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| I mean, look at this design!! |
Between teaching class and English conversation club, I sit wedged between a pleasantly warm wood stove to my right and my beautiful host mother, donning her everyday house dress, to my left. In the wake of a delicious Armenian meal – a savory mixture of beans, canned tomato-juice, potatoes, and rice – Anush sips her tea and teaches me to knit a hat. Meanwhile, an Armenian television drama fills the silence in the background. Anush oscillates between patiently explaining the meaning of several words I can’t understand from the TV and tolerantly fixing my knitting errors whenever I clumsily drop a stitch.
Anush has been knitting and crocheting since she was five. She can now sit and thoughtlessly create a handmade skirt of consummate skill using only her thick, clearly-spends-a-lot-of-time-gardening fingers and a tiny crochet hook in just one evening.
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| Incredible Pattern |
Together we’re going to try to sell some of her best work, because it’s simply fantastic. And, after she had taught me several new stitches and a really interesting new design (if you can teach me to knit you can teach anyone), I realized that she could be sharing these skills with other young villagers who would like to learn as well. If fact, she could do some knitting lessons with other villagers to make extra money to buy more yarn for her own work, which she could then sell in larger cities or towns. Anush loves the idea.
This moment captures the beauty of cross-cultural, or even just cross-person, relationships. We've all got a set of skills just waiting to be shared with the world; sometimes, we just need some outside support to begin to recognize those gifts. Anush, for example, didn’t realize how special her talent was until she saw how painstakingly slowly I struggled to stitch two simple knots together.
Now, she feels empowered by the idea that she has something extraordinary to share with others, and I’ve got a nice new winter hat.
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