My Neighbor Viola

Viola at the front door to her apartment.

Viola and her fifteen year-old daughter Alice.

I live on the fourth floor of a Soviet era Armenian apartment building that was heavily damaged in a 1988 earthquake, and then renovated in 2002. From my living/sleeping space I look down on a similar three-story building where my neighbor Viola lives. The space that Viola and her youngest daughter Alice live in is approximately 20 feet square. Three-fourths of the space consists of a large room divided by cabinets lined up horizontally, which create two sleeping spaces and a small living area. From the outside you step into a small kitchen/eating area that has a very small bathroom on one end. Walling off the backend of her brother-in-law’s three-room apartment and then cutting an illegal entry door into the tufa stone wall created the apartment. The apartment is barely heated by a small electric space heater, as Viola cannot afford ($220) to run a gas line to her apartment.

Yesterday evening, after Viola spent four hours meditating with a close friend and her father, I went over to visit. Her fifteen year-old daughter Alice has been accepted into a program (FLEX), for high school students from former Soviet bloc countries, to study next year in the US. It’s an exciting time for Alice and her mother and we were discussing the possibilities, and the obstacles.

Viola was born in November 1962 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan into an Armenian family. In May 1966 an earthquake in Uzbekistan led the family to move to her grandparents home in Gyumri after one month of living in the yard outside their Uzbekistan home. Viola went to school in Gyumri, married at 23, and in December 1988 she was teaching school at 11:40 am when a devastating earthquake, which killed 25,000 people in Gyumri, shook the earth. She ran outside, watched a tall building collapse, and ran home to check on her one and a half year-old daughter who was with her husband. Her husband ran to check on her parents who had survived. Days later the bodies of her uncle and his family were found in the collapsed fourth flour of a six or seven story building. Initially bodies were laid out on a public square for identification and left there as there were no coffins. She described the horror and chaos of the situation. Because there was no gas or water the family made its way to Yerevan for two weeks and then returned to Tashkent for one year. The family then returned to Gyumri, lived in a domik (metal shipping container) for eighteen years heated by a wood stove, and moved into the apartment just over one year ago. She divorced her husband in 1988 after he was institutionalized (and still is) for mental problems.

In the meantime Viola earned a doctorate in philology (a type of linguistics centered on written texts, common degree in Armenia) in Russian and English. She has now been teaching for eighteen years and currently teaches at two universities in Gyumri.

Immediately after the earthquake, she prayed for God to help her, realized that she needed God everyday, and that began her spiritual journey; hence, the long weekly meditation sessions. Her spiritual master is an Indian (Sant Baljit Singh) who she met in Crimea (Ukraine) many years ago.

Viola says that her fellow teachers don’t like her, and while she rustles with some discomfort at that statement, in the end, it doesn’t seem to bother her. And this is precisely why I enjoy her so much. In a country where everyone worries about what others say, and everyone conforms, Viola goes against the grain. With her bleached blonde hair, progressive attitude about her daughter’s opportunity in America (few men would let their daughters go), vegetarianism, openness about discussing problems in Armenia, divorce (6.4% of women and 2.3% of men ages 50-59), religious views (93% of Armenians identify with the national Armenian Apostolic Church), un-Armenian name (her father named her after the flower) and not living in a multiple family situation, she is anything but typical. And in a society where women are obsessed with meticulously clean homes, Viola can’t be bothered to keep up.

Viola struggles to make ends meet, though she says that she doesn’t “pity anything in my life.” Her oldest daughter lives in Yerevan, where she is an under-employed university psychology graduate whose biggest concern is that she may have to move back to Gyumri. Her mother worries that her daughter can’t afford heat and was sick much of last winter. Viola has resigned herself to paying bribes to get a visa through in time for her daughter to leave for the US in August. Last week she paid a judge AMD6000 ($17), a significant portion of her monthly wages, to get paperwork related to her husband’s incompetency processed, after being told initially that it would take at least three months. Additional fees to the translator and courts are AMD24000. Both she and her daughter are struggling to learn how they will communicate by Internet once Alice is in the US. In Armenia, daily Internet access outside of Yerevan is rare (and prohibitively expensive.)

Alice’s self-assurance amazes me. At fifteen I could not have done what she is about to do. She currently goes to school when she feels like it, a common practice in Armenia where there are no penalties for absence. She wondered what would happen if she did not go to school everyday in the US; what if she didn’t feel like it? I told her that her host family and the school would have a problem with that. She told me that she heard that students didn’t “help” others (cheat) on tests. (This is the area that probably bothers PC TEFL teachers the most!) I confirmed that cheating was unacceptable. (I could see her mind spinning as she was trying to figure out how that could possibly be so.) And then she is mildly concerned about money, clothes, prom dresses, the possibility of being on a farm, not having access to a large city, not fitting into her host family, etc. She seems amazingly comfortable with her English, often cutting off her mother who tries to translate back to her in Russian, to let her know that she understands. Alice is fluently tri-lingual. I think that Alice will be a charming addition to any American host family, and they’ll be fortunate to have her.