Great expectations

Armenia, photo by Tanya Andren

Aria Kinch, Armenia, 2001-2003

By Kristen Hare

  She knew, before she left Michigan, what the Peace Corps was, and what the Peace Corps wasn’t. At least a little.

  Aria Kinch agreed when the recruiter told her that she’d get way more out of these two years than she’d ever give. She understood that life in Armenia would be hard in a million ways life had never been hard before. And she got that the Peace Corps’ logo, “The toughest job you’ll ever love,” wasn’t false advertising.

  Still, with each conversation she had before leaving home, each goodbye, her excitement and her expectations grew.

  “Go out and change the world,” her friends, family and colleagues told her again and again.

  On the plane ride from Washington D.C. into Zvartnots International Airport, Aria carried that with her. 
  Go out. 
  Change the world. 
  The sense of possibility buzzed around inside her.

  Off the plane, the Peace Corps staff took Aria’s group to Zvartnots Cathedral, an Armenian heritage site, for a welcome ceremony.

  The full moon hung heavy to one side of a snow crowned mountain that June morning. At the old temple ruins, first built in the 7th century, she was surrounded by arching pillars and red poppies.

  As the sun rose, local musicians played the duduk, a wind instrument made from the wood of the apricot tree. Other than their song, the place was silent.

  Her own excitement quieted.

  Zvartnots was an ancient place of worship, but there was little left now. Just crumbling stones the shape of what once was and a group of eager Americans ready to go out and be helpful.

  Aria and her group boarded a bus bound for a town two hours from the capitol. Through the mountains, across the Armenian roads, they saw no one. They arrived in Gymri late that morning and found a town devastated by blow after blow after blow.

  Gymri was at the epicenter of an earthquake in 1988. Many buildings never rose again. Pictures of the dead decorated the headstones in the vast graveyard. There’d been the recent land war with Azerbaijan, cutting off the town’s supply of natural gas. And the town had lost power for two and a half years after the Soviet Union fell. Many places never got it back.

  This was a staggering place, but still, she found quickly, it was a place that remembered what it had once been. The literacy rate in Armenia was 96 percent when Aria was there. People were well-educated. They knew of the world. But there was little power. No jobs. Most of the men left to find work elsewhere. 

  It felt like a place in permanent mourning.

  From the beginning, Aria struggled with the language, more than most, she thought. She cried a lot in frustration. And sometimes, she laughed.

  The word for toilet was similar to the word for watermelon. She often requested the wrong one.

  She couldn’t talk as she had back home. Seeing the sadness and struggling to find words, her excitement withered. 

  But in its place, something new developed.

  People saw her, a young American with wild blond hair and a quick smile, and they wanted to talk. They told her about the people they’d lost, the good jobs they’d once had, what life was like before.   

Aria Kinch, right, and a friend in Armenia. Photo by Tanya Andren

  She listened, often seated in the homes of the old women in her town, sipping strong coffee and accepting a gregarious hospitality from people who had little to give.

  For two years, Aria worked as an English teacher in Nor Hajen.

  But she thinks now, 10 years later, that wasn’t her real work.

  In Armenia, Aria learned that change comes very slow in a place that has existed for very long. Traditions matter, sometimes greatly when they're all that's left. She learned to stop. To listen. To witness. 
  Now, when people ask her what she did in the Peace Corps, she tells them, quite sincerely, and quite proudly -- I drank coffee with old ladies.