Home Sweet Gyoogh

By TALIN KHECHOOMIAN
Tkhechoomian@ucla.edu

“We must respect the girls,” yelled one of the boys carrying a bag almost his size in his villagers’ dialect. The little boys grabbed our bags off the decrepit, over-heated van before even greeting us. This was just a glimpse at the hospitality and generosity this small Armenian village Yeghvard showed me and my 11 new family members.

“Since 1977, the LCO has organized summer campaigns whereby volunteers from around the world can come to work on their ancestral lands,” (lcousa.org). Our project was renovating a Church in a border village known as Yeghvard. We shoveled rocks for the altar and floor of the Church, mixed cement and did some of weeding in the front yard of the Church.

But physical labor was not what lasted in our memories. It was experiencing life as a villager that impacted us most. It was like Real World, minus the Cribs mansion and slutty roommates. We lived in a village home, drank village water, ate village cheese and played with the village kids who became our annoying yet adorable younger siblings.

Each night the children would beg us to go to the “discoteque” (the disco consisted of a boom box placed in the playground with one CD playing the same songs over and over).

“Where did you learn how to dance Armenian like that?” they would say, failing to remember I along with three others came from Armenia’s homeboy city— Glendale, California. They were shocked that we could form coherent sentences and respond to them in Armenian. Coming from a home where I get ridiculed for confusing the word tanel and berel it was an ego boost to know my far from perfect Armenian was so impressive to them.

These kids looked up to us and came to work every day to help (sometimes not allowing us work because they would grab our shovels). I felt like the Lady Gaga of Yeghvard, having to fight off swarms of children as we opened our gate. It was suffocating at first, but the love and respect we got from the kids was so humbling. We were the coolest things that happened to them since they discovered the cell phone.

More remarkable than being showered with love and respect were the diverse group of people I had to share a home with for three weeks. Boredom brought the 12 of us with such different backgrounds very close together. My LCO family was not only the most bizarrely hysterical group of people, but they were also the easiest to get along with. I was able to confide in these people and in two weeks they came to know me better than some of my friends I have known for years.

Free time after work consisted of drinking beer and ice cream (we learned later that this was not a good combination), having doorak and nardi competitions, picking mulberries from our backyard and painting on our skin with its juices and chasing pigs. The environment we were in really allowed us to get in touch with our creative side. We made a toilet seat cover out of cardboard and duct tape, learned French curse words, made a volleyball net out of a clothes line and managed to personify inanimate object with eyes, legs and hair.

There was not much to do there, yet every second spent there was memorable.

The time I spent with the LCO members was amazing; but the real goal of my trip was connecting with the villagers, and finding out their stories. One of the most memorable conversations I had was with 14-year-old girl named Ani. I asked her if she prefers Yerevan, the country’s capital, or the village. Her maturity astounded me as she said In Armenian, “I prefer the village. Although we have our problems here, the situation here is slowly getting better.”

By situation she meant lack of jobs and water for farming and daily necessities. She also meant the poverty they faced and the flawed education system.

“They change teachers so often, as soon as they get used to one teacher, they leave and have to get used to another,” said a mother of two. Despite having a lack of education, their wisdom in the real world far surpasses the average American child’s.

Nine-year-old Monika, daughter of our cleaning lady, was like an adult trapped in a child’s body. One day, as I stood up from weeding, she said “don’t sit on the floor,” and started picking off prickly plants off my soccer shorts. She also forced my 20-year-old cousin to tie her shoes so she would not hurt herself and scolded a 29-year-old man for playing too rough with the small children, as if she was his elder.

Our presence was eye opening for both parties. The girls in the village saw that women were able to do physical work just as well, if not better, than the boys who would often skip work to sleep in (I don’t mean to snitch). We became their role models and they became ours.

We came from completely different backgrounds, but we were able to learn so much from each other. A priest who came to bless our worksite described it the best: “Welcome home,” he said, “Don’t feel as visitors you are in your home.” After getting stares from almost every person in Yerevan it was a relief to hear these words. These are our roots, our culture and people. We may differ when it comes to taste in clothing, the way we speak and other numerous traits, but bottom line is hye enk menk.