Edik Baghdasaryan
Liana Sayadyan

In the Tavush Marz, in the center of the town of Berd, one of the stores has a sign on the wall that says "Xerox copies". I went in to make a copy of a document that a resident of Berd had received from the local administration. The sixty-year-old man working in the store took the paper and began to read it. I looked at him in surprise and asked, "What are you reading it for?" Without lifting his eyes from the paper he said, "We have been warned not to make copies of dangerous things." "What does that mean -dangerous things?" I ask. "You know, leaflets and things like that," he says.

Tavush is one of the most beautiful places in Armenia, but tourists rarely visit. The Yerevan-Berd highway that passes through Tchambarak has completely eroded in places. It's clear that no one is concerned about it, even though there are military units located in the region. The only hotel in Berd has no running water. There are buckets of water next to the toilets, and it smells like a toilet in the rooms. That's why visitors to Berd try not to stay here overnight. The only guests in the big hotel are two soldiers, our photographer, our driver, and I.

Under the Soviets, Berd belonged to the Shamshadin region, a separate administrative-territorial entity. When the map of the republic was redrawn, Idjevan, Noyemberyan and Shamshadin merged into the Tavush Marz (province), with Idjevan as its administrative center. "Since then Berd has become a burden for the marz administration," says Emma Adamyan, a former administration employee. Government officials only visit Berd when there'a a school opening or a new water pipeline in one of the surrounding villages. "Whenever there's a ribbon to cut, they are here," an old man at the bus station tells us. Visits to the marz reach a peak during presidential and parliamentary elections. The candidates and their entourage ride come riding in in their jeeps, promising new jobs, investments, fertilizers for farmers, long-term loans, etc. This happens once every four or five years, but in between, nothing changes for the residents of Tavush. The poor go down a few steps; poverty becomes a way of life, malnutrition an everyday occurrence.

Poverty has settled in, right in the center of Berd, in the eight shacks of the settlement known as the Janjanots (fly trap), in the rooms of the ten families living in the Berd Hotel, in the eyes of beggar children and in the eyes of angelic, four-year-old Siranuysh, who never gets to eat anything but bread.

Grigor left school after the third grade. "Why did you quit school?" I ask.
"I didn't want to go, " he answers tersely.
"What are you doing now?" I persist.
"I work at Samvel's shop. I unload flour and other things."

Grigor makes 500 drams (about a dollar) a day, and helps his family out. There are eight children in the family, living in a one-room shack, with no toilet, no running water. Their mother, Emma Shahnazaryan, is mentally ill. When we visit the house at nine o'clock in the morning, the children are still asleep, and the mother is baking bread in the oven. The youngest is four-year-old Siranuysh, who looks at us with her sad eyes, trying to understand why her mother woke her up.

The oldest son, Tigran, is in the Army, the rest are at home. None of the six school-age children goes to school. There are plenty of reasons - no clothes, no schoolbooks, no food, no apartment.

A bit later, the father, Arthur Avalyan, comes in. He tells us they receive a monthly allowance of 22,000-drams (about $40). "The money is not enough even for flour, and all we eat is bread. A bag of flour barely lasts six days; it's impossible to feed the children. I'm a truck driver-I transport loads, but I can't get by, we barely make ends meet. I'm not saying that I should sit with my arms folded and let somebody else take care of me. I work-I just can't by. I don't want anything-I just want a house. I have five sons to send to the Army. The oldest will come back in the fall, and the next will go," Arthur says.

"When Kocharyan was here during the election campaign, I handed him a letter. I haven't received any response so far. Maybe there was one, but they didn't give it to me, I don't know. This shack was given to us temporarily in 1992. The chairman of the local executive council was Matevos Tsaturyan then. My wife is mentally ill, but I can't take her for treatment. I took her to the local hospital, they gave her some drugs, but she hasn't gotten better," he continues.

Ashot Pashinyan, the head of Tavush's department of education, says there are 43 children in the marz who don't go to school-17 children in Idjevan, 18 in Noyemberyan, and 8 in Berd. They are mainly children who go to the mountains with their families to pasture the cattle. "We do whatever we can to keep them within the educational process; we give them assignments so they don't lag behind their peers," Pashinyan assures us. Thus, according to administrative data, Berd has the lowest number of children outside the educational system in the area, but we met 13 such children in Berd in the course of one day. Apparently, many are not registered, so official numbers do not correspond to reality. Marine Manucharyan, chairman of the NGO Women of Utik, says they are aware of 20 children who have left school.

Two of them belong to Zhora Khatchatryan, who moved to Berd with his wife and children after the 1988 earthquake. They live in the same kind of shack, and receive an allowance of 10,000 drams a month. Only two of their four children go to school. The oldest daughter is in the 9 th grade. She wants to be a teacher, but for her, this is only a dream. "The little ones don't go to school-they don't have the clothes or the schoolbooks," says her father, who has just come back home after ten years in prison.

To be continued.

Photos by Onnik Krikorian