"I'm small, you know? I was only 2 kilos when I was born. My mom went into labor running away from our house when it was bombed. Our house was re-built, and you can still see the Azeri village from our window. Locals know to never go close to the border, but sometimes people get lost. Those people never come back."

 -A 19-year-old student from Noyemberyan, Armenia.

A Thousand Words

Found on Tumblr, taken by Instagram user INeedMoreBeer

This is a picture I found today on Tumblr, and I love it more than I can really describe. It was taken during this year's celebration of Vardavar, which is a summer festival that dates back to Armenia's pre-Christian times, and is one of the only holidays with obviously pagan roots that's still commonly throughout the country ((I think)). While I didn't get to experience Vardavar since it's in mid-summer, it sounds amazing: like Holi or Thailand's water festival. You basically run around all day spraying people with buckets of water; kids jump in the city's numerous fountains, taxi drivers get drenched if their windows are open, and unsuspecting foreign tourists are particularly beloved targets, or so I've been told (here's a great video my students showed me of the festivities).

I love this picture so much because it's such a contradiction to the Typical Armenia Image, which is some mix of Mount Ararat, a stone church, or a pomegranate, in different combinations.

And when you're here, and foreign, people are really excited to tell you the verbal equivalents of these images. "Every race has its roots in Armenia," people say. "Mesrop Mashtots helped invent your alphabet too," others note. "Did you know President Obama has Armenian blood?" students ask. "Armenian is the third most beautiful language in the world," a teacher comments. "An Armenian invented X, Y, and Z," someone else adds. "Armenian is the language of God, and we are His people."

I don't know what adjective to describe Armenian pride, but one of them is certainly "impressive." I think I'd be just as patriotic if my country and language still existed after thousands of years of wars and a genocide.

But sometimes I think all the images and ideas about Armenians and Armenian-ness are an attempt to cover up the fact that there is so much bad shit happening in this country. An unbelievable amount of corruption in every sector of life, from education to law. Closed borders with two out of four of its neighbors. A war that has no end in sight. A startling rate of emigration. Citizens' complete lack of hope or trust in the political system. Environmental degradation and lack of sustainability (the nuclear power plant that provides 40% of the country's energy is considered one of the most five dangerous nuclear facilities in the world. It's located in one of the world's most seismically active areas, and is--by the way--20 miles outside Yerevan). The fact that a trained university lecturer in Yerevan makes no more than $400 a month (less than professors in India, Malaysia, or Ethiopia.)--and if you're just an associate or assistant professor, it's more like $200 a month, despite the fact that the cost of living in the city is not much less than in the U.S. In short, it's not all stone churches and Mount Ararat and fruit.

I love the picture above because I feel like it's a representation of everything in Armenia--the bad and the good. The Stalin-era apartments, the rust, the cracked pavement; the brightly-colored laundry as it whips in the wind, the kids playing, drenching each other during a joyous summer holiday. There's no symbolically-oozing pomegranate, no William Saroyan quote, no talk about the Turks, no Photoshop-enhanced monastery. It's imperfect, it's real, it's beautiful in its own special way. It's Armenia.