Why my PST host family was the best

I didn’t know if I have written this story, and well, I’m too lazy to read through and check.

This is the reason my PST host family was the best host family ever:

The last week of PST we had model school, our practicum. The TEFL program taught for 10 sessions, creating our lessons from scratch. We at best got to see the students (being taught by another class) once, and so that meant on the first day we were going in totally blind. Oh and we had 3 hours of language six days a week. And we taught in the nearby city so we had to take transport there every day and back, which isn’t exactly quick.

What I’m trying to say is that it was stressful. Stress from responsibilities combined with the same food over and over again (as good as it is) made it incredibly hard for me to eat much, if anything at all. I was eating about one meal a day. Now for an Armenian family, a child not eating is a horrible thing, a sad thing, even shameful. The PST families were competing to have the best fed, best speaking, just all around best volunteer. If another host family commented to another volunteer that it looked like they lost weight, that was meant almost as a slander! As far as I knew this wasn’t said to anyone in our group, but it has happened in the past. Now I really haven’t lost any weight here, or if I have it’s been probably less than 5 five pounds.

Regardless—my family was concerned. I tried to eat when in front of them, I would give my lunch away to other volunteers and eat what I could (usually just the cucumber they’d give me) but my family was sad.

The lunch incident actually reminds me of the stories I would hear about my grandfather when he was suffering from cancer, my grandma would make him meat loaf sandwiches because she thought he loved them. (This is from my parents, my grandfather passed away when I was three so I don’t remember this). It turned out that he would give them out to his friends, he just couldn’t eat and was losing a lot of weight. Up until the day my grandma passed away I never once tasted her meatloaf. (P.S. to this story: Mom, Dad, Katie, I’m not sure if I got this story totally right but that is how I remember it!)

Aside over.

So the weekend after the first model school we went to this outdoor café which we often went to called Bella’s. There was this food there called llama Joe’s. I’m transliterating it like that because that is what came to my mind when I first heard it and exactly how peace corps volunteers pronounce it (lamajo perhaps?). But anyways it’s basically a tortilla-esque flat bread that has ground beef and sometimes tomatoes on the one side and you wrap it up kinda like a taco. It’s not substantial so you eat a lot of them. For some reason I could eat these where everything else I just couldn’t stand. (Hard boiled eggs for breakfast every day, tomatoes and cucumbers every day, I just couldn’t deal with that. And I know come winter I will miss dearly those tomatoes and cucumbers, oh I know I will.)

My family would asked about my evening in Charentsavan, so I would say well, we went to Bella’s drank some beer and I ate lamajo. A few days after model school we didn’t have much to do (for once) as PST was winding down so we all met at a friend’s house in our village to swap movies and music from out computers.

I come back a few hours later and I see my Tatik rolling out dough on a wooden table, making lamajo. Really? Did that really just happen? I was so happy. The homemade stuff is so much better than the stuff at the café. I ate like 7 or 8 of these and it was amazing. What an awesome host family, they just made it, I didn’t ask, or hint (or try to hint) or anything. I’m now at site and my new host family is wonderful, and I am still trying to get to know them, but I love my PST host family dearly. They treated me great.

Now I am sure other volunteers will have equally great stories about their host families, so the title is a bit of a hyperbole, even though it is true ;-)