“The Azeris would quickly come and sell their eggs to us as soon as their hens laid them.  They would come and drink tea with us in the evenings and we would go to them.  Let me say, though, that we never had any foreigners - including Azeris - living in our area,” said Berd resident Nina Adamyan, in her interview with Hetq. Mrs. Adamyan recalled how, during the early days of the Karabakh Movement, the Azeris would pelt buses coming from Yerevan with stones.  “I took our local official, Gagik Vardanyan, and said that we need to go and negotiate with them.  They were waiting for us near the building of the Alibek village administration.  I said to Ali, their village head, ‘Hey, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? What’s going on here? Yes, we’re all concerned with Karabakh, but we’re neighbors after all.  Let’s wait till the powers that be decide on this issue.’  Ali then took us to his house and we were his guests.  Our local official was scared, he kept saying that they would kill us, but no such thing happened,” the war veteran recalled. The fact that she knew the Azerbaijani language meant that Mrs. Adamyan could understand and reveal some of the trickery that the Azeris tried to employ during negotiations.  “The Azeris had razed their farms to the ground, but in the presence of the Russians they were talking to each other in their language and saying that they were going to blame the burnt farms on the Armenians.  I understood them as they said this to each other and interrupted, saying, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’” Mrs. Adamyan was also part of the prisoner exchanges that took place in the Berd region.  “I don’t know why, but I was never afraid, even though death was always a possibility.  At night, they would direct the projectors at us and fire in our direction.  I have seen a lot of bad things – they would send potato sacks with the pieces of a person’s corpse inside…” Today, Nina Adamyan is urging Armenians to stay united.  When asked about improving relations with Azerbaijan, she answered with an old Armenian proverb, “Make friends with the dog, but don’t let your stick out of your sight.”