Hail like Hell

If there’s one thing to convince an agnostic about the fire-and-brimstone vision of god, it’s golf ball-sized hail.

I often tag along on my host mother Marina’s work runs to nearby villages to meet with school officials. It’s a nice way to see familiar but different scenery. Really, they’re the same; Armenian villages in the south of Georgia can only be put together so many ways. You have your potholed dirt road, run-down buildings, haystacks, large-brick walls and tin roofs, all clustered together in the middle of nowhere. But then there’s the other side; in each one you don’t feel at all taken aback, overwhelmed; each feels made of the same stuff, so each feels homey. Then there are the little differences. Patara Khorenia has a lake, men washing their Лада cars at the bank on a Saturday afternoon. The nearby (and even closer to Turkey than Ninotsminda is) Orlovka is populated by “Old Believers,” a small sect of Christianity averse to the direction the East and Russian Orthodox churches evolved toward. Still, it’s fascinating that no matter how far out you go, still, there’s that “Enjoy Coca-Cola” sign hanging over the local market.

The other day on the way back from a quick visit to another school in Orlovka, black clouds appeared on the horizon. The kind that actually make you nervous, no matter how many Tucson monsoon seasons you’ve done. Tucson might put on quite the lightning show, but Ninotsminda has it beat on the “oh Jesus, find cover” factor. By the time we returned to Nino, a downpour had begun, but not a drop of rain was falling from these black clouds. Hail. All hail. Golf Balls. Pouring golf balls like the water comes down in Tucson in July. Aghas drove the rest of the length home tree to tree, hoping that a big one wouldn’t dent the roof or shatter the windshield. I love that the entire time, all I was thinking is this will be how I open late September’s blog post. Thanks God; you’ve just furthered the unhealthy self-absorption.

I’ve been teaching now for a week and a half, and it’s exhausting but good work. I’m pretty sure I’ll be working with the eleventh, tenth, seventh, and fifth graders, haven’t yet decided on whether I’ll also pick up the ninth or sixth graders as well. There’s more challenge and more work with the older kids, as I have to cut through the thicket of puberty to get anything in their heads; the flip side though is that there are those few really brilliant ones I’d really like to have a chance to work with before they’re off to university, if they go. If they’re not planning on it, I’d like to get them to the point of reconsidering that, or even applying to an exchange program that’d likely change their lives if they went. I won’t lie, there’s a bit of a saccharin “Dangerous Minds” plot in my dreams here. In all seriousness, though, that time abroad would be a career accelerator that I’m not sure many have thought much about. And it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of ways to study something in America on someone else’s bill. I’d really like to help the strongest ones find a way.

The fifth graders are a blast for mostly the opposite reason; they’re total blank slates with English. I taught them their first English phrases in Cyrillic and the Armenian alphabet, and teach in the class in Russian. They’re still young, so like children all across the world, they’re really loud, but they’re not yet too cool to learn.

We’ve been teaching without a schedule for the past two weeks, as it’s hard to figure out how to allocate the resources the right way in the beginning here. Due to this, I haven’t really been able to plan any lessons; rather I kind of do a tag-team improv thing with my counterpart teachers. It works more often than it doesn’t but it’s really really tiring. The daily process involves me “observing” until something gets really boring from the book and I scramble to come up with a communicative activity to save the day. Hopefully we’ll come up with a structured way of doing this once the schedule is finalized, so I can give my stomach lining and head a bit of a rest.

I’ve had some trouble with discipline lately, and find myself taking to all the tricks teachers have used in my upbringing with mixed results to handle the problems. I’ve had to break up teenage boys, I’ve guilt tripped, I’ve threatened with summoning the principal, but so far my favorite has been just shutting up and standing there. Silence is deafening, and it saves my own voice.
Still, each class has its gem student, and I love teaching to see what they’re capable of. I’m trying to get the eleventh graders comfortable with writing; I want them to start writing what will essentially become journal entries. It’s been an uphill battle to get them to do the homework, but I think eventually I’ll find the right difficulty-challenge level where they won’t mind taking care of it once a week. I have an ulterior motive, prompted by reading a book written by a Peace Corps volunteer in China, who learned tons about his site, Fuling, from the writing assignments of his university students. I hope to keep giving them assignments that kind of open my eyes to how they think and live here. It’s sneaky, but this is the whole mutual learning thing I’m after out here in the boondocks.

As far as family life goes, all’s more or less really well. Host dad and I bicker and laugh as much as always, and I really appreciate all the reality I get to taste. It’s strange to say, but I like hearing my host family get into quarrels, mom yelling at kid over homework, host sister with teenage eyerolls, etc. they’re so wonderfully real. There are people in the village that have begun referring to me as Aghas’s son; not totally sure what I think of that. It’s sweet, but I hope it doesn’t eventually interfere with my independence. Still, I love them all and feel really blessed to live exactly here for two years.

I think I got maneuvered into making burritos for the host family this weekend, the small and agreeable price to pay for bragging about the glory of Mexican cuisine. Hoping I don’t set the kitchen on fire. The nice thing about living in an Armenian village is that we actually have a plentiful tortilla equivalent. Armenian լավաշ (lavash) seems like it’ll make a really nice substitute. Hopefully I can line up an appetite with my time as honorary chef; my desire to eat is so erratic I can barely figure it out. Sometimes I’ll skip an entire meal and find myself starving, putting a Fanta and a Snickers in me between lessons to keep from crashing. Other times I down my weight in bread and cheese (death by հաց և պանիր). I’m sure that’s one of the many things that will eventually stabilize. I miss khachapuri; is that bad?