Our First Letters!

Hi Class 23!

We are so happy to have received your letters! And right before our New Years Celebration here. It was a great start to the New Years. Here we celebrate New Years from December 31st (New Years Eve) until January 13th. January 13th is considered to be the 'Old New Years.' Everyday we celebrate! We eat lots and lots of food and go to different houses to visit all of our friends and families. We generally do not even sleep at all on the night of New Years Eve. We spend the entire night going to visit other houses or having people come visit our house. We put the best food we can make on the table such as: dolma, meat, salads, and lots of cakes. We wish everyone health, happiness, and a good new year. On January 6th we celebrate Christmas. Our New Years holiday is celebrated more than Christmas. Christmas sometimes we will get one gift from 'Winter's Papa' (Santa Clause).

Now your letters are another present we got to receive! Many of us have dreams of going to America one day. We will have to work very hard to learn English and study well to go to college or University. Some of us want to be chefs, teachers, businessmen, or farmers when we grow up. But have never traveled outside of our country. Many people from our country go to Russia or Georgia for vacations.

We are a very hospitable culture and always welcome new people into our houses with open arms. We drink coffee and tea and like to share everything we have with new people we meet. Do any of you have any Armenian background?

We have old caves in our village where people used to live up to 40 years ago! These are pictures of what they look like today. About 100 years ago over 20,000 people lived in these caves. They lived off of everything they could make themselves - bread, cheese, yogurt, meat, eggs, etc. Now no one lives in them, but there are still grandparents alive who went to school in these caves.

***Some of us only learn how to write in cursive, so we apologize if our handwriting is hard to read. We are working still working on our writing.

We look forward to you guys receiving our letters! Thanks again for yours.

-The Khndzoresk Students

Halloween In Armenia

Happy Halloween Room 21!

We celebrated Halloween here for the first time and like your holiday very much. We brought pumpkins from our gardens to school and carved jack-o-laterns to put outside our house at night. We also created masks for our costumes to wear when we went trick-or-treating. The older kids in our school went trick-or-treating to the houses in our villages and asked for candy just like in America!


We received some different things than you might recieve in America...pomegrantes, apples, walnuts, cake, candy, and some money. Everything that we received we brought to the kindergarten so they would be able to share part in the holiday. The children were very happy.

How did you celebrate Halloween? What did you dress up as?

Food, Flag, and Fun!

Room 21,
Thanks so much for your comments! We are also sorry for the delay, but wanted to provide you with some information to your questions and some more information about ourselves…
Our Language
A couple of words for you to learn…
HELLO – Barev Dzez
HOW ARE YOU? – Vonts Ek?
BREAD – hats
CHEESE – panir
THANK YOU – shnorhakalutsyun
ONE – mek
TWO – yerku
THREE – yerek
Our alphabet has 39 letters and was developed hundreds of years ago. We are the only country in the world that speaks this language. We also learn Russian and some English so we can communicate with other parts of the world. We are very far away from Chicago – flying takes over 20 hours and multiple stops!
Our Flag
Our flag is red, blue, and orange. The meanings of colors is red – for the war, blue – for the Armenian sky, and orange – for the fertile lands of Armenia. We have seen a picture of your flag and now know about the history behind it!
Our School
We have the following classes at our school: P.E., Russian, English, Armenian, Armenian Literature, Chemistry, Social Studies, Military Studies, Armenian Church History, and Math. We have two different villages in our area – 1 small and 1 bigger. Our small school has a total of 44 kids in the entire school! Our bigger school has about 350 kids and 16 kids in our class. We have grades 1st-12th. We love your idea of filling up buckets to make people feel good! We also like to be respectful in class, treat others as we would like to be treated, and study hard.
Our Weather
Our weather is similar to yours. It snowed for the first time here yesterday. All of the tops of the mountains are now filled with snow and it is very pretty. Sometimes because we are high up, it looks like we are living in a cloud.
Our Food
The majority of the food we eat comes straight from our gardens or our animals. We have many cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep in our village. We also have big gardens full of fruits and vegetables. Many of our fathers work in the mountains with the cows and bring back milk to make cheese, yogurt, and butter. The girls here often work in the garden gathering the fruits and vegetables. Our favorite foods are: dolma, hash (animal foot cooked in soup), barbeque meat, lavish (thin bread similar tortillas), cucumbers, tomatoes, and egg sandwiches. If we have a special occasion, the family members fill the tables of a variety of foods, candy, and drinks as shown in the picture on the right from a wedding.
Some questions for you…
• What are your favorite types of music?
• What are your favorite games to play?
• Do you have any cows?
Thanks for writing us! We will write you again soon.
-Khndzoresk School Students

A Little About Armenia

Before coming to Armenia, I knew very little about the country, or even where it was on the map! Now, I live with a host family in a small village and am learning about the people, language, and culture. I have 4 pigs which live underneath me in my basement, 18 hens, and cows and horses that gaze up and down the road at any given time. We have a huge garden which has tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, lettuce, potatoes, and tons more (I’ll write more about the food here sometime soon).

A lot of the people in our village work as farmers – tending to the cows or sheep in the field, gathering milk or eggs from the animals, or working in the garden to get all their crops ready for eating.

There are 4 seasons here, probably similar to Connecticut! It gets quite hot in the summer, cool during autumn, very cold and snowy during the winter, a warmer during the spring. We are at a rather high altitude so almost every morning I wake up these days it looks like we are living in a big cloud.

The village life of Armenia is much different than in the United States. There are few cars on the road, 1 school, and a couple of small stores which have necessities for cooking, cleaning, or living. If you need anything else (toys, clothes, etc.) you must take a bus to the nearest city about a 20 minute ride away. There are a total of about 2,000 people in our village and almost everyone knows each other. They take care of each other like family.

The children start school about the age of 5 in kindergarten, and go through 12th grade before advancing to University. The students go to school from 9am-2pm and go Monday-Saturday. Generally, they don’t even get a lunch period!

Our students have finished writing their first letters to you and are very excited to hear from you. The mail takes a while here as it is miles and miles away, but we hope they all get to you!
**photos by Peter Weems

Barev!

Barev! (Hello!)

My name is Katie McKillen and I will be your penpal from Armenia for this year. I am in the United States Peace Corps and will be living in Armenia for two years. I will be learning the language, culture, and helping the people. I am from Chicago, IL and have traveled a long way to get here. My journey went from Chicago to Washington, DC to Vienna, Austria, and finally to Yerevan, Armenia.

Yerevan is the capital of Armenia and has the only international airport. The country is not much bigger than all of Connecticut combined! It is about the size of Maryland. In total, it has approximately 3 million people.
The language of Armenia is Armenian. It is the only country in the world that speaks its unique language. However, the children learn some English and Russian in school. The writing looks like this:

Բարև Ձեզ, ինչպես եք? (Hello, How are you?)

I am currently working at a school in Khndzoresk, Armenia where the children are diligently working to learn English so they can be penpals with you all. They are very excited to hear from you and learn about America. Most of the children have never traveled outside of their country, or even their town.

I will be writing you every couple of weeks to tell you about the culture of Armenia and my journey. We can't wait to hear from you soon!

From,
Katie and Your New Armenian Friends