Water Day
I just survived my first Water Day today, July 19, 2009. This is a national holiday of sorts in Armenia, and I personally think other countries should adopt it. It is like a day long water fight and almost no one is exempt from this. They also throw the water at cars and buses.
In my village, at about 10 AM, a group of boys gathered at the corner by my house, with buckets and started throwing water at one another and every car that passed. They also threw at almost all the other people who braved going outside that day. I could safely watch from my balcony, and I thought I could play the tateek (grandmother) card. I think because I was brandishing two waterpistols, I was fair game. At one point there were probably 20 kids throwing water. They tried getting us on the balcony, but weren’t able to reach, although we had buckets and were able to get them. At one point I did venture out, but only to run across the street to the store, where I was safe. I only got a little wet on my run back.
At one point there was actually a water fight in my house! Later in the afternoon, the grandmother in my house started throwing water on those of us on the balcony. After that it was all out war on the balcony. Needless to say by the end of it, we were all soaked. It was a lot of fun.
My village also has the greatest taxi driver. Since we don’t have any other form of transportation to or from our village, we use the taxi about once a week. He has gotten to know all our names and he buys us things. Two weeks ago he was driving some of us into the city and he stopped and bought us all ice cream. Another time, he came to pick us up from another village and brought a bag full of apricots. And last week, he again stopped on the way into the city and bought us all ice cream. He’s just so nice. It’s another part of small village life that I like.
This past week, those of us who will be teaching English, have been involved in what they call “model school. “ They bring in children from the surrounding villages, between the ages of 9 and 16, and split them into 3 groups. There are 12 of us, and they have paired us up so we team teach. We teach each group 3 or 4 times. Kyle and I finished teaching the oldest group, 14-16 year olds, Wednesday and now have the youngest group, 9-11 year olds. We have to come up with our own lessons and hand in lesson plans. For the older group, we started out on personal adjectives, and had them fill in part of a character web on themselves. We then talked about 3 simple tenses (past, present and future) and had them fill in another part of the character web with their plans for the future. They then did a timeline of their life. The last day, they wrote a short autobiography. It really went pretty well, given their limited English and our very limited Armenian. Going from that group to the youngest group today proved a bit of a challenge. These children have limited English, if any, but are very eager to learn. They are full of energy and loved it when we played a game with them. We don’t meet with them for a few days, so we have some time to come up two more days of lessons.
These last 3 weeks of training are going to be super busy. Besides model school, we still have 3 hours of language lessons every morning and the homework that goes with it. And I still want to spend time with my host family. I’ll be glad when this part is over, but sad to leave this host family. They have truly made me feel a part of their family and I will miss them when I move.

This will be the last post on this blog address. My new blog address is:
suesadventuresabroad.blogspot.com