Exploring the beauty and culture of Armenia

My name is Karen Mikayelyan, I am 28 years old, and I am a volunteer at Birthright Armenia (BR). I began my volunteer journey on December 1, 2022. Since, honestly speaking, our organization is not that well-known in Russia, where I came from, I would like to share my experience and impressions of my time spent in the organization.

MY JOURNEY TO DISCOVER ARMENIA

During the two and a half months that I have spent here, I have been able to rediscover Armenia anew and in a completely different way. My life has been such that even though I come from a fully Armenian family, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was not deeply immersed in Armenian culture and community. I only understood about 55-60% of spoken Armenian, and could not read or write at all. I did not even know the Armenian alphabet. Thanks to BR and the excellent teachers the organization provides, a few days ago I finished reading my second Armenian fairytale by the great Armenian writer Hovhannes Tumanyan in Armenian, which makes me incredibly happy and excited, to be honest. The organization gave me the opportunity to meet a huge number of wonderful people and make new acquaintances and friendships that I hope to maintain, develop and multiply in the future.

During my time here, I have been able to volunteer at two wonderful organizations - the first is Yerevan State University (YSU) in the microbiological research laboratory, and the second is the Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC), where I recently joined.

I have two degrees and relatively extensive work experience. With my first degree, I am a medical laboratory technician, and with my second, a psychologist. In the YSU laboratory, I was lucky enough to participate in new innovative projects such as scorpion venom research, research on bee microbiomes and their properties for future use in medicine, as well as participating in the development and cultivation of soft cheese varieties from local lactic acid bacteria.

FUTURE PLANS AND EXCURSIONS

At FPWC, I plan to study zoopsychology at the brown bear rehabilitation center. For me, this is an absolutely new and unexplored field, but it has greatly interested me. Together with the foundation's team, we will try to remove these majestic giants from Armenia's red book.

In addition to work, new friends, and language learning, the organization provides unforgettable excursions and trips. In six weeks, we have managed to visit many cities, museums, and monasteries. There were hiking trips of 3-4 km and fascinating stories from guides.

Two excursions, in particular, were memorable for me. The first was to Magellan's Cave, which is the deepest in Armenia and the tenth deepest in the world. It was a real expedition to the center of the mountain. At first, we walked, crouched, and later crawled (definitely not for claustrophobes). We crawled for about forty minutes until we reached an internal recess where I am sure everyone there felt the power of the mountain and the strength of darkness and absolute silence. I had never experienced anything like it before.

The second memorable trip was climbing up to Teghenyats Monastery through snowdrifts that reached above our knees. As a person from the north, such an amount of snow could only evoke simple childish joy, immediacy, and nostalgia. I never thought there could be so much snow in Armenia. Armenia surprised me again.

Obviously, all this wonderful and amazing experience would have been much more difficult to obtain without the opportunities provided by BR.

I am writing this to express my gratitude and admiration for the entire team at Birthright Armenia, as well as to encourage those who were not aware of such an opportunity or were hesitant to discard their doubts and embark on a journey to Armenia to discover new adventures and unleash their inner potential on the historical homeland.