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
1 comment:
Hi Katie!
Are you getting our blog posts? We are not sure! Let us know by writing back in the comments if you get a chance. :)
Thank you for writing us again. We have a few more questions as always! Today we are wondering:
What kind of classes do you have in school?
What do you learn about in school?
How many people are in your school?
What kind of foods are popular in Armenia?
Why do you only have necessities at the supermarket?
Now we want to teach you a little bit about America! This time we wanted to teach you about our class, our food, and our weather.
Our class: We have 22 students. Our class rules are be respectful, be a good listener, take care of our school, keep our hands to ourselves, and fill up peoples buckets. If you want to know more about filling up buckets you should read the story called: "Have you Filled a Bucket Today?" By Carol McCloud. It is about how everyone carries an invisible bucket and when its full we are happy and when its empty we are sad. We can help fill up buckets if we are nice to someone, and we dip into people's buckets when we are mean.
Our food: Some of the food a lot of American people like are pizza, McDonalds, Macaroni and Cheese, and apples. YUM!
Our weather: We get four seasons. Right now it is cold. We almost never have earthquakes, tornados, or volcano eruptions.
Talk to you soon! :)
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