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Sara Petrosyan

Torfavan, Hit by a Series of Natural Disasters, Gets Little Help

everal natural disasters each year. The disasters are not serious, but they're enough to cause Torfavan's mud-brick houses to crumble. On March 13, 2005 The State Seismic Protection Agency recorded a 5.0 magnitude earthquake 12 kilometers southeast of Vardenis, which residents insist caused buildings to start to collapse. Thirteen structures were damaged, but the Armenian government ignored the data that local authorities had presented and did not put the village on the list for compensation. The earthquake was followed by a heavy snowstorm, causing further damage to the buildings.

The town of Vardenis and several nearby villages were affected by the March 13 earthquake and the ensuing snowstorm. The Armenian Government responded with a decision on April 7 "... to provide money in order to alleviate the effects of the earthquake and the snowstorm." The Gegharkunik Marz received 13.5 million drams to repair damaged buildings in Vardenis and nine surrounding villages. Torfavan was not among them.

Aharon Khachatryan, the secretary of the Torfavan municipality, explained that the village mayor had personally presented a list of the thirteen families affected by the earthquake to the Gegharkunik Governor's Office, to be passed to officials in Yerevan. "We approximated the amount of damage, cement, other things. We were told that experts would come to calculate the extent of compensation but nothing was done," said Aharon Khachatryan.

On March 8, 2006 Torfavan was hit by yet another natural disaster. This time a thunderstorm damaged 21 homes, and the town hall and social club. According to the local mayor, they informed the Department of Emergency Situations of the damage, approximated the monetary losses, and presented their findings to the government. They are still waiting for a response. "The thunderstorm mainly tore off the roofs. People have rebuilt the roofs to a certain extent, since the spring rains were starting," Khachatryan added.

The NGO World Vision International helped to repair damage from the earthquake in Vardenis and the nine villages that were worst hit. Lyova Abrahamyan, mayor of the village of Shatvan, explained that the houses and barns of more than 80 families in the village had been damaged. " On the second day after the earthquake, representatives from World Vision came to see the condition the village was in. They first distributed basic necessities, and then they sent a group of experts who estimated the monetary damages."

With financial help from World Vision, 47 houses in Shatvan were repaired. "We set up construction groups in the village which repaired 34 homes, and construction companies rebuilt 13 houses that had suffered severe damage," the local mayor said.

Abrahamyan said that the government was given a list of houses that were the most damaged, and after World Vision repaired these houses, the government provided 800,000 drams to purchase cement and sand for the families whose houses were less damaged in the earthquake and weren't included in World Vision's reconstruction program.

Vardan Aghajanyan, director of World Vision's regional development program in Gegharkunik, said that immediately after the earthquake, at the initiative of his organization, monetary losses throughout the Vardenis region were estimated and nine severely damaged communities, mainly populated by refugees, were chosen. World Vision repaired 162 houses in these nine villages; according to Aghajanyan not a single damaged house was left out of the program.

Aghajanyan explained that they negotiated with the village authorities as to how to repair the damage. In one case, construction materials were given to the community so they could repair the houses themselves. With the help of community residents 122 houses were repaired. Construction companies were hired to repair over 40 houses which were severely damaged. Aghajanyan also noted that in one case it was impossible to repair a home, so the organization bought a new house for the family. The World Vision representative did not specify how much money was spent to repair the damage from the earthquake, but it is clear that the meager sum provided by the government - 13.5 million drams-was not much help.

While the World Vision representative insisted that they were not dependent on the village authorities and that they developed the program for reconstruction based on their own data, it is a fact that the organization undertook projects only in the communities that were included on the Armenian government list.

Asked why Torfavan wasn't part of the World Vision program, the director of the program replied, "All the villages in the region can be considered damaged from the earthquake. The houses in these villages were all built in the 1950s and are now crumbling, in a critical state. Torfavan's houses are like that."

In Torfavan, previously Azerbaijani territory, 86 families who fled Kirovabad and Baku now live in crumbling clay houses that were built in 1947-48. These families do not understand why they are not on the governments list for financial aid. In some homes here, people risk getting trapped under ruins if they take a wrong step. People here cannot repair their houses with their own resources. The Torfavan community did not take advantage of privatization when it was possible, and the greatest problem here that they don't own their own land. The result is poverty and all its terrible symptoms.

Sara Petrosyan, Lusine Toplaghaltsyan

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