Life as Usual

I could see my breath as I stepped into the bathroom, and shuddered at the thought of taking off any of my layers (let alone all of them) to bathe. But I needed to, I wanted to…even though I didn’t. The hot water caused my skin to steam, even as I soaped and shampooed and filled the bathroom with such a thick haze that I could barely see my feet. Isn’t winter fun? I stepped out and hastily toweled my hair, ever the more thankful that I had finally gone ahead and cut a good six inches off. Actually, one of the other volunteers did the cutting, probably the first home haircut I have had since I was six or seven years old. It looks quite nice and even more important, I didn’t have to feel it wet and cold down my back as a struggled to get dressed enough to move back into the warm part of the house.

Last night we headed up to the village above Vayk. This is the village my host mother and father grew up in, as well as my counterpart. The small car was to come at 6, and at 6:30 we all piled in—7 full grown adults and a toddler. The ride up was more pleasant than the ride down, me with a headache, crammed into the back seat with three other woman and the squirmy toddler, who had entirely too much chocolate (and a little vodka, licked off of fingers), my host father in the passenger seat, with his nearly six foot tall son in his lap, very drunk and talkative, and the driver who kept stopping for various reasons…to chat, to look at the city in the dark and so on. At least, I reasoned, if we were to get an accident, it is very likely that it would be physically impossible for me to move, let alone get thrown though the windshield or something. This was comforting.

Still, I am settling into my life here, and things seem normal. I realize I crave things, not because they don’t exist in this country, but simply because they exist in this family. Simple things that remind me of home, but are beyond the means of this simple life. These people are isolated from the rest of the country, the part with wealth, and it is easy to forget about each respective world when living in the other. It is easy to forget that I view 1000 dram (about 2 dollars) in a starkly different way than the vary family that I live with. I enjoy the simplicity but I miss the freedom that seems to be mutually exclusive when living with a family, even one was wonderful as my own.

I have finally summoned the courage to begin making my own breakfast (oatmeal…extravagant I know, but better than bread), after battling fears of insulting them, shaming them, or embarrassing myself. I have done quite a bit of the latter, which I am much easier able to accept than the former…I have had quite a bit of practice at this point. Still, I look forward to the day when I don’t have to sneak around making oatmeal when the family isn’t home so as to perfect my technique to avoid eliciting the much unwelcome “help.”

Freedom will increase and my health will certainly improve with some control over my diet, and over all I think I will be happier, but I will also very much miss this family. I catch myself often nowadays in some sort of a waking daydream mixed with reminiscence. It is as if I briefly forget that I am not at home. I am sitting here and it is finally warm, the new heater silently casting blue light and much welcome warmth throughout the living room, and we have just moved Gevorg’s bed in here (he sleeps in the warm room in winter), and Gero and Alvard and watching television, and tea is boiling on the stove, and things seem normal. Like next week will be Christmas break and we will put up the tree and make cookies and bake a ham. But it isn’t normal. There will certainly be no ham, and all my interactions are in Armenian, and the television is speaking Russian, and my sheets are dirty because I don’t know how to wash these giant things by hand in a tiny little plastic basin, and the family is taking their weekly bath (if that often for some of them), and we just had beet soup for dinner. But it still feels like home. And that is the bottom line. And I am really, truly learning the meaning of home and family, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the building or the city, or even the country, and blood relations don’t really matter in the end. I have lost quite a bit of independence (although I have gained a considerable amount since PST if that tells you anything), but this time I consider it to be a worthwhile trade, at least for a while. My language, my cultural knowledge, my ability to eat strange meat, my confidence….these things have all improved while living here. We don’t always understand each other, in fact we often don’t understand each other, but we laugh and laugh, and dance and sing, and eat and drink, and badger and pester, and laugh some more, and slowly I feel a part of something bigger than me, more important than me, and ultimately representative of my mission here in the first place.