Guests Find Home

6/5/2010 12:53 AM

Every American is aware that guests, like fish, stink after three days.  That is why I’m at the critical stage of managing my entrance into a family not just as a guest who must be fed all the food in the house and waited on hand and foot as the codes of Armenian hospitality demand, but as a functional, contributing family member; or, if that is too ambitious, a likeable, friendly, if slightly odd boarder from the big city who dabbles in village life.  Peace Corps loves to challenge traditional gender roles, but to challenge I first have to have legitimacy in the traditional male gender role, something that I feel American social science, dominated by theories both feminist and queer, fails to appreciate, and, by extension, most NGOs.  So today at lunch after school, I managed to communicate to Papa that I’d like to work on the farm. 

I changed out of biz-cadge and into the American farmer’s blue jeans, grey T-shirt and sneakers.  Poppa wore his button-down shirt tucked into slacks and plastic gardening shoes.  I came out of the house to find him working in the manure field.  The manure had been mixed with straw and laid in a field about eight feet wide by fifteen feet long.  Poppa was cutting into the field with a flat-headed shovel, cutting out dried bricks of manure to use as fuel from the winter.  When he saw me, he quickly cut the last six bricks from a row, and began his tour of the farm. 

Here are our three cows, he gestured towards three bulls tied to stakes.  They’re for meat. 

Then he gestured to the wide open fields around the town.  The milk cows roam around town, he indicated, eating grass.  He walked me to a flock of sheep and introduced me to the shepherd.  Six of these are mine, he explained, the other ten are his.  They’re for meat, milk and wool.  Mama and I make yogurt and butter and sell it in town. 

(continued 6/5/2010 1:42 PM)

We walk to a row of abandoned stone buildings built into the hillside south of town.  They’re as wide as a house and hundreds of meters long.  Their roves have long since collapsed, and the grass inside grows thicker than on the fields outside.

Soviet farm buildings.  He explains.  For pigs. 

“But no one around here raises pigs,” I want to ask, but lack the Armenian.  A cow munches the plants inside.  We walk down the hill now, with purpose, until we come to the backyard/garden/farm where Papa’s brother, my host uncle, lives with their Papi and Tati, his wife, her unmarried sister and his two children, Georgi (9) and Emi (8). 

He meets us wearing an old sweater and pants, along with his Tatik, who has stunningly pale skin and long white hair braided in a circlet on her head.  Despite the sunny, 70-degree weather, she is wearing a long black wool coat that comes to her feet.  She tells us we are to repair the sheep shed, which is slanted to one side and lacks a roof.  The shed is built of metal poles pounded into the mud, covered with a lattice-work of rebar and walled with scrap metal, all held together with strong wire and twine.  First we pull the poles out of the mud.  This is complicated by the necessity of freeing the poles from their twine-and-wire attachments to the walls and rebar roof.  In this, I help by pulling out my multi-tool, which sports a wire cutter in the pliers, a metal file and two knives, one straight, one serrated.  Both my father and uncle are duly impressed, but prefer to use their dedicated wire cutter and a straight kitchen knife. 

Once the poles have been removed from the ground, they are replanted and pounded into the dirt by my uncle, standing on a 55-gallon drum, while my host father guides them into the ground.  We then retie the roof and walls with wire.  Tatik hands us a sheet of scrap metal and we slide it onto the rebar lattice.  My uncle jumps on it, standing on two meters of rusty metal pounded into mud.  Papa, Tatik and I hand him pieces of waved roofing made out of a sort of brittle cement or ceramic, and occasionally another piece of scrap metal to move around the roof on. 

Once the roof is finished and the walls are checked and retied where they need to be, we go into uncle’s house for lunch.  Their living room is luxurious, covered in traditional carpets with an upright piano in the corner.  His bathroom is as large and well tiled as an American’s, with a heated towel rack.  In fact, the entire house has central heating, as well as a modern washing machine in the kitchen.  We eat potatoes with chicken, with all the appropriate Armenian side dishes of lavash, cheese and greens.  Georgi and Emi watch us silently.  We talk, as well as we can, about America and Armenia and what I am doing here. 

He is strong, he tells me.  He wrestles.  Would I like to wrestle with him?  No, I laugh.  “Chararoutian Corpus.” Peace Corps.  The family gets the joke and laughs.  What about arm wrestling?  Okay, I tell him.  Mek. One.  We are gathered in the living room.  The whole family is watching.  We place our hands.  He knows all the tricks, I can’t gain an advantage on him from the beginning.  There are several tricks in arm wrestling, but only two strategies.  The first is to overpower and quickly gain an advantage on the opponent by immediately using your full strength.  The other is to outlast your opponent, match his strength, keep his hand as close to the center as possible and wait for him to exhaust himself.  I decide on the latter.  We are closely matched.  But I showboat for the family.  “GAAAAAAAAHHHHH” I yell.  I’m hoping he will laugh, and lose some grip, but he doesn’t.  In the meantime, he has increased his strength and pushed me a third of the way over.  I refocus, but too late.  He has me at a superior angle.  I submit, he’s very happy, and the family all laugh at my ridiculous scream and tell me how much they like me.  He drives me and my host brother and his children to see Ararat in the distance, then I play dodgeball and monkey-in-the-middle with Georgi and Emi and Arman.

6/5/2010 7:25 PM

An extremely minor and fast flash of panic.  Have spent the entire afternoon in my room, first completing the previous journal entry, then messing around on the computer, then taking an exceedingly long and pleasant nap.  Six hours alone in my room.  Not good.  Should be out learning Armenian and working and what have you.  Then a flash of panic at the thought of going out of my room and having to be “on,” mind constantly running in high gear trying Armenian words, wearing appropriate clothes, being polite and pleasant, minding gender norms, trying to read emotions and intents of everyone around me. 

6/5/2010 9:34 PM

As soon as I walked out the door, mama told me to wash up, that dinner was on the table.  It’s Saturday night, so a big fancy meal.  Fish (Trout?) from lake Sevan wrapped in Lavash.  Then I walked out on the farm with poppa and Georgi.  Poppa taught me the cardinal directions (I can’t remember them), discussed his love for the land and asked about farms in America.  I communicated that yes, we have cows and chickens and lots of wheat and that corn was a big thing.  Poppa is the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer, with his three meat cows, one milk cow and six sheep, his peach and cherry trees, his wheat fields and wife and two sons to work the farm.  Still, he couldn’t farm alone.  His brother owns the tractor, his father tends the sheep in the fields, and the entire town looks out for each other’s well being.  After walking the farm, he told me to go play with Georgi and Emi.  Now the sun is setting over Mt. Aragats, stormclouds are rising over the mountains to the Northeast, the boys are watching TV, mama is asleep in her rocking chair after a hard week.  I have the window open to air out my room before the storm and am listening to Lorin Maazel conduct L’nationale orchestra du France in Uranus, the Magician, from Gustav Holst’s symphony of the planets.   

6/5/2010 9:50 PM

Mamajan just woke up and brought me a bowl of freshly picked and washed fruit.  Life is good. 

6/9/2010 12:48 AM

I asked Papajan if he wanted to come to New York.  No, he doesn’t.  He wants to stay in his village where the grass is green and the sky is blue and things smell good and he has his house and animals and family.