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.