Birthday post


Happy b-day to me!!! I turned 50 years old: to be more specific, I JUST turned 50 years old, i.e. at 11:10pm on January 10th.... what a wonderful birthday it is to know that people have donated close to $13,500 to my various fundraising efforts for this trip. I am humbled, and truly appreciative.

I know that my contribution to Armenia will be a drop in the bucket: after all, what is it really to be living in the diaspora, to make, say, annually $75,000 CAD, when you know your brothers and sisters in Armenia make, on average, something like $3,000 CAD annually...

What right do I have, as a Canadian, to make that much more? A rate of 1 : 25? Crazy math... am I 25 times more valuable than my Armenian counterpart? No, of course I am not. Yet the lottery of my birth allows me to claim that I, as a Canadian, can earn, say, $75,000 annually, and be completely comfortable with the wage discrepancy...

Well, I am not, dear friends. A life in Canada should not be worth the life of 25 Armenians, financially speaking. This math is not solid, it is not "woke"... it makes no real sense that I, a child of immigrants from Greece and Syria, should make that much more than your average Armenian. It just is not far.

That said, I will do my best to get any donations offered to me to the people who really need it, in Armenia. T-minus 18 hours to my trip... wish me luck!

Huge thanks to Sheila and Antoine Terjanian: they are offering me a place to stay, thereby minimizing my costs. Antoine also gave me the idea of working with the Atken Armenian Foundation, an organization with deep roots in several communities, including  in the town of Yeghegnadzor in the province of Vayots Dzor where I will be staying, and Syunik NGO, a dynamic organization devoted to doing incredible work to help those most in need. I will be working with these wonderful people for two weeks.

Antoine also offered me this t-shirt for my birthday (note especially the dentures and poly-grip: seriously?  :-)

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