Lusine Balyan
Anahit Vardanyan

"I'm not going to pretend and say this is my birthplace and I would never leave. If I have nothing to do here, how long can I admire the trees and bushes? Judge for yourselves. My peers in the city have achieved so much. They've graduated from university, are working, and some have even married. And me.."

The village of Ditavan in the Tavush Marz is close to the sky. Here the day begins when the sun rises and ends when it sets. The small village, curled next to a forest, has become even smaller in recent years, as a result of the many problems it faces. You won't hear children in the streets--they're helping their parents with farm work. There are hardly any young people here at all. Hermes and Felix are the last of their group of friends left in the village. After finishing high school, Hermes was accepted at Yerevan's Polytechnic Institute, but he couldn't afford the tuition. Felix didn't even try.

"I had very good grades in school, which my teachers will confirm, but that's not enough to be accepted to university," he explained. " I felt that when I went to school in a neighboring village, after finishing the eighth grade here, and saw how poor the level of education was at my school. For instance, our foreign language teacher didn't even have a university education. How could I think about higher education with the knowledge that he gave me? I wanted to study in the law department at Yerevan State University, where high grades in a foreign language are a must."

Talking to Felix and Hermes, it's hard to believe that they don't have higher education. They are knowledgeable about literature and history, and are interested in astronomy.

"There's nothing keeping us here. If there were an opportunity, we would leave for the city right now. There's nothing to do here. In warm weather we work on the land, and in winter we bring wood from the forest. At our age it's boring, even sickening. We don't go to the library anymore. There isn't a book we haven't read. We have a better library at home. We fight boredom with books. Unfortunately, we don't know about modern literature. We can't buy it. There's a dire need for information in the village. First of all, we only get a few TV channels here. Second, we only get newspapers when the pensions arrive, and that is always late. We are not saying that we would leave the village forever; that's not possible. It's our birthplace, and there are many things that connect us to this place."

Felix and Hermes say that time passes more quickly in the summer. That's when tourists and people who have moved away visit the village, giving the young men a chance to make new friends, and find out about life in the city and the interests of young people there.

"If we were in the city, maybe we wouldn't think about what to do, how to spend out time. Of course, when we talk with our peers from the city we understand that they have more opportunities than we do. For instance, they have homes in the city. W we tried to go and work in the city several times, but we had to give most of our salary for the rent. And we couldn't help our relatives in the village, which is the first goal for everyone who leaves home."

Felix and Hermes think it will take a miracle before village life in the far corners of Armenia improves. They are afraid that they will never be able to read the books and magazines or do the kind of work that they want to, in short, that they'll never find a way to quit accepting what life has given them, and make a change.