A Collage of PST

I’ve been having a hard time deciding what my next blog post should be about. As PST has picked up the pace, there are so many small moments that I wish I had the time to expand upon. As much as I have tried, I can’t seem to discern which moments deserve to be highlighted the most.

When I was a teenager, I used to make collages with old magazines. I landed on this hobby because I needed a creative outlet but lacked any actual artistic abilities. What I could do was cut and paste photos or designs that stood out to me and arrange them into something compelling. So instead of my usual post, this will be a collage of moments from the past few weeks of PST that I hope will create an image of my life recently.

Hearing my practicum students go from saying “she is ’Seetle’” at the beginning of our class to confidently yelling “she is FROM SeAttle” by the end of our lesson. As a thank you for the week we spent with them, our students gifted us handfuls of early-ripened apricots and taught us a traditional Armenian dance (thankfully one of my students positioned herself right next to me to help guide my incredibly uncoordinated limbs).

Symbolically adopting a small stray dog that popped out of the bushes one day and has followed the other trainees and me like a little shadow since. I’ve started calling him Shadow because of this and my day is always brighter when he chooses to accompany me on my walk to language class in the morning.

Accidentally creating a soccer club with a group of teen boys in the village and some of the other volunteers. Even when playing against kids, I can’t help but embrace my competitive nature and really throw myself into the game (which has resulted in a scuffed knee, some cleat-shaped bruises on my feet, and a pair of very dirty shoes). One day when I passed one of the boys walking down the street and said hi, I overheard him tell his friend in Armenian “That girl plays football well,” which made all the soreness feel well worth it, especially after witnessing how surprised most of the boys were to see a woman playing a sport with them.

Staring up at the night sky speckled with stars while hanging my laundry to dry. It’s new to me not to have a dryer but I actually relish the time I take for myself when I do the laundry because the view from our yard is so peaceful in the evening when I can watch the sun sink below the mountains and enjoy the quiet.

Rolling out homemade tortillas in my language and cultural facilitators’ kitchen while covered in flour and listening to 2010s indie pop music blasting from an iPhone. My fellow trainees and I attempted to replicate an American-style taco night for our LCFs with the ingredients we could find at the local market which ended up being a resounding success despite our collective inexperience.

Singing Adele and John Legend songs with my host sister and her friend in our backyard after they coaxed me out of my bedroom by tapping on my window.

Taking a bus, then the metro, then 2 rickety white vans (called Marshutnis) to reach the village of Ashtarak. After exploring the famous gorge that cuts through the town, my travel companions and I spent nearly an hour searching for an open restaurant until finally settling on a tiny shwarma stand where the owner graciously allowed us to escape the rain and, much to our amusement, played Rasputin by Boney M for us while we ate.

Crawling down multiple sets of narrow metal ladders with my host mother into the “pit” where Gregory the Illuminator spent years imprisoned by a pagan king at Khor Virap.

Walking around a large pond with my host family one warm evening and sharing in a laugh with them all as we watched a couple of ducks engage in some very PG-13 behavior (certain things just transcend language barriers).

Trying my best to say “I want my lawyer” in Armenian during a police interrogation role-play game in language class.

Standing on top of a map of Armenia in a school gym after finding out for the first time which village l will be spending the next two years in and weirdly feeling like I’d been bound for that spot all along.

This weekend, we will all be visiting our permanent sites for a few days to meet our counterparts and our new host families. When we return, we will only have a couple of weeks left of training before our real service begins. It’s hard to believe that I only have a finite amount of moments left in PST. There are days where it feels like PST has lasted for a lifetime but most of the time I am shocked at how quickly it has all flown by. As my moments here in PST are running out, I know they are just the first few of so many more moments in time that will soon coalesce into a big beautiful portrait of my service in Armenia.