Closure

If you make it through the entire 27 months of your Peace Corps service, then you reach a milestone that we PCVs in the PC call COS: Close of Service. I find Close of Service to be a really clunky term, as I'm not entirely sure what it is that closes after two years. My …

Ari, Man Gank

My village bus was nearly fifteen minutes late. I almost took it as a sign to turn back and walk home. It was an early May morning, 11:12 a.m., and the sun was already strong enough to make sweat spring up spontaneously all along my skin. The air was already dusty and the other people …

The Final Forty-Five

I remember how it felt to be forty-five days from my staging event for Peace Corps. It felt awful. Despite almost a year having passed since I applied for the Peace Corps, more than six months passing since I'd been offered a spot in Armenia, and a few months since I was medically and legally …

Hostel Environments

Before Peace Corps I was scared of... most things. About ten years ago I would've easily described myself as being afraid of everything. Specifically, germs. I used to be really bad with germs. And people - definitely bad with people. People are scary and unpredictable and they carry so many germs. I must say, I've come …

Lost & Found in Translation

Living in a second language - or third, fourth, any degree of foreign language, really - is really freaking hard sometimes. And honestly, the moments where it feels good, easy, or rewarding are rare and fleeting. I vowed early on in service to make a note of all those occasions where I was proud of …

A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed

The unofficial motto of Peace Corps preparation has got to be: "go in with low expectations - no expectations if possible." Man, I tried so hard to live by that and until very recently I was still hypocritically doling out that advice on a dime to any prospective trainee I came across online. As much …

Hakob the Magnificent

“Alyzabeth jan, we're going to visit our friends in Karakert, will you come with us?” asked my host mother, Nune (not my current Nune, but a Nune nonetheless). Actually, in order to be less confusing, let's call her Mrs. M. This was the summer of 2017, my very first month in Getashen, and I was …

St. Nune and the Gospel of Nominative Determinism

As someone with a bizarre name - well, a bizarre form of a common name - I've always been a little obsessed with the etymologies of names - where they come from and what they mean. Elizabeth, for example is a more modern form of a Hebrew name: Elisheba. Composed of two parts meaning "God" …

Down & Dirty: 5 Lessons Learned in the Peace Corps

Welcome to the first ever post on my blog (and hopefully the last) to require a graphic content warning. Seriously, some of this is really disgusting, but I won't apologize. Everything here reflects my real, personal experiences. Read at your own will. So, without further ado, here are five and a half important, uncomfortable, and …

My Week With Tatik

I had been dreading this week for months. Nune, my housemate, has gone to Moscow for ten days to visit her two newest grandchildren, twins born to her youngest daughter (who is only a few months older than me) in September. And she's left me home alone with our tatik. Nune and I live alone, …