Another Inconvenient Truth

Lately I have been reading and enjoying a book my sister sent me, Half-Broke Horses.   In it the author portrays her life growing up in the American Southwest during some difficult times in our country, the 30’s and 40’s.  One of her first experiences in a new town brought back vivid memories of my arrival in Armenia:

I felt nature calling and asked Old Jake where I could find the facilities.  He pointed toward a little wooden shed in the north corner of the compound.  “It’s nothing fancy, just a one-holer,” he said.”No moons cut in the door to advertise it, either, ‘cause we all know what it is.”

            Inside the outhouse, once you’d closed the door that didn’t have a moon, enough light came through the cracks in the wood so that you could see.  Spider webs dangled in the roof corners, a sack of lime sat on the dirt floor, and there was a scoop to sprinkle it into the hole to keep the flies down.  A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush.  As I sat down though, though, I realized you can get used to certain luxuries that start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all.  There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things – though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart – and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.

            Next to the seat was a stack of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, and I picked one up and leafed through it.  I came to a page advertising silk bodices and lacy chemises.  I won’t be ordering from the page, I thought, and when I was done with my business, that was the one I tore out and used.

            Now, I would be less than truthful to say that I have fully adjusted to all such physical inconveniences.   In fact, I could probably name the location of all the public bathrooms in my town that are actually equipped with toilet seats.  There are five.  In fact, I still remember the exciting day when the city official on the 4th  floor of our office building gave me a key to the locked bathroom.  Not exactly the “key to the executive bathroom” but it sure felt like it.

            But over the next two years, I discovered another “inconvenience” that was much more difficult to adjust to.  During our initial language training, I was a little surprised to be taught the phrase, hamar che, it is not convenient.  We were told if someone wanted us to stop and talk or to go drink coffee with them when we were busy, we could just use this phrase. What I did not understand at the time was how much this embodies the Armenian view of time.

Early on in my service at my Non Profit site, I would arrive at 9am for a meeting that the Director had arranged himself the day before.  He would then show up at 10:30 as if he were on time.  He would ask me where my Armenian tutor was.  I tried to explain that I pay her for an hour every morning to work with me and ……… she had gone home.  He usually had this startled look on his face, like “why?”  I guess he expected that I would pay her to just sit around and wait for him to arrive.  This became all too typical of meetings at my NGO.  Apparently in the Soviet system, the boss is not expected to be a “role model.”  This was one of the perks of being the boss, of having a title.  And once our meeting started with a half dozen staff members, it was not uncommon for a friend of his to knock on the door and walk in.  All of us would then be expected to just wait while their personal conversation took place over the next ten or fifteen minutes.

                 This is not unique just to Armenia but also occurs in Turkey, as I mentioned in my blog about my trip to Istanbul.  My British acquaintance also struggled with this at meetings he conducted.  The members of his team would have two to three cell phones sitting in front of them on the meeting room table.  They were not in the least bit hesitant to take a personal call right in the middle of his managers’ meeting.  When I began to teach English in the school in my town last year, I discovered this was also an accepted part of the school culture. The grade school students, as in America, have mastered the art of “texting under their desks.”  But even more disturbing is the tendency of the teachers to pretend it’s not happening or even allow them to leave the classroom to answer a personal call.  I have asked several teachers I work with, why the principal of the school doesn’t just have a rule for all the students to “turn off their phones” when they come to school.  They look perplexed at the logic of my question.  Maybe they are afraid they might have to do the same.  Either way, the quality of education suffers.     

                    If Armenia is ever to compete in the business world, they will have to deal with this cultural value that still puts relationships (friends and family) above performance.  Now it is not hard to understand how this value evolved in a society where family support was a key to survival.  I had actually come across this phenomenon back in the late 60’s working at a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota.  Even though they lived at the poverty line, I was surprised to hear that no one had phones in their houses.  I should qualify that.  Nobody has a phone for more than a month.  For when their neighbors found out about it, the owners would soon have a $500 long distance bill the first month and have to discontinue service.   The concept of sharing obviously made sense during the times when the culture relied on hunting the buffalo.  If your family didn’t succeed in killing a buffalo one season, you would obviously rely on friends and family for food during the winter.  The practice made perfect sense during the era of buffalo hunting.  But while I was working there, it was surely an impediment for the families to adapt to the modern world. I imagine for those with casinos on their land, this is no longer a problem.

