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  • Home
    • About >
      • Our Story
      • Our Team
      • Our Projects
      • Our Supporters
  • ARK Ecological NGO
    • Get Involved
    • Volunteer
  • Blog
  • Explore Kapan
    • Getting There
    • Flora & Fauna
    • Mount Khustup
    • Voghji Valley
  • The Legends Trail, Tatev - Khustup Segment
    • Kapan Spiritual Culture >
      • Կապանի հոգևոր ժառանգությունը
      • Духовное наследие Капана
    • Take the Adventure >
      • Արկածներին Ընդառաջ
      • Навстречу приключениям
    • Entertainment and Pastime >
      • Հետաքրքիր ժամանց
      • Интересное вреяпрепровождение
    • Overnight at the Legends Trail >
      • Գիշերակացը Լեգենդների արահետում
      • Ночевка на тропе Легенд
    • Where to Eat >
      • Որտեղ սնվել
      • Где вкусно поесть
  • Take the Adventure
    • General Guide
    • Tatev - Tandzaver
    • Tandzaver - Antarashat
    • Antarashat - Arajadzor
    • Arajadzor - Shgharshik
    • Shgharshik - Vahanavank
    • Vahanavank - Bekh
    • Bekh - Bekh Anapat
    • Bekh Anapat - Vachagan
    • Vachagan - Baghaburj
    • Baghaburj - Khustup
  • Other Hiking Trails
  • Dacha Trails (Arevashat)
  • На русском
  ARK Armenia

Blog

Volunteering with ARK

5/23/2016

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My name is Philip from America. I’d been traveling for two months full on, moving places every few days. So I needed to stop and take a break. Why not volunteer again? I checked on the workaway.info website and contacted a host who had an eco camp in the southern Armenia town of Kapan. A few days later I was taking a shared taxi from Yerevan. Unfortunately, it broke down on the way, but after a long delay in which some mechanics came and fixed the problem, I arrived and met with the host Armen and his wife Siranush.  They lived near the center of town in an apartment that doubled as the office for their business, ARK Armenia. Two other volunteers had also come to help, as well as the organization’s content manager, Karine. The latter was an American who was living in Armenia. Every so often Karine would visit Kapan to do work for Armen, though most the time she was managing the website online from her apartment in Yerevan. The other volunteers were a Canadian woman and Belgian guy. We had dinner together not too long after I’d arrived. Sirnaush had prepared typical Armenian food and it was delicious. In retrospect I should have watched her cook during my stay in Kapan to learn a dish or two. No matter the place I’m always up for improving my culinary repertoire. One day Siranush plans to give cooking classes but not yet.
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​As volunteers we stayed the night in the Kapan Camp, 1.5km from the center of town. It was up on a hill in a green area. The eco camp had three simple huts with two bunks each. There were also a small kitchen and place for a shower. The rest of the land was for gardening and raising crops. A work in progress, the camp was in need of weeding and other tasks to get it ready for the upcoming tourist season (June-August). I did what I could to make it nicer. For example, one morning I used a small hand sickle to cut wild grass around the perimeter. The job would have been much easier with a lawnmower and weedwacker, but in Armenia both were uncommon. When not at the camp I was usually at the office helping with the Internet side of the business. We had to update the website, and part of that required us to hike the trails in the area and map them on GPS. The first trail we took was to Baghaberd, a fortress that dated back to the 5th century. Its builders chose to erect it on a rocky hill with penetrating views into the nearby river gorge and mountain valleys. Now in ruins it had little more than a few stone walls. Still, the spectacular panorama was well worth the 2km hike from the highway. While we were up there I took plenty of photos. Karine included some in the webpage. Hopefully the pictures will inspire tourists to come to Kapan region to see Baghaberd for themselves.

The Kapan Camp aside, Armen also managed a second accommodation site in the village of Aradjadzor. It was actually a summer home that belonged to his family. In the Russian language such a place was called a ‘dacha’ and that was what it went by. This Dacha also needed some fixing up. I helped to clear weeds and blackberry bushes. Another day I painted some rusted railings. It was all hard physical labor. Perhaps had I done such work for more than a few days in a row, I’d have tired of working outside in the sun. But for the time I was in Kapan, I was happy to be of good use. Moreover, because of the house’s location in the mountains, the surrounding area had plenty of hiking trails. We charted one that led the way to Kapan, and to an old fortress called Halidzor. This was a long walk—4 hours—through thick forest. The uphill part I liked the most. I can’t really explain why but the challenge of forcing myself up a steep incline brings something out of me. If I take on a good pace I might not even rest, wanting instead to reach the top first. Anyhow, the opportunity to hike the trails was something that made my volunteering experience in Kapan an exceptionally great one.
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Progress On ARK’s New Ecocamp, ‘The Dacha’

5/18/2016

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As you may know, in April, we wrapped up a crowdfunding campaign where we raised nearly $4,000. It’s now May and we want to show you how far your contributions are going.
90% of the money we raised was to be allocated towards the construction of our second ecocamp, which we are calling ‘The Dacha’ (the Russian word for ‘country house’, as it was once our founder’s childhood summer house). It is located in the idyllic village of Arajadzor, an area 10 km outside of Kapan. We have much work to do on this property, as it hasn’t been cared for in decades, and it’s quite old. 
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But the view… Oh, the view! ​  ​ Looking far off in the distance  from the Dacha  reveals the light blue profile of the majestic mountains of Iran, which makes everything worth it. And as our recent visitor, the British adventurer and leader of the Transcaucasian Expedition, Tom Allen, exclaimed with delight, “If there was a place like this in the UK, it’d cost upwards of 300,000 pounds!”
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So, we feel pretty good about it. 
For the last month, we have been hiring local laborers to come and perform specialized work. Yesterday, they were working on renovating the very steep area we plan to transform into a kitchen and communal area. We expect this new kitchen area to be ready by June 10th. Eventually, travelers will be able to come and sit, eat, and enjoy the nature from here!
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There is also a small room, located in the upper level of our yard that we have recently decided we want to renovate into bedrooms.  ​There’s a lot of work to do here, as the rooms are currently barren—just cold, hard cement—and is currently like a jungle, smothered in vegetation, so we had our volunteers spend the day cleaning the route.
 
