Thursday, August 28, 2008
It’s early in the morning here at my permanent site and I just can’t get to sleep tonight. I am excited about tomorrow and in general the time I have spent so far in Armenia and especially at my permanent site. I have been busy working on or preparing to work on so many projects that it is beginning to get difficult for me to fit everything in my schedule. I thought the opposite would happen once I got to my permanent site.
However I am very happy to have all of this work since it is definitely not the norm for most of the other Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) I’ve talked with here in Armenia. A majority of PCVs are located in very rural areas of Armenia, where the local populations live almost entirely off of subsistence farming or very small business. These towns/villages receive little in the way of aid, whether it is from NGOs, the government, or foreign aid assistance. The PCVs there must start from scratch and try to build something from nothing; much like the Armenian Diaspora community has down for about 100 years and longer if you count prior historical circumstances. Right now many of my PCV friends are bored, because they have not acquired a high enough proficiency in the language to get down to business with their Armenian counterparts and within their communities. My Armenian is not much better, but I am lucky in a way that there are many patient people here to listen to my broken Armenian.
My village has had several well-liked volunteers before me, because of this there is a very strong pro-American sentiment at my permanent site. Although I am still the new volunteer in town and I receive suspicious gazes every day, the people in the town are overall friendly to me and there is a large segment of the population who has worked with PCVs before and loved them. Another thing that is interesting to me is that I am regarded as a volunteer here at my permanent site. They have had so many PCVs here in the past that the local population is used to having a new volunteer every couple of years. Yet, I definitely don’t just want to be another volunteer, I want to do a lot for the people of my town and I feel like I am off to a good start even though it is just a start.
The projects that I am working on, in some fashion or another, right now are diverse in scope and nature. Even though I know these projects are partially a product of my environment, I have also tried to be very open and visible in the community. I am out and about in the community everyday, even if I’m having a bad day, and I put myself on the line quite frequently since currently my Armenian language skills is not that great.
My first project that I worked on and completed was writing around a 20 page grant for a local NGO who is trying to raise political awareness in my town and the surrounding villages. The NGO I have been working at is kind of a one-stop shop in terms of what types of projects it performs. Personally, I believe this is the future of grass-roots, based NGOs throughout the world for three primary reasons. For one thing it is very difficult to sustain multiple NGOs in small communities. Personnel, overhead, and traveling expenses add up, it is easier to have a fairly permanent staff and basic equipment that you can rely on project after project. Secondly, the NGOs in these local communities generally have members who are interested in a wide variety of development topics; not just women’s rights, or the environment, or health improvements. Generally, the people that I have met at the NGOs represent a small percentage of the local population that wants change and will try to improve most aspects of life in a specific community. Third, initially having just one NGO prevents initial start-up squabbling in the case of multiple NGOs in a community; it is hard to build coalitions within a small community when people are fighting over projects. The key in initial NGO start up within a ‘new’ community is consciences. Although some would argue that multiple NGO’s in a town is good and necessary for development, just as competition is a must within the free-market, but at this point I would have to disagree. Local NGOs like the one I work for already face fierce competition in the international market of grants and donations. If an NGO doesn’t perform well on a single project a donor organization will look elsewhere when donating later on. However, I do think if the NGO becomes too large or if it is located in a large enough town or city then multiple NGOs are preferable. I have only been at my permanent site for 2-weeks so I am sure more realities of the NGO business will soon become apparent.
Okay, now for the other projects I am currently working on. Another project I’m working on is with the same NGO is an environmental project, for which I have a meeting tomorrow at 3p.m. The entire ‘staff’ of our NGO, plus around 10 people from Yerevan will come in to discuss our future plans. In early September, I want to take some of the best English speaking students to a nearby town to be test for the FLEX program run out of the State Department. FLEX is a 10-month program; where high school aged students from all over the world have the opportunity to study in a high school in America. This project will be tough to organize with such short notice and since most, if not all, parents are too worried to let their kids leave home and go to America. The next project I will be working on is more of just a fun day, but fun days are good every once in awhile. In the middle of September I will be going to Yerevan to help out with a “Save the Nature” open air painting day, which will be organized by Sunchild NGO. It sounds like fun, but it will be quite the trip for me. The other project that has recently come to my attention is a forest beautification project. There are several little parks around in the nearby forests and all of them have trash scattered all around the park area, usually just out of sight of the horovats (barbecue) pit and the picnic tables. I want to clean up 5 different sites and install permanent trash cans, whose contents will be disposed of after every weekend. I also want to put up sign explaining local fines, environmental consequences, and the different decomposition rates of certain types of trash. The last project is kind of another fun one, but some local men, one of them being my host brother-in-law, are starting up a judo/karate dojo here in my town. They are interested in getting a tumbling a mat for their dojo. Getting grant money for this might be more difficult since at this point I don’t know exactly how this tumbling mat will help the community at large, but I ‘m sure we can think of some way it will positively impact the community. Armenians love judo and most large towns I have been to have a dojo for young boys to train. Maybe that will be the key to receiving grant money, advertise to girls in our village, Eureka! If we can have lessons for girls than maybe grant money will come about easily. We’ll see.
Okay now my paragraphs are just rambling on, I probably should go to bed. It is 2:50 in the morning here and I want to wake up kind of early and go running; that probably won’t happen, but there is always tomorrow.
I hope everything is going well back in America and all over the world. I heard there was flooding in Melbourne, Florida a couple weeks ago I hope nobody was hurt and that not too much property was destroyed, I don’t know if the insurance industry has fully recovered from Katrina and the storms of 2005. I also heard there was a threat of tornados and flooding in Georgia, because of the tropical storm that also caused the flooding in Florida. I hope everyone in Georgia is safe and that little Miss Charlotte was not scared by the storm. I hope the Bulldogs have a great weekend against Central Michigan and that Bud and Holly have a fun joint birthday party. I’ll talk to y’all later and I love everybody back home.
Love,
Mark
Remember this blog is a reflection of my own personal thoughts and reflections and in no way represents the views of the Peace Corps or the United States' government.
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