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Yeranuhi Soghoyan

55 Year-Old Zhena: Picking Through Garbage for Something to Burn

Noticing that I was staring, the woman tried to hide her blackened hands behind her.

“You can find me picking through the trash along the streets of Leninakan around evening time. That’s why my hands are in such a state. I’m poking around for paper, plastic bottles, oil...anything I can burn as fuel back home in the tin stove,” says 55 year-old Zhena Grigoryan, showing a bit of embarrassment.

Mrs. Grigoryan says that picking through garbage doesn’t befit what an Armenian woman should be doing but that they have to live and keep warm during the winter months.

“I console myself with the thought that there are still decent people alive in this country and that my daughter and I will see better days ahead,” she says.

Despite the note of optimism in her voice, Mrs. Grigoryan confides that she once felt despondent enough to contemplate suicide. She and her 14 year-old daughter had gone for days without eating and the girl’s fingers had turned blue from the cold.

“I felt so hopeless that day. I just wanted to grab my daughter hand and end it all by jumping off a bridge. What kind of life is this? No work, no decent house. You can only find a job in this country if you’re under the age of thirty. But what about us 50 year-olds? Don’t we need to eat and buy clothes?”

Mrs. Grigoryan and her daughter, Syuzanna, live in one room in a run-down building that used to house a school. There’s no toilet or even a water faucet. They go without a proper bath for weeks and the laundry gets done once a month at best.

The woman is officially registered as homeless and receives a monthly 20,000 AMD stipend from the government. They usually can’t make up their minds whether to spend the money on food or medicine. Syuzanna suffers from a liver disorder.

The girl is in the 7th grade but has already been absent a total of 200 hours this school year.

“She’s been absent because we don’t have roper winter clothes. She went out a few times with someone’s hand me down shoes and got sick. The girl’s be laid up in bed for a week now with a cough. We’ve been waiting for the local doctor for three days,” Mrs. Grigoryan said.

The mother says that even if the doctor shows up and writes a prescription, she doesn’t know how she’ll pay for the medicine.

Syuzanna shrugged her shoulders when I asked if she was worried about getting left back or thrown out of school due to her absenteeism.

“What can I do if I get sick so often?”

The girl says her favourite subjects are Armenian language and literature, but that her real passion is dancing.

She’s been taking classes at the Kumayri Dance Studio for the past year and a half.

Mrs. Grigoryan has only praise for the studio’s director who, taking the family’s financial situation into account, has waived all the normal fees.

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