The orphans staying at the orphanage located on the 3rd floor of the Kanaker #9 professional technical institute hostel are already over the age of 30. They have faced so many hardships what with keeping food on the table, keeping their dignity and surviving, that they have started acting like men and have turned cruel.
Although the women live in separate rooms, however they are like one family. Their childhood years are what bring them together. They gather, reminisce about the past, they talk and try to forget the hardships they have faced in the past. The women say that they can’t forget all the bad days and one of them always remembers something sad every day.
“168 Hours” met the women in Irina’s room where they had gathered as usual to try and heal the wounds. The orphans told us that recently they threw a party and they were so happy that they screamed their lungs out. I ask them “Why?” and they say:
“The director of the Gavar orphanage died and we were celebrating. It’s good that he died. We really had a good time and turned the whole thing into kind of a wedding party.”
“A human being died and you were partying?” I asked.
“He wasn’t a human being, he was more like Hitler and we were his hostages. Anyone at the orphanage will tell you that there was Nazism here. They used to humiliate us and hurt us however they could..”
As I was talking to these women, I felt the hatred in their eyes. They remembered their childhood after every word they said. As they continued, each woman kept interrupting the other and talked with disgust about the past childhood days, from which they can’t break free. They say that living in the orphanage is like living in jail, where your friends are not the ones that treat you like dirt, but rather the workers and that stays instilled in your mind until the day you die. Even released, they feel that someone is going to cause them harm sooner or later. They want to defend themselves, but realize that they are no longer in the orphanage. They are very tense and careful.
I talked to a girl at the orphanage, who wished to stay anonymous due to the fact that she doesn’t like to mention that she is from the orphanage. She didn’t take part in the discussion at first. Let’s just call her Nare.
“I remember, when we were little, at the age when we were just getting used to going to the bathroom, we often didn’t make it in time and wet ourselves. Well, as you know, children at that age have problems with going to the bathroom. You’re not born knowing when to go to the bathroom. After all, how can you understand when you’re only 2 or 3 years old, right…? Whenever we didn’t make it in time to the bathroom and made our clothes dirty, the nanny used to take us outside, take off our clothes, pour cold water in the winter and clean our buttocks and body with a broom. When we moaned from the pain, she used to tell us that there was no way that she would clean with her hands. I can still feel the scratches of the broom on my skin. They used to clean us with the broom you use to sweep the floor or the dirt on a toilet seat. They used to clean us orphans that way.”
In contrast to her friends, Nare talks more calmly, nicely and she has delicate facial features. She says that she was a very good girl when she was young. She has always tried to stay out of the crowd and simply be an observer. Nare lives alone and doesn’t have any relatives. She has never tried to find her mother because she has never been informed about her. I ask the orphan women whether or not she has tried to find her relatives after getting out of the orphanage. Everyone stays silent for a minute, mutter a couple of words and then claim that their mothers are dead. But when they say “dead”, you can feel that they only think that their mothers are dead, when they could really be alive.
We had no right to talk about attacks
“We used to gather around as old girlfriends and talk about our lives at the orphanage. They say orphans are treated better nowadays at orphanages. We have only heard that, we don’t know for sure. Many things have changed. Benevolent organizations are lending a helping hand and they make sure the children are not hurt or humiliated.”
The women consider their lives spent at the orphanage as the lives of hostages in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Gayane remembers when she was in the 1st grade and couldn’t pronounce the first letter of the Armenian alphabet “a”. The teacher had simply hit her head on the parquet. Once, when her ink had run out, the teacher had hit her on the head with a wooden stick and told her that she had done that on purpose. The women say that they still have marks on their heads because they were hit for every little thing.
“One time, the teacher threw the wood at me, it hit my head and blood starting flowing from my nose…it was the wooden stick from the closet on which we used to hang our clothes,” remembers Irina and says that none of the orphans had the right to let others know about the attacks. At the time, the orphanage was sponsored by the Enlightenment ministry and there were over 400 orphans. Armine tells the story of how one time, when the ministry representatives had “taken the time” to visit the orphanage, she had told them that the teacher had beaten her.
“I told them that me and the kids had gone to the park and one of my shoes had got lost in the swamp. The next day, the head of the team noticed that I was hiding one of my feet behind the other. He asked me to show my foot and when he saw it, he asked me where my other shoe was and gave me a good beating.”
