What Rural Armenia Can Learn from Kalavan’s Performative Entrepreneurship

What convinced me in 2018 to invest my time, money, and energy in Kalavan was the public media narrative being pushed by local politicians that it was a place intent on rapid cultural and economic development. That idea aligned closely with the values I'd been honing from my experiences traveling around the developing world since I was a young man. It both fascinates and upsets me to see how some parts of the world can be so lavish, rich, and economically prosperous while others struggle to even house or feed most of their people. Economic education and empowerment became one of my strongest passions, so living among people who shared that passion enticed me. I knew that I wanted to play a part in helping the people of Armenia learn to take control of their lives through easily implemented economic and cultural improvements and step away from mindsets that unfairly limit how people think and act, such as those carried over from previous generations that grew up in the totalitarian conditions of Soviet dictatorship.

It may sound shocking to Western mentalities because of how ingrained and celebrated the concept of young entrepreneurship is in our culture. Still, developing economies worldwide do a great deal to impede their own opportunities, each shooting themselves in the foot by actively discouraging entrepreneurial ideals in the young. In many cultures, the concept of working for money is still shrouded in cultural superstition. It is seen as an inescapable demon—a necessary evil that the adult men of the household subject themselves to for the sake of providing for their families. A child's place is to be studying in school, doing chores at home, or playing innocently with their friends. A lifetime of work awaits them later on when they have their own families and are old enough for the burden.

In Armenia, there is even a saying that speaks directly to this superstition: "Փողը ձեռքի կեղտ է:" (p'voghy dzerrk'i keght e)—"Money in hand is evil." Many Armenians believe that their kids will become greedy and mercantilist if they start to interact with money early, which is a similar judgment that the Soviet State applied to them when they were growing up. So parents hide money away from their children like how parents in the West might attempt to censor violence and sex. They are trying to protect their children from a perceived evil, which makes it less likely those children will ever be able to see money for the fantastic tool of exchange that it is.

Meanwhile, in the West, it's practically a rite of passage for young children to set up lemonade stands on sidewalks near their homes or go door to door, offering to mow their neighbors' lawns for a dollar. We almost universally view this behavior as endearing. We admire the ambition and ingenuity of young children who undertake efforts to offer something of value to the world and ask for a small fee (which we are happy to pay) for it. It may not seem like a big deal. Still, this kind of early positive reinforcement primes the children who are exposed to it to form certain associations with the concepts of making money ethically and especially with finding creative ways to do it.

On one occasion, my neighbor's children, with whom I had had many positive interactions, came to my door asking if I could hire them for any job. They had become aware that I was hiring a few of the adults in the village to work on the restoration and refurbishment of my house, and some mixture of natural curiosity and self-interest impelled them to see if they, too, could take advantage of the opportunity to make money that I was providing.

Not wanting to disappoint their burgeoning entrepreneurial ambitions, I gave them gloves and told them I would pay them the equivalent of $1 USD each (500 Armenian dram) if they would do about 15 minutes of outdoor chores for me. This was a task that would be genuinely valuable to me because it would save me time that I could use for tasks I produce greater value from. The work was completed quickly, and I paid them the agreed amount. They seemed excited and pleased by this arrangement, and I felt good about encouraging them to think proactively about helping themselves by offering to help others.

Imagine my surprise when the next day, the father of the children showed up at my door quite upset about the arrangement he learned I had made with them. It was initially difficult for me to understand the problem due to the culture and language barrier between us. My first thought was that he must have been angry that I had engaged his children in potentially strenuous physical labor, but I quickly realized that wasn't it. He wasn't mad about the type of work his children had done for me or even necessarily that they had done any work at all. He was mad that I had paid his children for the work. He just kept repeating, "They are too young. They are too young."

"Too young for what, exactly?" I wondered. I knew that he and the rest of the village didn't think they were too young to do these kinds of chores at home. I knew no one thought the children of the village were too young to interact with me, as I frequently volunteered to work with them at the school. The only new variable in this equation was the payment of money, which their father interpreted as somehow demeaning to his family. Money was to be made by the father alone and later the adult sons when they too would be old enough. Children going off to work, in his mind, was surely a sign that they were destitute and desperate for a handout. Their cultural beliefs, which were, ironically, designed to keep them from feeling poor, were setting their children up for the continuation of their lifestyle of lack of material wealth.

