Interview with my Granfather – Minas Karibyan

Minas Karibyan is seventy-eight year’s old and is living with his wife for the past seventeen years in Glendale, California. Born in a little village in Iran, Minas has been through many tough times to get to where he is today. From riding donkeys to sitting in a plane for twenty hours, he has been through all. This old man was once an adventure seeker in his village. He had to walk almost a mile everyday to get water. Living with more then half of his family members in the past is what he misses the most today. “We were a pretty big family,” he would say. As Minas moved to Armenia his life went racing through time as he got introduced to cars, trains, and even planes. As he moved to America he started to enjoy the organized and industrialized cities of California but misses all the memories he had to leave behind. Today Minas Karibyan enjoys taking long walks that remind him of the past but he never gets tiered of driving his car to the park to play a game of cards.

    My name is Minas and I was born in a village in Iran called Saci village. I lived in a wealthy family because my father was kind of like the boss in the village. We were five brothers and two sisters. I also had two grandpas and two grandmas. There lived about sixty families in my village and each had about five to eight people. This was a very small number compared to the size of the village. People usually spend their day fixing their crops and watering them. Life was pretty hard especially in the summer because we had to get up at five or six in the morning to go to the valley to feed the sheep. When winter came school started and we did not go to the valley much. We spend most of the time on school but we still had to feed the animals. School was only for about three to four months.

    One winter my brother got sick in the village and we did not have a car at the time. So we had to go to the city with our horses to bring back a doctor and we obviously couldn’t take my brother to the doctor because it was too cold. When we got there the doctor refused to come. So he gave us some medicine to give to my brother but when we went back to the village with the medicine my brother had gotten so sick that it did not help. After about three days my twelve year old brother past away.

     In the summer when we did not have school there was much work to be done with the crops and fruit picking. There weren’t any means of transportation in our village except with horses or donkeys that we used to move goods from one village to another or even from city to city. When I was seven to eight years old my uncle had a truck with which he came to my village and took me and my brothers for a ride. It was the first time I saw a car.

    I went to school until the sixth grade until my family and I moved to Tehran. I traveled with donkeys and horses to Sultanabad and from there we went to Tehran with a bus. There we lived with our relatives for a while until we got some jobs and built a house. There were plenty of cars in our new home. In the village there was only one which was my uncles. In Tehran there were taxis and buses which took a while to get use to all the noise. There were cars in Tehran but not as much as there are here.

    After I finished my school in twelfth grade I went to work at a garage where I was a mechanic. After four years of being a mechanic, the cars had been through so many advancements that my job required me to go to school. Of course the lessons required money, which I did not have. So after that I became a taxi driver. It was a very common job. After twenty years of driving people around my family and I moved to Armenia. With a train we went all the way to Jolfa. This took us about a day to get there. Then the Russian train took us to Armenia from there. The first couple of days we did not have a house, but my brothers were living there at the time so we stayed with them for about a month until we were able to get a house.

     The transportation in Armenia was not bad. It was hard for us a little since we did not have a car for eight months. Then one of my brothers and I bought a car, one for each of us, so we had two cars in our family. At this time we started to visit our relatives more often. Then after a while we moved to America in 1990.At the time there weren’t any one way flights to America. We had to take a plane to Leningrad where we stayed there for three days. From there we had to buy plane tickets again. So from there we flew to Ireland then Canada then New York then finally we came to Los Angeles. It took twenty-four hours to get to New York then ten hours to get to Los Angeles, only counting the plane ride. It was pretty hard the first month until the kids found a job. After that we rented an apartment where we started our new lives for the third time. After about three to four months we were able to buy a car which made it real easy for the kids to go to school.

    In the village there were no such things as the mail or even bills. When a man from one village was going to visit there family members in another he also took along with him other peoples mails and gave them to their families. Then when we moved to Tehran, the mail services were not so bad. There was a mailman that brought letters or newspapers from other places everyday but it only took mail to places within the city. If I wanted to send a letter to my old village then I had to wait until somebody went to visit. The mailman used either a car or a bicycle to deliver the mail. Every morning or afternoon he came to collect the mail and to deliver it. When we moved to Armenia the mail was also good there. As the years went by in Armenia they had put boxes In front of stores in which we would put our mail in. However, in Armenia I could have sent mail to my old village even though it took a couple of weeks to get there. The mail men also used cars or bicycles to deliver the mail but the city that we lived in was small so many people delivered their mail by foot. Then when we came to America I saw that the mail service here could not have gotten any better.  In Tehran there were no such things as bills. Every month the owner of the apartment came and knocked on the door and asked for the rent. It was not as strict as here. There were no specific due dates. Before I even came to America I did not know what bills were. The mail over here is very organized and safe.