Wheat by ~HarelLoire

On my drive home this morning, I was thinking about my greatest daily challenge. This is an activity that consumes significant amount of processing power of my brain yet happens almost completely subconsciously without impacting anything else. It is like the markets – never completely understood, conquered, or tamed, yet having significant impact on our lives. All day long, when I read something, hear something, speak with someone, discuss a topic, answer a question or hear a response, I’m trying to determine the credibility, value, impact of what I’m consuming. I am hard at work trying to determine what is noise and what is information. Let’s say a concept is being explained very clearly and logically, does that mean it makes sense? What if someone writes with excellent vocabulary and perfect sentence design, does that make the writer credible? You are reading what I have written. Is this noise (discard immediately) or a thought worth considering for a bit. Am I smart? Can you trust the letters, words, sentences and paragraphs that I have crafted here? Reporters write millions of articles daily but how do you determine which is worth the minutes spent on reading?

There are many examples of what I’m describing. Even in a hierarchical relationship while we may comply with a request, we subconsciously either agree or disagree with it and in bad situations simply don’t care. A coworker raised a question about a requirement saying that we should poll others to see if we have captured the requirement correctly. That’s another example. Why am I paying any attention to this daily challenge? Could it be that those who are extremely smart or capable are able to separate noise from valueable information better than the rest of us? I wish I could devote a month or two to the analysis of this subject. The reason is that perhaps there should be a class in school teaching valuable lessons on separating garbage from jewels that are thrown at us from every angle every day.

Sometimes what we consider garbage in hindsight becomes obvious to have been a jewel. Is there any way to prevent the initial mistake or is this just human nature? There are also times when taking a message for granted is required for survival (hearing fire in a crowded theater – run then think). Because this processing is subconscious in my case, I cannot write my methods of separating communications but maybe if I pay attention going forward, I can report back my findings. Until then this activity will continue to remain one of my top daily challenges.

The death of culture by ~Gabryellalf

A couple nights ago I had a long discussion with my wife about maintaining the Armenian culture. But first, why is it so important to maintain a culture? What is culture anyway? In this context, culture is “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” Many people, unfortunately, never get to experience another culture to its fullest. Those who do will probably agree that it takes a long time to develop sufficient in-depth appreciation for the language, customs, art, history, poetry, songs, religion, food, character traits, jokes and everything else that makes up a culture. I see culture as the fragrance of a bouquet of flowers. Each society, as a unique bouquet, has its own beautiful culture with intricacies, some with similarities, but to truly understand these we need a fine tuned sense of “smell” (appreciation more appropriately). I believe few people get the wonderful opportunity to experience multiple cultures and even fewer get to meaningfully contribute to more than one. I am not talking about a four week visit to France, or even a one year immersion program. How about a study abroad for five years or living in a different country for a decade? I have lived in the United States for over fifteen years and find myself discovering interesting cultural undertones every day. Perhaps that is due to the wonderful diversity of this culture. Going back to the main question of why maintain a culture, I believe we must because we as individuals are small links in the greater chain that defines a culture and need to maintain to provide those around us and those that come after us the opportunity to appreciate and celebrate that which is beautiful in every society. Armenians have become very small in numbers and not too many non-Armenians actually study the Armenian culture, but I am sure those who do are bound to discover many amazing jewels created during the past few thousand years. Letting the fragrance of this or any beautiful bouquet parish one individual, one family at a time, through indifference or deliberate acts is not too different from ethnocide.

All people of Armenian heritage must celebrate that heritage, maintain and if at all possible contribute to that heritage just as they contribute to any other culture with which they identify. Who is an Armenian? Anyone who celebrates, attempts to understand, helps preserve, contributes to the Armenian culture is an Armenian. Perhaps this definition needs further refinement but for me a person of Italian descent who studies the Armenian culture or contributes to it in some capacity is far more Armenian than a person of Armenian ancestry who ignores his/her roots.

This brings me to the question of identity. As humans we have many roles, job titles, social responsibilities, individual qualities, and personal idiosyncrasies. To understand our cultures, our heritage, our ancestors, our history is to understand ourselves which is perhaps one of the key requirements for self-actualization.

Thank you for sticking with me through this long detour but the discussion I had with my wife revolved around the Armenian language which currently has more than one orthography (see Traditional Armenian and Reformed Armenian). Just as having two systems of weights and measures creates confusion, additional non-value added work, and need for conversions, so does having two different ways of writing create issues when communicating in a language especially across many dialects, proficiency levels, and geographic and other boundaries (ArmSCII vs. UTF-8 for example). The two systems simply make it more difficult to preserve the Armenian culture, teach Armenian, and publish in Armenian. I’m sure there are linguists working on various parts of the language but I very much hope that soon a leadership force will emerge to standardize along a common easy-to-teach standard, teach that standard across the globe, and use the language as the tool to perpetuate the Armenian culture.

Culture shock by ~yarry

I don’t remember exactly how long the honeymoon period of textbook culture shock lasted but soon I found myself dealing with the resentment, rejection phase during which I couldn’t believe how terrible American education was, how tasteless American food was, and how wonderful everything back in Armenia was. This is the first time I understood and felt the physical pain from longing (Armenian word “կարոտ”). I’d become close friends with this pain. We would get to know each other well as it would frequent me for a few years.