Imagine a scenario where these children actively rebelled against their parent's wishes for them to refrain from learning useful skills and making money until they were adults and ready to submit to lives of real labor. Imagine that they became inspired by exposure to Western ideals of entrepreneurship and, by the time they were teenagers, already started reliably earning more money than their parents through unconventional means beyond their old cultural paradigm. What do you think their parents' reaction to that would be? In my opinion, the probability is that they would feel threatened and be very unapproving of their children's aberrant behavior regardless of the objective benefits it would lead to. They would do whatever they could to discourage or outright ban their children from making these kinds of beneficial choices, which is strikingly reminiscent of the tactics employed by a communist State seeking total control over the ambitions of its people. And their children, in turn, would either submit to their parents' coercive and counter-progressive tendencies or make it a point to oppose them even harder, driving an irreparable rift between their culture of origin and the more capable people they would be growing into. That is the terrible choice facing many young people who somehow manage to break out of the psychological prisons they were born into—alienation from their home or success at levels beyond what their culture could ever have enabled them to dream of.

Now, imagine the opposite scenario. Imagine that these village children had parents who, despite not having much direct experience with it, saw the obvious potential benefits of encouraging their children from an early age to find ways to get what they want by helping others. Imagine that they did not feel threatened by the prospect of their children going on to adopt values and live lives that might be starkly different than their own but that made them happier, healthier, and more personally fulfilled? What might those boys go on to accomplish as adults? Sadly, we might never know. Not in this generation, anyway.

Thanks to natural curiosity in the young, however, not all hope is lost for radical cultural evolution regarding entrepreneurship. It wasn't long after this negative incident with the children that teenagers from around the village started showing up at my house to monitor the work they, too, had learned I was hiring adults to do. For most of them, it started as just general curiosity about me and some of the uncommon choices I was making for the new amenities to my house, which was gradually taking on a more modern look and shape.

Noticing their curiosity, I asked the teens if they would like to get involved with work on the house, too, for which I would pay them a slightly lower daily rate than the adults (due to their lesser experience). Well, it turned out that even if they could get their parent's permission, that wouldn't work for them because most of them had a lot of other obligations between school and chores at home. They couldn't devote whole days to doing things like basic landscaping and construction work around my house because their schedules just wouldn't allow for it. But I didn't want to lose this opportunity to actualize their interest for what might only be a fleeting window that it had risen to the surface.

I proposed a different, more entrepreneurial deal to them: They could show up at my house any day or time they wanted and get to work on any of the various established projects going on. I would pay them a fixed rate for every hour they participated. I would let them decide their own hours and what type of work they were most comfortable with or qualified for, which meant that they would have to think a little creatively (i.e., entrepreneurially) about the work. It wasn't like a regular job with a boss commanding them to follow strict and repetitive orders for a designated block of time five days a week. They could show up for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning or an hour in the afternoon after school if that's what worked best for them. All that mattered to me was that they put in an honest effort and make reasonable progress on whatever they felt confident working on.

What started as a couple of stragglers coming now and again when they needed a little extra cash to buy something essential soon turned into some reliable regulars showing up for at least a few hours every day. Very quickly, they saw the relationship between how much they were willing to do to offer value to me and how much they would be compensated in return. As they were the ones in control of how and when they would offer it, their work ethic was consistently strong. They knew there would be no point in showing up to work when they were too tired or unenthusiastic to get anything done, so they only came when they were in the mood for it and their labor would be efficient. It's no different than how a modern self-employed freelancer or work-from-home employee is free to manage their own time and working schedule because there is no reason for them to show up to an office and force themselves to work at less-than-optimal productivity simply for the sake of maintaining a regular schedule and being easy to manage by their overbearing employer.

When the teenagers finished the small projects that I had initially hired them to work on, they were quick to propose other things they could do for me around the house, such as building a larger outdoor pen for my rabbits, clearing brush, and making footpaths, or building retaining walls outside my home. When I asked if they had done those things before, they admitted that they hadn't, but they felt they could easily learn how. And indeed, it was easy for all of us to learn. Merely by watching a few short instructional videos online, asking a few of the more experienced adults for some pointers, and doing a quick stock of what building materials I already had or would need to purchase, they were able to extend their entrepreneurial employment with me to new forms of value that neither I nor they had been aware would be equitable for me to pay them for.

