Another Day in Gyumri, Armenia

Shant Mardirossian
Canada

This morning I wake up to a traditional Armenian breakfast which usually contains: eggs with beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, yogurt, and lavash bread. I get changed and wait for one of the most interesting rides on the famous marshutkha. This van manages to squeeze up to 20+ passengers who bend their limbs in unimaginable ways to fit on this very inexpensive ride of 100 drams. It’s fun and exciting, yet stinky, crammed, and quite dangerous. Best part is that you can get it to stop wherever you please.

I get off the marshutkha a little early and walk to Gyumri Healthy Center where I carry out my volunteering duties. The Gyumri Healthy Center is a developing NGO organization that has a future mission and vision to establish a Healthy Center that encompasses a wide category of health including: physical therapy, rehabilitation, resistance training, Yoga, Pilates, and sex education. Here I work with my 3 colleagues – Naira, Nune, and Satig. They are a charismatic and optimistic group who have faith towards the future of their developing center. I work hard here to teach these therapists’ the many practical techniques and exercises that I have acquired while earning my B.Sc degree in Kinesiology. We spend long hours practicing on one another so that these skills become sharpened enough to carry out on patients. Also, one of my ongoing goals is to teach Armenians the benefits of regular exercise and diet. For that reason, Naira, Nune, Satig, and I keep active by going for runs together, doing some resistance training, yoga, and stretching.

I leave work awaiting a home cooked meal from my lovely host mother Anahid. This lady can make anything and everything. She makes dolma, harisseh, dried fruits, jams, marubas, pastries, and a whole variety of other tasty meals. I enjoy dining to these flavoursome foods, while listening to Anahid and her husband’s Jora’s unthinkable genocide and earthquake stories. As our time spent together grows, the more I appreciate how genuine Armenian people are. Its fascinating how some people have nothing to give, yet give you everything they have. The local Armenians truly do illustrate the meaning of loving their neighbour as they love themselves. I only wish a fraction of this sort of unity would carry on into western society.

After dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go to Armenian language class. The other volunteers and I gather with our teacher Anahid, and her three helpers: Lucineh, Rosa, and Armen. Together we strive to learn proper Eastern Armenian language, which for many volunteers is very different. Many Armenians today including myself are Diaspora Armenians. Growing up all around the globe, Diaspora Armenians have accumulated many unique dialects of Armenian language. For that reason, it is quite difficult to fully understand, speak, and decipher true eastern Armenian. Therefore, attending these classes has become very helpful for us Armenian speakers and non-speakers, as we learn to understand, speak, read and write the traditional Armenian way.

After class I walk home to kids playing football, men playing backgammon or chess, and woman chatting with their neighbourhood friends, all while hearing authentic Armenian music being played within the vicinity. I go home to another yummy meal then get changed to gather with all the volunteers down at Azatutian square, downtown Gyumri. Here we sit together like one big family while enjoying the scenery, music and warm presence of the local Armenian community. Some of us choose to drink coffee with Armenian sweets like “gata,” while others “do as the Armenians do” and chirp on raw sunflower seeds all night. As time passes in the midst of Armenian company, I realize that, regardless of where I come from, what traditions I grew up in, or how different I am, I go sleep at night knowing that I have finally found my way back home.

Picture a Day: Baby Steps

Zach Dyer
(USA)

For most of the day at the Healthy Centre I sit and write grants or research organizations or put together classes. After several days of compiling glum statistics about the region's health problems, I begin to wonder how much good an organization can do with only two paid employees that operates out of a renovated garage. Up against such staggering numbers and a long history of poor general health across the population, what will heat in the winter, or funding for a sexual health training (the two grants being worked on by the volunteers here) really be able to do for the people of Gyumri and the Shirak region?

And then there are moments like the one captured in this pictured. Today's picture means a lot to the people I work with at the Healthy Centre. The boy pictured is four and a half and is taking his first unassisted steps in his life. He is one of the many rehabilitation patients of the Healthy Centre, and one of the many success stories. What isn't shown in this picture is his mother, off to the side, crying to see her little boy walking on his own. After several surgeries and now in the second stage of rehabilitation, Garnik has learned how to use the muscles in his legs to walk on his own. After moments like this, I think to myself, "yesterday there were a million problems to be fixed here, today there are a million minus one." And I sit down at the computer, and I do my best to help an organization that does it's best to help the world around it.