I attended high school during this year and mainly learned English, American history and the culture. All other subjects were nowhere near what I had already completed in Armenia. If they hadn’t been in a foreign language, I could get excellent grades without listening during class or opening a single textbook. In hindsight, this year was not about academics. Instead, I went through a difficult cultural adjustment, learned the language, and worked on ways to attend college in America. Throughout the year, my American family supported me in so many ways that when I look back as a parent, I wonder how they actually managed to do it. I am sure it was not easy at all for them.

In many ways, I am very fortunate to have experienced a new culture and a new family. We tend to have lens through which we view the world, but in my case, I had been given an extra set to see it in different colors. The result has been a fascinating experience. Transitions from Armenian culture to American culture, from my family to my new family, from being a kid to growing up, from helping out to being helped, from wanting to leave to wanting to stay all took place at roughly the same time. Amazingly, there were many people who supported me in this process. The librarian at the high school was one of the most encouraging and supportive people ever and played a very key role during that year. Many of the friends and family of my new family also were very supporting and wonderful people.

I hope that over the years, I can come back and add to this post all my memories. Normal teenagers go through so much at the age of sixteen. I had chosen to go through it all in a foreign country. Fortunately, my host family was there to help. The hardest times were the holidays. December 31st was a really difficult day away from family and friends. I would have never thought that I’d be writing about it almost exactly fifteen years later. Around the holidays, I had already started working on getting accepted into an American college or university. I had taken the standardized tests and had discovered that my English was far weaker than my math. However, the main hurdle remained the financing as I had no more than a couple hundred dollars saved up. But as I had come to expect, an unexpected, unbelievable event made it all possible.

Lesson 21 From English Notebook

It was the winter of 1993. Yerevan was covered with a white freezing blanket of snow. It was serene and peaceful outside, no cars, no people, nothing. Just the snow… and the occasional smoke emanating from a makeshift tin exhaust vent built into the kitchen or living room window, a pipe on a wall made black by whatever people had been burning to stay warm. No power, no gas, no phone, no water. It was almost as cold inside as it was outside. My father would joke that the only utility still operational was the sewer system. No school, no work, nothing… just staying alive. The reality was unacceptable, unimaginable, and unforgettable. I had to get out of that frozen hell known as the Fatherland, or the Mother Armenia. I cannot even imagine what my parents must have felt in those days because for me life was easier… reading, writing, talking, laughing and dreaming, and of course, buying the daily bread ration, chopping wood for the stove, and bringing water from the nearby houses to our fifth floor apartment.

Every day for hours, I would do English exercises, copy down chapters of books in English, listen to the the Voice of America and the BBC on our short-wave radio, and dream big dreams. Perhaps learning the language was all I could do because the dream was too far, too impossible. My family was happy but we were not wealthy or well connected. I could see no other way to reach a dream than to do what I could do and hope for the rest.

Months later, in our room where we had the tiny ten inch TV running on a car battery, during the evening news broadcast I heard about a program that was recruiting exchange students for a one-year visit to America. There was no other option. I had to apply. The process was unclear but I had to write an essay and submit for consideration. After writing the best essay I could write in a language I had just barely learned and taking it to the embassy with my friend, all I could do was wait, and continue dreaming. Little did I know that over fifteen hundred others had also submitted their essays. I’m not sure how many had re-written their essay at least a dozen times to make sure the writing and the spelling were perfect and had written over the same text on the final version to make sure every letter was perfectly traced to fix the poor job of the cheap pen.

Days or maybe a week or two later, I heard that the results were back and names would be announced at the embassy. I went there alone as I could not bother my parents or anyone else to come along for a non-event. Everything was rigged in those days. Why would this be any different? Others had attended expensive private English lessons or had gone to English schools. Their parents had money and connections. I had little chance but deep down there was a glimmer of hope that maybe by divine intervention, my name would also come up. So, I went to the embassy alone and discovered a huge noisy crowd. Some time later, a man came out of the embassy, stood on the fence holding onto the wrought iron railing and began to announce names into a loudspeaker. I think mine was the first name announced. All I could do is stand there in complete shock thinking maybe I had wanted to hear my name so much that it was all an illusion. I asked the people next to me if they had heard my name but they were too busy listening for names they cared about and did not know for sure.

I had passed the first gate. The holes of the giant sifter were too small for me to fall through this time, but I knew that at each of the next stages, they would come with an even smaller sifter with bigger holes and would shake the applicant pool some more to see who would remain in the human sifter.

Another expression that I thought of yesterday, also in Armenian, was “մայրենի լեզու” which literally means “mother tongue.” This represents the first language of a child, which in my case is Armenian. Why is the language of a child represented as the mother’s language? Why not father’s language or the village language? Seeing my children grow up in a country where English is the first language I now fully understand this expression. My wife speaks Western Armenian while I speak Eastern Armenian. Even though my son understands both languages very well (they are not so different), he speaks his mother’s Western Armenian. In addition, he speaks Armenian vs. English almost in the same proportion as his mother. Having observed others, the same is roughly true for many other children. Of course, the time we spend with them is what causes this to happen. So, if I were to be a full-time stay-at-home Mr. Mom, they would probably speak what I speak. But time aside, given life the way we have it, I finally understand why generations have called the first/primary language the “mother tongue” rather than anything else.

The third expression that does not leave me alone is “giving someone the benefit of the doubt.” I do not know whether this has anything to do with the Jury system or the standard of being certain “beyond any reasonable doubt” but for me that’s exactly what this expression represented. While sitting in the Jury room, all I did was give someone the benefit of the doubt of the facts until I could no longer doubt the facts.

Having thought of these three, I am now looking forward to other words that stick out in daily conversation because of some special unique meaning.