up and over the hill

Amanda, Im sorry I didn’t say Happy Birthday when it was your birthday last week but you are awesome and...HAPPY BIRTHDAY. (she turned the mighty 2-4). Anthony, I know you’re coming up sometime soon or you already did so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to you soon. Sarah, you are a summer birthday too. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I wrote you all a song and it goes like this: (sing it to the tune of “happy birthday”) Happy Birthday to you... Happy birthday to you... You smell like a monkey... You look like one too... (I don’t care who you are... that’s clever). Mrs. Dickerson, if you’re reading this, I know this is not the correct usage of the “ellipses.” Not really too much going on right now. The next big event other than teaching our classes is swearing in on August 14th. Im pretty excited about that. It will be sad moving away from where I am now because I have gotten pretty close with the family and the village as a whole. Speaking of, on Friday after class Mike, Megan, David, Victoria and I went to the supermarket in the nearby close city and bought some things. I had a conversation with my host mom here and she said that she wanted to learn how to make spaghetti. I told that I would teach her. So on Sunday, I made the spaghetti while the family was at church. They said they were going to be back around 5. I started preparing around 4:30 because I didn’t want the noodles to be over-cooked. This is something that Ares, Guillermo, Marco, and Massimo taught me when I lived with them in Sweden. To not overcook pasta... It seems like every time that I cook some kind of pasta I think about them since we had so much of it there. Anyway, I make the spaghetti, the fresh way with lots of garlic, and fresh tomatoes which were squished between my fingers (that was fun) and with cow meat. My family didn’t get home till 7:00 ...and they had already eaten. Great. On top of that, they sat down and we all ate a watermelon and cantaloupe together. They apologized for eating but said that they had to since they were at a church picnic. I understood. My host Mom ate the spaghetti anyway and even got seconds. I think she was just trying to be nice. The Grandmother ate some too, she really liked it (and I genuinely think that she did- either that, or she is one heck of a liar). I had it again this morning for breakfast with my host dad. I don’t think he liked it. To be honest, when I get back to the states, I don’t think I will ever buy the can. I really like it fresh. Moving on. This upcoming week we have three weeks of teaching in Armenian about healthy living. Mike and I are in a group for the first three sessions which are 45 minutes each and we are doing our presentation on the eye and eyecare. I will be talking about eye anatomy and how the eyes work and mike is going to give an eye test and talk about nearsightedness, farsightedness, and normal vision and the corrective lenses one would use to correct the different vision problems. The other groups are talking about nutrition and something else. Next week I am doing Anatomy and First Aid and the final week will be Dental hygiene. Supposedly the sessions go by pretty quick. We will see tomorrow. On top of this, we are to do a “community project” and based on the surveys we gave a while back we are going to make a pamphlet of health tips and what you should do if you, for example, have a headache. We are going to have a health day on August 2nd and hopefully have some doctors come and talk about healthy living and take people’s blood pressure and stuff like that. I am pretty excited about that but it will be exhausting to do all that while doing out teaching because our teaching doesn’t stop till August 7th. It is nice to know that we will have about a week of nothing because swearing in. That is what I think now, but I have a strange premonition that that will not be the case at all. I have been reading a lot. Will (if you are reading this), does your Dad want those books back or can I donate them to the library. Let me know what I can do with them because its a lot of weight to carry around, and also the other volunteers will probably want to read them. By the way, I really appreciate the email about whats been going on in the States. You’re a champion. So this is a continuation of what I have written above so sorry if I repeat myself. We have had our first three days of Practica. Mike and I chose to do healthcare of the eye and I think it went by pretty well. It is hard teaching stuff in Armenian and what makes it worse is teaching it in front of a live audience. Before Peace Corps I was wondering when my years instructing at Raven Knob, teaching guitar, and teaching English would come in. Well they came in handy. Real handy. The three forty-five minute sessions with the various age groups (7-10,11-13, 14+) went really well. We talked about eye anatomy, how the eye works, how the eye takes in light, and differences in eye problems. We also gave eye tests and some other activities. The time went by really quickly. Mike and I had to come up with some stuff on the fly, but thats what makes it fun. I think my Peace Corps group in my village is starting to feel the end. There is some sort of serenity. Even in the midst of our community project and our practica we aren't really getting at each other. There is a hill behind my house and it has a cluster of rocks that we went to the first couples days we were here and today was the first time since then we went up there. We just walked up there and just talked for a while. Tomorrow we are going to go back up there and watch the sunset. There's only three more weeks left of PST and then we all go our separate ways. I guess that's when the adventure really starts. Tomorrow is another central day and we go into Charensevan to learn more about policy and Peace Corps stuff and then saturday we are going into Yerevan to go see some museums. I hope to hone in and purchase a guitar. We'll see how that goes. So far I am 0 for 3 in trying to get a guitar. Thats ok though. One day. Dad, my package came. Thanks for the stuff. I really liked smelling the socks because they smell like home. Everything was in there. Mike really liked the cookies and he says thanks.

Until Next time