Archie the Armenian
Sep 3rd, 2007, 12:32 am
Nothing particularly exciting has happened in the past week, but stuff has happened nonetheless, like the weather getting warmer. Highs have been in the 60s, lows in the 50s. This unusually cold winter is coming to a close. Being a man of the Northern Hemisphere, I still can’t get over how the seasons are flip-flopped down here. What kind of a messed up world do we live in where it’s winter in September?
Last Sunday, I walked over to one of the many locutorios, communication centers where customers can make phone calls and access the Internet, located by my place to send a fax to my insurance company in the US. I gave Archie, a middle-aged man with gray hair and a mustache, the sheets and the fax number. While he was faxing away, I noticed he was killing time by reading the photocopy of my passport. After all the pages went through, he asked me if I was Arab. This is how the convo basically went:
Archie: ¿Sos árabe, no? (You’re Arab, right?)
Me: No. Mis padres son de Bangladesh. (No. My parents are from Bangladesh.)
Archie: Ah. Sos budista entonces. ¿Pero naciste en Estados Unidos, no? (Ah. So you’re Buddhist then. But you were born in the United States, right?)
Me: Sí. Yo nací allá, pero soy musulmán. (Yes. I was born there, but I’m Muslim.)
Archie: Allahu ackbar. (God is great.)
Me: ¿Dónde aprendiste eso? (Where did you learn that?)
Archie: En Afganistán, cuando estaba en la Unión Soviética. (In Afghanistan, when I was in the Soviet Union.)
Me: ¿Sos de Argentina? (Are you from Argentina?)
Archie: No. La Unión Soviética. (No. The Soviet Union.)
Me: ¿Sos de Rusia? (Are you from Russia?)
Archie: No. Armenia. (No. Armenia.)
We then continued to talk for the next twenty minutes or so. As many people do after I tell them I’m from the US, he asked me why the hell I was in Argentina, which he described as basura (trash). As I was trying to tell him why I was living here, he grabbed a small piece of paper and wrote something like “1 U$D = 3.15 ARS,” the exchange rate of US dollars to Argentine pesos, and said, “Te gustó eso” (“You liked that”). Of course, I didn’t come here to party it up and take advantage of the shaky economy. Why must everyone think I’m so rich boy American here to blow all my money on expensive food, women, and wine?
Archie told me that he came to Argentina from Armenia as a political refugee in 1999, not speaking a word of Spanish. Back then, the Argentine peso was pegged to the US dollar, so Argentina was an attractive place for immigrants from all over (he didn’t say that, but I’m guessing that was part of Argentina’s attraction for him). And then the economy crashed in December 2001, bringing the country into a severe economic crisis. However, according to Archie, there was no crisis. He said it was artificially created by the government to allow for a coup. I dunno about that. It could be true, but I dunno because I haven’t looked into the details. There definitely was massive unemployment and economic uncertainty during that time, so I don’t know how he could deny the existence of the crisis. Well anyway, he vented his frustration that he was a civil engineer with a master’s degree working in a locutorio. I could tell he was frustrated with his life. Yeah, I can definitely see myself being pissed off if I had a good job in another country and was forced to flee to a place where I don’t speak the language and take a job that pays little and then the economy crashes. He said he recently found an engineering job in Quebec and plans to move there with his wife and kids (I don’t know if they came with him in 1999 or joined him later) towards the end of this year. Insha’Allah, that’ll work out for them.
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