Yerevan
Photograph courtesy of Jan-Michael Breider


Although, as mentioned in the previous post, I am unable to take any pictures of my own of the amazing imagery that I see every day, I feel very fortunate to have found the photographs of Armenia taken by Jan-Michael Breider in 2005, who kindly gave me permission to upload a few here, on my blog. His gallery contains a number of awesome pictures taken both in Armenia and elsewhere. Many thanks to the kind photographer for an opportunity to share images of my own country through his own eyes...

It’s been two and half weeks since I came to Armenia. Apologies for lack of elaborate posts – work has been consuming most of my time and inspiration. Conducting surveys in Armenia proved to be a much more strenuous task than it was in Georgia – partly due to logistical problems with our host organization, partly due to the overall character treats of my country-men. However, after a week of extensive travels, my love for Armenia proportionally increases as my liking of Yerevan gradually decreases. Unfortunately, my camera broke and I didn’t have a chance to capture the magnitude of Ararat, the sparkling beauty of the lake Sevan and the depth of the green mountains in Dilijan and Ijevan. The beauty of my country is humbling and awe inspiring. While working with people requires a lot of skills in diplomacy, I truly enjoy communicating with them, especially the folk living outside Yerevan. There is a lot to be learned from them – a lot more than any report on the state of the country would ever tell you.

The depressing aspect of my work is that I do not completely agree with what the organization that I represent does for the people. FINCA mission aside, it is obvious that microfinance in the region does not defer much from any given commercial bank – it is perceived as such, it operates as such. Interest rates are high, poverty outreach is minimal and repayment schedule is so rigid that at times I wonder why anyone would want to borrow on such terms. But then I realize that there is no other alternative and it makes me even more depressed. I think about the “untapped” market that FINCA executives constantly talk about, then I think of the rural folk who are the part of this “untapped” market… I wonder what it is like in other places of the world – I wonder whether microfinance is really what it is presented to be while it is still hot and “sexy.”

I have five more days of field work left. As of right now I am completely clueless what our analysis is going to reveal. While I know the obvious, I am somewhat reluctant to see the results, knowing equally well that there is no way that it would reflect the stories of the simple folk that I have heard so far…

This is how I know that the Universie really loves me...

Nothing is left to chance, Nika. The choreography of players and circumstances is plotted with mind-numbing precision. Gigantic forces of attraction are activated and engaged. The odds of your inevitable success begin skyrocketing. And every second of every day is calibrated and recalibrated… whenever you remember to visualize.

Who loves you, baby?

The Universe

I’m in Yerevan now…

Despite all the excitement, it feels very strange and even slightly disturbing to be back here… There is something almost surreal in the way I see the city that I once knew like the back of my hand. I could walk its streets with my eyes closed. I knew its every building like it was a piece of furniture in my old room. I felt at home in every corner of every street at any time of day – morning or night. I would walk the streets for hours at a time, unable to get enough of it, greedily taking in the sights and smells and noise and the night lights… I was still so young, so much in love… and now…

Yerevan has changed. It no longer feels like the city I was in love with. It has become faceless, heartless, has lost its charm. There is so much noise here, so much glitter. The new buildings that have mushroomed here and there in the past two years seem hostile and out of place. The endless stream of traffic –there is so much traffic that the air smells of nothing but exhaust. And then there is dust – a cloud of yellow dust ominously hanging over the city. Yerevan, what has become of you…

All the construction that is happening in every major street indicates that there will be a lot more change. It gives me a feeling of doubt and uncertainty. I no longer know what this change will bring – I already hate it, resent it with all might. It may be good for the economy, but it’s so hard on the eye…

It feels strange to be back here. I feel strange and out of place. I am filled with nostaligia and longing for the old and familiar. I feel the kind of pain that one feels when encountering a loss. I feel like I lost something important and dear. I no longer know my city and I feel strangely out of place.

Interlude

Slowly the sun rises to announce the start of a new day. Under the gray sky is the gloomy city. The sun is ill, her thin rays hardly escaping the thick ivory clouds. With great efforts I make myself get up. I am in the hands of a terrible headache, every cell of mine captive to pain - a constant reminder of everything that I wish to escape...

Yesterday… Where was I yesterday? Don’t remember it well, all the events are vague and in fog. I close my eyes and see rain, a different sky, cars, unfamiliar faces. Charlottesville, I guess I was in Charlottesville yesterday.

Next week I’m supposed to be in New York - another ten-hour trip, airports, delayed flights… and finally the one who has come to meet me. That’s next week, if there is every such a thing...

