Arshak Ghazaryan, high school principal in the village of Bagaran straddling the Armenian border with Turkey, fears that there’ll be no one left in the community in a few more years. He says that the young people are leaving, due to a lack of work, and the birth rate has gone down. But he can’t blame them for doing so since socio-economic conditions are forcing them to find their fortunes elsewhere. "It’s quite dangerous to have a poor village on the border. I believe that villages like ours are of strategic importance for the country. What will happen if our border has no one left to guard it? If things continue as they are, there will come a time when we’ll hand these lands to the Turks as well," he says. The school principal believes that the government must grant certain allowances to border communities. "Rents for land and water are quite expensive. People are forced to give up on the land. Transportation here is just like it was back in the 1960’s; that’s to say only once a day. People are crammed into the one van like sheep. We complain but no one seems to listen." Mr. Ghazaryan added that there about 40 students from Bagaran and neighbouring Yervandashat that study in Yerevan and that they can’t make it home on the weekends since the van service usually doesn’t make the trip.