Home is where you put your weight down
Smelling the roses after lunch at Dolmamas
I am stretching my legs with a walk up to the galley next to the toilets on the Fly Dubai plane on my way to Yerevan. Two men are chatting outside the service galley, look like soccer hoodlums to me but it turns out that they are missionaries from South Africa who come to Armenia each year to preach at a summer camp for young adults. Some kind of church to church support. As they tell me about their upcoming few weeks in the Armenia countryside. I am imagining a big tent with open sides and lots of people, singing and clapping and praying in tongues and saying how happy they are to be here and the people up the front saying how excited they are and using lots of words like majesty, savior holiness, redeemer, justified, kingdom and more about personal and you than about others and us. Who knows, anyway I liked them and their commitment and if it wasn't about Jesus and in another place these guys would likely be ready to blow themselves up for some Jihad somewhere.
It was a long
flight, fifteen hours from Melbourne, seven more as a stopover in Dubai and
then on to Armenia, my new home. At the luggage carrousel, I stand chatting
with a suave Armenian guy named Karen, who is in his early thirties and looks
like he has just been unfolded out of a shirt box. He lives in Dubai and sells
luxury cigarettes for $30 a packet. I ask him if he smokes and he says no,
neither does his boss. And then one of the mishos comes up to me and says that
God has given him a prophesy about me, he bows his head and moves in close and
I am pinned between him, Karen and a concrete pylon and I look up to see if
there are any vines to Tarzan my way out. The mishos shinny bright eyes look
knowingly at me; I guess he thinks I am looking to the heavens. He says that the work I will do in the region
will be much more impactful than I can possibly imagine and that the image he
has is of an atomic bomb going off, it is so powerful. He is imagining grace, I
am thinking self destruction. But for my first day here, seems like a good
sign. Karen gives me his number and says lets hang out, I say why not.
Yerevan in summer
is a dry heat 32C, wide pavements and big green lush tree lined streets, a city
of parks and monuments and pillars with the bronze busts of poets and
politicians of old grand Russian buildings and shopping. So many young women
with shopping bags from the summer sales, the kind of girls who dress and laugh
and walk intertwined arms and legs like sibling puppies and sway as they do in
that kind of way that would make a bishop want to kick in a stained glass window.
And there are churches here that go back to 300AD and now when they build new
churches, they build them in the same shape and style as the old ones. If you
are on a good thing you might as well stick with it for a thousand years or so.
I think it is different where I come from, if you are on a good thing you tend
to take it for granted and then grow unhappy and want to get rid of it, do a
new design and make it bigger or smaller and more modern, more something. I
wonder where modern comes from.
I have made new
friends in the office, many people with names so different from any I am used
to, like Armenuhi, Artak and Aramazd and surnames that are like some kind of scary
Sudoku puzzle, Ghalamkaryan, Bezhanyan, Khaleyan and Saghatelyan. The good thing is
all names seem to end in “yan” so I remember the first letter, and then mumble
something and add yan at the end. Friends here are suggesting I learn Armenian,
I am thinking I would rather be boiled in oil and I will be doing well if I can
confidently get a few surnames right after a year. I do know two short phrases to
get me out of trouble. “Problem cheeka” translates to “no worries” and “lave
em” means “I am fine”. I am still working on “thankyou” which is pronounced
“shnorhakalutyun”; seriously.
One of my friends
here in the office told me a story about international development.
He says a man was
traveling along a dirt road in a shiny Toyota Land cruiser, he is forced to
stop as a large flock of sheep is blocking the road. The man gets out and walks
over to the shepherd.
“If I tell you
how many sheep you have, can I please take one for my research?”
The elderly
shepherd nods in agreement.
The man from the
car pulls out his Ipad, goes to a satellite App and after less than a minute
says, “You have 353 sheep.”
The shepherd
scratches the stubble on his chin and says, “If I tell you who you are, will
you give me back my sheep?”
And the man from
the car nods his agreement.
“You must be from
USAID.”
“How did you
know? Asks the man with the Ipad
Well I didn’t ask
you to come here and you told me what I already know……… and now, will you
please put down my sheep dog?
After an
intensive search I found a two bedroom apartment right in the centre of Yerevan
that will suit me well. The search itself was an adventure, with agents and
agents of agents, sometimes five in a room speaking Armenian or Russian, one time
I found myself mistakenly trying to do business with the guy driving the Mercedes,
he turned out to be just the driver of the agent but he nodded a lot and seemed
to like shaking my hand after each apartment viewing. Most apartments’ here are
fully furnished. In Yerevan that means that every surface is covered by
something, walls lined with grand cabinets and side dressers and little carts
with little wagon wheels to put drinks on, paintings and chandeliers and
mirrors. They find places to include some mirror in part of everything and if
there is nothing to put mirror on in they just do straight mirror on the wall, size
of a door. Like Louis the 14th meets Salvador Dali. I have been
wondering what I am going to do with the 1800 kilos of furniture and personal possessions
I shipped from Australia. I have found these things have a way of working
themselves out but as yet I can’t see how this one will. Landlords here don’t
want to take things out as they don’t know where to store them. My apartment is
just round the corner from the
Opera, which is one of the main landmarks in Yerevan. It was built in 1933 and
has the Aram Khachaturian Concert hall at the back. Most people know Khachaturians
Sabre Dance, it goes: DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DUH DA DA DA DUH DA DA DA
DUH DA DA DA DUHDA DA DA DE DOODOO DOODOO DOODOO DOODOO WEEOO DEEOO WEEOO DA DA
DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DUH DA DA DA DUH DA DA DA DUH DA DA DA DUHDA DA DA DE
DOODOO DOODOO DOODOO DOODOO WEEOO DEEOO WEEOO BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM,
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