I haven't had it in me to sit down at my laptop and write a coherent post. Here's some notes on village life while I'm at the I-Cafe.
My family has been harvesting hay for the winter, to feed their cows. My host brothers spend their days in the fields with scythes, getting sunburned. My uncle spends his days working on his Belorussian tractor. When the tractor is working and the hay has been scythed, he drives it around to the fields and bales it with a hay-baler-trailer. By the time I get home, there is a pile of hay bales in the backyard as tall as the house. I help my family lift them into the attic and the barn to store for the winter. "Thanks for helping us," they tell me. "Thanks for the yogurt and cheese," I tell them.
A blond young man, much too pale to be a villager, stopps me in the street. "Your teacher, she is Ms. L?" He asked me in English. Yes, she is. "What is her number?" Are you her friend? He cannot answer the question. "This is where she lives, yes?" She does live there. One of the other PCVs goes to get her. "Tell him I am not home. He likes me. I do not like him. We were in school together." she says. The young man parks the green car with two of his buddies in it in front of the house I'm in with some other PCVs. He comes in. "Where is she? What is her number?" She's not here, we tell him. Maybe she went to Hrazdan, a 40 minute drive away. He doesn't believe us. We don't have her number. "Maybe you do, you just don't want to tell me." Well, if you're going to lie, lie big. I directly confront him. She's not here, I tell him, and we don't have her number. Intimidating body language. Stand tall, cross arms. Wearing mirrored Sunglasses. No more friendliness, no clueless American abroad. Careful, measured, direct speech. Suddenly I'm glad I weigh so much more than everyone else, that I'm a head taller than him. "You do, you're just not saying," he says. But as he says it, he laughs, and looks away, and I've won. We don't have her number, She isn't here. Go home. Do you understand me? He's not going to go home right away, he doesn't want to lose face that much. But he stops bother us, sits in the car for 15 minutes while I watch him, then turns and drives the three hours back home.
Teaching model school in the village, we expected eight or ten kids to show. Instead we got fifty or sixty. One boy begins to disrupt the class. I pick up his chair to move him away from the disruptive group of boys and to a studious group of girls. "Ganatsi, Ganatsi," I tell him, using the imperative. He runs out of class. "What happened?" I ask my PC trainer, observing the class. "You told him to go. You meant to say, 'Ari,', come. Don't worry, he'll be back tomorrow."
In the city where I come to use the internet, I run into Mormons! They're wearing white shirts and silk ties from Hong Kong, carrying the book of Mormon in Armenian. One is from Utah, the other Washington. I'm surprisingly enthusiastic to meet them, trying to preempt the creepy friendliness of the missionary. But they've been in the country 6 months and are starting to stray. They thought they would be going to Latin America and learning Spanish. They've lost the enthusiasm for their work, and are just going through the motions. In a way, I'm dissapointed.
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