If many people impatiently wait for summer to come, Haykoush Karapetyan’s family, who live in Shahoumyan village, look forward to summer with fear in their hearts. “Our house will soon be flooded with snakes, scorpions and tarantulas when the weather gets warmer. We moved to this place last year. A snake sneaked into our house and would have bitten the child if we had noticed him a second later. The fear doesn’t let us sleep in summer.

The scorpions run all over our bodies at nights. We are on guard the whole night, to at least protect the children from their bites. I am already very concerned. In three months my third grandchild will be born. Where on earth shall we keep him to spare him from the scorpions and the snakes?” granny Haykoush said in an interview with “Hetq”.

 It’s several years now that a family of five has been living in a temporary iron house. “Our house used to be on other land. They told me we should leave that place. The village administration allocated a small lot of land from the former chicken farm site for us to locate our house and have a roof on our heads. We placed our house on that soil. At the same time, we don’t know whether that piece of land belongs to us or not. We don’t have a single document. We live without any certainty regarding our status. They may come and order us to take our house and go away. When it rains, the rain floods our house. When it hails, we are hail beaten. I pity these children. They get sick once a week in these hard conditions. Believe me, our family faces great hardship. We can hardly bear this. I have two grandchildren. Soon the third will be born, and it is already impossible to live here. We hardly make ends meet by gathering things from the trash dump and borrowing money. We go to the trash dump every day to gather things to burn. We also gather bottles and other things, clean them, sell them and earn some money to buy bread and somehow survive. One day I may ask the mother of my daughter-in-law to bring us some flour, the other day I may ask for something else from my neighbor. I don’t know how long this life of a beggar may last.  We live in such poor conditions that my old mother, hardly able to walk, brings two plates of dinner every day to at least feed our grandchildren. We don’t care about ourselves; we can endure the hunger somehow. We will eat bread when we have some and we will remain hungry if we don’t,” Mrs.

Haykoush said.

Haykoush Karapetyan’s family gets 21,000 drams in monthly benefits. This is the only income that the family has. The family has no property in the village except for the rotten rusty iron house. The land where the temporary house is located doesn’t have any soil to cultivate. Living in the village, the family has to borrow vegetables from the neighbors. The family built a tiny stone room in front of the iron house so that they can use the stove without burning the house.  The floor of the stone house isn’t covered with anything, the tints of the roof are damaged and the rains flood the room.

“We live like dogs. Please, just look around in the village. There isn’t a family that lives in worse conditions than we do. We are in need of everything, but we can’t demand a thing from anyone. If we were not unemployed, we would work somewhere and earn our daily bread. My son leaves the house at 8 in the morning. He is a worker. He returns home from work only at 10-11 o’clock in the morning, but everything is in vain. We still can’t make ends meet. The hands of my son were bleeding in the evening. His fingers were all torn. I couldn’t help crying. And even after that his children are still hungry. We are about $1,500 in debt, excluding lots of other small debts. Don’t think that we made such a debt to have feasts or buy us new clothes. We just bought flour, butter and vegetable oil. We didn’t manage to pay the debts in small amounts and, as a result, accumulated such a huge debt,” Mrs. Haykoush recounted with tears in her eyes.

Only beggars can be considered to be poor

Julieta Koshkeryan, a leading specialist at the Shahoumyan village administration, was quite surprised to learn that we were writing about the family of her co-villager Haykoush Karapetyan.  “Are they poor? I wouldn’t say they are; they live quite well. Of course, they don’t have a house, but they live a good life,” she said. I asked Mrs. Koshkeryan how they could live a good life, if they didn’t have money even for bread and medicine.

“You are not from this village, that’s why it seems to you that they live in hardship. I tell you, they live a good life. At least they don’t beg for bread from their neighbors. Whose fault is that that they have made such a big debt? When someone is in a trouble, it’s always that very person’s fault,” she concluded. It turns out that only the people who beg for a piece of bread from the neighbors can be considered poor. The officials of the village administration do not care that young children have no bed to sleep in. They also do not care about the fact that the snakes and scorpions sneaking into the house may be of great danger for the members of this family. We are sure that Mrs. Julieta has never visited this family. According to the village specialist, the family of Haykoush Karapetyan doesn’t have any privatized land because they didn’t apply to the village administration during the land privatization process. “They didn’t feel like having their own land, that’s why they didn’t submit any application. If they did, they would certainly get their piece of land because back then people would get land even under their children’s names. Mrs. Haykoush applied to us only last year, saying that they are left in the street and have no place to put their house. So the village administration allocated that lot from the territory of the former chicken farm for them to temporarily put their house on. They never applied to us with any other issue,” J. Koshkeryan said. We asked Julieta Koshkeryan whether it is possible to register that lot to the ownership of the Karapetyans so that the family doesn’t have to move from place to place. “Why not? It is quite possible. They need to pay the cadastre cost of that lot and the land will become theirs,” Koshkeryan answered.

“I dream of having at least two rooms”

Grigor Safaryan, the father of the family, was at work when we visited the family. His wife Rouzanna was peeling potatoes. Five year-old Haykoushik couldn’t wait to be fed. She was sitting under the wall, silently waiting for the potatoes to boil. When I asked Haykoushik what she would like to have, she answered without hesitation - “I ask for an ice cream from my mother, but she doesn’t buy it.” Instead, her grandmother told me about her dream. “I dream of having at least two rooms, so that my children could live like humans,’ she said. Rouzanna is going to give birth to her third child in four months. “I don’t know how we will live. My husband is a worker, but the employers do not pay him on time. I have no hope of living a better life one day. We didn’t turn for help to any state body because we knew that they wouldn’t help us. Why should we ask for anything if they are not going to help? Besides, to tell the truth, we are ashamed to ask for help,” Rouzanna concluded. The family of five sleeps in one small room on two beds. Due to the family’s poverty, Haykoushik has to still sleep in the cradle even though she is already big enough and is going to go to school this year. Her seven year-old brother sleeps in one bed with his granny. Little Haykoushik already knows that a new baby will be born in several months and she will have to yield her cradle to the little one. She is a bit happy about that, thinking that the parents may get her a new bed.

Haykoush Karapetyan has pancreatic diabetes. “I can’t buy even medicine to survive. I asked the brother of my daughter-in-law for a thousand drams to buy 13 pills for me. They told me I need to go to a hospital in Yerevan to get free medicine. But I couldn’t afford the sum of money they were demanding. If I could register myself as a pensioner, I would get my medicines for free. I was so bad yesterday; I didn’t have a pill to take. My daughter-in-law was horrified. She thought I was going to die. She made some herb tea for me that brought some relief,” Mrs. Haykanoush added. When I was saying good-bye to the family, Mrs. Haykanoush said, “My boy, I hope your visit will bring us luck and the doors of hope will open for us.”

Translated by Anoush Mkrtchyan