First week

Notes from mission:

Yesterday, October 21st, we met with a couple of members who had wanted to meet to get better acquainted. The first was a brother, Abgar Marterosyan(sp). He was friendly and we had a nice visit. He apparently was a former branch president. He is living with his two sons, 6 and 5, with his parents and another sibling, I think. His wife had been killed several years earlier in a car accident. It was after that that he heard about the church, was baptized and had gone to the temple to have his wife sealed to him. He works at the gold mill and has a crazy schedule that sometimes means he can’t come to church, but seems to have a desire to do so.

We also met in the evening with a Sister Marieta Aghabekyan. She fled to Armenia from Azerbyjan. I think she is in her sixties, never married. She welcomed us into her humble home; tidy and fairly clean as I guess you can get with so much dust and dirt around. The home is made of cement or blocks and there aren’t any carpets to speak of, just a little lineoleum-like substance on the floors. The missionaries said her Armenian is horrible and her preferred language would be Russian. She apparently is a visionary woman and has visions which may have led to her conversion. She happened to be in Ararat downtown and saw the missionaries. When they talked with her, she said she wasn’t interested in what they had to say, but thought some of her neighbors might be. But she later told her mother that she thought there might be some Americans coming to the house. Her mother wondered why they would do that. At any rate, they didn’t come but did go to her neighbors. So, she went over to her neighbors and asked why they hadn’t come (I think I’d stay away if someone had told me not to come, but whatever). So, they did come; she very quickly was baptized. She did have one vision similar to the picture in the Book of Mormon where Christ is descending…only the colors in hers were green, purple and blue lights. She has had several manifestations of things; loves the scriptures, especially King Benjamin. She can’t read Armenian, only Russian, so all her church materials are in Russian. She also loves to sing and sang to us in Russian, Love at Home. She showed us a bunch of family pictures from long ago as well as some more recent pictures of branch activities and pictures with missionaries.

She sent us home with a big bag of tomatoes that she had picked that day. She is a very sweet sister with a strong testimony of the gospel.

Food:

We’ve had a couple of interesting things to eat since coming. They have something called lavash. It is similar to tortilla. It is baked hard and then they add water to it to soften it up. We tried something that was lavash and barbecue (pork, cilantro, spices), wrapped up like a burrito---pretty good and very filling. The other thing we tried was called Lava Joe’s. It was a sort of meat paste and cilantro on smaller lavash. We rolled them up like a burrito and ate away. The missionaries wanted us to try them so we did. We might eat them again.

We have been careful to wash fruits and vegetables with a bleach wash and then with filtered water and so far have not experienced stomach issues. Just hope it continues.

Weather:

The weather so far has been wonderful. Warm and sunny during the day and not terribly cold at nights. The air is a bit polluted with all the burning they are doing, either garbage or leaves. There is also a gold mill and cement plant nearby that add to the pollution.

Odds and Ends:

We are up three flights of stairs with no elevator, so we get a bit of exercise going up and down. Some of our neighbors will daily throw a pail of water on the stairs and sweep it down. I think this keeps the dust down somewhat. There seems to be quite a bit of garbage and litter about that just stays there. Where are the scout clean-ups when you need them? I commented that I hadn’t seen any rats, just cats and dogs into the garbage and someone commented back that where there are cats and garbage, there are rats. Ugh!!

The streets are paved, at least the main ones; I suppose the streets were all once paved, but the pot holes have taken over in a lot of them and driving isn’t always smooth. We walk if the distances are short, but when we have to go a long ways, we take a taxi. We have a couple of taxi drivers that we use, neither one is a member of the church and both very interesting. Aram is from Ararat. He is native Armenian who has a wife and a couple of girls. He drives a blue car with lumpy seats and every time we drive in it, we hope we’ll be able to walk afterwards. He doesn’t know much English, so it helps to have the missionaries with us to translate. The other driver we use is George. He’s from Yerevan. His family is still in California, but he had been deported after 16 years working there. He went to get his license renewed and he was sent home. He knows some English which really helps us. He drives a lot for the Mission Office. He’s most helpful. We mentioned to him that we had had a hard time finding a shower curtain, so the other night as he was driving us home, he made a couple of stops and ended up with the curtain rod. When we got home, Rog put the curtain rod up, even though it was received partially broken, but he made it work. So we’re back in the shower business.

Washing Machine:

Washing is an interesting process. We have a two part washer. We take the shower hose and fill the tub with warm water, add clothes and soap and turn it on to agitate for a few minutes, then let it stand and agitate again for a few minutes. We then turn the knob to drain and then re-fill with cold water to rinse the clothes. If we don’t get too much soap in the wash cycle, then we only have to do one rinse cycle. After rinsing, and draining water off, we take the clothes and put them in another section that contains the spinner. Spin the clothes for a minute of two and then hang them up to dry. We have a line that hangs outside the balcony (think West Side Story) and we take clothes pins and hang towels and sheets out. We have an inside drying rack for garments and whatever else we are drying.