At the airport

So I am at the airport in Yerevan waiting for my flight to Moscow. Check-in was pretty easy. The airport in Yerevan is called Zvartnots, named after an ancient church. The airport is small, and being moderniized, and they have free wireless. My flight boards in about 25 minutes, next step, Moscow, then America.

Final Preparations

Well, I am making my final preparations for my trip home. Today I have been cleaning my apartment, packing, and gathering Armenian gifts. Yesterday I washed the clothes I plan to wear on my 18 hour trip. I hung them up to dry yesterday, expecting them to dry today. However today turned out to be very overcast, and very snowy. Maybe they will be dry by tonight. Today I also realized that I have forgotten how to use a washing machine because I have been handwashing my clothes for so long. One of the slightly comic realities of being a Peace Corp volunteer.

But anyways, everything looks in order for my flight. Will be in Yerevan tomorrow, waiting to get on that plane to America.

Winter weather

Although this winter is much milder than the last one, Armenia is still very cold for me espcially since I am a native Texan. The winter snow started dumping a couple weeks ago and now there is snow everywhere, and it will remain until March or April.

Almost done with this year

My third semester as being a teacher in School#1 in Jermuk, Armenia is almost over, and my time as a Peace Corp volunteers is winding down. I am proud of what I did this semester. I have taught many lessons about prevenative health, how to maintian being healthy, and have taught about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I also did a lot of HIV/AIDS education in the capitol, Yerevan as well.

I have one more day left at school, then 4 more days before I leave for America. I am very excited to come and see everyone, and also because I know I worked hard and accomplished a lot this semester.

My other major innovation this semester

So in one of my previous posts I wrote about how teaching health to younger children through songs was an innovation that I think will improve my teaching in my next and last semester.

I have had a another inovation in my teaching thjis semester, that is the combined health and English lesson. As I have noted there is not a keen interest in health education at my school, or at least I have not been able to find that interest here. But for economic reasons there is a keen interest among some students for learning English. So I just teach English, but I teach health vocabulary and prevenative health concepts like the importance of drinking water and exercise.

This way my students get what they want and need, free English lessons from a native speaker, and I get to do what I want- teach prevanative health lessons that are very important.

Had a really good day yesterday

So yesterday I tried out a new strategy for teaching health and it worked out really well. I taught them a song about the importance of brushing your teeth. I think the reason this worked so well is that Armenian children enjoy singing,and Armenian teachers like to teach songs, and use song to control the kid's attention begins to slip. So I took an important and useful cultural practiced and used it to accomplish my goal of community health education. I was really proud of myself.

Since the teacher's are used to teaching to songs to the younger children they enjoyed teaching, and the content of the song led them to talk about the content, which was the importance of brushing your teeth everyday. So the teacher enjoyed co-teaching with me, they talk about health, and the kids had fun too. It was an all around winner.

And today they even sang the song without me being there! Sustainible too! It days like this that make me really happy to be a Peace Corp volunteer.

World AIDS Day is done

So, we finished up World AIDS Day 2008 in Armenia. I think it went great. I walked all over Yerevan handing out pamplets with the essential facts about HIV/AIDS, and has several great conversations about HIV/AIDS with people on the streets of Yerevan. All these conversations where in Armenian, and that combined with the walking made me very tired. But it was worth. The conversations we had were good, and I say alot of people intently reading the pamplets after we handed them out. I feel really good about what we did, and I feel like this is one of the best things we did.

I teamed up with my good friend Steve, and a groups of Armenain volunteers to hand out the pamplets. We had about 7 or 8 Peace Corp volunteers to canvass the city and a large group of Armenian volunteers that were rounded up by APEC, the NGO that we partnered with. The Armenian volunteers did great, we had a good time with them.

After handing our flyers all over the city, we did a showing of a movie called Transit which showed that HIV is spread through sexual intercourse, which I think was effective.

Overall, a good day to be a Peace Corp volunteers, I feel that we did a really good job in getting the facts out about HIV/AIDS, which in a region where people tend not to know all the facts about this pandemic, is very important.