I stare at the ceiling and the only thing I’m aware of is that I’m exhausted. My imagination seems to have expired itself - and where am I today?

Yerevan, this is Yerevan, with its naked indifference, unconcealed ugliness. There is nothing more Armenian than the view from my window, and it’s depressing. Two women arguing in the corner, kids running home from school, an old man carrying a loaf of bread. Buildings all around - tall ugly giants that seem to be observing everything with their window-eyes. Their look at me is full of accusation and I feel guilt. Nothing seems to have changed, the same view, the same indifference, Yerevan….

The sky is too dark to let me leave. Still too early for New York. Today it's the reality. In a few hours it will completely take over and I know that there won't be a way out - my tired imagination won’t save me today, this pain has left no room for escape. Paralyzed with cold and pain, I will sit motionless on the floor, smoking cigarettes one after another, watching hours pass. I must wait patiently for sleep - a temporary relief to my insanity. I’m ill and suffering from inadequacy and it is more vivid here, in Yerevan.
The Tale of the Cities December, 2000.

Yerevan

Because It Is Summer, I'm Bringing Them All Back Yet Again

Eight summers back I was in Charlottesville, having just moved to a tiny studio in a rundown building off of 29th. Having just escaped almost slave-like conditions that a five-star hotel has for its employees, this ghetto seemed nothing but heaven to me. I will always remember the experience of Charlottesville with bitterness; the misery, hostility and exhaustion of that entire summer will always be there to haunt me, and yet, out of the dark and strenuous experience The Tale of the Cities was born, a story that I wrote and rewrote and shaped and reshaped and cried and bled on paper without knowing that I would be living out that story one day. And despite every single hardship that I went through that summer, I will always be grateful for having found two of my most dearest people – the Bosnian girl who generously let me share her shoe box apartment, and the one who is the main reason why I am here in Richmond today.

Seven summers back I was unhappy, depressed, torn by longing and overwhelmed with regret, feeling helpless and trapped in a city cursed by the sun, the city that only years later I was going to love and accept as home. I remember that long and hot summer of hell, living on ice-cream and tomato sandwiches day in day out, staying up night after night, dreaming, writing, writing the Tale, and when the pain of helplessness was too much to bear, I would cry myself to sleep, dreading the awakening the next morning, knowing that the new day would not bring any possible change. At the end of the summer, when the heat started to break, exhausted and jaded and dry after all the tears I'd shed, I sold my soul to the “devil” and got a full time job and fell in love, hard and fast, against all odds and every reason of rationality, the way you fall in love only when you’re twenty one, still young and stubborn, ignoring and trying to defy the reality with all might. Looking at it now, I realize that it was nothing but desperation – desperation that was to determine the next two years and everything that had to come afterwards.

Six summers back I graduated. And got my first apartment in downtown Yerevan. With five months’ rent I bought all the freedom and solitude I could ever ask for, realizing, for the first time, that I could live like that, alone, hidden in the heart of the downtown, happy in my solitude – a woman, alone, in a big city. And yet, before the summer came to end, I gave up the freedom and was married, without fully aware of any repercussions, waiting for a new life to start under a different sky.

Five summers back I was in Florida. Biding my time in timeless indolence. Hopeful, still in love, waiting for that long expected happiness to dawn, and thinking to myself that there must be something more to this thing that they call marriage.

Four summers back I was still in Florida. Surrounded by bliss of domesticity, slowly embracing what was coming to shape as complacent middleclassness, and desperately trying to grasp the finality of marriage. And yet, I’d often long for the woman I had left behind, the woman alone, in a big city… At the end of that summer Another Life was born, which, with its main theme of adultery, was nothing but the longing for all the other lives that I could have had, had I not made that one particular choice that I was slowly coming to regret.

Three summers back I was in Yerevan. Dazed and crazed by the heat and the sun, the cloudless skies, watered streets and freshly cut grass, happy, delirious, a butterfly on the sidewalk, intoxicated with my own freedom, testing its limits and daring it every way I could. Restless. Sleepless. In love – but this time it was the city I had fallen in love with, fast and hard. For the first time I felt that I was at home, finally at home in a place that I had so long hated and tried to defy. At the end of the summer I moved into my second apartment downtown and with another six months rent I bought the dream that I had so often longed for – the dream of a woman, alone, in a big city.

