Wednesday, April 04, 2007
profuse apologies
I know what your thinking...how does Jill manage to go almost six months without posting a single entry and then posts 5 in one day? What can I say? I have no excuse other than that I live in Armenia and perhaps that I have grown a bit lazy. The four posts that you will find previous to this one were all written at various times and never finished. Thus, I never posted them. It dawned on me the other day that I probably never will finish them so i decided to just go ahead an stick them on the internet. I hope you enjoy. I will have some new (actually current) posts soon...I promise :)
sock salesman
The door to door sock salesman came again this afternoon. Yesterday a car drove through the neighborhood honking its horn and selling the cabbages piled floor to ceiling in the back seat. I have no use right now for socks or cabbages yet I want to help the poor people whose lives have been downgraded to this existence of just barely scraping by. The reality is that I can’t help them all, or even a majority of them. I have spent nearly the last two years in the Peace Corps in an attempt to “help them help themselves.” It has been successful, to a degree. But the process of rebuilding a country is a slow one. In the two years I have been here I have seen a modicum of improvement but it isn’t enough for the people who have spent the last 15 years waiting for things to get better again.
Prosperity is promised along with the word “democracy” but no prosperity can come of the level of corruption that abounds in this country at the current time. People have given up on prosperity and democracy along with it. They just want their old lives back. The longer I am here the more I start to think “who can blame them. Sure, they were living under the hard rule of the soviets and had no freedom of speech, nothing to buy, a crooked world view, but they were warm, their houses were intact, they didn’t need to cut down their own fruit trees to heat their homes.
I had a very interesting conversation with a progressive Yerevan family the other day. They talked about how the first few years were dark and difficult but that everyone helped everyone else, they got by in hopes of what was to come. Now it is every man fo himself. People are rude and distrusting. The family says this is because it has simply been too long. People have been in survival mode for so long that are just shutting down and looking out for themselves. I’d have to agree.
Prosperity is promised along with the word “democracy” but no prosperity can come of the level of corruption that abounds in this country at the current time. People have given up on prosperity and democracy along with it. They just want their old lives back. The longer I am here the more I start to think “who can blame them. Sure, they were living under the hard rule of the soviets and had no freedom of speech, nothing to buy, a crooked world view, but they were warm, their houses were intact, they didn’t need to cut down their own fruit trees to heat their homes.
I had a very interesting conversation with a progressive Yerevan family the other day. They talked about how the first few years were dark and difficult but that everyone helped everyone else, they got by in hopes of what was to come. Now it is every man fo himself. People are rude and distrusting. The family says this is because it has simply been too long. People have been in survival mode for so long that are just shutting down and looking out for themselves. I’d have to agree.
electricity (such novelties)
Sometimes I look in the mirror and I think “hey, I’m an adult,” and that surprises me. I am afraid that I am transforming into the helpless child that everyone seems to view me as. I am not sure how I will react when I can solve simple problems for myself again. This week has been an electronic nightmare. My water heater won’t stop breaking, the last of three times taking the entire fuse box with it. The old soviet rotating fuse contraption that looked as if would open some sort of trap door when turned finally gave up the ghost. The electrician replaced it with a modern fuse with twice as many amps! Of course, my whole apartment is still connected to this one fuse. The brilliance of the whole day was that they had to call my “electreek” (the guy who reads my electric meter, I guess) to turn off the power in the entire building so that they could work on my fuse box. I am sure I am very popular with my neighbors right now.
Of course a shiny modern fuse doesn’t solve all of my problems. I now need to call the guy who originally installed it and get him to move the water heater (which is mounted on the wall above my bathtub) and all of its associated hoses, pipes and even the faucets, several feet to the left. This is because the regulator inside isn’t working (or is set too high), effectively turning my water heater into a steam blaster. The panel that opens the water heater is against the wall prohibiting anyone from actually fixing it. Of course it is…
Oh yeah, and my lamp broke too. In trying to ascertain if it was simply the bulb that needed changing (it wasn’t) I replaced it with a working bulb that I somehow managed to cross-thread and now can’t remove. It seems I can’t even replace a light bulb. I need to get out before I cause serious damage!
The good news is that I am getting out. In less than two weeks I am off to London and Paris with Joe and I am very excited!
Of course a shiny modern fuse doesn’t solve all of my problems. I now need to call the guy who originally installed it and get him to move the water heater (which is mounted on the wall above my bathtub) and all of its associated hoses, pipes and even the faucets, several feet to the left. This is because the regulator inside isn’t working (or is set too high), effectively turning my water heater into a steam blaster. The panel that opens the water heater is against the wall prohibiting anyone from actually fixing it. Of course it is…
Oh yeah, and my lamp broke too. In trying to ascertain if it was simply the bulb that needed changing (it wasn’t) I replaced it with a working bulb that I somehow managed to cross-thread and now can’t remove. It seems I can’t even replace a light bulb. I need to get out before I cause serious damage!
The good news is that I am getting out. In less than two weeks I am off to London and Paris with Joe and I am very excited!
Vacuum cleaner!
