevan, Dilijan, or even Calumet… every place I went I thought “Please just leave me here forever.” Though I know America is my home, it is the country that raised me and that has held all my hopes and dreams for so long, I am happy to say that Armenia has made its way into my heart and will never leave. Though I am back here in America now, back on a speedy-schedule, trying to finish college, trying to plan (futilely) my life, Armenia is never far from my mind. Really, it is my friends in Armenia… who are never far from my mind and as I communicate with them through the blessings of modern technology, it is hard for me to find the words to describe how much I miss them, but I hope they know how much I love them, and how much I await my next opportunity to come to Armenia and sink in deeper.

Volunteering in Armenia-- A reflection

What makes someone want to volunteer? This was a question I asked myself a lot during my time in Armenia. Not so much because I had just taken four months off of school to come to Armenia to volunteer, but more because I spent a good deal of my time there trying to encourage others that volunteering is a desirable thing to occupy your time with.

When I first arrived in Armenia I was told I was going to be volunteering at two locations: Manana Youth Education Center and Naregatsi Art Institute. I didn’t know much about what I would be doing beyond teaching an English class to an unknown number of students of an unknown age. The first couple of weeks, I honestly felt like I didn’t know what I was doing there. Here I was, a 20-year-old student who has never taught a formal class before, never written an official grant proposal and certainly never learned how to understand a budget. I’d volunteered a lot during my life: built houses, done food drives, flower-pot fundraisers and more, but I’d always had a pretty firm idea of what I was doing, and more often than not, someone to tell me exactly what to do.

This kind of volunteering was different. I soon realized that I was going to have full control over the creation of an hour long English class twice a week with anywhere between 8-20 kids from ages 9-16 with English abilities ranging from “hello” to Jane Eyre. I learned quickly that the grants that I was applying for were serious and heavily depended on my ability to complete them correctly. More than anything, I learned that when working in a new place, you have to be flexible and sometimes spend a lot of time listening and trying to understand before trying to change anything.

This kind of volunteering is not the kind of hammer-and-nail, soup-and-bread kind of volunteering that I was used to. It required a serious commitment of my mind and my energy. When I first realized this, I really intimidated me and I kept wishing that someone would just give me a manual and tell me exactly what to do with my students and how to best help my co-workers. These anxieties would come and go throughout my time in Armenia, but by the end when I was reflecting on my time, I felt that I’d left something good at each of my volunteer sites and also received so much from each as well, even if I hadn’t noticed along the way.

After my first class at Manana, I no longer feared teaching a class. I didn’t know how to cope with students of such diverse ages and capabilities, and I didn’t really know where to start. I decided to start with what I was good at: music. Something I quickly learned about Armenia, which seems to be true in much of the rest of world, is that the Beatles were the most important thing that happened—ever. I can’t tell you how many of my friends in Armenia answered the question “How did you learn English?” with “The Beatles”. My friend Elen, who had taught English at Manana before and was an avid Beatles fan, suggested I start there. My first lesson I had about 10 students. I cut up the lines from “With a little help from my friends” and handed each a line from the song. Then I had them each read their line out loud. Then I sang the whole song for them and had them line up in order of when they heard their line sung. Then we sang the whole song together. When we finished I looked around and they all had huge grins on their faces. After that, I did a similar exercise with the Shel Silverstein poem “The Long-Haired Boy” except I made them dramatically act out their lines.

