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Published on 12/04/1995 All articles from this issue

An American in Armenia adjusts to a rougher, tougher way of living

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By Heatherly Lewis

Special to the Town Crier

NOTE: Lewis, a Los Altos native and Mountain View High and University of San Diego graduate, is a teacher for the Peace Corps in Armenia.

"Well, the first days are the hardest days..." Maybe it was all the magazines I've been receiving about Jerry Garcia that brought this song to mind, but I found the words running through my head during the past few months. Last week my dad sent me an article titled: "Teacher's First Days Become a Learning Experience." That doesn't even begin to tell the story.

Sept. 1, 1995: This year, just as in the past 16, I am preparing for the first day of school. I don a dress, pick up my backpack, and head out the door, along with a stream of residents pouring out of the surrounding apartment buildings. I step over broken glass and cow patties in the school yard and round the corner: a thousand children in black and white are thronging around the school steps, but stop their chattering as I begin to weave my way through them. I feel more weary than self-conscious of this scrutiny - I have become well-acquainted with it over the past week. Snatches of whispers reach my ears: "Amerikatsi"; "engleren usutschuhi (English teacher)." I finally reach the top of the steps, and find the welcoming face of a teacher. From my vantage point I watch the yearly rite of "First Bell," which to my eyes resembles a political youth rally. I search the sea of faces, wondering about my future students, wondering how we will influence each other, but more immediately wondering: what am I going to say to them? The bell rings at last - the first day has begun.

A week earlier I arrived in the town of Hrazdan, peering out the windows of the Peace Corps truck that carried me, my belongings and various apparatus that would aid me during the long winter ahead with little electricity and no heat. A hundred or more stark, rectangular cinder block apartment buildings stood like soldiers in front of the hills, punctuated by two schools, a government building and a scattering of tiny rusty metal structures that carry a steady supply of chocolate, vodka and cigarettes. To be honest it looked dismal, and I felt my heart sink - thinking back to three months before when I had strolled down a perfectly manicured campus in San Diego, overlooking Mission Bay. The driver hooked up my propane stove, gave me a spare wick for my kerosene heater, shook my hand and drove away in a cloud of dust - leaving me feeling like a 6-year-old on the first day of school. "Don't leave me!" I wanted to cry out. But instead I ascended the dark, smelly stairway to my new home: a two-bedroom apartment I was to share with a teacher and her three daughters.

That first week I spent a lot of time sitting: whether as guest for dinner (a lengthy affair) or at school, trying to negotiate my schedule in Armenian (a long process), or trying to get someone to inform me about the English curriculum (there isn't one). I learned that there was a shortage of textbooks, and when I saw the ones that existed, I was further disheartened. The old English books were compilations of outdated British English, complicated grammar and undisguised communist propaganda.

We had been told to anticipate such things, in addition to a school with broken windows and a leaky roof, and working alongside discouraged teachers whose monthly salary is $10 - and sometimes, for lack of funds, not even that. There were some things, though, I wasn't prepared for: a class of 25 8-year-olds yelling in Armenian: "Have you seen (kickboxing movie star Jean Claude) Van Damme in America?" Or a class of 12-year-olds which resembled a scene out of "The Breakfast Club" (the one where they're dancing on the tables). I found myself in tears often, wallowing in frustration and feeling very incompetent to the task that lay before me. How can I, without books or materials, in a language I hardly know, teach a foreign language and maintain discipline in classrooms filled with children who at times seem determined not to learn?

There is still no answer to this question, but my peace of mind has come about through a different means. I was walking to the market one day, as usual trailed by a group of giggling children, when one of my second-grade students called out to me: "Barev Dzez enger Miss Lewis!" (Hello comrade Miss Lewis!). It was this use of the word "comrade," still routinely used, that struck me.

It sometimes seems as though time has stopped in this country. Since the pullout of the Soviet Union, a blockade on one border and war on another, life has been reduced to little more than survival. The people have been witnessing deterioration in every facet of their lives for years now- but there is little with which to replace or rebuild what has been lost and destroyed. Hearing an 8-year-old call me comrade surprised me because it seemed representative of a system that failed the country, and brought into focus the fact that, in many ways, times past are still being mourned because the present often seems like a stagnant period of wondering what comes next.

What occurred to me that day has been confirmed for me since, and I have drawn strength from it. The basic English I teach my students, will, for most of them, not matter greatly in their lives. My success or failure as an English teacher seems less important than what I bring to Armenia simply by being here, among the people: a different perspective, my own way of living, fresh ideas, and wrapped all together, something that I hope will, in a small way, symbolize hope and growth for the future of Armenia.