Armenia (PST)

My Peace Corp Armenia blog

By Justin T. Barbalace

I have made it to Armenia and have started my Pre-service training (PST) witI started my PST in Armenia on Jume 6, 2006. I have been placed outside of Vandazor. It is a small, peacefull village with wonderful people.

First the Legal Stuff: This is a account of my personal experiences with the US Peace Corps in the Republic of Armenia and not an official Peace Corps website. My eperiences most likely differ from those of other people, expecially if they are in a different region of the world. Take what I day with a grain of salt and don't expect everyone to feel as I do.

June 22, 2006

We first arived in Yerevan by plane and met almost all the volunteers currently in country (76 I hink). Almost half them are getting ready to COS (Close of service). Then we were bused to Vandazor where we stayed for 3 nights while we got over our jet lag and started to adjust (and had some very basic language classes). There was then a Cerimony where we all were introduced to our host families and some local dancers preformed.

Our Language and Culture Facilitators (LCF) ROCK!The LCFs in our village are Sveta and Stephan. They are not only out language teaches, but help introduce us to the culture and customs. They play a big roll in our integration into Armenian life.

Our village is of course the best, a village of about 250 families. There are 8 of us placed in the village, all of us with different families called host families. I don't think there is a bad family among them and they all play big rolls in our learning the language and culture. This being said, My family is the best, but we will talk about them in a minute. All of us in our village are in the Community & Business Development Sector (CBD), with 3 subsectors: IT (mine), Business Development, and NGO. Among our Tallented People we have Kyle -IT, Kathy-Business, Betty - Business, Eileen - Business, David - NGO, Linda - NGO, Chyrl - Business (but IT has adopted her), and myself -IT.

Like I said, we each have our own host families, and of course mine is the BEST!

July 16, 2006 

They consist of Emilia (Mom), Henreak (dad), Saco (Brother), Hermina (Sister) and her 2 daughters Nala and Shanie. The family has a couple cows (for milk from which they make cheese, yogert and butter, a couple pigs (New years Dinner) some rabbits (I don't think any of them have made it to my plate yet..), a cat (Pest Patrol), and a dog (intruder alarm). They also have 3 nice sized gardens that they grow many of thier vegtibles for the year in. Most food is home made and the ingrediants are local. almost nothing is waisted, if there are leftovers from dinner, they are served the next morning for breakfast.

Always a reason to party! On July 4th we were supposed to have a US independance day celebration that would get all of the villages together, but due to rain it got cancelled. That did not stop any of the Villages. Every village had a celebration for the volunteers thrown together at the last moment and I think everyone agreed that it was better then bringing all the villages together. The mayor of our village had an old closed resturant opened up and got the power turned on for ours. Everyone came together and put together a BBQ. We had dancing and music and played games, some Armenian and some American. We the kids even got us playing musical chairs, and many times the chair that was removed was the one that broke. While we had no fireworks and the such we all agree it probably was one of the best 4th we have had. We sang for our host families Proud to be an American and God Bless America and since the 5th is Armenia's Constitution day they sang for us one of thier songs.

The Language has been expecially trying. I have spend a lot of time studying and find it quite difficult. It is a very old language and the Armenian's take great pride in it. Early on the Armenian's saw the advantages of creating a written alphebet and started documenting and writing everything down, and preserving those documets. As Armenia was the first country to declare Christianity (300AD) as its netional religion, it created its alphabet based on that religion and it is said that all the original 36 charicters (now 39) have a christian meaning. An example of this is the letter for the Ku sound (not the asperated Kgh sound or the Lazy Kuu sound, but the short/tight Ku) as in Christ is a crude picture of Christ on the cross. One man was commisaned the create the alphabet and went to great lengths to give every sound its own letter, then taught it to children to make sure it worked. (See the Alphabet dood on the right and the letter Ju - my letter). The Armenian's take such pride in this language that they have created a monument with individual statues on each letter (we visited this monument on July 10, 2006).

While Armenia is a small country and for around the past 500 years has been ruled by others, the language and the alphabet have survied event through the soviet times as the primary language. During Soviet times the Armenians had erected statues of people that wold recreate letters that would quietly show thier religion and faith. Many of the original books of the bible only servived in there Armenian translation and then were translated to other languages.

More History! Yesterday we went to visit some OLD Armenian Monastaries, Haghpat and Sanahhin. They both are over 1000 years old and are stuning examples of armenian archetecture. While the roofs on the out side are pointed, the insides are doamed and made of stone. It is beleived that much of the Stone achetecture found in europe originated from the Armenians.

More Soon!!