Twelve year old Suren was home alone when we pushed the unlocked door open and asked to see the parents.
There was pop music heard from the stereo in the room, but that didn’t go along with the dirty walls and terrible situation of the house. “Mom went to get water from the well, Dad is at work,” said Suren as he turned off the stereo. “Where are the other kids?” asked the stranger and added, “There are seven kids in total, right?”
“Yes. My older sister is at school, my other brother is in the neighboring village and the others are playing outside. I’ll call them,” said the boy as he made his way out of the house.
After a while, the wife came back home with two buckets of water. The five children came in almost at the same time. Thirty five year old Sanam sat near the table and the kids lounged towards him-one sat on his lap, the other under his arm and the rest gathered near their mother. They all started listening to the visitors and then they were bombarded with questions.
The Sahradyans-a nine member family-are the neediest in the Lernagog village.
This is what village head Sargis Markaryan told us and assured that the Sahradyans are in extremely bad conditions compared to the other families living in the village, who are also living in bad conditions. All seven children are minors. Sanam is a housewife and her husband-40 year old Hayk-works at a flour producing factory near the village and gets a 25,000 dram salary. The family also gets a 30,000 dram subsidy for being a large number family.
Basically, each member of the family receives 203 drams daily. Of course, this budget is unsatisfactory, but this is the reality for 16 year-old Lusine, 15 year-old Taron, 13 year-old Ani, 12 year-old Suren, 7 year-old Anna, 6 year-old Karen and the two year-old curly haired Mariam Sahradyans. The food that they eat consists of the cracked wheat and macaroni that they get from the store by borrowing. “Sometimes we eat candy,” says Sanam. “How can we not buy candy? After all, they are kids and kids want to eat sweets.”
The Sahradyans live in one of the unique villages of Armenia where there is no land for cultivation or cattle-raising. The village of Lernagog, which is 65 kilometers away from the capital city of Armenia, is one of the industrial villages of Soviet Armenia with the flour producing factory founded in the 1970s and hiring pig raising farmers. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 2500 residents living in Lernagog were earning a living and happy. At the time, the Sahradyans were also happy, but in the beginning of the 1990s, they had to worry more about taking care of expenses and they had to start thinking about means of survival.
“We can’t make ends meet, it’s hard now,” says Sanam. “He (referring to the husband) works at the factory, but he brings flour instead of a salary so I can make bread for us to eat. We pay off the loans at the store with the subsidy. We get no other income. I collect wood from the mountains so we can keep warm. I bring a minimum of six buckets of water from the well for washing and laundry,” says Sanam.
Everyone living in Lernagog faces the problem of water. There has been no water since 1995. They bring drinking water from Talin and 40 liters cost 150 dram. Sanam says that they even borrow money and promise to pay back later. According to her, they have seen worse when the flour producing factory still hadn’t opened up. “At least there is flour now so that the kids can have bread to eat. We didn’t even have that two years ago.”
The family lives in the house inherited to them by their parents, but there is nothing. They have a heater, but no wood. They have bowls for water, but no water. They have beds with torn sheets. They also have a television set which doesn’t work. Sanam’s fingers are all red and swollen-there are many reasons, for example, the cold weather, cold water and heavy buckets. The only thing that saves them is the heater. As long as there are still some branches that burns, the family gathers around the heater and tries to get warm. “The kids don’t even have clothes for winter. They wear whatever they have,” says Sanam as she touches the heater. “The other day, my son cried because he has no clothes to wear. He said ‘Mom, I’m cold’, but how can we pay for clothes when we borrow food from the store?”
The villagers say that Sanam is a hard-working woman and she even manages to help out the other villagers to make bread. The principal of the village school Avetisyan says that the children of the family are behind in school, but adds: “What can you demand from hungry children?” Sanam’s kids, in their turn, say that they don’t have all the books because only the religion book is free of charge.
There are religious pictures hung on one of the walls of the cold and empty rooms. That is where Sanam prays. There is a chapel in the village and Sanam goes there every Sunday.
“I go and pray every Sunday and on the days when I can’t find bread; God helps me,” says Sanam. She pauses for a second and says: “I don’t know, I have faith in God.”
That day she did not feel the need to pray because she had been able to cook supper with the cabbage that her neighbor had given her. Sanam called that meal “borsh” (Russian soup with vegetables and cabbage leaves), however, there were not enough leaves of cabbage floating in the soup to call it “borsh”. It is hard to call their life a normal life…