My attempts to arrange a meeting with the head of the Aravus village administration before my trip to the village in the Syunik Marz proved in vain.

He did not have a telephone at home.

The only connection the village has with the outside world in the freezing winter are the schoolchildren, more than 50 in number, who walk to classes in neighboring Tegh every day. The village has only an elementary school. For eight-year schooling, children are forced to walk to Tegh after they complete fourth grade – traversing the steep inclines and dips on the difficult that connects the villages.

The children from Aravus have only been marked absent on one occasion at the Tegh School, when a pack of wolves had surrounded them while they were rushing to class on a foggy day. The children were saved from a possibly tragic end by the noise of a car coming down the road. After that incident, many of the parents were afraid to send their children to school without supervision and four families even left the village and took their 16 children elsewhere.

There are only 12 children studying at the village school in Aravus. Their four teachers work in indescribably squalid conditions, striving to get the children to a basic level of literacy. The school is a modified trailer-home with three classrooms - one of which doubles as a teacher's room - separated only by curtains, and protected from the outside wind by polyethylene “windows”. The bell which should have announced the end of class was replaced by the children's complaints, “Miss Narine, we're hungry!” Miss Narine, who heads this little educational institution, then took out the children's breakfast from their packs and placed the food on tables which had been held together through the decades by a myriad nails. The children, unabashed by the presence of strangers in the room, tasted the food their parents had prepared for the day.

“I'm going to be a general when I grow up,” Vagharshak, still in the first grade, suddenly announced. “I'm going to be a dentist,” said someone else. “I'm going to be a painter,” added a little girl, inspired by her friends' boldness.

It is difficult to imagine that these children from Aravus, studying in such conditions, will be able to realize their dreams.

Many people consider one of the Millennium Challenges – securing primary education – not to be a major problem for Armenia, but here in the village of Aravus, 268 km from the capital Yerevan and 87 km from the provincial center Kapan, these schoolchildren do not even have a guarantee of receiving elementary education. And it is surprising that, even in such conditions, young people comprise a quarter of the village's population, and many of the 22-23 year olds are already the parents of 2 or 3 children.

Argam Hovsepyan, the village head, could not specify one person as the most needy in the village. In his opinion, socio-economic conditions were the same for everyone in Aravus. Their needs are all collective, and the community leader stressed a new school building as the main requirement.

“It is possible to find a solution to every problem. For example, we make up for the lack of a drinking water supply by carrying it in buckets from the valley, or when unfavorable weather conditions cause crop damage the government provides wheat as compensation. But there is nothing that we have been able to do to tackle the important problem of the children's education,” noted the village head bitterly. He immigrated from Sumgait, first settled in Yerevan and then moved to Aravus, near the border, on his father's demands.

At that time Aravus faced a barrage of fire from Azeri forces. Nobody left the village in those years. The elderly kept the children in the village church, a structure built in the 18 th century, while the younger villagers fought to defend their homes.

“A bus came one day to take the children and their mothers out of the village. But it went back empty; nobody wanted to leave the village. That seemed to fill us with new power, we felt stronger because we knew that our children were under fire,” recalled schoolteacher Yelena Hayrapetyan. Her arm bears a wound with embedded shrapnel to this day.

Grena Kocharyan was disabled as a result of the Karabakh war – a bullet passed through the temple of her skull, but she miraculously survived. After the victory, however, she became homeless. The village head recently allocated one of the desolate stables in the village to her, where 10 members of her family now occupy 20 square meters of space.

“Whoever sleeps earliest gets to sleep in the bed, while the rest have to lie on the floor,” said Grena, without complaints, “I just got my son engaged and will arrange his marriage soon. It would have been good if I could have arranged a zoorna-dhol musical accompaniment, but it will have to be a quiet wedding. But I don't know in which part of the room to put the newlyweds' bed.”

Nevertheless, the family, which receives only 38000 drams in disability compensation, is confident that one day Grena's service will be appreciated.

Aram Bazyan, who was deported from Baku and found shelter in Aravus, had never imagined that he could end up homeless in his Motherland. He settled down in a barn belonging to one of the villagers. The loft was cleared of hay in one day and the neighbors helped with whatever they could so that Bazyan could move in with his wife and three small children.

“We move the beds away from the walls especially when it rains or snows, because there are leaks on all sides,” said Silva, his wife, “Winter isn't halfway through yet, but we've already burnt 10 cubic meters of wood. We keep the fire burning day and night to warm the place despite the cold blowing in from the wide cracks around the door and windows.”

“I'm a local, while my husband's a refugee. I heard lately that they were constructing a building for refugees. Maybe something will work out for us there. Otherwise, my three children go to the neighboring village for school in the early morning cold and can't get warm until the following day,” sobbed Silva, looking at us as her last hope, “Write about us, maybe someone will find out and something will change. I'll pay you back somehow. My poor Lia, only 7 years old, is freezing…”

The village administration does not have a building either and there is no medical post. Villagers requiring medical attention are taken to the neighboring village, where there is a doctor only twice a week. The road going through the village is also in bad shape. Local resources, i.e. the state annual allocation of 1.5 million drams, are not enough for this community to solve these problems.

“If a school is built not only will we solve the problem of the children's education but we'll also have new jobs and people won't leave the village. We had seven conscripts from our village in the Fall - they'll be back for sure if they know that life is picking up in their birthplace,” said village head Argam Hovsepyan.

The people of Aravus have an old tradition – in the spring, they cook milk soup in the churchyard and distribute it to the village elderly and the ill so that the year goes well, the harvest is abundant and life is good.

They now joke that they have decided to cook a pot of milk soup especially for the authorities in order to draw their attention to Aravus.