One Year Later: Peace Corps Evacuation of 2020
March 16, 2021
One year ago today, when COVID-19 exploded and international travel came to a screeching, year long halt, Peace Corps Volunteers were informed they would be leaving their homes and jobs abroad and returning to a very uncertain future in the US. I was one of them.
This was the first and only world wide Peace Corps Evacuation, and even today the future of the Peace Corps as an organization, and that of many of the evacuated volunteers is incredibly uncertain.
This is my personal story, a year later about how that feels now.
The story goes that Caesar was stabbed on the Ides of March, and we used to joke in crowded college cafeterias that the 15th was a fateful day cosmically, creating our own smaller dramas.
It’s not that I think my story is especially worth telling, because I think there will be a lot of stories told about this especially fateful time, it’s more that I can’t stop telling it.
Three whole years ago, joking about the ides, and fate, aimlessly 22, I decided I was going to live abroad.
A calendar year later, I paired my life down to one suitcase, a backpacking bag and a daypack, and stuffed a little notebook filled with scratches of a guttural, beautiful language I planned to choke out in my back pocket and caught a flight to a country I didn’t plan to leave for two and a half years.
That was March 17th, 2019. It was my first flight alone, and I planned to move across the globe, alone. Sometimes I wonder what happened to that person, the one who takes leaps like that, when today going to the grocery store makes my heart beat in my throat.
March 17th, 2020 I caught a different kind of flight—one arranged hours before instead of months, with some of my American expat friends on it, but not all, and all of my Armenian friends remaining in the country I had to leave.
This is the kind of story to which there’s no point in building suspense—we know how it ends.
“Hamaria mi tari,” My host mom says on the phone in modern March.
It’s snowing outside just a little here in Northern Minnesota, and while I still understand her perfectly, my own sentences come out clunky and wrong, the damage I did in the spring refusing to think about Armenia evident.
I want to ask her about the weather, and our students at the school, and if the snow on the mountain has started to creep back up to the top, if the village smells like fresh woodsmoke, if that horrible little dog still lives at the corner, if the sloping shoulders of desert hills are scarlet or soft orange today. Ma jan, are the bees hanging heavy on apricot branches yet? Tell me about mer Hayastani spring.
Instead, I agree with her, choking out words after all. Almost one year it has been.
Once I spoke prettier and could write in lovely slanted Armenian script. I was never near fluent, but once I could talk about most anything with her. We would sit after school in the living room by the parakeet, Masha, or out on the porch by the fig tree and drink coffee, soortj and eat dried apricots, chir, and complain about the heat, or the 6th grade, or talk about St. Petersburg and how it must be beautiful there this time of year.
“Mad jan yerb es galoo?” she asks me. For her, it’s night already. For me, mid-morning.
Words that twist and tighten, when am I coming back?
Standing outside a green taxi in the rain, clouds so thick I couldn’t see the mountain, I sobbed and promised I’d come back. Of course it was raining. Of course my lovely red hills were completely obscured, busy village streets drained of life, of course the world had an ugly gray slant, tinged pandemic green, a world I didn’t recognize sick to my stomach, sobbing in the rain with two other women I would miss like a whole life.
Yerb em galoo? When am I coming back?
“Chigitem, but I will.” I answer.
I know she doesn’t really believe me, and I don’t blame her. I can’t give her a date, I can’t say how long for, I can only say that I am coming. A failing of situation more than language.
How do you reconcile a life you’ve moved on from with the fact that that same life leaks in, every day? A month home in America, I went to throw my toilet paper away instead of flush it. I rehearsed grocery store conversations in Armenian, forgetting I speak the native language here and don’t need to rehearse. Even today, I still catch myself about to call my students jan, a generic term of endearment.
“Okay, Maddy jan,” she says patient, and doesn’t press. I ask about my host sister, and how her English classes are going, and she lists teachers’ names, and asks if I remember them, and of course I do.
After a while, we hang up, and return to my normal life here in Northern Minnesota. I make a cup of coffee, one different from the fine powder of thick Armenian soortj, and I go to a school. Here, students are separated by plastic, with markings on the floor and strangely empty hallways, even in person much of class is still on a screen, a stark contrast from the loud hallways of Armenia, with third graders tugging at my sleeve, traditional dance ceremonies in the hallways every other week, standing shoulder to shoulder while the girls dance with pinkies linked. It’s the difference of a year and a world.
My desert hills have been replaced with the snowy slopes of the Sawtooths, my runs through the apricot groves with hikes at the lakeside.
A year has passed since I left, and two since I arrived, but still, in that place between sleep and wakefulness, I hear soft harmonics of Armenian words, and the chatter of Masha the parakeet, I can feel the warm dry breeze from those red rolling hills. In that space where time and realities blend, we sit in the kitchen while the morning sun stains the mountain peach, and the bees sit so thick on the apricot tree the branches bend under their weight.
In the almost dream I can speak like I used to, smooth but awkward, and we talk about St. Petersburg, a place I’ve never been, and all the places we want to go, and the shadows shrink and our morning coffee cools, and I smear raw honey on her homemade bread. Eventually, I fall asleep in earnest and the dream warps and the colors are brighter and I’ll wake up again in Northern Minnesota.
But the warm spring air outside on my cheeks, the smell of woodsmoke, taste of apricot—for just a second the world shifts like the changing of a lens, and two worlds bleed together.
Another world, but maybe not so far after all.
I’ve written a lot about Armenia since I’ve left. Some of it I’ve shared, some of it I’m not ready to yet.
To read my most recent piece on Armenia, click here. To view the archive of writing I wrote about Armenia while I was in Armenia, click here.