Free Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote Page B

enjoy. And if he was going to have to work hard all day, he wanted to have something to show for it when he came home at night. Gareen offered to arrange a meeting for Hrag with her friend Seth, who had just completed his TFA commitment. Seth had only positive things to say about the experience, though he did admit that during his first year he sometimes came home crying. Hrag was unfazed.
Well, that’s not me. My first year will be hard; my second will be better. All in all it’ll be such a great experience.
    Hrag applied and was invited to interview. The daylong process was scheduled for April 1—April Fools’ Day. He knew it would be intense. Applicants were required to prepare and deliver a five-minute lesson plan. They had been sent reading material on educational issues in preparation for a group discussion and a one-on-one interview. Role-playing and problem-solving exercises were also on the agenda.
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    TFA made no secret of the seven attributes it was seeking in prospective corps members. Everything was posted on its increasingly sophisticated website and included in the mailings. But Hrag and the others had no way of knowing which combination of traits unlocked the door.
    Hrag didn’t spend much time worrying about it. He had been on several other interviews already, and he actually enjoyed the process. He was nimble, good on his feet; he liked showing folks what he could do. So he went in with a game plan designed to give TFA what it was looking for. He carefully prepared his mini-lesson. Hrag asked one of his favorite professors, Dr. Krauss, for help in adapting one of his particularly memorable lectures on evolution into a five-minute presentation. The night before his interview, Hrag staged a dry run of the suitably dumbed-down lesson using members of BC’s Armenian Club as guinea pigs.
    Hrag arrived at Boston’s Prudential Center in a suit and tie. TFA selectors watched as each applicant delivered a lesson to the entire group. Hrag came armed for his with fifty colored plastic dinosaurs and a raft of photocopied handouts. The dinosaurs went flying when he simulated the crash of a meteor by pounding his fist on a desk. The dramatics effectively illustrated his point: in the event of a natural disaster, the animals with the broadest niche were most likely to survive. As he stuffed the toys back into a brown paper bag, he reckoned he had nailed the teaching exercise. Everyone else in the room appeared to think so, too.
    As part of the initial application, candidates had been asked to write an essay describing a time when they were faced with a serious obstacle. Hrag had written about the summer he spent in Datev, a “Third World village tucked away in a forgotten corner of Armenia.” Hrag and Gareen had traveled there on a service project sponsored by their local Armenian club. Though their parents weren’t born in Armenia—Manuel was born in Syria, Claire in Lebanon—both were Armenian patriots. In America, the Hamalians had clung to the cultural roots of a country they themselves had never seen. Their social life revolved around the Armenian community in the greater New York area and their extended families that had settled there. Hrag and Gareen had grown up on their paternal grandfather’s tales of the old country he had been forced to flee. The children were proud to be Armenian and thrilled to be able to visit their country to help rebuild a school there.
    â€œArmenia was my homeland,” Hrag wrote, “and no matter how far I was distanced from it as a result of the Diaspora of my people, I was determined to reconcile myself with it.” He went on to tell the story of how he won over hostile Armenian villagers who seemed to resent the noblesse oblige of the visiting Armenian Americans. The breakthrough came when Hrag sent a stray soccer ball soaring over the heads of the young kids playing near the construction