InternationalWith home ownership comes a sense of belonging
Published: Saturday July 21, 2007 in Living in Armenia
Living in Armenia. Armen Hakobyan
Buying a home can be a daunting and emotional journey for most of us. So many hopes and dreams are tied up into owning a home, especially when it's your first one: "This is where we'll build a life for ourselves, raise our children, plant a vegetable garden, and grow old together." More than a real estate transaction, buying a house is a commitment, not only to the bank, but to our concept of family. Owning your own home is an intrinsic part of the American dream and according to the U.S. Census Bureau almost 70 percent of Americans own their own homes.
There's the minor issue of getting approved for a mortgage, however, making sure monthly payments can be made, buying garden tools, patio furniture, and for those living in the northern reaches of our hemisphere, most definitely the purchase of shovels or snow blowers.
However for any real Armenian family, the most important and critical piece of furniture is the barbecue. My husband comes from a village, so a gas barbecue was out of the question. I was raised in the city therefore a tonir was out of the question. We settled on a large, custom-made wood-burning barbecue, which saw its share of family get-togethers and quiet Saturday evenings when the sun was setting, and the smell of the wood burning and the aroma of the food would alleviate any or all of the previous week's angst and tension.
A sense of ownership is not enough, though. One needs to have a sense of belonging as well. For most of my life, I always felt like I never belonged. I never belonged among my blue-eyed, blonde-haired friends, who used to live in pretty houses on even prettier streets in neighborhoods where I could never have dreamed of living. Back in the early 70s, Canada was not home to many immigrants, and the "visible minorities" in my Grade 1 class were an Arab, a Jew, and me.
So there I was, a dark-eyed, dark-haired quiet little girl who lived in an over-store apartment, usually infested with large black cockroaches; my fair-skinned friends went to music class or dance class and all lived in houses with neatly trimmed backyards, where they could play. I recall walking home from school one day and seeing a "For Sale" sign on the front garden of a brick bungalow. I stood there gazing wistfully at that house and feeling like Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. How I wanted to live in that house! I ran home and told my mother excitedly about this wonderful fairytale house that was for sale and could we please, please buy it. Only decades later did I realize the pain I must have caused my mother back then, an immigrant with no education, no family, and no money in the bank. All I remember of her reaction is her face slowly turning away from me.
So when I moved into my first house, modest as it was, my dream was still the house on the street with the "For Sale" sign that I, as a little girl of 8 or 9 had seen. The house we bought was the house where we raised our children, planted a vegetable garden, had barbecues, and eventually decided to sell to move to Armenia.
Home ownership in Armenia, however, has taken on a new meaning for me. We bought a home here in Yerevan because we were going to be living here. Lately many of our friends who live in different parts of the world are buying homes in Armenia. I have had the privilege and utter comic relief of watching these people that I love go through the very difficult process of having a home in the homeland. Most of these friends, I wish to make clear, will not be living in Armenia permanently now or even in the foreseeable future.
Owning a home in Armenia allows them the freedom to come and go, to have a foothold in a place they have claimed for themselves, to leave perhaps a legacy to their children by enabling them to dig and discover their roots. But with all this lovely imagery comes the reality of dealing with builders who are constantly behind schedule, contractors who don't show up, entire paint crews who are off the job for days because their cousin's sister-in-law's 88-year-old mother passed away in Gyumri and they must go to the funeral.
I hope the reader takes what I am about to say with a grain of salt, but my American-Armenian friends are the funniest. One particular friend, who will remain nameless, had this notion that there must be a department store-like place which sells home supplies and that we would have a cart and go aisle by aisle to find all the things he needed for his newly finished apartment. On the way to this imaginary place I was trying hard to control my laughter.
Where we were going in fact was a narrow, dusty street located just behind the statue of Vartan Mamigonian on his horse, arms outstretched, ready for battle. Not unlike the frame of mind we needed to be in to survive this shopping expedition. The street, which is overcrowded with cars and people, is home to about 10 or 12 small shops lined together selling everything from light switches to laundry detergent. There are no carts, no salespeople to assist you, and most importantly no air conditioning in any of these specialty stores. We ended up making 4 or 5 trips to the car to unload the stuff he bought, and at the end of it we were both exhausted. Once in the car, with the air conditioning on at maximum, I turned to him and said, "Welcome to Armenia!" I don't think he was amused.
And then there's the issue of quality control in newly constructed apartment buildings. Another friend, shortly after moving into his apartment, discovered that two of his three sinks were leaking and a rather large crack had formed on the wall that separated his two bedrooms. In the laundry room, the crew that had tiled the walls had failed to bring the tiles all the way down to the floor. When my friend complained that there was a 3 inch space between the floor and the tile on the walls, the varbed (master) said, "Well, just close the door and you won't see it." This is the kind of answer you're likely to get 9 out of 10 times.
