Nane Makuchyan

Mariam, 28, has been hospitalized once again, this time at the Nork Psychiatric Hospital . She has been homeless since she was twenty.

Mariam's parents divorced when she was a child. For many years she lived with her sister and mother on what her grandmother earned selling sunflower seeds. Before that, she says, "We lived fine. My father was working at a food store, my mother worked as a cleaning woman at one of the factories." Mariam recalls the time when a roof over their heads was not just a fairytale, and explains, "When they got divorced and my father left us, we went broke."

Mariam talks about her father now without bitterness, and she misses him, though he has never shown any interest in her fate, and doesn't even know where she is. Last June, we went with some other journalists to try to find Mariam a night's lodging. She confidently took us to the dormitory near the Sebastia Hotel where her father lived, insisting, "He's my papa, he'll definitely take me in." Instead, we barely managed to protect her from her father's angry fists.

After her grandmother died, her mother, already frail, developed a bone disease and became unable to look after her teenage daughters. Mariam, who has an exceptional singing, was admitted to the Vocal Department of the Yerevan State Conservatory. She studied there for just half a year.

"Since I hadn't studied music in school, I had to pay my own tuition - that was the rule. At home, they fought with me about it all the time, and told me to quit the conservatory. So I was forced to quit, and my mental health started to get worse. I remember my illness from then," Mariam recalls.

Soon, because of mounting debts, they lost their apartment and moved into a rental. They were running out of money. In 1997, they moved to Kashatagh (Lachin), as part of the settlement program organized by the government of Nagorno Karabakh. They were given a plot of land and a half-built house. "We didn't know anything about farming; we were prepared to wash dishes, or work as cleaning women, but we could not learn how to cultivate land," Mariam says. Her sister got married to a local Karabakh war veteran, and Mariam and her mother, incapable of farming, returned to Yerevan in 1999.

In Kashatagh, her mental state worsened. "I could have stayed in Kashatagh if there had been a decent mental hospital. I was in the Stepanakert hospital once, but the conditions there were awful - the men's and women's wards were located in the same, very small space," she says. In Yerevan , their life as vagrants began.

One cold winter night in 2000, the frozen body of Mariam's mother was discovered on a Yerevan street. Her father, now remarried, refused to take his daughter in. Mariam could be found near GUM, a department store, or at the adjacent covered market, where the traders would give her something to eat. She slept anywhere. "I was afraid to fall asleep, I walked the streets all nights and I would sleep during the day, it didn't matter where. When the frost began, it was awful. I had nowhere to go," Mariam recalls. Her mind and body unable to bear the lack of sleep, she found herself in a mental hospital.

Because of her age, Mariam cannot be placed into either a children's home or an old people's home. Thus, the state can do nothing but send the sick young woman to a mental hospital. But she can only stay there for 24 days at a time, the period that doctors say a patient needs for recurrent medical treatment.

Mariam stayed at the Sevan Mental Hospital for one year. On her release, she was driven from Sevan and dropped off near GUM. The hospital staff explain that she was healthy. Her problem was shelter; she didn't belong in a mental hospital.

"If only I could find a job - as a cleaning woman, a dish washer - and shelter, even just a tiny room with a table, a chair, and a bed. If I could go to a store, to a market, buy stuff, eat and enjoy my food." Mariam says, cradling herself. It's the lack these basic things that keeps sending her to the hospital.

Each time, the Ministry of Health gives her authorization for 24 days of treatment free of charge. But dealing with the Ministry of Social Security is much more complex. In her years on the street, Mariam lost her passport, and now she is treated like a non-citizen. Without a passport, she cannot get the disability allowance that would provide for her most basic needs. She cannot move freely or even use public services.

Once, even the state-run ambulance service refused to take her call for two days. A dispatcher told her, "We accept calls only from the family members of mental patients." When she said that she had no relatives, she was told to give her address. They categorically refused to accept the fact that the patient lived at the GUM market. "Such an address doesn't exist," the dispatcher said.

"We do not deal with specific individuals," was the most common answer we got from various humanitarian organizations and NGOs, including the Red Cross and the UN offices, who instead spend their time preparing voluminous reports on the number of homeless people in Armenia and their problems.

There are numerous local and international organizations operating in Yerevan . Some of them deal exclusively with problems of homeless children and homeless old people. None of them deals with people like Mariam. According to Deputy Minister of Social Security Karine Hakobyan, "Mariam's is not the only case like this; there are many people like her. We can't do anything in such a situation."

The only solution Mariam's doctor and the ministry of social security can propose is to send her to the Vardenis Mental Home. But this institution provides long-term care, not the periodic treatment that Mariam seeks.

The state proposes to put this young women away for the rest of her life, when all she really needs is a job and shelter. "You journalists should raise this issue, that we don't have hostels, we don't have the means to solve the problems that homeless people face," Karine Hakobyan advised us.

In a few days Mariam will be discharged from the hospital in Nork, and returned to the GUM market. Once again, her spectre will haunt the streets of Yerevan.