Young Sarkis’s body burns from the scorching sun. His feet are ashy and he is dirty all over. This three-year old child hides behind the building whenever he sees a stranger. Sarkis’s behavior is similar to someone from the jungle. His parents often spank him, not because he has misbehaved. They simply turn evil due to their poor social/economic status and “throw their anger” on the child.
“I beat the kid because I am so frustrated, but I understand that the child is innocent. After I beat him, I regret doing that; I hug him, give him a kiss and cry,” says Sarkis’s mom Anahit, who suffered a heart attack at the age of 33 and whose left side is totally weak. Anahit’s eyes get red from the nervousness and she doesn’t even try justifying what she does. They face many hardships.
There is a cattle shed approximately 300-400 meters away from the “Play City” entertainment center, where there is a deserted area. That cattle shed is the “home” of husband and wife Anahit and Vartan. This is where Anahit and Vartan used to keep an animal and the place doesn’t even have an address. After turning off the light, everything is lost in the darkness. There is no electricity in the cattle shed where these people live. They have been living there for the past 10 years and haven’t seen the lights come on normally. The family lights candles at night and the parents are often forced to take that light away from the children too with the hope that the candle will go out. They do that in order to keep the light at least for thirty minutes the next day in the evening.
I try to talk with Sarkis, smile, joke, ask him questions. He doesn’t answer and simply stares at me. I take a photo of Sarkis and I show him the pictures I took to cheer him up. He looks at me surprised, as if he’s seeing himself for the first time. I ask him, “Do you see what a handsome boy you are?” He looks at me and turns his head away. Sarkis quietly goes away by walking on the dirty sand barefoot. It seems as though three-year old Sarkis is not a child.
Sarkis’s mom Anahit gets up from her bed and stands with her cane, out of courtesy, but since she can’t control her left side, she falls down. Anahit says that she can’t find any way to explain to Sarkis that there is no food and that they must starve for a couple of days. Her husband Vartan spends the whole day looking for colorful metals, clothes and leftovers of food from the trash can. Sometimes Anahit feeds her child the non-pasteurized milk from the trash. Trucks pile construction materials near the area and Vartan collects the wood and rubber materials to keep his wife and son warm during the winter. I ask him, “how can you give the kid this milk, which has stayed under the sun for so long? He’ll get poisoned.” “His organism is used to it. What can we do? Tell me, we must have him eat something, right?” says Anahit as she fights back the tears. The family used to have a home in the Duryan neighborhood in the Avan community. They sold that house ten years ago with the hope that they would be able to take care of some expenses. According to Anahit, the buyer tricked them, made up the documents and left for Russia without paying any money. They called the police and asked them to arrest someone by the name of Karen Khachatryan and force him to pay. After a while, the police told them that they can’t go on with the case because they can’t find Karen Khachatryan.
“Those were the dark years. We stayed in the suburbs, but you can’t pay rent just by selling herbs. We came and settled down in this cattle shed,” says Anahit, who lives on tranquilizers and may go crazy from the pain if she doesn’t take 4-5 tranquilizers a day. “There are times when my husband finds bread from the trashcan. We don’t have alternatives, don’t you understand?” she says. Anahit gets a 10,000 AMD pension for being handicapped. She has applied to the Avan municipality, the “Red Cross” asking for help, but the only help she got was female clothing for Sarkis from the “Red Cross”. Anahit’s husband suffers from a psychological illness and he doesn’t get a job because he shows a doctor’s slip. During this entire conversation, Vartan only said one thing: “We’re lost”. He travels 300-400 meters just to bring a bucket of water.
I walk in their house for the last time with the hope that three-year old Sarkis will say or do something. He wasn’t home. There was a big doll wrapped up and placed in his cradle with the blackened sheets.
“Whenever he goes outside to play, he puts this doll in his bed,” says Anahit, mother of three-year old Sarkis.