PST is drawing to a rapid close—we are already on week 7. Time is such an amorphous thing here—one day it feels like I just arrived in Armenia yesterday, and the next it feels like I have been here forever. Regardless, I find myself asking where all of the time has gone. I can only hope that things will move along as quickly during the rest of my service. I have learned that too much time to sit and contemplate that realities of life here is a bad thing. There is a delicate balance to strike between productivity and reflection. Right now we are erring on the side of productivity, or at least busyness. Perhaps too much so. Maybe I have said before, that PST has been compared to hazing, and that things will slow down when we arrive at our sites.
For now, my one and only priority is to learn the language, well. I want to be fluent now, but more realistically, I am hoping to be functionally fluent by the end of my first year. It is a realistic goal, but certainly not one that everyone obtains, or even many people obtain. There is very evidently a large range of language abilities amongst volunteers, due to many different factors. I have a good start but need to keep at it. I have had some questions about the intricacies of the language, and so I thought I would enumerate a bit here. If this is something you aren’t interested in please skip ahead!
As you probably are already aware, Armenian has its own alphabet (a very old one), and so we have had to start over in terms of learning how to read and write. I am now sounding out words at about a first grade level I would guess. Well, actually, I am getting better, its just slow. The blessing lies in the fact that the grammar and the structure is fairly easy and in many ways is similar to Spanish. It is a language that uses auxiliary endings instead of prepositions and pronouns. These items exist, but everything is added to the end of a conjugated verb. So, actually in Armenian we have postpositions instead of prepositions. This means that we have to learn how to conjugate the verbs and which ones are irregular, but actually making sentences is easier than I originally thought. It also helps that there is usually not only one way to structure a sentence. So, in English we might say "I am going to the store now" But in Armenian, you could say:now, store I go....................heema khanuta gnumemI go to the store now...........gnumem khanuta heemaI go now to the store...........gnumen heema khanutaAnd it is all correct, and it uses the same three words...those pesky little articles don't really exist...as much. They do, but they are one letter, which is tacked on to the end of a word. In this case, it is the "a" at the end of khanut. What I have written above is a transliteration, or the English letter equivalent of how the Armenian letters sound. For this reason, you can find Armenian words spelled in all sorts of different ways depending on who transliterated it. For instance, the town I will be living in can be Vayk, Vike, or even Vayq.
Another tribulation of Armenian is that there are certain letters that you have to hock lugies to pronounce...kh is one of them (it is one letter, and sounds sort of like making a kh sound in the back of your throat). There is also a gh and a few others. And there are 2 other k's, 2 p's and 2 t's. In each case, one is aspirated and one is not, and in all cases, I can't tell a lick of difference, I just have to memorize how words are spelled. The flip side of this is that in Armenian there are 39 letters in the alphabet, and each makes one (and only one) distinct sound. There are no silent letters, no hard and soft c's, no combinations of letters to sound like something else...it is very straight forward. This is another reason why Armenian words can be spelled so many different ways when we transliterate them…
For the most part the grammar is similar but there are very obvious differences. For instance, Armenian uses a definite article with proper nouns. So we might say “Jill”in a sentence, whereas in Armenian, we would say “the Jill.” Interesting huh? I am such a nerd…thanks for sharing in my geek moment.
Overall, it is an enjoyable language to learn and I am really impressed everyday with how well we are all doing in five weeks of studying. We have covered far more than a year's curriculum in a college level course already. Regardless it is still frustrating, especially when we are expected to be doing productive work in villages where there is little to no English, and part of success includes convincing Armenians to think outside of the Soviet box. The brainwashing is going to be a tough thing to overcome. That, and the traditional lore:
No, drafts won’t make you infertile
I didn’t get sick because I wasn’t wearing socks
Cat hair doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not you will get married
Neither does sitting at the corner of the table
Throwing your trash in the street really is bad for the environment
The river isn’t any better
Even if it goes to Azerbaijan
Well, you get the picture. This a different peace corps experience than, say, Africa, the pacific islands, or some Amazon village. In all cases, it is more developed for the most part and one point was a fairly advanced country. In some cases it has regressed since the Soviet Regime fell, in others it has simply stagnated. In either case, progress was not helped by a massive earthquake that damaged infrastructure during a time of high poverty. More than 15 years later, there are still areas that are uninhabited due to earthquake damage. Armenia’s history is very long and quite fascinating. I will not, however, go into detail here as I am no expert. But, if you are interested, there are resources on the web.
The relatively high level of development is part of what makes it so difficult to be here at times. There is a couple in our group who were in PC in Papua New Guinea a few years ago and they have commented that in some ways it is more difficult to live here than in a country where you have a pit toilet and carry your water from the well. It is because things are close enough to what we are used to remind us of home yet far enough away to remind us that we are definitely not there. It is like everything is just not quite what it should be. I have learned a lot from living in these conditions. Perhaps this poem says it best:
I am learning…
What freedom really is.
How to be myself in a culture that is not my own.
How to suffer silently and with dignity amongst those who do it everyday.
To not take the little things for granted,
And not to neglect the big things that are important.
To live and love with all my strength, no matter what.
To adapt my mindset towards adjustment
And to embrace that which is given to me
Rather than to take and to expect that which is not my own.
Or that which simply cannot be.
And to make the best of whatever becomes
Even when (especially when) this entails discomfort and reevaluation.
I have learned…
That the things I really need, I already have.
And no matter the difficulties and challenges
I have the support of people who believe in me,
Who will enable me to find the tools necessary to succeed
From within myself and those around me,
Rather than to expect these items to be given to me.
Success is my choice.
And my obligation.
As a person who is normally fairly articulate, it is especially trying to not be able to really express myself to those around me. I find writing to be one of the best outlets for this frustration. So, thanks for being my audience, maybe you will see more poetry in the future.
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