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Sara Petrosyan

A hot meal as a token of appreciation: Families with many children are on their own

These days, Mariam and Vardan Armenyan worry more about the horrifying conditions they live in than about the half-starved and half-naked state of their ten young children. The Astghik Dormitory, once part of the Yerevan Lamp Factory, where they have been housed since 1988 with other survivors of the earthquake and refugees fromAzerbaijan, has become an abandoned building. People who lived here temporarily were given apartments and moved out, leaving the huge structure in the Armenyans’ possession. “Since the other people left, we’ve been attacked by rats -- they gnaw at our clothes, our doors. We live in horror, but we can’t even call the sanitation-epidemiology station, there’s no telephone,” Mariam says sorrowfully.

The family is barely surviving in this dilapidated and gutted building, in the hope that one day they too will have a home. They have been assured by theYerevanmayor’s office that they are at the top of the list for housing in the new Town of Hope development, scheduled to open on May 28, 2003.

We met Mariam Badalyan last March at the entrance of the dormitory. She said she wanted to go to the nearby store and ask for some eggs for breakfast, but she had accumulated such a debt that she wasn’t sure whether the storekeeper would give her credit. If he didn’t, they would have to wait until two in the afternoon, when the Hayordats Tun soup kitchen would provide their daily meal. Mariam is raising seven girls and three boys, but they only give out food for six children. It was 11 a.m. and they hadn’t had their breakfast yet. According to Mariam, this had happened often in recent months. “There are twelve of us and we need two bags of flour a month to have enough bread. Under the former mayor of the Arabkir district, they gave us six loaves of bread a day, and a token for the public baths, but for four months now we haven’t even gotten that. The new mayor says, ‘I'm sick of you, you’re not the only ones.’”

The father of the family, Vardan Armenyan, used to have a job at the Grand Sun factory, but in November 2002 the manufacturing department where he worked closed down. The family’s only income is the poverty allowance. “We get 19,000 Drams (around $32) a month, but that’s not even enough for soap and washing powder. I do laundry every day.” The Aray store gave them a TV for the New Year. The children were overjoyed when they heard their names on a TV show announcing the prizewinners. But their joy was short-lived when two months later their mother said she was going to sell the TV to buy food. “There’s no other way out,” she told them sharply.

Five of the children were home that day. Three of the girls hadn’t gone to school because they didn’t have any shoes, and two were below school age. At first the children had gone to School #77, but for five years now they have studied at the Arabkir district children’s home. “My children are completely normal and healthy, but I don’t have the money to send them to a regular school. The children’s home is good, they are there until six o’clock, they eat there, and wash, we don’t have to pay for books and notebooks,” their mother said, at the same time sorry that the children weren’t getting an education appropriate to their abilities.

The Armenyans were relocated from Gyumri toYerevanwith their three children. Their home had been completely destroyed in the earthquake. Their other seven children were born in the dormitory. The room in the dormitory their family of twelve occupies has three worn-out beds, a broken dresser and a couple of wardrobes. “The children used to sleep on the floor, but refugees sold me the cabinets, beds and bed-clothes they had been given before they moved out, though I haven’t pay them off,” Mariam told me, considering this progress for the family.

According to Susanna Aslanyan, chairman of the Maternity Fund of Armenia, the Armenyan family is a general portrait of almost all families with many children in the republic. Their organization implements cultural projects for only a small group of families with many children who are well provided for. “The families with ten or more children whose children were born in recent years and are of school- and kindergarten-age live in indescribably hard conditions,” Aslanyan said. She emphasized that humanitarian aid doesn’t make it much easier for them. There are families whose fathers are outside the republic. The families are divided - children are in the care of grandparents, or get settled in children's homes, at best. To soothe their consciences, mothers say that at least the children are fed three or four times a day. Aslanyan relayed the main complaint of mothers with many children - “The state only remembers us when it drafts our sons.”

Gagik Hovhannissyan is a veteran of the Artsakh war. From 1991 to 1994 he fought as part of the Arabo detachment. His wife Armenuhi Manukyan is only 31-years-old but they have nine children, the last was born in February. They now live with their three youngest children in an earthen hut outside the city.

“We moved out of my family’s house in 1996, and since then we’ve stayed in various places - with relatives, friends, etc,” Gagik said. From time to time, the children find places to stay: one in a children’s home, another with a grandmother, some in the Fund for Armenian Relief (FAR) boarding school, and so on. Right now five of them are at the Kashatagh children’s home. “The children were settled but we didn’t get any place to live. My wife and the younger children stayed with her relatives, I stayed with my brother. They told us they’d allocate an apartment for us -- we came back from Kashatagh and wound up on the street. The mayor’s office told us they don’t have anything for us and we have to wait. We found this place and settled in, meanwhile our ninth child was born,” the veteran said. 

They have somehow managed to fit into the narrow earthen hut and are only sorry that they couldn’t bring their six other children toYerevan. “I want my children to be with me, to get a good education. They are healthy children and as a parent I have to take care of their education,” Gagik Hovhannissyan said. His six children are of school age but their father said they have never attended school regularly since they have never had a permanent residence. “However, because I’m a veteran they did me a favor and accepted my children at various schools without papers. The charitable organizations have provided them with clothing and school supplies, but for years now I haven’t been able to gather my family together under one roof,” he said with anguish.

In 1998 the Maternity Fund of Armenia conducted a survey of families with many children to determine their problems and needs. It was discovered that their biggest concern is the lack of shelter. In addition to dwelling, food, and other problems they requested that their privileges be restored, especially in the field of education and health care. Health care services are inaccessible to 82% of the families with many children, according to the survey. “Mothers with many children develop various health problems and should be placed under special observation. Last year seven mothers died of diseases,” chairman Susanna Aslanyan told us. She said that in recent years projects for families with many children have been implemented. As an experiment, three hospitals have been assigned to them -- two inYerevanand one in Gyumri, and with her organization’s assistance several women have undergone surgery, although this is not a solution.

“Families with many children are a target group whose status is unclear,” Susanna Aslanyan said. Thus, in the earthquake zone a family with many children is defined as having three children, within the system of family allowances as having four or more children, within the system of privileges of the Ministry of Transport five or more children, and so on. But based on the ethnographic picture ofArmenia, it would be correct to legally define a family with three children as a family with many children. For the first time in 13 years, an opportunity to provide apartments to these families has been created inYerevan, but only forYerevanresidents.

Town ofHope

The opening of the first thirteen buildings for needy families in the new Town of Hope on the Ashtarak-Yerevan road is scheduled for May 28, 2003. Twenty families will celebrate their house warming in a development planned for 200 needy families. The district was founded by the Diaconia charity fund headed by the German-Armenian Djanbazian family, in collaboration with theYerevanmayor's office. Ruzanna Zakaryan, head of the social department of the mayor’s office told us that the commission in charge hasn’t yet decided who the first lucky ones to get apartments will be. “We have many applications, and the neediest families will be selected among the first twenty.”

The commission has already defined the criteria for the selection. Ruzanna Zakaryan noted that they have visited some families and familiarized themselves with their living conditions.

It is hard to say whether the families without shelter that we visited who have nine or ten young children will be among the first twenty families. Both Mariam Armenyan and Gagik Hovhannissyan told us that nobody from the commission had visited them, and wondered if the promises that had been made were only aimed at keeping them quiet.

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