Unveiling The Life of an Education Volunteer in Armenia

Get an unfiltered view of Peace Corps service through this straightforward interview with Lyz Davis, a passionate Education volunteer in Armenia. Driven by the goal of creating a positive impact, Lyz shows the realities of volunteering in a faraway place. From profound interactions with community members to practical tips for future volunteers, Lyz gives us a raw insight into the tests and triumphs of their experience. We learn how Lyz has adapted to cultural surprises, overcome challenges, and started community initiatives. Most of all, Lyz shares an inspiring account of personal evolution through immersive service. Join us as we uncover the essence of the volunteer journey and see how Peace Corps changes lives on both ends.

Table of Contents

• Volunteer Experience and Motivation
• Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
• Surprises, Challenges, and Personal Growth
• Community Projects and Interactions
• Advice and Support
• Practical Tips and Language Learning
• Impact of Media and Final Thoughts

Volunteer Experience and Motivation

1. Can you provide an overview of your experience serving as an Education volunteer in Armenia?

Of course! This is an answer I’m very practiced at giving as an elevator pitch. For two years I volunteered as a co-teacher of English as a Foreign Language for students in grades 5-10 in a rural Armenian village. I also worked as part of a team that organized and executed a nationwide contest for students reciting English-language poetry. I also got to spend a few weeks as a camp counselor at a creative arts summer camp. All the while, I learned a lot about Armenians and their culture while living with a few different Armenian host families

2. What motivated you to join the Peace Corps and choose Armenia as your service destination?

I think I first heard about the Peace Corps in the 9th or 10th grade. It was part of a spiel my history teacher, Mr. Beard, was giving us about opportunities and ways to serve our country. (He was the teacher in charge of registering boys with the selective service upon their 18th birthday.)

It was never really clearly in the forefront of my mind though until I was mid-way through my degree in English, concentrated in Language Arts Education, and decided to pivot to a concentration in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). I became enamored with the idea that I could still become a teacher, but also travel the world. It also appealed to a strong desire to build communities and connect with others that I developed in college, where I felt like part of a community for the first time.

Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration

3. Did you live with a host family? Can you tell us about them and how you cross that cultural divide while being a member of their household?

I lived with a host family during Pre-Service Training for 10 weeks, and that was such a cultural shock to me! Not that they were Armenian, but just that they were such a big family – 7 people under one roof in a 3 bedroom home (1 bedroom of which they gave to me), three generations of a very close family. There were my host mother and father, their two sons (in their early 30s then I believe), one of the son’s wives, and that couple’s two children – then me as well – so we became a family of 8 for those 10 weeks. It was a level of activity, care, and inclusion I was not used to at all as my own family is much smaller and made up of more reserved personalities.

I then had the pleasure of living with a new family while I adjusted to my permanent site, for 3 months I lived with a husband and wife, their then 12-year-old daughter, and the husband’s mother. It was a different, more quiet family experience, but we became very close. I then spent a year and a half living with a single woman, who was more like a good friend and roommate to me, though I also think of her as my mother. I felt like we transcended words in our relationship – we could communicate very well in Armenian, but on days when I was frustrated with my language, she was still very understanding and she was a great advocate of me in the village.

Surprises, Challenges, and Personal Growth

4. What has surprised you most (or least) about Armenia or culture? Has it influenced your service?

Everything was a surprise, honestly. But to choose one thing, Armenian hospitality is so, so surprising. Especially in the villages, where people do not have an abundance, they will readily share with guests. If a neighbor comes over for coffee, you serve them coffee and chocolates. If you’re driving along the road and see a neighbor walking, you pull over to ask if they need a ride. It’s an incredibly generous culture. At the current moment, this is as apparent as always.

At the time I’m answering this question, approximately 100,000 Armenian refugees from the Nagorno-Karabakh region have arrived in mainland Armenia. I am in awe of seeing my Facebook friends offer to open their homes, offer supplies, and offer support for them without hesitation.

Armenia was a very easy place to be a volunteer, be a foreign visitor, as everywhere I went, people were so kind, welcoming, and eager to share their culture with me – offering traditional coffee, foods, and experiences like dancing.

5. What challenges did you face while working with community members in Armenia, and how did you overcome them?

The unique aspect of my service was serving during the time of Armenia’s Velvet Revolution which peacefully transferred power to a new government.

Right now, it will be interesting to see how Armenia is impacted by the refugees arriving from Nagorno-Karabakh. This will put a strain on rural communities but also allow an opportunity for those rural communities to experience population growth. There will be new students in many schools and new families in many communities, and the dialect of Armenian they speak may not be comprehensible to volunteers who have learned standard Eastern Armenian. 

My mind is completely blank. I wouldn’t say any challenges within my service were unique to Armenia – more so just universal to the Peace Corps in general. You will always have miscommunications, a need to earn the trust of your community members, and problems expressing your true self in another cultural context, but that is all part of the experience.

6. Have you personally grown and developed during your time as a Peace Corps volunteer? If yes, how?

I grew and developed immensely and in ways I can’t ever fully grasp because by now, five years out from leaving Armenia, I can’t see the changes for who I am now.

I learned to be more family-oriented, more trusting, and less guarded. I learned to love, much more openly and freely than I ever had before. I learned that I am a good traveler, that I have common sense, and good judgment, and that I can trust myself to be fine in difficult situations. I learned that I am more resilient than I had ever realized.

Community Projects and Interactions

7. Could you share some of the secondary projects you were involved in while working with your community members?

I worked on a project that was known at the time as the National Poetry Recitation Contest. The contest offered a framework for schools to host contests in their regions where students competed in reciting English-language poetry. The finalists then competed in the capital for a national competition and won prizes like English books and certificates. 

