Paul Keutelian Online

This is my last day of work here at the Cosmic Ray Division. I’m just wrapping up some loose ends here and compressing my drive so that I can fit the rest of the interns’ photos. If I collect everyone’s photos and videos, I believe I will be sitting on top of almost 80 Gigabytes of data. That seems pretty ridiculous, so my recommendation may be to have an official group camera for next year versus having everybody swap each others photos.

My project at CRD was a success, the time server is still broadcasting (Day 3) and all the computers are having no problem synchronizing with it. All interns are finished with their internships, and I am the only one at work (ironically). I don’t mind it though, I very much enjoy coming to work and without it today would be wasted. Tonight is the last full night I will spend in Armenia. Tomorrow evening will be helping the interns get ready to go and finally taking them to the airport. My counterpart, Stefanie, is trying to extend her stay in Armenia (I would too if I didn’t have school); she will find out today whether that will be possible.

Armenia has definitely gone through many changes within the past two years. Now, being in the thick of things I am able to get a healthy dose of what is going on. For those reading the CYMA blog at their website know what I am talking about. Bringing Armenia to the world table is going to be a very big team effort. Both sides (Diasporan and Native) are very good at presenting their material to each other – but very few times will either side objectively sit down and work with the other. This is, of course, a very large generalization – but with current conditions I think it is fair to say. The other interns have their own viewpoints on the conditions here and how they came to be and where Armenia is going, but I feel that Armenians, diasporan and native, are going to have to first realize that Armenia is all of ours, and that we all are responsible for its development.

One of the interns on this trip brought up a very good point, “We always here about being proud to be Armenian, how important it is to maintain the language, culture and religion; but we never hear anything about repatriating.” Repatriating? That’s right. We never do hear about the importance of going back home and being a part of our homeland’s future. And with a population as small as ours, every little bit is critical. This is not to say that we only matter if we are physically in Armenia. On the contrary, many people don’t need to step foot in Armenia to enable new things to happen and help people who come here to make a huge difference.

As part of the suggestions I am giving for the future of CYMA, I am going to recommend that for at least a week, the group stays outside of Yerevan. The city is not representative of the rest of the country by any stretch of the imagination. Yerevan is a tourists’ playground, and it is absolutely gorgeous and when it is completely finished it will be a marble city with statues on every corner and every building and sculpture will shine like new. Already it is cleaner than a lot of place in the States. But the real help is needed on the outside. The infrastructure for the rest of the country is in shambles. There are villages that continue to have little or no water, electricity, and are even cut off from the outside world for months at a time during the winter. The resources and manpower need to be delivered to the villages by diasporans, and it is the responsibility of the diasporans to make sure that their donations are used in the way that they expected. Follow up on what you do.

There is also a humungous disparity between real life in the west, and what life in the west is depicted like in Armenia. The questions and stories I’ve heard make me wonder where all this representation came from. Is it from the tourists flooding the city with their money, spending it as if it has no end? It’s not their fault, they are tourists and tourists are usually tourists because they have a lot of money to burn or they don’t know how to spend it wisely. Coming to the other side of the world is not cheap, and the people who make it just to party usually have enough money to not worry about it running out. Is it our western advertisements? For all of us, it is a given that these advertisements do not reflect reality, but has that concept arrived here yet? America, to most of the people I have met here, especially the youth, is a great big Emerald City. When I tell them about how conditions really are, like prices, the way we work, the way things look, how things are taken care of, it’s usually a look of amazement or disbelief that I receive. It’s not unexpected, I mean I would be shocked to hear someone debunk something I’ve been used to hearing and believing for years and years. As is written in the blog that is being linked at the end of this, just by arguing what the people here think is the norm for us a big step in the right direction, because we both need to understand where each other is coming from. Our answering their questions is a way for them to understand our background, and us coming to live in Armenia for extended periods of time is our way of understanding where they are coming from. If you have not read the latest blog from CYMA, click here to read an example of what I am talking about.

    This may be the last post I write from here in Armenia, depending on if I have time within the next two days.  If I do write a post, it will be on the CYMA site at www.cyma-wd.org.