Myrthe Korf

Today a month ago, my best friend died. Dibar wasn’t just one of my closest friends, for three and a half years he was also my boyfriend. Dibar had been with me almost literally from the very first day I moved to Armenia six and a half years ago, first as my boyfriend and after our break-up three years ago as one of my closest friends.

Dibar died suddenly – of a heart attack. He was much too young, only 41 years old. He still had so many things he wanted to do in life. For years he had dreamed about opening his own bar and recently it looked like he might finally make that dream a reality. He wanted to go to Europe, go back to Holland, where he lived long before we met. He was looking forward to seeing his sister and niece and nephew again this summer. The last time he saw them was when he and I went to Lebanon together six years ago, about two weeks into our relationship. That trip together was the beginning of an unusual and rollercoaster relationship.

We were very different, maybe too different. We had lots of fights about lots of things. That’s why we broke up about five times during our relationship (although some people will say that these break-ups weren’t even real break-ups). But we also had good things together, we found something in each other that we needed. That’s why we got back together again and again. That’s why I had patience with Dibar. There was something that kept us together for so long, despite the difficulties. Over the years he made me laugh at least as much as he made me cry.

Being Dibar’s girlfriend wasn’t always easy. But then, I am sure that being my boyfriend wasn’t either. Sometimes I hated Dibar for always being late and for having to clean and organize everything (though the cleaning thing had its advantages!). We had so many fights about him always being late, about him always having to “fix” everything, put every utensil in the kitchen in a specific way and place, a system I tended to find not very usable. Whenever I was abroad and he stayed at my place to take care of the cats, after my return I would always find things in a different order: the towels in the kitchen, the silverware in the drawer, it had all been rearranged in my absence. Dibar had always changed it to his “system”, which invariably wasn’t mine.

One day, fairly early in our relationship, I waited for Dibar for one and a half hour. He never showed up. This was before everyone in Armenia had a mobile phone, because phones and numbers were still too expensive for most people. Dibar and I shared a mobile and he happened to have it with him that time so I couldn’t contact him. After one and a half hour of waiting I finally went home. Dibar was not there, so I called him on the mobile. Turned out he had been carried away in one of his cleaning sprees and completely forgot about time. He had left the house only ten minutes before I had arrived back home. Of course I was raging mad. Looking back, I don’t know who was more of an idiot: Dibar getting lost in his cleaning spree or me waiting for a full hour and a half before calling it quits.

I remember Dibar sleeping on the couch. I remember Dibar sleeping. Period. For years he would usually sleep during the day and work or go out at night or spend the night playing computer games. That was largely due to his work as a bartender, but he was much more a night person than a day person anyway. At times, I hated him for that, because I am not a night person at all. He would go to bed when I’d get up to go to work and he’d get active and wanted to go out by the time I was ready to go to bed.

The irritating habits, those were very typically Dibar. His close friends and his colleagues will confirm this. But no matter how annoying they were, you couldn’t stay angry at Dibar. He was too good, too kind and too crazy a person for that. Dibar was social, interested in other people, ready for a chat; he was intelligent, had an inquisitive mind; he was caring and had a big heart; he was passionate, both in his love and his hatred for things.

In the end our love turned into friendship. We managed a lot better as friends than we did as a couple. After we stopped living together and, later still, after we broke up, Dibar’s annoying habits became easier to deal with. Our friendship was definitely less of a rollercoaster than our relationship had been. There were things about my life I no longer shared with Dibar and there were likely things about his life he no longer shared with me. There were a few periods when we didn’t see each other very often, but no matter what, we were always somewhere in each other’s lives. I don’t have a lot of good friends, and Dibar was the person closest to me. Dibar was one of the very few people that I trusted 100%. I’ve always felt fortunate that we stayed such good friends. Even more fortunate is that I actually got to tell him this more than once. We even talked about this the last time we met. I’m glad I got to tell him then how happy I was that we were still good friends.

Yerevan holds so many memories of Dibar. These days, when I walk through the city, there are so many places that bring up memories: there’s the bar he worked at at some point, there’s the hotel he worked at, there’s where we met for the first time, there’s the place where he told me he was in love with me, there’s the place where we met when he organized the suprise party for my birthday, there’s the restaurant where we had dinner the last time we met, on the street I run into people he introduced me to.

