Yulia Grigoryan

Temporary shelters built after the 1988 earthquake to house residents in the Shirak Province village of Shirak are no longer habitable, thus leaving 45 families without adequate shelter.

Ten such homeless individuals had signed a contract with Glendale Hills, a construction company, to build new apartments for them. Each apartment was to be built in the span of 270 days, after which the company would start on the next.

To date, work on the first apartment hasn’t even started.

Resident Sousanna Martirosyan told Hetq that the deadline for the completion of her home has since passed. The family paid scarce financial resources and made numerous trips to Yerevan to get the contract signed.

“They never came and they never built a house,” complained Martirosyan. “If we knew that they were going to cheat us we would never have paid them in these tough times.

She said the company keeps promising them that her house will be built but nothing happens.

Martirosyan says living in their temporary hut has become unbearable, especially since it is built directly on the ground, attracting any number of critters and insects.

Her eldest son left the village with his family seven years ago for Russia. The hut was too small for all of them. The son wants to return but can’t see how the family will live in the dilapidated hut. Thin wooden beams are the only thing holding up the roof in the bedrooms.

Nadya Alekyan has it just as bad. She lost her husband in the earthquake. The couple never had kids so the woman no lives alone. The conditions she lives in are a throwback to the Stone Age. The hut has rotted and has no water or natural gas.

After a drawn-out bureaucratic tussle, Mrs. Alekyan received a onetime payment of 3 million AMD but says it isn’t enough to buy a new place. So she’s kept the money in the hope of someday finding something affordable.

“I’ve been living in this nightmare for years. In the summer I carry water from my neighbors and melt snow in the winter. I can’t remember the last time I bathed. I survive on a pittance of a pension.”

Another resident, Geghetsik Grigoryan heads a family of eight living in a two room hut. The family doesn’t have the financial means to move out.

“If the government doesn’t allocate an apartment for us we just can’t purchase one. We tend a few animals and work the land. We get by somehow. If we had the resources, we would have moved already rather than waiting for the government to do us a favor,” said Grigoryan.

After feeling cheated for the past 25 years, most of the village homeless have lost all hope and confidence in government. They want to raise the issue of the housing construction delay but don’t know where to turn.

“The authorities just take care of their relatives. What does Galust Sahakyan [president of the parliament] care about how we are living? Who can we turn to?” says Soussana Martirosyan.

The homeless say they want to take the matter up with the new minister of urban construction and to sue Glendale Hills, but were advised by the community mayor not to make matters worse.

“They won’t do anything this year and they’ll spend all the money next year on the 1000^th anniversary of the Genocide,” says Sousanna Martirosyan.

Shirak village mayor Khoren Harutyunyan argues that he told residents not to stir the pot because construction has ground to a halt all over because the government has run out of money.

“Construction hasn’t started here because the government hasn’t allocated any funds. I don’t believe that the government isn’t interested and doesn’t want to resolve this headache. It’s just that the government is in a poor way and can’t do much right now,” Harutyunyan told Hetq.

The mayor said that seven of the 45 homeless families each received 3 million AMD, adding that they could purchase something modest if they wanted to.

Another thirty are on a waiting list for an apartment and eight never qualified because they didn’t present the required paperwork.

The mayor himself says he lives in a temporary hut with ten other family members. Harutyunyan says that he too left for Russia, like many others, but decided to return.

“The worst here is much better than the best abroad. Living under a foreign yoke is not happiness, he says.