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​Other plans we have for the Dacha include dividing the large bedroom into two different rooms, so they will be easier to keep warm during the cold months of the year. We will also renovate the heater to be like the permaculture heater we created in the first ecocamp, to ensure efficiency and sustainability.

And, we plan to turn this basin here into a pool!
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The future ARK pool!!!
That’s all for now!    Are you getting excited yet?!

We are. 
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ARK is Heating Up... Thanks To Our Permaculture Heater!

5/14/2016

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We’ve been busy little bees in the last few months. We recently wrote about how we installed a shower in the ecocamp and now, we are excited to announce yet another piece of technology: a space heater!
 
But this ain’t just any old heater. It’s one designed according to permaculture standards.
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The design of our heater follows the model of the ‘rocket stove’, which was suggested to us by two volunteers from Argentina that stayed with us this past March, Francisco and Florencia.
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Here are Florencia and Francisco with our founder, Armen, ready to get their hands dirty!
We were incredibly lucky to have them because they just so happened to be permaculture specialists and their contribution to the camp was offering their expertise in helping build this energy-efficient, home-made heater. 
 
Contrary to what some may think, permaculture is not just about gardening. Being a permaculturist means thinking about all aspects of sustainable living—both agriculturally, socially, and structurally.
 
This includes finding solutions to heating that conserve resources like wood, coal and gas, because conservation of energy is one of the greatest ecological concerns today.
 
According to permaculture design, solutions should get these results using natural materials and processes. This is why ARK’s newly constructed heater is made of biodegradable and re-usable materials. We created the exterior entirely out of clay and straw and the inner skeleton is an old stove we have repurposed. This means that in 50 years, if we decide we no longer want this heater, we can literally just smash it to pieces and put it in our garden and it will biodegrade. Even the steel from the oven can be used in the environment (because did you know that placing steel near apple trees produces better apples?).
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Basically, our ultimate goal was to create something that would keep the temperature in the heater high, so that wood and gases will burn to their full chemical potential.  But truly understanding the design of this heater requires an understanding of the chemistry behind it. 
 
To do this, we first created a layer of insulation out of a clay and straw mixture on the interior of the first chamber.  Then, we had to find a way to keep these gases inside the oven as long as possible. That’s why we created a serpentine route, or labyrinthe, if you will, so that gases will not escape directly and on their way out, wthey will give their energy to the whole structure.
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Once we had created this, we added a final touch for charm, to symbolize the help of our Argentinian friends, without whom this could not have been possible. This small mural on the heater represents the symbol for the southern hemisphere because that is where they are from. ​​
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Get Dirty on Our Hikes, Clean Up in Our Camp

5/11/2016

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Two weeks ago, we started construction on a shower at the ARK ecocamp and since we’re all about transparency, we thought it might be interesting to fill you guys in on what was involved in the completion this project--especially if you love ‘Do-It-Yourself’ activities as much as we do.
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The entire shower cost somewhere around 120,000AMD (~$250). And as this was quite an intensive project, rather than relying on volunteers as we usually do, we hired local specialists to help us turn it into a reality. We also just like providing jobs and stimulating the local economy whenever we can afford to.

ARK’s shower occupies what used to be an old shed that we initially purchased with the plot of land that now makes up our ecocamp. We repurposed the shed into a shower and hired someone to clean it up thoroughly, paint it and install the necessary materials.
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There were several stages to this project. The first was with creating the shower’s water supply. This project required us to connect the main water source, a city pipeline running underneath the camp, to a tank that will collect water overnight to be used during the day. Then, we connected the water in the tank to the shower through a hose.
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After that, we had to provide electricity to the shower, which will be used to install lights in the shower, work the water pump, and later, it will allow us to heat up the water (Yes! We’ll have hot showers at the camp!). 

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We also had someone come in specifically to help us weld the water tank that we purchased. Instead of buying a new water tank, we decided to recycle an old one, but it had many holes, so we had to close and fill them. This was very time consuming, but well worth it.

Lastly, we had to clean up the old shed, paint and redecorate it, and install the shower pieces.


As of right now, the shower is almost finished! We only need to purchase and install a boiler and it could be ready and raring to go by tomorrow. However, boilers are a relatively expensive investment and not always easy to find in Kapan, so it’s difficult to predict when we’ll have the funds to make this happen, but as always, we are very optimistic! Especially after our last crowdfunding campaign, which has not only brought us funding to start construction on our next ecocamp in Arajadzor (which we are calling ominously, ‘The Dacha’, because it’s the family countryhouse of our founder, Armen), but has also allowed us to reach more eyes and ears than ever before so that more and more people are coming to stay with us, volunteering, making donations, and continuing to make our organization sustainable.

So, we’ll keep you posted on when it’s ready. In any case, we have a shower at our office in downtown Kapan for those of you who want to visit before the ecocamp’s shower is complete. So don’t let that stop you. Plus, there’s always rain!
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