Month: November 2017

Birthright Armenia, Musings

[Blog] Week Twelve, Rambling

Faith Hakimian

BIRTHRIGHTHEADER

The weather has gotten colder again, and my breath rolls from my mouth and nose in clouds when I walk outside each morning. Some green and yellow leaves still cling to the branches of the trees, but more fall every day, carpeting the sidewalks and the streets. In the park beside the Republic Square metro, the emptied fountains have been decorated with white Christmas lights.

Four weeks. That’s how much time I have left before I head back home. And it’s passing at an astonishing rate, leaving me in a state of mild panic. It’s not unlike the feeling you get when lose your footing while running down a hill, leaving you sliding and digging in your heels in a desperate attempt to stop.

The past few days have been fairly quiet on my end, which I’ve enjoyed. I took a little time to wander Yerevan with my camera, and though I didn’t get half as many pictures as I’d like, I have a few now that give a lovely impression of the city. I finally made my way up the Cascade. The climb was impromptu and after dark, so I’ll need to do it again when I have a little more time to just sit and enjoy the incredible view, but even a few minutes looking out across the spread of city lights was a lovely experience.

Iron bear statue in Charles Aznavour Square.
Buildings on Abovyan Street.
Abovyan Street.
Fountain in Charles Aznavour Square.

My wanderings also, predictably, took me into a bookstore. Anyone who loves books knows the pleasure of wandering along the shelves and hunting for another world to explore. It’s a slightly different experience when most of them are written in a language you don’t speak (or read) fluently, though the extra time it takes to read even the titles can be enjoyable in its own right. The clerk came over to me after a few minutes and asked if she could help me find anything, and when I asked if she had any fantasy stories in Armenian she told me she had translations of Harry Potter and The Hobbit; I left a little while later with my own new copy of the latter, still grinning like a little kid.

23658742_10156941890199552_5851980273817163189_n
The Hobbit… in Armenian!

I’ve had a rough spot or two in the last little bit as well, as if the honeymoonish feel of visiting for the first time has begun to wear off and leave me overwhelmed by everything that still needs to be done to get Armenia to thrive. One of the first pieces of advice that every Birthright Armenia volunteer receives is to not give in to negativity, and while that always made sense to me, I understand a little better why the staff makes sure that it’s one of the first things we hear on our arrival. Armenia is a developing country, with all that comes with that– both the good and the bad. It’s sometimes hard to ignore the little voice of fear and frustration that whispers that things will never change.

But that view is so small. It forgets about how far we have already come and denies the work and the vision of so many people who see potential where others see failure. It looks around and sees what doesn’t work but not everything that has already been fixed. Worst of all, it’s the kind of thinking that paralyzes, because if nothing is going to change, trying to make things better is a waste of time. It’s also categorically false.

That’s about it for this week. To those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday I hope you had a wonderful time with family and friends! December is coming fast, but I’m still hoping to finish and post a new short story here before the end of the month, so keep an eye out for that. It should go up early next week as long as I don’t get distracted by outlining the second draft of my current novel instead.

Birthright Armenia, Musings

[Blog] Week Eleven, Old Churches

Faith Hakimian

BIRTHRIGHTHEADER

If I could change one thing about the Birthright excursions, it would be to spend more time at each of the places we visit. Of course, barring manipulation of the spacetime continuum, that time would have to come from somewhere and would probably mean visiting fewer places. So perhaps that wouldn’t be the best thing to change, because I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of these beautiful sites.

For our most recent outing, we started by visiting the Yereruk Basilica in Armenia’s Shirak province. It was a chilly morning, particularly after sitting still for the two hours or so it took for the vans to drive from Yerevan to the village of Anipemza on the western border. A distant, cloudy haze filled the sky, as it often does here, somehow making the rocky plains around us seem that much wider.

0402.JPG
The landscape around Yereruk.

The Akhurian River and the closed border with Turkey are nearby, a reminder of the unfriendly political situation that the country faces. It adds a further bittersweet note to the visit, beyond the one that always seems to haunt old ruins.

The remains of the basilica are awe-inspiring on their own, though I can’t help wishing I could see it whole. The church is large enough that it’s clear it was central to a large community when it was constructed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It’s also one of the oldest surviving examples of Christian architecture in Armenia, which is why it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in August 1995.

 

From there, we climbed back into the vans to go to the village of Dashtadem where we were to have lunch, which we did in the home of one of the village families. I’ve talked before about Armenian hospitality, and this is another example of it. Birthright excursions started visiting this family after the staff went door to door, asking if anyone would be willing to host us. This family said yes, and now when we come this way, we eat with them.