It’s not just places, it’s other things that bring up memories: suddenly hearing a mobile go off with the same ringtone as Dibar’s, his apartment appearing in the background of some pictures a friend took of a totally unrelated event, something someone says.

And then there are our cats, also known as The Kids. When I moved in with Dibar, he had two, Yin-Yang and Nirvana. I remember Dibar woke me up one time in the middle of the night: Yin-Yang had fallen from the window sill and had hurt herself badly on the way down. She was wounded. For about a month we took care of her before she eventually died. Nirvana was kind of shy, not a very social cat, but to Dibar’s surprise Nirvo took to me almost immediately. Eventually, I took Nirvo from Dibar, because I was leading a slightly more regular life and better able to take care of him. He has been living with me for the last four years or so.

I remember how Dibar came home one day almost four years ago. He knew I was thinking about getting another cat. He told me relatives of a friend had the cutest little kitten and they were looking for a good home for him. Dibar had fallen head over heels in love with the kitten. So did I, once I’d seen it. We took home the cat. That’s how Archy came into my life. Dibar was crazy about Archy. Dibar was always the one who would take care of Archy and Nirvo when I went abroad (By the way, Dibar, you do realize left me with a big problem to solve: I’m going to have to look for a new cat-sitter). Archy and Nirvo will remind me of Dibar every single day.

The past year and a half were not easy; I had and still have a lot on my plate, issues I have to deal with, decisions I have to take (now you also know why I am not blogging very much anymore). Partly as a result of this, I decided many months ago that it is time for me to move on, to leave Armenia. Now that Dibar is no longer around, the step to leave Armenia has become so much easier. I may not leave Armenia today or tomorrow, but I will leave. Sooner rather than later.

Dibar was such a big part of my life in Armenia and his death leaves a very large empty space in my life. He was always there and now he isn’t anymore. I miss Dibar, the Crazy Orange Dolphin.

It’s already been a week, that I made my latest contribution to Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s (aka Wereldomroep) program Wereldnet. Time passed so quickly and I only now realized I hadn’t posted the link to the podcast yet. So here it is.  This time I talked about the Genocide Memorial Day on April 24, about cyber granny who disrupted the internet in a large part of the Caucasus, about how a new shortage of eggs in Yerevan was avoided before Easter and about the plan to introduce mandatory chess classes in Armenian schools. You can listen to the entire podcast here (in Dutch).

I have been teaching Dutch to private students in Yerevan for almost five years now. I am not a (language) teacher by profession and teaching languages is definitely not my calling in life. I don’t see myself standing in front of a classroom full of pupils or students, for example. I taught German and English for a while, but I decided to quit, because I am not finding nearly as much satisfaction in that as I am in teaching Dutch. You might be wondering: are there so many people in Armenia who want to learn Dutch? There aren’t masses of people, but there’s a steady trickle finding me. Ninety percent, if not more, of those who want to learn Dutch are women getting married to someone in Holland. Since 2006, citizens of most states need to pass a language exam in order to get a residency permit for Holland with the purpose of marriage. I will write a separate post about the sense and especially the nonsense of this exam, but in this post I will focus on my students, because they are the reason I enjoy teaching my native language.

So who are these students? In the five years I have been tutoring, I have yet to help one male student prepare for the language exam; all my students so far have been women. In fact, in all those years I have heard of only one Dutch-Armenian couple where the woman is Dutch and the man from Armenia. With one exception the women I taught were all university-educated. Some were still in university, some had a job or had worked until they decided to prepare for the exam and their move to Holland. Apart from these similarities, my students fall into two categories. One is the group who met and fell in love with someone from Holland, whether Dutch-Armenian or native Dutch. The other are the women who are getting married to a Dutch-Armenian guy who wants a wife from the motherland – in Dutch they are called ‘importbruiden’, imported brides. As far as I know, these men were all born in Armenia or Baku and ended up in Holland as refugees, either for economical reasons or because they fled the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Either way, these men all hail from this region; they don’t have roots elsewhere in the Armenian diaspora.