I never thought vacuum cleaner could make me so happy. I mean, something that was once a chore is now a reminder of an easier life—a healthier, cleaner life for that matter. There is something therapeutic about aggressively sucking up 20 years (probably more) or cobwebs, dust and dirt. I breathe easier now…literally. But there is something bigger involved as well. I did something small—bought a piece of technology—to make my life easier and more comfortable. I took control over the situation and made it better. But what if I can’t afford to spend 40 dollars on a piece of technology like most of neighbors cannot? My landlord called me again the other day to ask for the rent money early. This time she was much nicer about it and explained that what she wanted to buy was flour, food, and gas for cooking. They were out of all three. As I sit here feeling sorry for myself because my water heater broke and I am heating up my bath water on the stove that puts things back in perspective. I still want my water heater fixed…
I have begun my winter preparations already. It is fall now, but winter is not far behind. Already the produce is changing, the nights are chilly and I have put away the tanktops in favor of the long underwear. That is actually the reson I bought the vacuum clearner—I bought a rug to help keep the room and my poor little feet warm in the winter and I thought I should be able to keep it clean. My neighbor came over the other night and in the midst of admiring my new rug she saw the vacuum and told me that is was a good “style” of cleaning. I’d have to agree.
I had a friends mother in town help with my canning for the winter months (I bought the produce, sugar, and gas for cooking and supplied the jars, she did all the work). I am now the proud new owner of a shelf full of canned tomatoes and peppers, peaches, and raspberry jam. I’ll buy the rest throughout the winter. Dry goods remain year round, as do canned goods such as corn, olives, mushrooms, peas and jams and juices. Most are unaffordable for the average Armenian so they do all their own canning when the produce is so cheap people are practically giving it away. I’ll certainly miss being able to buy a kilogram of tomatoes for less that 25 cents.
I am now working with my counterpart to try and write a grant for trashcans for the city streets. It already has it problems, but if we can accomplish it we will have done a major service to a community that has nowhere to put their trash other than on the ground. The trash service is so unreliable here that most trash gets dumped locally in rivers, etc., and the idea of putting trash in your pocket until you find a trash can is unheard of, probably because there are no trashcans.
We have figured out a system so that people won’t steal the trash cans (problem #1), now we have to figure out how the trashcans will be emptied (the trash trucks don’t work so everything has to be done by hand) and who will do it (the trash truck drivers don’t want to). We also have to figure out how many we need and where exactly to put them. There is also a fear that people will put the trash from their homes in the trashcans because pickup is so unreliable and that the trashcans will overflow onto the streets and stink and look bad. Not that vayk is free of that problem currently….
I have begun my winter preparations already. It is fall now, but winter is not far behind. Already the produce is changing, the nights are chilly and I have put away the tanktops in favor of the long underwear. That is actually the reson I bought the vacuum clearner—I bought a rug to help keep the room and my poor little feet warm in the winter and I thought I should be able to keep it clean. My neighbor came over the other night and in the midst of admiring my new rug she saw the vacuum and told me that is was a good “style” of cleaning. I’d have to agree.
I had a friends mother in town help with my canning for the winter months (I bought the produce, sugar, and gas for cooking and supplied the jars, she did all the work). I am now the proud new owner of a shelf full of canned tomatoes and peppers, peaches, and raspberry jam. I’ll buy the rest throughout the winter. Dry goods remain year round, as do canned goods such as corn, olives, mushrooms, peas and jams and juices. Most are unaffordable for the average Armenian so they do all their own canning when the produce is so cheap people are practically giving it away. I’ll certainly miss being able to buy a kilogram of tomatoes for less that 25 cents.
I am now working with my counterpart to try and write a grant for trashcans for the city streets. It already has it problems, but if we can accomplish it we will have done a major service to a community that has nowhere to put their trash other than on the ground. The trash service is so unreliable here that most trash gets dumped locally in rivers, etc., and the idea of putting trash in your pocket until you find a trash can is unheard of, probably because there are no trashcans.
We have figured out a system so that people won’t steal the trash cans (problem #1), now we have to figure out how the trashcans will be emptied (the trash trucks don’t work so everything has to be done by hand) and who will do it (the trash truck drivers don’t want to). We also have to figure out how many we need and where exactly to put them. There is also a fear that people will put the trash from their homes in the trashcans because pickup is so unreliable and that the trashcans will overflow onto the streets and stink and look bad. Not that vayk is free of that problem currently….
beans
I was walking through the crisp newly fallen leaves, bathed by the evening’s perfect moonlight. It dawned on me how at home I had become. Even in the darkest of shadows I knew every crack, bump and step in the sidewalk. The route was as familiar to me as the one I drove to work for years in Bloomington and yet more so because I knew what it felt like and smelled like. I had gone to visit with my host family. It seems that about once a week these days I am headed to their house for dinner, tea, fruit and conversation. I had not gone as a guest, but rather as a strange blue-eyed member of the family. My host mother and I shelled beans and engaged in small talk while my host brother hurried through his already unbearably cold bucket bathing routine.
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