first weekend with BR:
So, I haven't been in the office since friday, so I haven't posted anything since then.
Saturday, we (as in, the Gyumri BR group) went down to Yerevan for the Pan-Armenian Games, where teams of both diasporan Armenians throughout the world, and Hayastantsi Armenians in all regions of Armenia gather together. We didn't come merely as spectators for the game. We came for business reasons. See, with the many diasporan Armenians that had come to Yerevan for the games, it seemed natural that we would want to give them an opportunity to learn about how their next trip here to Armenia could be totally paid for.
Some of the people there didn't speak English (and I do not know enough Armenian to be able to explain to them what BR is), such as all but one of the members of the Ukraine team. But the one Ukrainian girl who spoke English translated for the rest of her team though. Also, I met up with the team from Spain, who were all very friendly. It wasn't really necessary that I took 4 1/2 years of spanish in high school/college, since they already speak English, but I got to practice it a little bit with them.
<sarc> Later on, I discovered that my hometown, Vienna, has its own team. However, the people on my team kept insisting that Vienna is located in Austria, and not in Virginia. I'm surprised at their lack of skills at geography, especially when it comes to the town that they allegedly are from. I later realized that their town is named after my hometown in northern VA.</sarc> So, nevertheless, I got someone to take a picture of me with them. I jokingly asked them if I could get a uniform and play on their team. They said they were all out of uniforms.
Sunday, I went down to the local church, where there was a badarak service going on. Unlike the more modern Armenian churches in the US, they don't have liturgy books in the pews. More than half of the people were standing, and there were pews in the center of the sanctuary, making it sort of a mixture between the modern churches with pews filling most of the sanctuary, and the more ancient churches, which I had visited with LCO that lack pews altogether.
That night, i hung out with my host mother, Irina, and her son, Gevorg, who is ~7 years old. Gevorg was showing me some of the pictures he drew, and I was guessing (in armenian) what they were of. Later when Irina was helping Gevorg with some math, I decided to write out a calculus problem to challenge Gevorg (obviously he wouldn't know what any of that meant). However, Irina was asking me in Armenian what all of this stuff meant. I unsuccessfully attempted to explain to her in Armenian the concept of an integral, since my vocabulary of math words in Armenian is quite… limited. I tried drawing a graph of a parabola, two lines representing the integration limits at 1 and 3, and shading in the area between the parabola, the two vertical lines and the x axis, but that didn't help at all.
To sum, the lessons I learned this weekend:
1) Don't make fun of Vienna, Austrians, <sarc> even if they did steal the name from my hometown</sarc>.
2) I should bring own liturgy book (with translations) to church.
3) Math is NOT a universal language.
Monday at the office:
I finally get to meet my supervisor Amalia. She assigned me with a very strange task: writing a proposal for a computer game designed to inform young people and warn them about AIDS/HIV, and it's due on Wednesday. Wait, what? Using computer games to educate people about serious issues?
Not only did this seem like a strange program, but the fact that after she interviewed me about my skills as a programmer, she asked me to write a proposal for a program, not the program itself. Uhmm… writing a proposal or other formal document is the job of a secretary. Not a programmer. I stared for about 15 minutes at the information she gave me about the proposal requirements. Must include detailed budget? Sealed envelopes? Reference from tax inspection on tax liabilities? CHEM HASKANUM VOCHINCH!!!! (i don't understand any of this!) I finally told her, "Look, I think it might be better if you have someone else do the proposal, and I do the program". Her reply to this was, "Oh, sorry, that's what I had meant. You write the program, I write the proposal. I accidentally switched the words 'proposal' with 'program' ". What a relief!
After lunch, one of then guys there, Aram, showed me some examples of these "educational games" that other people had made. These seem quite simple, and a little silly. In one of them, you play as a guy in a spaceship, and you have to maneuver the spaceship in a 2 dimensional plane, dodging flying needles and shooting lasers at them to get points (because needles are dangerous, since they can give you AIDS). If you touch a pair of floating lips or a mosquito, you gain points (because kissing does not give you AIDS, nor does getting bit by a mosquito). It was silly, but it's still more fun than I had expected it to be.
Anyways, I'll post more later.
*<sarc> ... </sarc> indicates sarcasm.
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