The walls of the old Dashtadem Fortress stood just a few yards from the house, and after eating a wonderful meal of dolma and lavash we walked across the road to explore it. I think I was grinning the entire time. I’ve always loved castles, but living in the States means I don’t often* get a chance to actually see them. The original keep was constructed in the 9th century, and its enceinte was constructed in the early 1800s, with other additions being made in the years between.

Kristaporivank in the distance.
View from the keep.
Main gate.
View from the wall.
Ramparts near the main gate.

 

From there, it was a short drive to the Cathedral of Talin. Like at Yereruk, the size of the ruins give a hint of the size of the community it served when it was built in the 7th century. It was built with two studies on either side of the apse, both of which contain a series of handholds that can be used to access the second floor and were used as a way to hide the church’s manuscripts when hostile rulers came with the intention of burning them all.

Interior of Talin.
View from southeast.
View of St. Astvatsatsin from Talin.
View from the northwest.
The collapsed Talin Cathedral dome.

 

We finished the day with a short stop at Aruchavank. Like so many of the old churches here it suffered extensive damage from earthquakes, and though most of it has been rebuilt, its dome remains collapsed. The architecture of its eastern wall contains two examples of a type of engineering that provides the entire structure with greater stability, and our guide told us that another monastery using the same method was strong enough to survive even after its central pillars were cut by the Mongols under Tamerlane.

The eastern side of the cathedral.
Entrance to Aruchavank.
Northern wall.
The southern wall.

 

I love the fact that there are stories like this everywhere we go, that history in this region has been recorded for so long that the connection to the past is so much clearer than I am used to. And I know I’m only seeing and hearing a fraction of them. There is so much to learn, so much to discover. Armenia is such a small country, but it’s so wonderfully full.

 

 

 

* The only other time (so far!) was about seven years ago, when I had the chance to study abroad in the UK and Ireland, and our group visited Kenilworth Castle. I took hundreds of pictures, and if I remember right, my friend and I were late in returning to the bus.

Birthright Armenia, Musings

[Blog] Week Ten, Planting Trees

Faith Hakimian

BIRTHRIGHTHEADER

This past weekend, our excursion was a little different. Instead of just visiting one of the countless, incredible sites of Armenia, we got to add something as well: we got to help plant three hundred fruit trees on the grounds of the Sardarapat Memorial.

This was my second trip out to the memorial in Armavir province. We took our first trip there back at the end of September when the weather was just starting to turn and the memory of a hot summer was still fresh in everyone’s minds. It’s hard to believe that that was only about a month ago. It feels so much longer.

0369
Fall on the grounds of the Sardarapat Memorial.

We met a group from the Armenia Tree Project (ATP) on a small plot of ground near the Sardarapat Museum. Trenches where we would be planting the saplings– apricot and plum– already lined the ground, and the young trees themselves lay spaced out where they were to be planted. All we had to do was set them in the ground, perhaps digging a little deeper into the rocky soil to provide room for the roots, and fill the space around them with dirt again. Then, we needed to build small dams below each sapling before watering each one with a bucket to welcome each tree to its new home. Last of all, the ATP workers would turn on the water and let it run down the rows, watering the trees once more after the first bucketful had settled them all into place.

0274
Trees in their new home.

It was early afternoon when we finished, and the bagged lunches that the Birthright staff passed out to us were more than welcome: big sandwiches, fruit, salad, gata (գաթա). We ate them sitting together on the ground just above the newly planted orchard. Afterwards, we had the chance to visit the museum and the memorial again, and I was happy for the more leisurely afternoon and the chance to take a few pictures that I hadn’t managed to on our first visit.

 

The rear of the memorial wall.
One of the eagles representing the courage of the fighting men.
A woman representing revival on the rear of the memorial wall.

 

Excursions like this are my favorite part of this adventure. They are a chance to give back a little in addition to looking and learning. They make it easy to think about the future. Armenia is this strange mix of young and old; our history stretches back for thousands of years, but the Republic only gained its independence from the USSR twenty six years ago and is still working to find and make its place in the world. Working where I am with the people I am with, it’s not difficult to have an optimistic view of what that place might be. No one denies that there is still a long way to go, but the atmosphere is heady and excited. It’s going to be hard, but we can do it. We can get there.

