Let Me Tell You A Little About My Host Village

Let me tell you a little about my host village, where I will be living for the next ten weeks while I learn Armenian, after which I will move to my permanent site somewhere else in the country to begin my service.  We are the first Americans to live here, the first and maybe only Americans anyone in town will meet.  It’s a farming village just above the hill from town that was an industrial center in Soviet times but has struggled with the post-industrial, post-soviet globalized economy.  Our language trainer Lala, an Armenian woman who has spent her life in public service in Armenia, quotes Bob Dylan and wears traditional carpets that have been turned into vests with matching handbags, introduces the town this way:

“This is the first year they are hosting Americans.  They can do it this year because they have just gotten running water.  Let me tell you an anecdote about this town.  A month ago, they came to me and said, ‘Lala, we cannot host Americans.’ And I said, ‘Why?’  They said, ‘We have heard that Americans cannot walk in a street with shit in it.  How could we clean all the cow shit from our streets before the Americans get here? We will have to work all day and night just to keep it clean while they are here.’  I told them that Americans may not be used to such things, but that they will learn to live with it.”

Here is what my host family has.  They have a comfortable, loving home with a mother who teaches Armenian and a father who farms (the mother takes exquisite care of her family’s home, clothes and cooking as well).  They have a garden with a dog and chickens and vegetables and a cow for milk and some sheep.  They have a television, a computer, a home telephone and a soviet-era telescope to look at the moon on clear nights.  Until I came, the brothers had their own bedrooms, the parents have a master bedroom looking out on the garden, the town and the fields and mountains beyond, there is a living room/dining room, a kitchen, a flush toilet in a closet and a bathroom/utility room with a sink and shower with hot water box.  They eat plenty of lavash bread and cheese, potatoes, fresh yogurt, salad greens, apples, rice and pasta and a little bit of meat with every meal, followed by fresh brewed coffee stronger than an espresso. (The fact that I am writing this at 2:18 am after a coffee four hours ago is testament to this)  Breakfast is usually a combination of bread, yogurt, jam and thick, crystallized honey with walnuts.  To drink, they have sparkling mineral water, homemade apricot juice (which they pour into a container of store-bought apricot juice) and yogurt drink.  They can drink the water that comes out of the tap, even if I cannot, but I have never seen anyone drink plain water.  They live in a town where they walk down the streets watched by families that have known them all their lives and everyone will report a child or teenager’s misbehavior to his or her parents.  The eldest son is able to go to university and his work in a solar energy laboratory every morning and return home every evening.  They don’t have a car, but they don’t need one to get around town, and if they want to visit their relatives in nearby villages they can pile into a Lada taxi lacking airbags and power steering, but sporting a digital FM radio/CD/MP3 player.   There is a primary school with a college-educated principal who has studied world history.  The school (where we learn Armenian) is a five minute walk from my house on the edge of town, including a stop to pick up Maggie, the redhead from the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago who lives next door to me and play a little impromptu football with her five year old host brother.  She’ll play with him too, and the first time she did so, my host father burst into my room to tell me to come quick, that Maggiejan was playing football.  The first morning we walked to school together, I carried her books, just because I could.  Around them, the countryside has hills and caves and flowers in the distance are snow covered mountains and raging lightening storms.  The town isn’t wealthy, but it’s very rich.

What do they lack, that an American small town has?  There are no megastores, only a few small village stores that function like bodegas, carrying soft drinks, alcohol, cigarettes, bread, meat and candy.  The one at the edge of town is run by a four foot tall grandmother, helped by her shy four-foot-two 11 year old granddaughter, who demanded that we come in for free ice cream when she met us.  “Accept it once,” said Lala, “and insist on paying every time afterwards.”  The town has no high-speed internet, although it does have telephone service and cell phone reception.  Only the main streets into and out of town are paved, but there isn’t much traffic, so kids can still play football in the middle of it.  There are no playgrounds, and the one sports field has a single backboard-less basketball hoop in front of a flat space where the grass has been worn down, so kids play football and other games in backyards and the town’s streets, arbitrarily creating goals out of convenient alleyways.

And then there are moments like this.  Maggie and I are walking in the fields south of the village with her host brother as an escort to reassure the townspeople that we’re not off to do god-knows-what-god-knows-where with each other.  We meant to go to the ridge overlooking the town, but her brother has gotten tired and a little scared walking through grasses and flowers that come up to my knees and his chest, so we’ve turned around and are walking back to town when we come across an old woman, a tatik, in the shade of an abandoned farmhouse.  On her back is a burlap sack full of potatoes, tied to her shoulders with string.  She is struggling to get up, and a young boy is helping her, but isn’t strong enough to lift her. 

Barev Dzez, Tatik

Barev Dzez, she says, beaming at us, and reaching her hands towards us.

I help her up.  The Armenian for “let me carry that for you” is far beyond my grasp.  I mime carrying.  I point to the bag, myself, my shoulder.  I am very strong, I point to my arms, flex muscles. I try to pick the bag off her back, but it is tied to her so tightly I cannot move it.  She is smiling, so happy that I helped her up, and she understands me, but won’t let me carry her bag.

Votch, Votch, votch.  No no no.

The boy shrugs and walks on.  The grandmother keeps walking through the fields.  I briefly consider picking her up (she can’t weigh much more than the potatoes) and carrying her home, sack and all.  Maggie and I and her brother walk on.  Anyway, what could I possibly for this woman, who can’t be stopped or killed by Stalin, by poverty, by patriarchy or even time itself?  Just help her up and let her on her way.  I can’t give her anything she doesn’t ask for.