Finally, in December, I moved to Getap village, two hours south of Yerevan, where I’ll remain for the rest of my volunteer stint.

Contrary to the warnings I’d received about winters in Armenian villages (extremely cold, long and dreary), I found being here in the winter cozy, absolutely beautiful, great for long runs, and very conducive to relationship building with my host mother & sister as well as neighbor families because much of our time was spent huddled around wood stoves. The inconveniences and challenges, about which I’d been slightly anxious, turned out to be insignificant once I got used to them. Also, the winter time was very conducive to my job assignment, which was to produce a short documentary style film about Heifer’s work in the Caucasus region. I’d shot all the footage in the fall, which left the winter months to put it all together in the comfort of my room in our fire heated home.

I am living with Roza (50) and her daughter Astghik (32) in what used to be a classroom of a now defunct preschool. With Astghik’s schoolteacher salary of $60/mo they cannot afford to buy a house, but dream of doing so. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, they knew a comfortable life, and their material possessions today demonstrate that. We make toasts with real crystal and eat off fine chinaware. They are very dignified and take much pride in their refined taste. At the same time we carry our water in buckets twice a day from a communal fountain (and in the heart of winter often woke up to buckets of ice), heat our bathwater and dry our clothes by fire, store our perishable food along the cool window sill, cut up trees for firewood, and essentially do almost everything by hand.

The New Year and Christmas celebrations in the village exposed me to what it’s like when people value maintaining tradition above all else. In the village, at least in my little host family, no shortcuts were taken. Back home we make a habit of finding the easiest, quickest, least burdensome way to do things. And if it’s too much work it’s usually considered not worth doing. Based on my observations, that mentality was nowhere on the radar screen here. The five days preceding January 1 we spent working from morning until night cleaning our home. We turned the place inside out. Their version of our “spring cleaning” back home. If it could be washed, wiped or scrubbed, it was. Carpets, linens, windows, walls, ceilings, curtains, upholstery, the finest dishware...we even carried the wood stove and its pipes outside and dumped them out. At one point we had our bed linens hanging in three different families’ yards because our clothesline couldn’t accommodate everything. Several days before the new year we spent half a day shopping (most of the time spent waiting in lines) for all the ingredients necessary to make the required dishes, pastries and desserts. One day my host sister baked from 9am to 11pm at night with only brief breaks to feed herself. At 11:59pm December 31st she put the last pomegranate seed on the tip of a swirl of sour cream to give one of her three different kinds of salads an exquisite touch. Our table was beautiful and packed with delicious traditional foods as well as champagne, vodka, cognac, wine, Jermuk, soda and juice. The next eight days were spent entertaining guests and being guests, as the tradition is to visit and dine with all of your neighbors and loved ones. Paper plate lovers would never tolerate the kind of labor that went into making the New Year celebration just right in my Getap home.

Staying for just the winter wouldn’t suffice for me. Much of what we do and eat is possible because of preparation in the spring, summer and fall. I can’t remember the last time I had a fresh vegetable—we are eating canned cucumbers, peppers, okra, watermelon, cabbage, etc. and drinking 100% natural canned juices, all of which were made from their spring and summer harvests. Soon I will begin going with my host mother every other day to tend to our modest sized strip of land, where we will harvest all the fruits and vegetables we need. In the summer I’ll be canning their winter ’06-’07 foods and if I’m not here for those chilly months, I’m sure I’ll wish I were.

Sophia Malkasian (USA),
AVC volunteer and BR/DH participant