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June 24, 2006
Last day in Yerevan
YEREVAN, ARMENIA –- We’ve laid a few hundred square feet of concrete floor, moved perhaps 10 tonnes of sand, and plastered hundreds of square feet of wall—-all in 6 days of working, of 13 total days.
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We’ve worked on two job sites, each very different from the other. We started and ended with an old Soviet building purchased by Habitat for Humanity in 2006. It’s a 24-unit hulk of rough concrete and tufa block that was started in 1989, just before the USSR disintegrated. By 1993, the economy had collapsed and Armenia was in the final stages of fighting Azerbaijan for Nagorno-Karabakh. Work came to a stop half-way to completion, and nobody touched the shell until recently.
Click pics to enlarge
The Gavar worksite.
The structure lies on the outskirts of Gavar, a village near Lake Sevan, a beautiful big lake near the Azeri border that the knuckle-headed Soviets considered draining to make hydro power. Set beautifully between snow-covered ridges of the Lesser Caucasus range, Gavar is a ghost town that’s still inhabited. Nobody has maintained the parks, the roads, or many of the buildings in the town in 16 years. Groups of unemployed men loaf about the public square, but nobody bothers to beg, probably because there’s nobody to beg from. In the center, an office building has been turned into makeshift lofts, the windows covered with whatever sheets could be found. On the outskirts, laundry hangs from the balconies of dank Soviet-era housing blocs. A third of the population left in the early 1990s, and those that stayed did so only because they had nowhere better to go.
Typical Soviet-era housing in Gavar
Many in Gavar are nostalgic for the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev ran the USSR and Armenia’s factories boomed. “You didn’t even really have to go to work,” one old timer recalled. “If you didn’t feel like working in the factory that day, your supervisor would just change the records. Nobody cared, so you really worked very little.” The reality of the market economy hit hard.
Today’s Gavar homeowners are an interesting bunch, ranging from the young one-armed man to old Salomon, a grandfatherly figure who looks like a friendly version of Saddam Hussein. Salomon always turns up to the job site wearing an old three-piece suit with a fat 1970s tie. It may be his only decent set of clothes, but he’s still a fiercely proud guy.
The hardest-working homeowner in Gavar (center), a guy with one arm
The Gavar homeowners face a huge task still. Successive Habitat teams aim to have the building ready for move-in by early September, shortly after the Armenian Pope and Jimmy Carter headline a 400-person effort to finish the project.
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We also spent two days in Khor Virap, a small village on the Turkish border in the shadow of Mt. Ararat, where legend says Noah’s Ark came to rest. There, we helped two brothers’ families (the Haroutyunyan families) plaster their walls and make concrete for around the house. The Haroutyunyans are tomato farmers who have relatively large plots. They sell their tomatoes to a paste-processor for about 2 cents per pound, while it costs hundreds of dollars a year per hectare just to irrigate the fields, not to mention the backbreaking labour required to grow a pound of tomatoes. (They nearly fell over when I told them what tomatoes sell for at Whole Foods.) Overall, the families net about $2000 per year, or about $1.22 per day per person. That’s actually a decent income by Armenian standards, and the Haroutyunyans have spent more than a decade saving and building their house before Habitat became involved. It will be finished by the fall.
Mixing cement in Khor Virap.
Perhaps the cutest experience was when I was plastering the high walls of a room in the Haroutyunyan house. The 10-year-old daughter found a putty knife and some plaster and began plastering the walls as I was doing. Somehow she understood what was going on.
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Yerevan itself is an interesting city with a lot of history nearby. The café culture here is huge, as seemingly every square inch of available parkland is filled with semi-permanent open-air café tents, some chic and trendy, others more like divey sports bars. Drinks run $1 or $2, and every café is busy almost every night. Who needs a dark, smoky bar when one could just relax outside?
Knock-off Evian water, available for 50 cents at any Yerevan café
Accordingly, Yerevan’s bar and club scene sucks, which is fine by me. The women compensate by wearing club attire-—skimpy shirts and high heels—-everywhere they go. It means that many of the women here walk around at noon looking like cheap Vegas sluts or sorority girls doing the walk-of-shame. Then again, the men tend to sit in cafes and drool at whatever walks by, so I guess it all works in favor of the reproduction of our species.
Last night we found a Russian karaoke joint, where successive Armenian men got up and crooned out old Russian favorites. I even got up and rapped Eminem’s song “Stan,” which garnered quite a healthy ovation from the crowd.
There isn’t much of a drug scene here, which is a good thing. It’s also surprising because poppy, the plant from which is made heroin, grows as a weed here. Alanna picked one and put it in her hair, but it mostly grows unmolested in the southern part of the country. [Update: heroin is made from a close relative of this plant, but its narcotic content is minimal.]
The poppy plant (Papaver orientalis) grows freely here. Heroin is derived from a close relative of this species of poppy.
Our group of random strangers also bonded well. We had (among others) a 58-year-old cabinet maker, a 28-year-old pastry chef, a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher with her i-banker husband, a late-20s former Mormon missionary making his way around the world, a 30-something Paris-based lawyer who’s contemplating a career change, two high-school-age brother-sister pairs, and a chilled former radical who “spent much of the Reagan administration in-and-out of the San Francisco jail.” Over the course of 14 days, we debated topics including whether the French Laundry is better than Per Se (nobody was a big fan of either) and whether “fri’ chicken ‘n’ mash’ potata” is the ultimate meal. (OK, so we talked a lot about food, because it was generally really good here and meals take 3 hours with Armenians’ generous sense of hospitality.)
Two of the shorter members of the group with one of the taller members
Tomorrow I will brave the mini-bus zoo to try to find a mini-bus to go up to Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Destinations are written only in Georgian or Armenian, neither of which uses either Roman or Cyrillic letters. It only costs $15, but the vans packed with 20 people really don’t look very comfortable. I considered buying a plane ticket, but I was informed upon entering a travel agency that only one airline flies the route, and that airline no longer exists.
The alternative is a taxi:
Posted by adrianjo at June 24, 2006 06:17 AM