Recently a group of successful Armenian business people visited our town for a conference.  I was invited to have dinner with them afterwards where the topic of opening the border to Turkey was discussed.  I told them that many in our town were opposed to it out of fear that the Armenian businesses could not compete and would go out of business. I found their response very interesting.  They agreed that initially it would be a major problem to for the country to face.  But eventually they felt it would be a “wake up call” to current hiring practices in Armenia.   Employees who are hired because they are relatives or friends expect to keep their jobs not through performance but because of relationships.  The participants at the conference felt competing with Turkey would force many Armenian businesses to consider hiring the most qualified applicants instead.  This would be a huge shock to the culture where relatives and friends expect preferential treatment.   

The offshoot of the current hiring practices is already having a negative impact on Armenia’s migration issue. I recently met with one of the twenty-something Armenians that I tutor in English.  Her face told a story of recent disappointment.  She had already worked through two recent job problems but this looked new.   When I first arrived two years ago she was employed in a mid-level supervisory position with the Courts. But when financial crisis rolled into Armenia, she and many of her staff were laid off.  Rather than sitting around waiting to be rescued by a relative or friend, she began exploring other solutions.  She first started a small internet café in her area of the town.  After a while she realized there was not enough traffic to make it worthwhile.  Then she contacted one of the banks in Yerevan that were planning to open a branch here.  In itself, this was a level of initiative I seldom see among the many unemployed in our town. She was told that an accounting course would be offered in a month and that the bank would be hiring from those who completed it.  She not only took the course but completed it with the highest score of those attending.  When she arrived in my office that day, she had just had her job interview.  Having gotten a perfect score on the accounting exam, her hopes were high for the interview.  With her previous job experience and solid abilities to speak English, I was also hopeful for her.  But at the completion of the interview, they just said: “Don’t be disappointed but we won’t be hiring you.” 

 

It wasn’t a couple days later that I was talking with the Superintendent for the construction of the new bank.  We were having the usual conversation of what our children were doing.  When asked about his daughter’s job he replied that she was a secretary at the police department.  But he added proudly that she would soon be working at the new bank he was building.  I guess she was so talented she didn’t need to take the accounting courses.  My student is now talking about leaving the country.  This cultural value of “insider hiring” is commonplace in Armenia.  But from where I stand, it will not enable Armenia to compete in the world market and will also drive many of the talented youth to look to other countries to find their careers.  The universities in Yerevan may get the short-term benefit of collecting student tuitions but it will be the neighboring countries that receive the long-term benefit of an educated and talented workforce. 

 

As this summer approaches I am preparing to help run 3 Summer Camps in the region as I did last summer.  It is exciting for the teenagers to make new friends and for us counselors to see them learn some new skills in the area of teamwork and leadership.  This past month I have been working with the local schools to arrange times to make presentations, pass out applications and interview interested students.  One school is up in the hills a ways and has taken me two weeks to set up good time to visit. But after it was all arranged, my counterpart at my NGO whom I rely on for translations told I would need to re-schedule our meeting because it was “not convenient.”   When I tried to uncover the conflict on her schedule, it was something her sister asked her to help her with.  I could see that if she met with her sister an hour earlier both things could happen.  She finally admitted she would have to get up an hour earlier in the morning.  I don’t think her cultural conditioning allowed her to see how “inconvenient” it might be for me re-scheduling a meeting that took me two weeks to create.

Should the border with Turkey open in the next year or two, I am afraid Armenians will be forced to do address these traditional values that no longer serve the Society.    Otherwise, I do not see how they will ever regain a semblance of the stature they like to recall in their long and proud history.