Travels with Sherpa Tom: Building in Armenia with the Fuller Center, Week one, Aug. 31 to Sept. 4

Our group is small, there are only six international volunteers - Boots, Ramsay, John, Polly, Lesylee and myself. I believe we will have another volunteer joining us next week. Each day at the build site, there are different local volunteers, some who work for Fuller and some who are neighbors and relatives of the family for whom we are helping build the house.

Our regular start time is not until 9:30 when the Fuller Center bus comes to pick us up. Monday, we first went to the Fuller Center for an orientation and briefing, and a chance to buy some items hand made by the families that Fuller helps. This is a way they can generate some additional income to pay the mortgage on their homes. The family we will be helping started their home 25 years ago, shortly after the Soviet Union disintegrated and Armenia became independent. There are three generations and they live in the basement and have an outhouse only. They have land, so they have a large garden. The exterior of the home is built, but not finished - there is much work to be done to make the home liveable and to allow them to move upstairs from the cellar. Their home is nearly an hour's drive from Yerevan, so we did not get there until midday. We spent the afternoon mixing and pouring concrete for the floor in the large dining room. There are electric mixers, but they then dump the wet concrete into a rectangle surrounded by concrete blocks with a wood floor. Two people then shovel the wet concrete into buckets which we then sent by bucket brigade into the house where it is poured and leveled. My position in the bucket brigade was just outside the front door - because of my height, I was the one chosen to lift the buckets up to my shoulder level to person inside. The floor of the house is about four feet higher than the ground surrounding the home.

On the Fuller bus

The floor is one third done

Looking across the cement we just poured, into the back bedroom

One pail of cement (from the large trough above), three pails of sand, three pails of gravel and two pails of water gives us the concrete they want

At the end of the day, the floor is finished


This is the room where we have lunch and coffee breaks

In the kitchen, you can see where the sink will go and where the outlets will be

Because there is electricity at the house, we have a water cooler for our bottled water

Monday night, we went to a restaurant with sidewalk seating - but even there, we continued to encounter smokers. Just as with other third world countries, Armenia has many people who smoke.

Tuesday, we moved on to plastering the walls. We spent the full day doing this and got maybe half of the walls done in a couple of rooms. Fortunately, they have an electric mixer for converting the dry powder and water into the appropriate mix we needed for plastering the walls. My understanding is that we will put three coats on, and after needed sanding of the walls, we may get to paint one or more of the rooms.

The home where we are working is in the town of Khor Virap, as close to Turkey as you can get and so has Mt. Ararat for regular viewing from the back of the home

After a long day at the build site, we came home to relatively clear skies and a great view of Mt Ararat and later, of the setting sun.

Tuesday night, we had dinner inside in a private room at the hotel - no smokers, no loud crowds or music from the sound system. It was a very pleasant dinner.

Wednesday was scheduled as a non-work day, instead it was one of exposure to cultural things in Armenia, including the Manuscript Museum, Genocide Memorial and some historical sites outside the city of Yerevan, including Sevan and Lake Sevan. The only problem was that I got the Armenian version of Montezuma's revenge starting late Tuesday night and continuing Wednesday morning - so I stayed at the hotel and heard about the trip when others returned. Since my digestive system seemed okay, I went out to dinner with everyone and we ate at the sidewalk cafe affiliated with the Marriott - good food and great service, but the cost was more than twice what we had been paying at other restaurants. Unfortunately, my digestive system was not completely well, and I had problems again a little before midnight. Thus, while Thursday was a workday, I stayed back at the hotel, as I wanted to be near working toilet facilities.

Friday, I was feeling better (but still not 100%) and decided to go with the team today. First, we went to the historic sites of Khor Virap. This is where Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for more than at decade at the end of the third century. The building about his place of internment dates from the sixth century and the larger chapel dates from the end of the seventeenth century.