A little bit about work

Well, the consequence of not frequently updating my story is: I don’t know where to start telling the story again. Quite a lot of things happened in the past week or so, and overall they are pretty “shocking.” Some kind of culture shock. Some kind of things that I never thought I would experience and see.

Let’s talk about work first. I sat in a meeting with the rural development department here and some guests from the U.S. government. It was a meeting introducing the guests about the development system, how people work, and how everything is connected etc. Anyway, it was about many systems and how they work. The information is overwhelming. Phew~ All I could see is that many many things have to be improved. But if you give me all the problems at once, I really don’t know where to start. Changing a system is not that easy, and it takes time – a LONG time. Impatient people can’t do this kind of work. It’s like changing people’s minds and habits – “how could that be possible?” as sometimes I would think. I feel like one of the biggest challenges is to fight against the old Soviet system. Armenia has only got out from the ruling of the Soviet government for about 20 years. A lot of work still has to be done in order for the country to be fully “independent.” Did I bore you already? I am talking about history and government. I found history to be very interesting. It explains a lot of what I see now. I wish I know more history about the Soviet Union.

Apart from the meeting, I went on two field trips in a week. The trips were amazing. Outside Yerevan (the capital city) is beautiful. I haven’t seen such beautiful place. I even tell people that it is more beautiful than Colorado. There are green mountains and green pastures with colorful wildflowers everywhere. The ground is either green, pink, yellow or purple. I don’t know how to describe it, see the pictures that I posted. Magnificent. During the trips, I visited dairy cow farms, villages and cheese factories. The villages are very interesting. I can see herds of cows and sheep walking on the street once in awhile. I think I went into a story book where kids herd their animals to the green pastures for grass and grown-ups are in the farm taking care of the vegetables. I was invited to one of the houses one time. Sitting on an old wooden chair at the front yard of a house with minimal facility and looking at the beautiful scenery is better than sitting in a billion dollar home in Beverly Hill.

The world here is very different from the life in the United States. For example, when I collected milk samples, I needed to clean the teats of cows with alcohol swabs. People here don’t usually have those neatly packaged alcohol swabs that I can easily buy in the stores in the United States. So what then? We soaked paper towels in vodka to make our own alcohol swabs. Ha. Vodka is very very common here and the price is pretty cheap. A few US dollars can buy a pretty good sized bottle.

Ok, so much for now. I will tell you the other part of my life (the non-work part) in the next blog entry. It is even more fun – surprisingly.

Below are some selected pictures of the journey so far:



Snapshots of bits and bites