It’s been another incredibly busy week here in Yerevan! Last weekend, I got to tour the temple of Garni, the Geghart monastery, and the Symphony of Stones monument with the other Armenian Assembly interns. We also stopped by one of the nurseries of the Armenia Tree Project, the predominant environmental organization here seeking to preserve Armenia’s indigenous plant life and biodiversity through afforestation. Walking through the lush rows of mulberry and fig trees, with the Armenian holy mountain, Ararat, in the distance was a truly surreal experience. Finally, we visited Yerablur, the cemetery for Armenia’s fallen soldiers, to pay our respects to all our martyrs of the Artsakh wars.
This week at the Women’s Support Center, in addition to my ongoing work on the judicial training module, we held a meeting with a group of college students visiting Armenia with AGBU (Armenian General Benevolent Union) and conducted a discussion comparing the differences in legislation and social stigma surrounding DV in California (where many of the AGBU students were from) and here in Armenia. We also had an additional training to go over the recent amendments to the DV law, which was all in Armenian and challenged me to learn more technical, legislative vocabulary in Armenian. Finally, we held a group debrief to discuss my coworker Araz’s observations from her focus group sessions at each of the WSC centers in Armenia’s provinces, which became a conversation about accessibility in the more distant villages.Â
Overall, I am beginning to understand the Eastern Armenian dialect much better than before, but it’s still a challenge, so I am grateful that my Western Armenian-speaking cousins from Beirut and Los Angeles are visiting me for the next week and a half!
@Barnard CollegeÂ