Two summers back I was in Richmond – to come here, of all the places in the world, a decision so sudden and unexpected and yet looking back at it now – the only possible choice that I could have made wondering “whether this was a choice or an inevitable consequence of the past years that brought me here...”, realizing that I’m living out the end of the story that I once wrote and dreamed about night after night before I'd cry myself to sleep out of helplessness and desperation.

This summer I am traveling all over Georgia and Armenia. I am in Yerevan now - the most beloved city in the world - the city that I will always call home, but the city that no longer feels like home. At the end of this summer I'll be back in Richmond again. If you ask me what’s the best that I have had so far, I’ll you that it’s Richmond – [living] in Richmond. Looking back at it now I realize that of all places that's I've been to and all places that I have lived in, Richmond is the place where I have been the happiest. It is the place that I will keep going back to, a place that I call home now - my home of choice. It's where my life is, temporarily on hold, waiting for me. Last summer I asked for nothing more but to have yet another chance to be back in Richmond, living a life without an expiration date, or any urgency to leave. That's what I will be going back to - to all the bliss and promises that any future could ever hold for me...

What exactly is it that I’m doing this summer

-since besides writing a random comment or two and posting pictures I do not think I have told anything about the nature of work that I did in Georgia and now am about to start in Armenia.

I am a fellow working for the Research Department of FINCA International. FINCA International is a microfinance organization operating in many developing countries, including many of the former Soviet republics. Every summer FINCA sends a group of fellows to different countries that it operates in to conduct a comprehensive survey of microfinance client assessment regarding client demographics, land and asset ownership, expenditures and standard of living, access to financial products, as well as nature of client businesses. So my job is to conduct the survey together with two other fellows in each country, clean the collected data, do a primary analysis and send everything back to the Research Department, where they run more complicated cross-country research based on the data that we provide.

The Georgia team has already completed its assignment. While the work was pretty interesting and exciting, to say the least, there have been quite a few wtf moments, as we ran around all over Georgia with our quest of gathering the precious data. The survey itself, while standard for all coutries, reveals quite a bit of cultural insensitivity and plain ignorance of the said department. For example, literacy and level of education may be interesting issues to explore, but when you’re going to a country with 100 percent literacy rate, questions such as “Can you read and write?” appear completely redundant. Asking a Georgian (or an Armenian) man whether they feel capable of making important decisions regarding their lives would evoke no other reaction but a punch on the face (I do realize that poverty is defined not only through some set number, but also voicelessness and powerlessness of an indiviual, but please leave the Caucasus out of that equation, will you?). Under the section of assets, we ask cilents how many metal cooking pots and pans they have – in Africa ownership of a metal cookware may be an indicative of wealth, but seriously, when I asked my own mother how many pots and pans she had, I got “who counts them, anyway?” in response. Dear Research Department, Georgian (and I’m sure Armenian) women have A LOT OF POTS AND PANS, so the numbers that we have been sending you are NOT A MISTAKE, they’re not outliers and they do not necessarily point to the level of wealth in this part of the world. Just deal with it, ok?

Our findings in Georiga have been pretty unexciting to say the least. Knowing a little about this part of the world and futhermore, having worked for FINCA Armenia in the past as a loan disburser and database administrator for two solid years while I was still in college gave me a pretty clear picture that FINCA is not necessarily serving the “poor enterpreurs” – in fact out of the 309 respondents that we interviewed, only 3 happened to live under 2 dollars a day, and only some odd 10 percent is under the national poverty line. Natalie Portman, do you have something to say about this? What also infuriates me is that FINCA, being the good-guy all-compassionate and helpful microfinance organization operates in the region on the same terms as most commercial banks here. I would not count a monthly 3% interest rate (that’s 36% a year!!!!) as charity, so please be kind enough to revise your mission.

My Armenia assignment is just around the corner. While I am looking forward to the opportunity to visit the same office I used to work in and talking to my countrymen, I do not expect to find anything all that exhilirating and groundshaking. Good thing that Armenia is smaller than Georgia and that FINCA has branches in only 3 other cities besides Yerevan – at least I won’t be all over the place like we were in Georgia. But then, the sample we collect, although representative of the total population of clients of FINCA Armenia, won’t provide an accurate picture of Armenia in general, since the southern part of the country will be left out (FINCA has not made it to Kapan yet). Wish me luck and patience.

Sidenote

I finally had the time and internet connection to upload some pictures of my latests skitaniya on flickr as well as put some of the snapshots of the Black Sea on Visual. I know there could have been a lot more and I wish I had a better camera, but hopefully this gives some kind of an idea about the places that I've been to and things that I have seen.

Tbilisi again