The following are my own observations, but they have been confirmed by others who teach or taught Dutch in Yerevan. There are some differences between the two groups. The women in the first group – the ones who fell in love with someone who happened to be from Holland – are all in their mid to late twenties and they all visited Holland at least once before they decided to move there permanently to be with the one they love. Some met the love of their life while they visited friends or relatives in Holland. The second group, the ones I call the “Armenian brides”, are younger, in their early to mid-twenties. None of them has ever been to Holland before: when they board the plane to live with their new husband, that will be the first time they go to Holland. From what I can tell, these marriages all follow the fairly typical Armenian pattern (especially outside Yerevan) where dating doesn’t happen and the wedding follows the engagement fairly soon, generally within a few months or whenever the bride-to-be has received her residency permit.

In my experience the women in the first group seem more independent, want more out of life than just to be someone’s wife and mother, they are much more set on finding a job in The Netherlands. The women in the second group seem more modest, more reserved, quieter maybe, probably more ready to fulfill the role which they’ve been brought up to fulfill, that of wife and mother. I have to state very clearly, though, that none of the women I taught from that second group come across as if they can’t fend for themselves or won’t manage (there has been one exception of a girl who is worthy of a blogpost of her own, but that’s one I’m not going to write for privacy reasons). There’s just something in the character and behavior of the women in the first group that those in the second don’t seem to have, a certain independence, feistiness, readiness to think out of the box – I don’t know what to call it. I have a huge amount of respect for every single one of these young women, who are prepared to start a new life in a different country, where they don’t speak the language (quite a few of my students don’t know English either). I’ve been there, done that. It isn’t easy. In a way, I have even more respect for the ‘import brides’, because they are off to build a new life in a country they have never been to before with people they might not even know that well, they usually haven’t spent that much time with their future husbands and might not even know (all of) their in-laws.

Invariably, at some point during the classes my students and I start talking about things not related strictly to the exam and to learning Dutch. Usually, my students start asking me questions about Holland and about life there or I have to explain something ‘typically Dutch’ that comes up in the teaching material. With a few of my students our discussions went way beyond migration and I more than once I found myself discussing not just life in Armenia or the position of women in Armenia, but also much more intimate topics like differences in dating and relationships, and even sexual education and the use of birth control.

Throughout our classes and conversations, I can sense how all my students are each in their own way mentally preparing for their move to Holland: they are thinking about building up a life there, how to make friends, whether it is easy to find a job. Sometimes I share something relevant about my life in Armenia or my students will ask me questions about how I learned Armenian (I now teach all my classes in Armenian), what it was like for me to move to and start a new life in a different country, though I didn’t move to Armenia to get married and chances are big that I will leave Armenia sooner rather than later. In fact, I think one of the reasons why I am successful as a Dutch tutor is because I know what it is to move to a different country, to build up a life there, to have to learn a new language. I know where my students are coming from and where they’re going to – in more ways than one. I put my own experiences into my teaching.

Two of my students became especially good friends and, after both of them moved to Holland about a year ago, we are still in touch through Skype and Facebook. I met both since they moved and plan to see them again during my visit to Holland later this year. I am so proud of them when they tell me about their big and small achievements, how one of them had an exhibition of her paintings recently, how they only speak Dutch now when they go shopping, how they feel comfortable taking public transport from one town to another on their own and ask the way if necessary – in Dutch of course! They may seem small and insignificant things to you, but, believe me, when you just moved to another country and are only just learning the language (and you don’t speak English either), these are significant steps. I am talking from experience.

My students don’t know this, but they give me so much more than just the money they pay me for their classes. I get a kick out of talking with them and observing the steep learning-curve they go through in the two-three months that we work together. I am still a bit nervous when one of my students takes the exam, though at the same time I am confident she will pass. By now I know the teaching material by heart, so in itself teaching those exam prep classes is not very exciting. It is my students who make my classes. I learn from them as much as they learn from me.

My students rock. Every single one of them.

This morning I held my regular talk for Radio Netherlands Worldwide radio-station (Wereldomroep). One of the topics I discussed was the recent change of mayors in Yerevan and changes new mayor Karen Karapetian pushed through that are not necessarily increasing his popularity with everyone, notably firing district heads, setting up language classes for the townhall’s staff and banning street trade.

You can listen to the talk here, but it’s all in Dutch.