From a purely writer-ish point of view, that’s the kind of thing I want to tell stories about. Hard odds and hope. Ups and downs and the difficult work in between. Ideas and ideals. It’s not just those more abstract concepts, either. As a writer of science fiction and fantasy (and anything else that lets me make up whole worlds of my own), something new sparks my imagination every day. The dichotomy of new and ancient means that centuries-old churches are as much a part of what Armenia is as the fact that the country is the “Silicon Valley of the former Soviet Union“. Kiosks throughout Yerevan let you renew your phone’s data plan and do a dozen similar things. The big intersection near where I live has no crosswalks, but if you take the steps down at any of the corners you find yourself in a kind of circular mall lined with stalls and stores and exits to the metro and the other side of the street.

I know I’m seeing the best Armenia has to offer, and though I’m aware of the worse parts of living here (low wages, government corruption, blockaded borders…), I don’t have to live them myself. Volunteering here for four months means that I get to experience life here in a way I couldn’t as a tourist, but four months is still just four months, a fraction of a year. It’s not enough time, for me, at least, to put down deep roots here. If I’m honest, I’m not entirely certain what I think of that.

Birthright Armenia, Musings

[Blog] Week Nine, Connections

Faith Hakimian

BIRTHRIGHTHEADER

While last week’s adventures can best be described as big and grand, my favorite parts of the past few days have definitely been of the smaller sort. Which is not to say that the experiences are going to stick with me any less. In fact, it’s often these incidental experiences that work themselves most deeply into my memories.

That being said, calling a khash party “small” is probably a bit misleading. Khash (խաշ) is a dish made by boiling sheep or cow’s feet to make a broth, which is then seasoned with garlic and salt to taste and given substance by crumbling dried lavash into it. It is traditionally eaten in the morning, and, in Armenia at least, only during months that have an “r” in the name. Vodka is often served as well, and you probably won’t feel like eating much else for the rest of the day.

Khash!

I got to enjoy the meal with a large group from Impact Hub Yerevan, the amazing coworking space where the Repat Armenia office is located. Or rather, I did once I double-checked the address and realized that I’d ended up at the wrong branch of the restaurant. It all worked out in the end–hunger and the nagging knowledge that you’re already late do wonders to keep you walking quickly–and the rest of the morning was spent enjoying each other’s company over tasty food.

That, I think, is one of my favorite things about being here. We love food and we love friends, and we make sure to eat food with friends every chance we get. And by “friends” we mean everyone from brand new acquaintances to lifelong companions. All those old stories: Beowulf. The Iliad. The Odyssey. Hospitality was deeply ingrained in those cultures as well, and there was an assumption that guests would be treated a certain way. After spending two months in Armenia, I think I understand it a bit better.

Another highlight of the week happened while I was shadowing at the hospital. It wasn’t medical in nature, and I’m still missing the chance to be more involved in that field, but that’s another topic for another day. What my time shadowing at Nork Marash has given me every day I’m there is an incredible immersion in the language, and earlier this week I got the chance to see how far I’ve come.

A family who had come in several times before came in again. At one point, the doctor stepped out of the room and I stayed behind. Since they had met me before, several of the family members knew that I was an American, and I heard them mention that fact to each other, which I took as an opportunity to mention that I did speak a little Armenian.

It was so much fun to talk with them. As soon as they knew I could understand, they asked me questions about where I was from and why I was in Armenia, and though I didn’t always know the exact word I wanted to use, we definitely got by. It was such a simple conversation, but the reminder that I’ve learned enough Armenian to make basic connections with strangers here has left me a little giddy all week.

Other than that, it’s been a fairly low-key week. A couple members of my language class are finishing up their time here, so we all went out to dinner together to celebrate (and practice our Armenian). It’s rained once or twice, and most of the trees are boasting beautiful yellow leaves. I’m about a week past halfway through my trip now, and while I miss everyone back home terribly, I feel a similar tug every time I think about leaving. I suppose the only thing to do is to savor every minute of the time I have left.

Yerevan
Karen Demirchyan Complex
Yerevan
Updates

[Update] November 2017

Faith Hakimian

HEADER

Happy November, everyone!

I have to admit, my feelings about this month are slightly mixed, as it’s National Novel Writing Month and I won’t be participating this year. Not that I didn’t think about it, of course. It’s just that if I tried, certain family members would (justifiably) confiscate my laptop. Maybe next year!

As for other writing, things are still moving along! October saw the completion of The Farewell, the short story I’ve been working on for the past while, and I’ve got a couple more in the works that I’ll post up here as soon as they’re finished. Blog posts about my experiences in Armenia should continue going up on Fridays as well.

And that’s about all! Thanks to all of you who have stuck with me so far, and to all of you who have wandered by as well! I hope you like what you’ve seen, and please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments on the stories or the blogs. I’d love to hear from you!

Until next time,
~ Faith