With both Manana and Naregatsi I was asked to think of ways to help the organization, whether by finding grants online, or rethinking structures or fundraising efforts or organizing events that could help bring more people to the organization. This part was much harder for me. Interacting with children was easy, but writing official statements about an organization you barely knew, trying to understand how their budget works, and trying to understand all the dynamics of an organization was really difficult for me. Something that I learned about grants in the process of writing them is that you need a lot of planning. You have to try to guess how to present your organization perfectly to a foundation or government program to fit their specific goals, and even if your idea is brilliant, it may not be taken seriously if that idea is not already supported by a bunch of other organizations. It was a true challenge and sometimes I felt like I and my colleagues put a lot of work into a total shot-in-the-dark. Still, I learned so much from it, and despite the fact that the organization maybe didn’t receive the grant, I think they learned a lot from the process. For example, the process of writing a grant and fundraising made us have lengthy and in-depth conversations about how to develop the organizations, how to talk about what we do, what materials we were missing in order to present a complete, legitimate budget, where we could do better, how we could expand the organization, what grand project we would plan if we received this grant, etc. In this capacity I felt that I was very useful. As someone who’d grown up in the U.S., in non-profit arts organizations, in a far away place where free-market capitalism and its simultaneous philanthropic sector has existed for centuries, I had a very fresh perspective on how to operate in a non-profit arts world.

When I felt that I needed more time using the skills I felt most comfortable with (music and interacting with youth) I went to AVC and I asked if there was any way that I could do more of that. I was soon introduced to Warm Hearth, a home for adults with disabilities. I went to Warm Hearth for about 6 weeks and would play music and sing and dance with the residents there. They were so kind and welcoming to me and definitely the most appreciative when I managed to learn a new Armenian song. They were eager to stand up and perform for me as soon as I was too tired to perform for them. Soon after starting at Warm Hearth, I was introduced to a school for young autistic children. My first time there I sat and played about 2 hours of music (mostly my own, the Beatles, and any other folk tune I could come up with, sometimes just improvising). I looked around the room at the adults, sure that they were bored and unsure whether the kids were enjoying it at all. Sometimes the children would approach me and I decided to just sort of let them have at my guitar. After all, it was probably a pretty foreign object to most of them. I would say “Uzum ek navakel?” and one of them would come up. Sometimes they would just place their hand on mine while I was strumming, some would detune my guitar, some would bang on the wood, and one even took a liking to the taste of the strings. Still, I let them explore it as an object and it thrilled them. I watched their eyes grow in fascination as they realized that they could control the sound coming out of the guitar. From what I could tell, it really empowered them to be able to control sound.

During my last week in Armenia, I started to really feel like I didn’t want to leave. I organized an event for singer-songwriters at Naregatsi with seven songwriters from Armenia and the diaspora. The evening packed the place with lots of young faces who had seldom been to Naregatsi, a place that celebrates and preserves Armenian traditional art as well as encouraging new forms of art and music in the new generations. My students at Manana organized a party for me and we sang and danced together. They gave me a photo album with each of their pictures and a little note in Armenian so I could practice Armenian at home. I e-mailed them all on Armenian Christmas and got lots of excited, beautiful emails back which I responded to with glee. I can’t get enough of their energy and optimism.

I’m realizing now that I completely forgot the answer the question that I began this whole reflection with: what makes people want to volunteer? This was an important question for me because one of my main goals in Armenia was to convince my students that volunteering could be a thrilling experience. On December 5, fifteen of my students joined me at the cascade for International Volunteer Day. I gave them all trash bags and gloves and we spent the next 5 hours running around Yerevan picking up trash. I was really nervous that I was going to have to stop a lot and organize some fun game so they wouldn’t get tired, or bored, or upset or disappointed… but I didn’t. They had so much fun. They were running from courtyard to courtyard, climbing up trees to pick out trash, laughing and skipping all day (I know it sounds cheesy but its true!) When I finally made them take a break they were restless and wanted to get back out there. At the end of the day, they were all so happy and cheerful. One student even asked me if he could take some trash-bags with him on his way home to pick up trash. One asked if we could do this every day. I was so thrilled. It was clear to me that they had easily picked up the volunteering bug. It’s not really a bug or a foreign, “Western” concept. It’s the simple idea of doing something good for people and the world we live it. Though it was truly difficult to leave Armenia, and I honestly can’t wait to get back, I left with a smile on my face knowing that I’d helped a few people in Armenia realize what a joy it is to do something for someone else, whether it be picking up their trash, singing them a song, or just flashing them a smile.