Water Project for Ujan Village

 
 One of the big things that LDSC does all over the world is to get clean water to the villages.  Armenia has 935 villages.  335 of them do not have their water systems supported by the Government.  These are very poor villages.  Next summer we will provide clean water to about 40 villages at a cost of about 3/4 of a million dollars.  This is your Tithing and Fast Offering money at work, as well as money from other sources.  The village of Ujan was the last of the water projects from this summer.  They were not able to finish their project as budgeted.  They had to bring the water about 5 km, over a mountain to get it to the outskirts of the village.  The pipes inside of the village were okay.  When we went out to look at it in mid August, the trench that you can see in the first picture was dug, but there was no pipe.  They had run out.  The original plan was to take the pipe line over the mountain, but they had to go around it because of the very large rocks.  We approved additional funding for the project. 

You can see the covered trench.  That brought the water from their source to the village pipes.

This is the ribbon that was cut in the closing ceremony.  The metal housing holds the valve where the new pipe was connected to the village water system.

Cutting a ribbon is nothing new to Sister Rich,  as a member of the Sunshiners, she was part of many ribbon cuttings.  We have the Mayor of the village standing next to her and the Marz or area Mayor next to him.  We also have several Mayors from the surrounding villages in attendance, as well as the new media and local Priest.  This is a large village with about 8000 people living there.

This fellow is going to turn on the water.  Remember that before we did the project there was only a broken pipe connected to the uphill side of the valve.

 The valve is turned and walla, water.  This is a relief valve.

With the water turned on, there is now clean water in the village.  We will provide fountains, similar to this one, however, this was not one of ours.  Most of the people drank the water, I did not.  It is against Mission rules to drink any unfiltered water.  It does prove that the water gets into the village.

As part of the ceremony, the Priest blessed the water.  He was doing a good job of avoiding us.  The Armenian Church is not too fond of the LDS Church.  I went up to him after and  thanked him for what he had done and told him that he had a beautiful voice.  He sang most of the ceremony.  He seemed to warm up a little.  The local people and news people had probably never seen a Mormon Missionary and a Priest talking in a friendly manner.

There was a symbolic table set at the ribbon cutting site with bread, cheese, honey and fruit.  These represent the necessities of life.  There was also a lot of Armenian Brandy, used to toast the project.  There was some bottled water for us. 

These kids brought us flowers.  They were wearing some traditional Armenian costumes.

They also brought a large piece of lavish, (flat bread) and salt.  This was symbolic of life.


We have started putting together the first water project that we will do next spring.  You can only do the  work in the spring and summer.  We have selected 16 villages.  The project will cost about $300,000.  We are looking forward to doing it.  Our task is to help the poor and needy and bringing them clean water is a good way to do it.

Armenian Corn

 This is story of Armenian corn, not to be confused
with American corn.  Our first night in Armenia, we ate dinner at the Mission Home.  The Mission President and his wife had only been in country a few weeks.  They served corn on the cob.  We thought it looked a little old.  We are used to corn being either really light yellow or white or both.  This corn was dark yellow, the way that it looks when you use it for a Halloween decoration.  It was so hard that you had to be careful not to break a tooth on it.

 We mentioned this to Suzi, out interpreter, some time later and she explained that Armenian corn must be cooked for about 3 hours.  We would call it field corn.  Apparently someone tried to introduce sweet corn, but the Armenians didn't like it.

The other day we drove a couple of hours to a small city almost on the Georgia border to look at a Kindergarten project.  Along the way, in the mountains we saw the corn sign.  We asked Erik, our driver, what it was and he told us that they were selling corn.  On the way back to Yerevan, we stopped at the sign of the corn.  We saw this young man with his pot of boiling water over a wood fire cooking corn.  Erik picked out a piece for each of us.  They don't put butter on it, which is surprising, because they put butter on almost everything else.  They just put a lot of salt on it.  

 Erik told the fellow that he wanted the most tender pieces. 










We really enjoyed it.  Erik thought it was a little mushy and we thought it was good.  Just goes to show that there is more than one way to cook an ear of corn.

General Conference

 General Conference in Armenia happens a week after the live sessions in Salt Lake City.  It takes a week to translate all sessions into Armenian.  We had a normal Sunday while the Conference was being held in Salt Lake City and this weekend was our General Conference weekend.  Each of the Branches had their own copies of the Conference in Armenian and their was also a copy in
English for the Missionaries to watch.  Most of the
Seniors in Yerevan got together at the CES building to watch it. It went really well except the Priesthood Session had some  technical problems, so Sister Rich and I went home and watched it on the computer.  The original plan was to have the Sisters all watch the Relief Society Session while the Elders watched the Priesthood Session.

