Eva Raniolo shares her volunteering experience in Armenia with the European Solidarity Corps Programme. Her project abroad was supported by ACARBIO association which cooperated with a local hosting organisation in Armenia.

 

I remembered that as soon as it was confirmed I was going to do my project in Armenia hosted by HUJ Voluntary Service of Armenia, I immediately started trying to learn the alphabet, with all its 78 letters between upper and lower case. It was both fascinating and strange. Then, I began to watch some lessons online, with low hopes, given the fact that even after many repetitions, I could not remember “շնորհակալություն” (“Shnorhakalutyun” – Thank you). I don’t know when it happened, but now, back in my country and writing in Latin script, I miss the Armenian letters, which remain to me only in some leaflets and a small tapestry hanging in my room.

When I first arrived, I was introduced to the dormitory, where all the other volunteers from the hosting organization were staying. During the past ten months, many new volunteers passed through this phase: you arrive almost unannounced, with the news of a newcomer spreading through the dorm’s WhatsApp group but without accurate information (arrival date, nationality). You find a bunch of young people and a black cat, sitting on the sofas in the corridor, using or playing with stuff left from former volunteers or inhabitants of the dorm. Then someone will take you and show you around the place you will live for the next months. It looks all nice until you reach the bathrooms: you open one door, and it’s a squatting toilet. So, you look for all the others, hoping that at least one of them won’t require you to do additional glute exercises, but it doesn’t happen. In the end, you get used to them. Then someone takes you to the city center, mostly to get a new SIM card for your phone and starts to explain the art of taking buses in Yerevan. It seems more difficult to explain than to experience: old buses (the ones in which you can sit on the carpet near the driver, with the additional task of becoming the bus cashier and dealing with the “tickets” and change yourself) and the city marshrutkas (I’ll talk about marshrutkas later). In these buses, you have to pay your fare – 100 drams – directly into the hand of the driver when exiting the bus. If, as usual, the bus is completely full, you can give it to the person next to you, and a human hand chain will start moving until your approximately 25 cents are correctly delivered. The newest buses, instead, have a practical box near the driver to put your coin when getting on the bus. While I was there, the card-payment machine was introduced on all buses except the aforementioned old ones, which will be permanently taken out of service in a few months. It feels like the end of an era. In the bus jungle (where, if you are standing, and someone seated takes your heavy bag onto their lap, there is no need to worry), it is also important to remember that the stops aren’t reported, both inside the bus and at the bus station. Therefore, without the local app (which works amazingly), it is almost impossible to get around. But in the end, in a few weeks you’ll remember all of the busses that from your dorm go down Komitas street to the center, that is really the center of everything you’ll need to do in this capital, that looks like a pretty small city.

For someone who likes languages, Armenia could be stimulating, even too much so. In the streets (where you can find everything in both Armenian and Russian) and also in the dorm, with English, German, French, Persian heard around along with Armenian words thrown into sentences. Also, in my project, there were at least four languages heard on a daily basis among volunteers, teachers, and children.

I worked both in the hospital playroom, playing games and keeping the little patients company, and in the hospital’s school, teaching English to three small classes. And, of course, participation in all the festivities such as the flower show, or the arrival with the consequent present distribution of Zmerpapik during Christmas, or the traditional red egg fight at Easter.

 

There were months of intense learning without even realizing it, from the children, from the other teachers, and about the unspoken Armenian cultural and social norms, such as relationships with others, education, views on culture and tradition, the role of the child, and life goals. I was also able to glimpse Caucasian culture and relations, the Soviet era, and contemporary issues (war, Artsakh’s refugee wave, geopolitical relations).

During the project, we also had the occasion to meet and discuss with volunteers in Georgia and Azerbaijan, within the two training sessions held by SALTO in Georgia. A trip made unforgettable by the Marshrutka, a collective taxi used during Soviet times, which brought us across the country (even though many still chose the old way of hitchhiking), at a reckless driving speed. But we were happy to be in a new country, or coming back ‘home’. 

The dorm often felt like a safe space, a place with many arguments and challenges of administering communal living, but at the same time, getting support from others; or just having a chat together while waiting for your water to boil or passing by in the corridor.

Reflecting on my time in Armenia, I feel there is something unspoken, something I noticed from the very first day while trying to describe it to my family, that even now I cannot fully put into words. An experience that must be lived rather than told.

 

Credits: Eva Raniolo