The authorities, in particular the corresponding bodies of the social and health sectors, have announced several times that they have come up with a strategy to increase birth rates in Armenia. However, despite that “strategy”, many of the children being born in Armenia are raised in horrible, inhumane conditions.
It’s hard to point out who’s to blame for this; perhaps the government is to blame for not only not showing support for the child, or perhaps the parents are to blame for having a child regardless of the fact that they are living in poor social/economic conditions. In extremely needy families, very often women give birth to children based on the reason that they didn’t have the opportunity to get rid of the child at the time. “There was no money for abortion,” this is the main reason we hear when asking women.
The child in the photo is Sarkis who will soon turn two years old. Sargis’s breathing kills him and he keeps on coughing. This child was born in the semi-basement of a hostel near a chemical-producing factory, which used to be the junkyard of that hostel. Sarkis’s mother and grandmother used to work in the factory at a time because the government was giving good workers the chance to get a home. After the factory went bankrupt, they managed to live in this junkyard and a lot of time was needed to get rid of the trash and the rats.
“We have been living here since 1996. Our family is big. My mother and I used to work in the factory and when the factory was on the verge of liquidation, they gave us this junkyard to live in, saying that’s the best they could do. Our room has been the junkyard of the building,” says 37-year old Armine. Armine introduced me to who was whose relative in the room. They are all women and there is no man in the house.
“I have a girl named Lilit, who will come soon, she’s Susanna, my daughter and she has just graduated from school. Sarkis is Lilit’s son, my grandchild. My son-in-law kidnapped Susanna when she was in the 9th grade. Lilit is a single mother now because I brought her here since they were living in poor conditions. Their situation is worse; they live in really bad conditions,” says Armine and adds that Sarkis’s father is currently serving in the army. Sarkis is diagnosed with a sharp pain in the lungs and their room is a place where you can get tuberculosis easily. “He has been in the hospital’s reanimation department and we often take him to get treated,” says Armine, adding that the child was born healthy but got sick when he was only ten months old.
Sewer water flows on the other side of the wall and this was the reason why the walls of Armine’s walls are wet. “There are two sewers; we asked the plumber a hundred times to open the sewer to let the rainwater fill in the sewer because the water makes it to my room. The room is a half-basement. If I pull the couch, you’ll see that the wall is not strong enough due to the wetness,” says Armine.
Armine has worked as a waitress in cafes, but she is now unemployed because the open-air cafe she used to work in has closed.
“I have applied to many places for work, but they all say the same thing: they need 18-25-year old, good-looking girls. I don’t know; I have to wait until the summer for our cafe to open and for me to start working,” she said and didn’t answer my question as to how she raises her daughter and her grandchildren. She used to get subsidy from the “Paros”, but “Paros” no longer gave them money after one of her daughters turned 18. I wanted to see Sarkis’s mother. They called her; a girl with a strange look on her face came into the room. People won’t think that she’s a mother just by looking at her because she has a childish face. She looked at her mother with hatred and asked why they called her. Lilit talked to her mother ignorantly and didn’t even look her in the face. She only tapped her feet while answering to my questions, trying to make me understand that she didn’t want to talk. I asked Armine: “Why is your daughter this angry?” She answered: “She’s always like that.” I was still trying to understand how little Sarkis is growing in these conditions when Armine told me that Lilit is waiting for her second child. She said: “How is she supposed to be in that nervous condition; I don’t know, we don’t have the money to take her to consult with a doctor. The baby is five months old or something, we don’t even know.” I asked Lilit, who had been forced to come to the room by her mother. “Aren’t you afraid of your social conditions by having another baby?” She told me: “I’m afraid”. Armine and her daughter often have quarrels. Armine felt bad for what her daughter said and kept trying to justify her by saying that she’s nervous. But that answer made Lilit angrier and made her want to strangle her mother in my presence. “Our relations have gotten worse recently. I keep telling her to abort the child, but she doesn’t want to. How are we going to raise that child; after all, it’s going to be bad for the child. See what happened-Sarkis was born and now the child is sick from the humidity and we keep going to the hospital. Thank God, thanks to the doctors Sarkis is treated with care. He is currently at the reanimation department of the Arabkir hospital and the doctors there are professionals. This illness repeats-Sarkis has a defect and the humidity of the house is going to make things more complicated,” said Armine and started listing the number of responsibilities that the government has for needy families. I told her: “The state says work and live. Do you work?” “I have an ulcer. I can’t work, but unfortunately, I am forced to do heavy-duty work. I still work, nobody earns a living for me, nobody helps me. But it’s impossible; no matter how much you work. Working in cafes has also turned into a problem because the owners want young girls. I have worked in cafes and know that people spend large amounts of money on this or that and sit at the nice cafes and order a lot of things, while people like us starve. How does the government explain all that? The least they can do is have the plumber come and open that sewer to have the water flow out of the house, so the house can dry up. Sarkis can’t go on like this. Everyone is doing whatever they want.” I asked Armine: “Aren’t you married?” She said: “No, obviously not”. I asked her: “Why do you say that?” She said: “Because he was drinking and that’s why we divorced. He only cared about drinking.” “Will you remarry?” “I have already seen it all, I learned my lesson and I wouldn’t want my enemies to experience what I’ve seen.” Lilit was silent. The child was crying his heart out because he wanted his mother to breastfeed. She was hugging him and feeding him with a look of disgust on her fact and then lowering the child from her lap when he started coughing, as if she was punishing him by not breastfeeding. The child cried again, but the mother didn’t respond.