The residents of the Shirak village of Jrapi wake up every morning and look at the hills before them, where there are unintelligible words written in a foreign language.  Jrapi is a border village and the hills are located beyond the border, in Turkey.

"What is written on that hill?" I asked deputy village head Pargev Balasanyan.

"It says, 'Happy is he who is born a Turk,'" he said.

"Isn't it difficult psychologically to see that writing every day?"

"What's difficult is living here, what do we care about that writing?"

The residents of Jrapi deal in farming and animal rearing.  The factories come and collect their milk, while the harvest - wheat and barley - is barely enough for the villagers themselves.  Bad quality seeds, a lack of fertilizer and the practice of rejecting irrigation water to economize leads to a poor harvest.

"Yes, we do have irrigated areas, but then you have to have enough money to pay for the water," said Pargev Balasanyan, "The system is in place, all that is needed is the money."

The villagers do not have money to pay for irrigation water.  And because they do not pay, their land does not get water.  And because it does not get water, the harvest is poor.  And because the harvest is poor, the villagers do not have money to pay for irrigation water.  Thus, they end up in a vicious cycle, and the only way out for some is to leave the village.

"We have around sixty to seventy hectares of land which we own, but cannot cultivate.  There is no money, there are no seeds.  That is why many are forced to leave the village," said the deputy village head, convinced that his two sons - currently conscripts in the army - would leave the village once their period of military service ends.

"People can make enough money in the city to support their family and rent an apartment.  Here, you don't have to pay rent, but you don't have enough money to support your family.  There are young people in the village who don't risk getting married and starting a family.  There are young people who are thirty five to forty years old and still unmarried."

Pargev Balasanyan was convinced that the situation could be rectified if the government intervened in some way.  Villagers should be allowed to take out long-term loans so that they could adequately cultivate their land.  "It would give the villagers a serious opportunity and raise their level of responsibility as well," said the deputy village head, "The people would do everything they could to return the money they borrowed, and when they see that things are working out, they won't leave."

Fifteen people receive a state allowance in the village, while around thirty people receive a government salary.  The rest live on money sent from relatives abroad. Around thirty percent of the villagers are not resident there.  The number of schoolchildren has gone down by a hundred over the past ten years.  "There are around ninety or twenty schoolchildren graduating from the school, but the new admissions constitute only  eight or ten children," said the school principal, Mrs. Antaramyan.

The school building, constructed in 1974, has not been fundamentally renovated over the past thirty-three years.  After the earthquake, it was declared a hazardous building and classes were moved to temporary wooden cottages.  Years later, another committee decided that the building was in usable condition after all.  The roof was renovated and a few changes were made inside before classes once again moved to the old building.  "Now, we're not sure what condition the building is in either.  There are classrooms where we don't allow the children to use when it rains," said the school principal.

Despite this, the academic level of the schoolchildren is quite high and many of them continue their education in the universities of Yerevan.  They do not return to Jrapi after getting a university degree.  Both the deputy village head as well as the school principal considered that to be natural.  "What would they do in the village if they returned here?  The only place where they could work is the school.  But we don't have any teachers in the school who are due to retire."

The walls in the school corridors have no space uncovered.  Posters, large and small, speak of all sorts of patriotic and moral issues.  The words by Khachatur Abovyan - "Give your breath, your soul, but don't give your Fatherland to the enemy" - should be in the heart of every child, according to Mrs. Antaramyan  "We instill a lot of patriotism in our children," she said, telling of how the children participated in the candlelit vigil for Hrant Dink.

While leaving the village, I looked once again at the hills across the border.  I read the foreign writing and recalled that the US Congress was debating a resolution about recognizing the Genocide during those days.  "Happy is he who is born a Congressman," I thought and left the Shirak village of Jrapi.