Lessons for a Better Life in Armenia

As a former newspaper and magazine travel writer, I’ve visited more places than I can remember. For about 25 years I was lucky that way, getting paid to travel.

I tried to do it responsibly, to write about the small tour company in Cambodia (Journeys Within) that started its own not-for-profit digging wells in the countryside, travel volunteering with organizations such as Earthwatch, and choosing destinations such as Mexico’s Sian Ka’an World Biosphere Reserve, where a tourist can travel lightly.

When my career started to wind down, I searched for something new and, not for the first time, thought of the Peace Corps. A 27-month commitment with no pay. On the up-side, a subsistence-level living stipend provided, along with lots of on-the-ground support, remarkably effective language training and good, like-minded friends.

But if you’re on this website, I don’t have to tell you what the Peace Corps is. Many young people have thought of joining the Peace Corps in the more than 50 years since President John F. Kennedy and the organization’s first director, Sargent Shriver, dreamed it up.

Increasingly, though, the Peace Corps is open to older volunteers who bring life experience to volunteer work around the world. There’s also something called Peace Corps Response, which places experienced professionals at Peace Corps posts with a limited-time commitment of 3-12 months.

They let me in on a special program—alas, now defunct—that allowed volunteers to study for a year for a master's degree in a field applicable to service, complete a posting and then return to finish the degree. I chose teaching English. You see, I wanted to have some real expertise to take with me into the Peace Corps, not just enthusiasm or gratitude for my good luck.

The long and short of it is that I went to Armenia—which is not Albania, not in Europe, not Muslim, not most of the things that pop into peoples’ minds when you mention it. It’s not even all that Third World—just economically ruined since the break-up of the Soviet Union, governmentally corrupt (which includes the lynchpin of democracy, education), environmentally endangered and oh, so psychologically depressed. I wish I could prescribe the whole country an antidepressant.

I taught English to funny middle-school kids, did some English teacher training and wrote for an NGO devoted to tourism development. But mostly I was just there, frustrating the little old lady in the apartment below because the drain in my bathroom leaked, taking banana bread to fellow teachers at school and bringing English to whomever I could. Why? Because English fluency could give good jobs to people who’d otherwise have to leave home for menial work in Russia.

Now I’m back home in California and it all seems so far away. I wonder if the United States still represents any of the ideals I joined the Peace Corps to promote: self-determination, peace, education and kindness.

Kindness first, always. I’m no born-again, but as in 1 Corinthians 13:2:

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
 

By Susan Spano, Ashtarak, Aragotsotn, Armenia