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| National Salad |
Saturday May 21 was a full work day. We woke early, ate a breakfast of bread, apricot jam, national salad which is sort of like cooked spinach with some cooked egg and cilantro mixed in, and a hard boiled egg. The coffee here is either Nescafe freeze dried or Armenian coffee - it is hard to find a latte or even really a mug of coffee so we suffer through adding boiling water to the freeze dried crystals in our mug. Oh well, it grows on you. The hotel purchased a container of milk especially for our group - but it's grown old and chunky so we've all been avoiding using it which adds to the hotel staff's confusion about our request for milk "why do they want it if they don't use it?" And we can't seem to explain that we need a new one.
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| Cafe Jazzve |
Well, today, Saturday we would begin cement work. Because it was Saturday, the family was home all day and the boys; Sampson especially, were very excited to get to spend the entire day with us. The only modern tool we have on our worksite is a portable cement mixer - powered by a very thin cord spliced together to reach the work site - and propped up with a small tree to keep it off the ground. The scaffolding is an amazing design of platforms propped up with the trunks of small trees and the forms for the cement are hand built with pieces of wood, strings with rocks serve as plumb bobs to keep things level and straight and the workmanship of the men using these tools is amazingly accurate. We volunteers keep both of our feet on the ground - the higher ground work is done by the men in the family.
Three shovels of sand, a few shovels full of rocks, two pails of cement, one pail of water and away we went... over and over we mixed batch after batch and passed them to the workers who were pouring the cement "caps?" we're not sure what to call them - along the tops of all the walls that will hold the roof on. It was slow work so we had a chance to practice our Armenian words; "Dardak" -empty "Leeka" - full we'd say as we passed the bucket along. We practiced our numbers and learned the word for cement "Beton". I spied a giant pig in the valley below and I mean giant - it was out all by itself rooting around and walking along a well worn path. Chickens, goats and cows, birds. It was a peaceful morning - using new muscles and watching our backs we had found our rhythm.
Suddenly, it began to rain lightly, then moderately, then thunder, then... downpour. We scrambled for cover, pulling our rain jackets out of our backpacks. The temperature dropped (good thing for Merino wool)! Rivers of water, mud, we moved into the domik with our family - perhaps it was divine intervention - we had time to have a real language lesson with Naira, the mom, and Margerite the grandmother who helped us tremendously with pronunciation - Naira is a math teach and can read and write english but just not speak it very well - we used my notebook and were soon engrossed in learning new words and pronunciation . I showed them a photo of Alika holding Olive our hedgehog and Naira says, "oh, a voznie" -- like she sees hedgehogs all the time! They loved seeing our dogs and snow and photos of my family. The boys were playing games with Ross and Mitchell - we were all sharing photos and laughing and building something stronger than a home - we were building common ground.
After coffee and ice cream - vanilla - (which was really quite good) - and I'm not certain how it stayed frozen because the family does not have refrigeration the sun came out - it was time to work. We were almost done with the cement work and really wanted to complete it before we left for the day. We slogged through the mud to the house and began again -"Bucket Line Ganal (go)"... "Leeka" "Dardak"... and on we went until suddenly we had finished. It was 5:00 p.m. we had moved 1,522 buckets according to our official team counter, Jim (761 filled with cement, 761 empties).
Slogging through the mud to board the van, the sole of my shoe finally gave way and came off. Flopping to the bus I climbed on and wondered what to do - hiking boots are scarce if not impossible to find, when would we have time to find them - stores close before we get back from our work day... We decided that we would shop for Badinkas (boots or shoes with necks in Armenian) for me on Sunday - we would have a few minutes to do so inbetween attending a church service and preparing for our hiking day.
Hosed off, our team cleaned up and went to dinner - at a restaurant that had lo and behold ... lattes! And food: fantastic pancakes which are sort of like crepes filled with either cooked vegetables and cheeses or cooked meats and cheeses, fish salad, a "meat salad" which was like a ceasar, and vegetable soup that was similar to borscht with potatoes, beets, shaved carrots.
We were informed that our team had completed the work plan for our six construction days in three so we were way ahead of schedule. We are proud of that fact as that means the liklihood of our family moving into their new home before winter is much better.