The teens didn't realize it, but they essentially participated in a sales process with me as their customer. They successfully convinced me to spend money on services I had not, at first, realized I wanted to spend money on. And it was all motivated by their self-interest in making more money and their curiosity to learn how to do new useful things (i.e., develop their knowledge and skills). We both profited greatly from the establishment and maintenance of this new working relationship.

In contrast to what I have directly witnessed over the years living here, several media puff pieces have gone out in recent years promoting Kalavan as a place brimming with economic self-determination, where "every resident owns their own business" and supports themselves. It's an attractive narrative, one that even I fell for. People are inherently attracted to the idea that you could just show people struggling at the lowest end of the economic spectrum how to use a few new tools and apply economic principles of entrepreneurship to radically change their lives. It's part of the almighty "American dream" that we talk so much about back home. It's the kind of thing I wanted to play an active part in developing here and eventually spreading to other parts of Armenia if we could show them how it could be done.

But the reality of what is called "entrepreneurship" in Kalavan could be more aptly described as that a few people have been given grants to establish guesthouses in their homes. Every once in a while, a tour group comes through and stays a few days. These are not the thriving businesses that the narrative would have you believe, and they don't generate enough income to support or raise the standard of living of most of the population here. Several times in the years I've lived here, guests have shown up in Kalavan being told they would have places to stay, only to find themselves being turned away by every guesthouse here that didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of offering a quality service to a paying guest. Many of these people showed up at my door looking for a place to crash and a hot meal because they had nowhere else to go for the night after making the long trek by foot or car all the way to Kalavan. The performative entrepreneurs of Kalavan seem to want all the benefits of Western civilization and business culture without any of its responsibilities and to be recognized and praised for such.

Furthermore, my efforts to help the general population of Kalavan establish other forms of industry that would improve their material quality of life have been completely ignored. For the first year or so, people kept leading me on about the things I wanted to do here, like lead workshops on entrepreneurial principles, teach English to the children (and anyone who would be working with English-speaking tourists), and start local businesses like a small store or cafe to offer the kinds of things locals normally drive an hour into town for and which would incentive more people to come visit or move to Kalavan, thus bringing in more revenue and entrepreneurial influence.

I've done my part to try to promote the village too, but there are some obvious obstacles currently preventing interest in Kalavan from growing. People complain that there's no reliable transportation in and out of the village. They want to know with certainty how and when they can come and go and at what price. There's no reliable access to basic consumer goods here because there are no stores, and it seems like every local I've broached the subject with has a traumatic response to the idea of participating in local commerce this way. Both of these problems would be very simple to solve. The residents here could easily create sustainable income streams from doing so. But it appears to me that they are terrified of trying anything that they haven't been told to do and had the government fund for them. They are afraid of risk and failure, both of which are necessary components of entrepreneurship. They think it will bring shame to them to try anything that isn't immediately successful or that hasn't been gift-wrapped and handed to them by someone in authority. So, in the end, I don't see how Kalavan is any more entrepreneurial than any other rural village in Armenia, which is to say not at all. Frankly, it seems like they don't even understand what that word means, but it sure is a popular buzzword to throw around these days.

Trying to understand the lack of entrepreneurial awareness and ambition here (and in Armenia as a whole) is what led me to write Everyone Is an Entrepreneur, which has already been translated into Armenian under the title Ամեն Ոք Ձեռներեց Է and published locally through Edit Print. It analyzes the differences between Western and post-Soviet attitudes toward freedom and economic self-determination. Even though the USSR fell more than 30 years ago, I feel like young Armenians today are still growing up with a lot of the cultural conditioning and limitations of their parents and grandparents. My book is meant to help them confidently step away from that way of seeing the world and empower themselves by applying their knowledge, skills, and passions entrepreneurially. It's based directly on what I've learned about Armenians by living in Kalavan village these last five years, combined with a lifetime of world travel across developing nations before that.

These are the lessons we are working now to pass on to anyone curious enough to learn and brave enough to look beyond the limitations of established lifestyle and convention.