Our dreams at least came true. On March 27 the U.S. government considered the Armenian authorities legal. Even more, they agreed to give money to our authorities. The head of the U.S. “Millennium challenges” corporation in Washington, John Danilovich signed a contract on giving 235 million dollars to Armenia. As for the U.S. secretary of the Department of State, Condoleezza Rice, she said that our authorities were “elected”. It will be wrong to say that this is a result of the hard efforts of our authorities. This kind of positive development in the American-Armenian financial relations has its deep meaning. Our authorities have always made efforts to get grants and this money is intended for developing the same fields as the starting point of the previous state borrowings was. In 1990 we took borrowings to reconstruct the water supply system and highways of our country (or for developing). Our government has made minimum 8 borrowing contracts since 1994 and has received minimum $100.900.000. Except of the money provided by the state budget, other foundations have provided about $54.600.000 (“Armenia foundation”, “Linsi” foundation) for the purpose of reconstructing the water supply system of our country. And as well as they provided about $46.300.000 for road construction programs. The capacity of the state borrowings intended for road reconstruction is not much because the “Armenia” and “Linsi” foundations have already provided huge financial support for that purpose. People have always been suspicious about whether that money was spent effectively or not. As for the issues regarding the water supply system, these have been forgotten already. But the situation of road construction is different. People have already witnessed the bad quality of road construction in Yerevan. The quality of road construction is very bad and it is seen well after winter. This year these constructions were connected with some stories connected with Artashes Tumanyan. Till that time he had been the main coordinator of road construction works of Armenia. And now it has turned out that there have been a lot of violations in this field. Let’s assume that it is a coincidence that Armenia is now receiving twice more money for the purpose of implementing the same program. This is a very serious sum for Armenian economy. In 2002-2003 when the “Linsi” foundation invested 100 million dollars in our economy everyone felt that the economy was getting active. It doesn’t depend on how much money was really spent and how much was grabbed, anyway the statistical service registered a growth of 40%. And now, when construction is one of the main economical profitable activities, these kind of rapid developments are more realistic. Now we will be able to say again that our nation always “builds”. Of course everything that we build serves us about a couple of years, and after that we have to reconstruct it again. But it is ok: only Germans can say and be proud that their roads serve about 60-70 years without any serious construction. In other countries this mark is a little bit lower. Of course it is not so low as ours and doesn’t harm our consciousness. At least according to official information last year the construction capacity covered the 20% of our GDP. Those people that said that construction was going to deform our economy and it would get into a poor situation after the economical boom, were wrong. They were sure that this constructional boom would last only 2-4 years. The new constructions and new street with American style now prove that our economy will be more deformed in the future. This means that the capacity of construction will increase in our GDP. One of the possible negative things is that because of low salaries people still leave for other countries to work. And these free places are given to the workers from the country who are not experienced in that work and are not professional. And this labor power is the power that has to work in agriculture. In fact this will not harm the agricultural field because there is much extra working power in the country. The problem is that these workers that come from the country to get experience here and work, in a couple of years look for new jobs in abroad because after getting some experience they already feel that are not paid well. As for road construction, it is done by workers from the country, which are not experienced in that field.
It is time to change our traditional saying, now we can say “villagers gather together and asphalt roads” (villagers gather together and break the wood). And people don’t have to get surprised when they see that the asphalt is melting away together with snow. Because neither the specialists are professional nor the workers. So you don’t have to always insist on saying that the only reason is grabbing.