In 2018, we were able to achieve funding in memory of a volunteer who had passed, Hanna Huntley, and host an English summer camp for the finalist contestants as well. So that allowed us to spend a week at a summer camp with Armenia’s best and brightest young students and encourage them to use English creatively as well as functionally, in poetry, creative writing, acting, speech and debate, songs, and art.

8. Can you tell us about any memorable experiences or interactions you’ve had with community members that have left a lasting impact on you?

I will always fondly remember my unexpected best friend in Armenia – my go-to taxi driver, David. One day my friend Nick and I hired him to take us on a personal tour of our region of Armenia and the day was full of laughs, singing along to the car radio, taking photos together, and David being honored that we paid his admission to a tourist site that he often drove by but never visited himself. David also took me once on a day trip with his grandchildren to a beautiful viewpoint and took a lot of pride in showing his beautiful country to me.

Advice and Support

9. What advice would you give to someone considering joining the Peace Corps and serving as an Education volunteer in Armenia?

Read everything you can about what Peace Corps is. Read books like Bannerjee’s Insider’s Guide to the Peace Corps. Read every page on the PC website. (Skip Reddit, mostly, that will just fill your mind with other people’s opinions.)

Try as hard as you can to keep your mind free of expectations. If you go in without strong expectations – you can only be surprised and never be disappointed. Never expect to have the same service someone else had. That said, if you go into PC Armenia open-minded and open-hearted, ready to fall in love, Armenia will meet you with an open heart and open hand.

Then, if you can see yourself there, do it. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

And finally, even if you don’t join the PC or do PC elsewhere, go to Armenia in your lifetime and you will not regret it.

10. What skills or qualities do you think are most important for a Education volunteer in Armenia?

Resilience for any PCV is critical. Any PCV will have bad days – be they a result of culture shock, language plateaus, unsuccessful lessons, or what have you. Finding ways to set those bad days behind you is the only way forward. The motto that got me through low moments of service was “the only way out is through” – though that is because I set the expectation for myself that I would not leave service early for any reason, as that was not in line with my future goals.

Being sociable, easy-going, and kind would lead one to have the best service possible. You’ll be put in a million social situations and making the most of them leads to having more connections to keep forever and more memories to look back on. Say yes as often as possible. I’m also hypocritical here, because I’m not an easy-going person at all, but I always wish I were more able to “go with the flow.”

11. How had the Peace Corps provided support and resources to enhance your service experience in Armenia?

Peace Corps is perfect in my mind because you get the framework you need to meet a baseline level of success and then you have the freedom to make or find more work as it suits you. By that I mean, PC places you as a TEFL Volunteer in a school, with a counterpart teacher, and you will have a minimum number of work hours to do in the school. Working beyond that, in clubs, camps, and on other development projects even outside of teaching will be up to you. But I was pleasantly surprised that PC even gave us TEFL volunteers the support and training to do grant projects if we chose to do so.

Practical Tips and Language Learning

12. Anything yet that you packed or didn’t pack that you’d like to tell future Armenia volunteers?

I didn’t pack a sleeping bag, but that was because pre-COVID we passed them down from cohort to cohort. We had the luxury of buying or being gifted a lot of supplies from volunteers who were on their way out – so I hope that a trend will return as new cohorts continue to arrive.

Armenia is getting more connected to import markets year over year, so my best advice is to pack minimally. The beauty of service is learning to live like a local and forgoing some of your creature comforts. The great joy comes in learning you can live just fine without those creature comforts even after you get home.

13. How has learning the language been? Any advice to future volunteers?

My Armenian learning experience was very smooth. The support during PST was phenomenal and we were set up to succeed even more by the pre-departure introductory lessons. I like to think I have kept my language up well even five years out. Certainly, most of it came back very quickly when we visited Armenia a year ago.

I would say to relax as much as possible. Just work on the repetition of basic words. If there’s a new topic you want to branch out into, work on teaching yourself some base vocabulary in the subject, and just ask someone to help you – everyone will be immensely helpful to you. Armenians are very kind and forgiving of your language mistakes, so be kind to yourself if you stumble. Certainly, plateaus and back-slides are natural but by the end of service, you’ll surprise yourself with how far you’ve come.

Impact of Media and Final Thoughts

14. How do you think your blog contributed to your overall mission as a volunteer? And what advice would you give to aspiring volunteers who are considering starting a blog or YouTube channel during their service?

Blogging served three main purposes for me as a PCV: 

1. Sharing my experiences and stories of Armenia with my friends and family back home in an efficient way by writing a story out once for a blog post instead of telling the same story a dozen times on different phone calls, and also posting on a blog lets people read your story on their time zone
2. I kept a personal record of my time in Armenia that I’ve really enjoyed revisiting over and over again.
3. I felt like it really helped me build trust within my community as well because Armenians could see the effort I was making to share their culture and photos with people in the States. Honestly, it is just such a valuable experience in so many ways and directly contributes to the two Peace Corps goals which aim to exchange culture and build cross-cultural relationships. A YouTube channel may also be a really fun way to share parts of the experience, but I’ll always prefer the written word because it allows you to bear your soul and compose your insights in a unique way.

Above all – keep a personal journal as well! My personal journal entries (sparse though they were at times, sometimes only one or two entries per month) are something I’ll cherish for the rest of my life and look forward to sharing with my kids and grandkids one day.

15. Any last comments or observations you’d like to pass on to future Armenia volunteers?

Just that even though the COVID-19 evacuation interrupted the normal flow of knowledge being passed down from cohort to cohort, there are hundreds of former Armenia PCVs out there willing to network personally and professionally with you and who can relate to what you’re going through!

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The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Armenia Government.