Most of the sunny day was spent shoveling sand into buckets, then through longest and loudest assembly line ever (leave it to the Argentinians to sing and dance while doing manual labor…really would you expect anything less?), pass the buckets all the way up to the third, then second, and then first floor bathrooms where the sand will be used for cementing and putting up tiles in this apartment building.

http://anousharmenia.blogspot.com/2006/07/habitat-for-humanity.html

On Wednesday July 12th several volunteers from AVC joined a group of 26 youth from Buenos Aires to help out with one of the ongoing projects organized by Habitat for Humanity. The group traveled to Gavar, a city close to Lake Sevan, to help out the staff of Habitat who were working on the construction of an apartment building. The Habitat team equipped the volunteers with shovels and buckets and guided them, as they had to transport sand up and down the floors of the apartment building. The assembly line of workers not only included diasporan volunteers but locals within the town who wanted to join in on the fun!

http://armenianvolunteer.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_armenianvolunteer_archive.html

Actually there’s been quite a lot of intermittent blogging this summer about HFH Armenia by foreign and Diasporan volunteers who’ve been involved to some extent. Here are just some of them.

http://bighoopearrings.weblogs.us/archives/471

http://www.innogize.com/adrian/tz/archive/2006/06/last_day_in_yer.html

http://saramarabu.livejournal.com/54648.html

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=55606249&blogID=148472097

http://jillisapc.blogspot.com/2006/06/catching-up.html

http://triptoarmenia.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!2F89C9C299B163B5!323.entry

If you know of any others, please post the links in the comments section of this post.

In “Hello Earth” Bush is experimenting with Georgian folk tune “Tsintskaro“, adapted and performed by the Richard Hickox’s choir.

I knew about her love for the fantastic Bulgarian folk tradition, but not Georgian. Must get hold of a copy of Hounds of Love on CD. Can’t remember the song it was so long ago when I had the album on vinyl, but no wonder The Independent quotes Georgian-born Katie Melua in a recent article.

Of course she’s still relevant. I wasn’t actually in the country when her music first came out, so I only discovered it three or four years ago. What’s amazing is that something like “Wuthering Heights” still sounds so different. I actually saw her about nine months ago, we were just passing at an industry event and I went up to her and said I was a big fan and asked her about the new record.

Anyways.