Things That Make it Hard to be Here

While everyone back home is feeling rushed and frantic and having a “normal” two years, time for me has taken on a turtle’s persona. This first month at site has gone by so slowly that I’ll be at retirement age by 2013 when my Peace Corps service is over.

I've been on "turtle time" for the past month or so, where every day crawls by very very slowly.

Apparently this is normal.

One of the hardest parts is that for the first month at site, we are on “site lock,” which means that we are not allowed to travel away from our villages.  So even though I am having this so-called “adventure” in Armenia, I have felt a little trapped in my town, unable to explore farther than my feet will take me.

One Saturday was especially long for me… Uninspired to do anything, unable to get happily absorbed in any project that would whisk the hours away from me, and unsure what to do with myself next, I ended up going for a 2 hour walk, where I was literally barked at and chased by a group of young boys.

I turned around at the top of a small hill which seemed to be the town dump. Officially or not, I couldn’t tell, but there were huge mounds of garbage everywhere.

I also took a much un-needed nap, for lack of being able to think of anything else to do at the time. And I studied Armenian, played my mandolin, cleared out my email inbox, sent a couple important emails to teachers back home participating in the World Wise Schools program with me, (Hi to Mr. Lund’s classes, Ms. Machiela’s classes, Mrs. Twardzik’s classes, and Mrs. Keranen’s classes!), bought bread, oatmeal, and deodorant from the store, read my book, prepared and ate some food, talked on the phone for awhile, and read a couple important Peace Corps documents. And it STILL was not bedtime!!!!!!! What kind of time warp is it, that stretches the minutes into years? And how did I manage to get stuck in it?

Imagine how strange it is for me right now, to read blogs about “finding time” in your day, or “slowing down” to enjoy life, or “taking a break” from your work. Lack of time is not a problem for me right now, by any means. There has been plenty of time. Plenty of time for thinking… and thinking… and thinking…

Too much time for thinking leads to lots and lots of questions swirling around.

I think all the volunteers in our group are going through some weird stuff right now, mentally. Besides the fact that we probably all have a ton of time on our hands, we’re spread out across the country, when we got used to all being together during PST. We’re trying to figure out our new communities, host families, and jobs, while balancing our relationships and “old” lives back home. (Not an easy task.) And we have to create our own structure in our days, which is not necessarily easy, when we still don’t know what’s culturally “acceptable,” and what kinds of lines we might unintentionally cross in order to retain our identities.

I think it’s especially hard, because on the surface, things seem so normal. I mean, I have full time Internet, for crying out loud! There are cars cruising by, stores to shop in, furnished houses, and a lot of the “comforts of home” that we are used to in the U.S. But this is still a developing country, so a lot of the streets are more pot-holes than streets. And the buildings are crumbling down and/or abandoned and some of the schools have broken windows in every classroom. How on earth do they get through the winter??? (How on earth will I get through the winter?)

This is a real school in an Armenian village. Students attend classes here.

Language causes mental anguish as well. At the end of the day, I wonder why I feel so isolated, even though I’ve been with people all day. As I think back, it becomes obvious.

Imagine: the TV is on in the background and it just sounds like a bunch of mumbling. The neighbor comes over for tea and you sit and listen to her and your host mom jabbering away. You pass people on the street on the way to the college who are saying things. At the college, all the students are talking to each other in Armenian. The teachers speak to them, someone tries to speak to you, you shrug and smile helplessly. You go to the store and ask for an item in your limited, awkward way, and you get your item, but meanwhile are overwhelmed by the clerk who asks all kinds of confusing follow-up questions. And of course there are other people in the store, all speaking fluently and walking out with bags and bags of goods, as though it’s no big deal to ask for fifty different items on the shelf and get everything they wanted the first time. You walk back home, passing more people on the street saying things. You get invited to someone’s house for coffee. At their house, someone is talking on the phone, the TV is on, and the family members are bustling around, all talking, talking, talking. Even the two-year-old speaks better than you! You leave, pass more people in the street, get home to your host mom who wants to talk about your day, which was good, but for some reason you still feel a little bit sad and you can’t figure out why.

While I understand, and can speak, so much more than I could three months ago, (Yay!) I can still go an entire day barely understanding what is going on around me. The way this wears you down happens completely unconsciously, but it causes very real feelings of anxiety and exhaustion by the end of the day.

Here’s another example: The other day I’m at the college, teaching two of the teachers about Photoshop. And there’s so much I know, and so much I wish I could tell them, but we don’t speak the same language, so things are progressing so slowly that I want to scream. There are things they want to know, which they try to explain to me. And there are things that I need them to know first, that I try to explain to them. And we don’t get anywhere, because they think I don’t realize what they want to know. And they don’t realize that in order to understand what they want to know, I have to tell them something else first.

YYYYYRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Patience.

All in good time, right?

There is more… I’m learning that no one seems to “plan ahead” here, and “set schedules” don’t seem to exist. At first, I thought it was ONLY the language that was making it hard for me to figure out what was going on. I figured that eventually I would catch on, ask a few questions, and be able to predict what would happen next. I may have to toss that dream away. A simple question like, “How many students are supposed to be in this class?” got me an answer that, in a nutshell, was, “One, two, five, ten, twenty.” A lot of classes I have attended so far seem to be planned on the spot, which takes up half the class time because no materials have been prepared beforehand. And then there are the computers…

You know what? I’m done talking about what makes it hard to be here! Things will get better; I know they will. And once they do, I can talk about how far I’ve come, which is way more inspiring to read than a bunch of complaining all by itself.

Overall, I really don’t have it that bad; I know that, too. I don’t ever have to worry about getting enough to eat, every month, I get enough money put into my bank account to live off of, the people have all been incredibly friendly so far, and I can hang out with the other two Americans in my town pretty much whenever I want and we can speak English to our hearts’ content.

The three Americans in my town

And this coming weekend, I will get to see a bunch more volunteers, at our first meetings after being unlocked from site, and then at a fun gathering we have planned, where we can compare notes about our first month as Peace Corps Volunteers in Armenia.

See? Things are looking up already!