Picture a Day: Family

Zach Dyer
USA

My first day at Gyumri Healthy Centre, like many 'firsts' I've experienced in this country took me by surprise. After cramming five people into a taxi, we drove away from the city center and rather unexpectedly took a turn down a road that at first glance looks almost nothing like a road. In the time it took for the taxi to navigate the ditches, potholes, trenches, and puddles that lead to the Healthy Centre, my expectations of what lie at the end fell significantly.

Once in the building, they explained to me that the center was a renovated garage that had once served as temporary housing after the earthquake. With only the front office and a modest "fitness center" in the back, the center was what was to be expected at the end of such a road. But what was not expected was the immediateness with which the three ladies of the Healthy Centre accepted me as if I grew up in the neighborhood, was a member of the family.

From my second week working with them, the two younger women referred to me as their brother and the older woman would introduce me as her son. After long weekends when I walked into work, Noune, the oldest of them would exclaim, "Zach-jan! Your second mother has missed you!" But the sense of family did not end there in the Healthy Centre. From the patients' families to the neighbors, after two months here they all greet me like we've known each other our whole lives. Not a day goes by where I don't feel completely comfortable sitting down for lunch with my coworkers and discussing anything from politics and religion to what "Starbucks" is and why I keep saying that I miss it.

When I went to other sites to volunteer, I found the same thing. At the day-camp where I teach English, my boss's son invites me out after. At the YMCA where I teach first aid with another volunteer, they suggest taking sightseeing trips with us. Even after an hour at the ambulatory center they offered me a bed in the office.

And while I cant necessarily say that every volunteer's experience has been exactly the same, for the most part, when the people here see someone opening up and trying their best to help, they try to offer the same in reverse.

Picture a Day: Mountains Beyond Mountains

Zach Dyer
USA

In the same vein as my hometown's Worcester Magazine 1001 words feature, I decided that for my AVC blog posts, I'd rather do more showing than telling. Unfortunately I don't feel I can be quite as succinct as the photographers over at WoMag, so 1300 or so "words" will have to do for each of these 5 posts that I'll use to wrap up my time as a volunteer in Armenia.

“The mountains,” I answered to the AVC coordinator's question about what surprised me about Armenia after my first weekend in the country. “They’re just completely different than anything I’ve ever seen. I expected you know, New England mountains, with trees,” I continued. And while coming into a country whose constitution is newer than the US constitution's latest amendment, a country in which I barely speak the language, a country in which power, gas, and water outages are daily occurrences, it was the mountains that struck me most.

Two months later, starting my last week of work, by and large it's still the mountains that take me by surprise in my daily life here, but in a different sense. If you've ever spent time in Armenia you know that to go almost anywhere you have to go up and down mountains—there simply isn't an "around" option because, climb any mountain and what you find on the other side is yet another green, treeless mountain. My time working here in a number of different organizations has found me in similar situations; to get anywhere, there are at least a couple mountains to get over.

My first project with the Gyumri Healthy Centre, the organization I spend the most time with, was to put together a first aid class for kids of the community. I chose to focus the class on first aid most useful in the summer and naturally included the topic of dehydration. The day I was presenting the lesson plans to the president of the Healthy Centre, I spent at least 30 minutes trying to communicate what dehydration is. While I've always been taught that water is a key component to health, it is widely believed here that water is bad for your heart, will give you high blood pressure, and will make you fat. So before I could suggest teaching children to stay hydrated, I had that mountain to climb. It wasn't until weeks later we were even sure about the Armenian word for dehydration.

Last week I was introduced to the director of ambulatory care in Gyumri and he allowed me to ride in the city's ambulances for the rest of my time here. I asked for a list of the medications they carried on their ambulances so I could make sure I was familiar with them before I actually went on a ride-along, and could keep up with what they were doing. As I was spending hours going through the list of medications they administer in the back of what are often station wagons or mini-vans, I came across the phrase "rarely used in the developed world due to high mortality rates" more often than I would have liked. When I brought this up to the nurse with whom I was speaking the next day she explained to me, the mortality rate is still lower than not giving it at all, and with such a small budget, it's all they can afford. Another mountain.

And while AVC brought me here to "come move mountains," I didn't quite realize that there would a couple to climb before I got to the less stationary ones. Luckily I don't mind hiking.

Zach will be blogging every day this week, his last week of service in Armenia.