As with any gathering of LDS faithful, food is a must.  We had a pot luck dinner.  We have some really good cooks with us. We had some real Jello from the States and Sister Rich made a couple of Jello salads, that were just like being back home.

 We got a chance to meet Elder and Sister Blunck, from Santa Clara, Ut.  As it turned out, they served on the Saturday late shift with Sister Rich, so it was old home week.  Elder Blunck and I looked at each other and realized that we recognized each other from the same shifts.  They are serving a couple of hours north of Yerevan in the town of Vandazor.  We are doing a couple of projects up there, so we will invite them to the closings.  They also know Jeana Rodgers really well.  Small world.

 These are obviously the better half's of the Missionary companionship's.

Two more of the faithful Elders.  These are all really great people and really good friends.







The Conference was a wonderful experience with a lot of the talks having a special meaning for each of us.  The Church is true and it is such a great privilege to be serving in this day and age, to be able to enjoy the Conference Sessions only a week after they happened on the other side of the world.

Armenian Language Lessons

Sorry, but there are no pictures with this one.  We start to learn Armenian about 4 weeks before we went to the MTC.  Our sweet tutor Queer Brough did all that she could, but with me, Elder Rich, it was pretty hopeless.  Now for a couple of stories about our progress with the language.

When Sister Rich and I want to try something new, we will ask or look it up in the reference material that Sister  Brough gave us.  We decided that we wanted to buy a whole rotisserie chicken from the stand by our apartment. I was the one to try.  It is very seldom that these guys can understand anything that I say to them, even simple numbers in Armenian. We looked up the words for 1 whole chicken.  I wrote them in my notebook and rehearsed them many times.  Unfortunately,  two things went wrong.  First, it is a mistake to try and translate directly from English to another language.  They don't say whole chicken, just chicken.  Second mistake, I used the word for four rather than chicken.  The guy said to me that he only had two chicken, I said that I only wanted one.  We had better luck the next time.

We have started taking the Marchutnee to work rather than the Metro and the Trolley Bus.  It is only 35 minutes.  The ride is very uncomfortable.  It is a 12 passenger van that can have as many as 35 people in it.  They stop at every bus stop, as long as someone tells them to.  There are people standing up and just crowded in them.  The Sister Missionary that showed us around when we were here told us that their main function in life was to humiliate people.  I have to agree, but they do get you to work.  The phrase to get them to stop is next Bus Stop stop, or kongaroom piek.  The day before, which was Sunday I had been working on a work to add to my Testimony.  The word for the Testimony is kavootchana.  The spelling of these words is just a guess.  Any time I am trying to learn a word, I will rehearse it over and over in my mind.  When it was time to get off the Marchutnee, I told the driver kavootchana piek. He did stop.  I asked Sister Rich if I said it right and she said all aghast, "no".  We had a meeting with our engineer and translator a short time later and told them the story.  They really got a kick out of it, because the way it translated was for the driver to stop sinning.  Now we will get in trouble for breaking the no proselyting rule.

I don't let these little set backs stop me.  I keep trying and Sister Rich keeps telling me how to do it right.  It is a beautiful language.

Elder Rich

Friends Two

 These are our friends, the other Senior  Missionaries that are serving in Yerevan.  Next to us are the Peterson's,  they are serving as CES Missionaries and are from Orem, UT.  Next to them are the Jone's.  They are the office couple and are from Moapa, Nv.  Next to them are the Pincock's.  They are from Rigby. ID and are Employment Missionaries.  These are the people that we go out to eat with each week.  They are all really great people and very good friends.  We are playing tourist on a Saturday, P-day, hence the levi's.  We are all standing in from of a statue of the fellow that created the written Armenian Language a long time ago.  This is in front of a museum of very old books.  The Armenian's are very proud of their heritage and they really like their language.  It is one of the key factors in their maintaining their national identity through a lot of very difficult times.  For our touring around on this day, we hired Erik, one of our driver/translators to take us around.  He has a van that will hold 10 people.

This is a picture of  Erik and us when we drove to a village above Vandazor.  We were pretty close to the northern border of Armenia and we were on top of a mountain.  We are going to provide some milk cows for a village up here.

This is a picture of our Water Engineer, Nshan.  He has done the engineering for fixing the water problems in over 150 villages in Armenia.  He also works as the engineer for the Congress.  He is a really fine man and we enjoy working with him.

These two beautiful women are also part of our staff.  Standing next to Sister Rich is Karmen, our accountant.  She is one of the sweetest women you could ever meet.  Next to her is Suzi, our translator.  She has been part of LDSC for over two years.  She is familiar with all of our projects and her knowledge has proven to be invaluable. She can also handle translation into Russian.  We really enjoy working with these women.  We are with Suzi almost every day.  She sets up all of our appointments and really keeps us straight.