Unfurling Miracles

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in the small Middle Eastern country of Armenia. Just imagine Maryland, mountainous and sun-parched in summer, and ice-silent and desolate in the winter. Next, strip away air conditioning and heating furnaces. Now add broken roads littered with rubble, aisles of same-looking cracked boxes of apartment buildings, and an average monthly income of $40. What you have, then, is Armenia-and that's in the country's thriving capital, Yerevan.

But I didn't live in Yerevan, I lived in Gyumri. One year in Gyumri, and learned more that I had in over 20 years of education. Before the earthquake, Gyumri was the second largest city in Armenia. But in a short moment, everything changed. December 7, 1988, 11:41 in the morning.When I was there, the city was still in ruin. When you saw the city; when you walked through the still-shattered mess of what was left behind, it was if it had all happened a month ago.

Every street was cracked along with every windshield in every still running car and bus. You entered into the white stone-broken wreckage surrounding you, and your own eyes cracked at the destruction. Huge heaps of rubble and rank litter and shattered bottle shards remained where once had stood schools and apartment buildings. To the left side of the city's central square, you could see the black stone wreckage that was once a church. And every time you turned to scrape feet along another street, you would see the crippled stray mangy mess of the dogs which, for me, became the symbol of the city's ruin-the lives I mean, left behind when the city dropped.

And all along the rock-littered edges of the city's crippled streets, you'd see the "new" homes built to re-shelter the homeless. They're called domeeks, but what they really were were tin-small rusted boxes without plumbing, and with old clothes flapping from clotheslines. Gyumri is glutted with these rusted shanty-towns because the earthquake left a hundred thousand homeless.

How can you imagine, then, that the Armenians in Gyumri lived? How could I imagine? The truth is, sometimes I couldn't. In Gyumri, every Armenian I met knew a friend or family member killed in the earthquake. Ashot was a musician married 22 happy years to a beautiful wife. She was crushed beneath their apartment building when it collapsed. Marine was my student. She was training to become a teacher. Her mother had been a teacher too. But her mother and the children her mother taught died beneath the falling rocks of their school.

The names go on and on across the death list of the "official" 30,000 who died (the unofficiallist is longer). I have never known such sorrow. I have never known such strength. In the womb of the ruin, my students could find reason still to laugh (especially at their American teacher stumbling over a monstrous Armenian word like shnoragalutsuyen, which means "thank you"). In the midst of the death and devastation, families invited me into their warm homes and offered friendship. Of course, that meant staying for dinner, drinking shot after shot of vodka, busting my gut on 5-inch piles of dolma, and clearing plates almost cracked with the weight of spicy pobrijan--"eggplant" in Armenian.

These were the greatest lessons of my life. I was in Gyumri to teach my students English, but the entire time they were teaching me. In a year I learned a lifetime of strength. It's strange, too, because nine years seemed like long enough to forget, but when your life crumbles suddenly around you, how can you? Loss and sorrow still wracked the bones of the people, yet they still struggled, they still laughed, and they still survived. The Armenians in Gyumri revealed to me what I still lacked in myself, and they helped me finally begin to find it.

Hope and strength are the twin miracles of existence, and they lead into the doorway of the divine. I have heard unhappy people mumble bitterly that miracles never happen. Visit my student, Elenora, and her family, and glimpse into the strength of their eyes.