A Trip to Armenia

It was of no surprise to me when my parents announced during the summer of 2007 that the family was taking a trip out of the country. The surprise came when they told me that the destination was Armenia. I, by nationality, am Armenian. I was 14 when we had this conversation and had never visited my home country before in my life. I was anxious, excited, and scared all at the same time – comparable to how most kids feel about starting a new life in a new school.

Armenia is the type of country into which you can arrive unannounced with no money in your pocket and receive food and housing within the hour. Everyone there treats each other like family. My family, which did announce that it was arriving, was greeted by what seemed like the entire airport garage full of cars. To avoid offending anyone, my brother, mother, father, and I all got into different cars with our distant relatives.

The entire trip was one gigantic cultural encounter that opened my eyes to a myriad of new experiences; but one specific encounter that I will never forget in my life was one related to fuel.

Armenia is a developing country that does not have a very wealthy population. The economy is still primarily based on agriculture and the technology is sub-par. This was clearly evident the minute you stepped outside of the airport and this encounter solidified every assumption I had made about the country’s industry.

We all know that a car needs some sort of fuel to run and some of us even know the different kinds of fuel: gasoline, diesel, and electricity. One day, when a relative was driving around my brother, father, and me, he stated that he needed gas. This statement would have flown right past us if he used the Russian word “benzene” for gas. He, however, used the Russian word “gas.” We asked him what he meant and he explained that most cars in Armenia ran on gas – natural gas. To give you an understanding of what image this evoked in our minds, imagine hooking up your car to your gas stove, cranking up the dial to “high” and waiting a few minutes for the gas to flow into a special container in your car. Our visions became reality when we arrived at the special “gas” station 5 miles from the center of the city.

This entire time my mind has been obsessing over the idea of how Armenians, as well as other nationalities that occupy developing nations, have to constantly come up with, what to us seem to be ingenious, ways to overcome obstacles in life that we never even face. Compressing natural gas in a canister and rerouting the entire fuel system to run on it to save a few dollars every month seemed absurd to us; but for them, there was no way to afford a car without doing it.