Armine recalls that when she told about the attacks, she found herself in an even worse situation. The director of the orphanage got angry (the representatives still hadn’t left the orphanage) and threatened Armine: “Come here, come here, now you’re going to get it…” After which they beat Armine once again and prohibited her to go to the buffet to eat. As punishment, they made her stand on one foot so that everyone could understand what the consequences were for those who dared to speak out about what goes on inside the orphanage. The orphans of the orphanage say that they haven’t seen the Nazis treat the Germans in the movies like the workers treated them at the orphanage. For example, if the orphans said one word about the beatings, the staff would put the orphan in freezing water and make him or her stay there. Now they are amazed to hear that there were no lines for bread during the Soviet Union and that “there was everything in stores”. They often used go for days without food at the orphanage.
“The director stole the bread or bottle of milk from us. They used to give us a piece of bread about the size of a palm. We used to bite a little peace and save another piece for later,” remembers Gayane.
She also remembers that the orphanage used to get clothes from Yerevan during those years. After the citizens of Yerevan left, the workers distributed the clothes among themselves, leaving the orphans with old, ragged clothes.
“The director was an anarchist and kept beating the orphans. One day, he took me to his office and beat me with any hard thing you can imagine. Our homeroom teacher entered the office, saw what he was doing and asked him how he could hit a girl like that. I was told to run quickly before he didn’t kill me. I left…” remembers Armine.
Mrs. Asia was like a mother
I ask the orphans: “But when you get together, isn’t there something good that you remember?
They reply: “Of course there is. We had good teachers too. I remember Mrs. Asia. Whenever she used to come to see us, she always brought roasted grains of wheat. Mrs. Asia was kind of like a mother. We have had teachers much better than any parent. They cared for us. We had a nurse by the name of Mrs. Rima and she treated as if we were her kids. The director and the storage room keeper were the worse, they were like Gestapo.”
After getting out of the orphanage, they felt free, but as they say, “we didn’t feel that free”. They are not cared for anymore and it’s kind of hard for them to adapt to the new society. The struggle continues. They struggle to get a loaf of bread each day, for their individuality, they are in search of jobs and try to overcome the obstacles of life.
“All the hardships that I have gone through in my life give me the strength to take care of myself and my child. There has been a time when I have gone from door to door asking for money for bread to feed my child. I don’t want my child to live the childhood that I have lived. I will go on, it’s okay. I will never leave my child in an orphanage because I have been there and seen it all. I don’t know how other parents feel about their children, but I will sacrifice my life for my child. I am very careful,” says Irina. She says that she is the man of the house; she puts a heater in the home during the winter, climbs trees, cuts the dry branches, shreds them and brings them home.
“We are living different lives now, we often forget that we are females. I have done everything from carrying heavy bags to other manly work. You always have to fight,” they say.
Thirty-five year old Irina’s 11-year old daughter goes to school wearing the clothes given to her by their neighbors. Irina has been living in a hostel ever since 1986. Back then, the government had promised to provide her with a home, but it didn’t fulfill its promise. Now the state only provides homes for the orphans who have left the orphanage after 1991.
“They tell us that we got out during the Soviet Union and the government should have done that back then. They say that they are only going to provide homes for orphans that have left the orphanage after 1991. Basically, we are citizens of Armenia, but since we have lived during the Soviet Union, we should probably ask president of Russia Putin to help solve our issues because here they don’t even register us. We don’t even know who we are. During the dark years, they “helped us out” and told us to stay in the hostel. The hostel is privatized and we might get kicked out. If they tell us to vacate the premises, we will be forced to settle down under the walls of the Opera building,” says Irina.
The women staying on the 3rd floor are unemployed. They earn 1000 drams from time to time by sweeping the homes of others. Irina gets to pay for electricity and pay off some loans at the store with the 11,500 AMD subsidy she receives from “Paros”.
I leave the half-destructed and pathetic rooms of the hostel’s 3rd floor. They could tell me for days about the hardships they have faced and how they are living now. I leave the building and think to myself that it would be nice to see them only remember Mrs. Asia and Mrs. Rima whenever they gather to talk.