Nuclear Cleanse
May 21, 2009 - It is all ready May 21? In these recent days, I have been walking around with a silly grin on my face. One day this week I woke up and noticed that, like magic, leaves finally came out on the tree next to my window. I am even sleeping with my window open! (which poses as a threat to sleep sometimes, you can hear the dogs barking all night long and then start thinking about all kinds of different things for many hours before falling asleep...but the air feels so good, I am soaking it up!) Every thing will be green until July, then back to brown until snow fall.
The goodness of being here is definitely increasing exponentially. I jumped in Lake Sevan last weekend. Cold and an utterly refreshing nuclear cleanse. My American buddies and I found a few Armenian folks who cooked us fish horovats at their gigantic fish farm that was on the most beautiful expanse of land! Fish horovats is super tasty. I believe I will need to take any potential visitors to this farm, it's an experience.
Today was the grand opening of the Anti Corruption Center. Yay! It went fantastically well, we had about 20 guests. I met some great folks from USAID. It's pretty funny to interact with so many international people here, in my little Soviet town, all in one day - Canadian, Mexican, American, Armenian, Armenian by way of Georgia. And I met two other Americans on Tuesday, too.
New volunteers come May 31. This is a land mark event. Why? I will have been here for exactly 12 months at this time. Time is flying... My coworkers, my good sweet friends, are making note that I go home next year. And then I think about it a little more and all ready start welling up.
The one year mark is pretty interesting. I look back, and think about how different my interactions were between my coworkers and I. I think most every body was very shy. And now they have all opened up so much, and we make ridiculous jokes all of the time, and it is just a very nice environment. They are like second family. And I have not been afraid to be an odd American around them - I mean, they are very accepting of my differences, where as the general public might have a more difficult time understanding where I come from.
I'm still doing a lot with "checking English translations" but I am hoping, hoping, hoping that it will end on Monday - I have no time for other things right now, and it is mundane and frustrating work when I'd rather be doing something else. I have some very excellent projects in the works. One of them is working with UGA's career center to build my university's center here. Or I might start some sort of "Students for Free Enterprise" organization here and open dialogue between our students and UGA's students. The other thing that I am very excited about is designing our human rights seminars for school children of Gegharkunik for the fall time. In conjunction with this, we are going to have a Human Rights Day (December 10) competition that will take place between the participants of the seminars - so this summer will be time to realize the details of this contest. I came up with the idea yesterday, and it's in the early stages of being worked out. Perhaps the contest will just be human rights-themed artwork, but if I can organize something bigger, I'd like it to be service-based projects. That might be too big-time though because it will be much harder to be on-site with the various locations. And THEN I was thinking it'd be REALLY COOL if we could get the kids (they will be the ages between 12 and 16) to make home videos about what they learned and have a video contest! But we don't have this technology so readily available. Darn. Then we will have awards that will be given out to the winners on our local television station on HR Day (and if it WAS a video contest, the best video could be shown on TV). July will rock. Fourth of July, then to London, and then I will own a washing machine.
Oh yea I got worms (the realities of living here). I don't know what from. Probably sausage. I have been trying to keep my meat-eating to a minimum for this very reason. I took some meds today that should wipe them out of the system ASAP. I think I am done with sausage all together though.
Sriracha sauce... Sounds good right now!
You have some big ideas! The idea of a contest for the kids sounds good. Kids like contests. I'm going to have a story telling contest when we're at the beach. All of the Aunts will be the judges. Whoever tells the best story will win a prize. Maybe you could just have the kids there tell their stories.
Grandaddy was a great story teller you know. That's what people did before they had technology.
Sorry you had worms.