During the upcoming presidential elections almost all candidates will give different promises concerning health care and social field development. The authorities will say that during the past years they have done their best to improve the situation in those fields, and the opposition will announce that after coming to power they will work better. Neither the promises of the authorities, nor the promises of the opposition will help Vilik, a young man aged 18 living not far from the train station, to improve his health conditions, who is close to death because of not having money as he is being taken from one hospital to another, but doctors don’t help him as he doesn’t have money to pay. They even don’t do it as a state order treatment.
The noise of the cargo train is awful. Some people, who have survived after the earthquake, are living near the train station and each time the train moves with noise they remember the earthquake as their shelters are trembling. Even sometimes they think that it is earthquake and run out of their shelters.
The small cabin, where Siranush grandma, his son’s wife and two grandchildren are living, is surrounded by dogs and other street animals. Vilik, aged 18, lives there too. He is extremely ill. I was trying to enter their shelter, but some dogs attacked me and I stopped. His grandma, Siranush, run out of the cabin being worried about the noise. When she saw me, she started to cry and invited me inside. She was crying and saying that she was losing Vilik. I went inside. It was worse there than outside. Vilik tried to hide her face under the blanket. I asked him, “Do you remember me, do you remember that last year I wanted to come here and write about you but you were angry and didn’t let me approach you?” He answered in shame, “Yes, I do, I thought you were a cop and wanted to catch me”. Later his grandma told me the reason why he was so afraid of cops. This guy, who has been selling chewing gums and newspapers in underground trains, has been beaten by the police. Once a policeman threatened him to go out, but he understood that if he stopped selling papers there he wouldn’t earn anything for living, and the cops persecuted him with hand weapons and since that time Vilik is afraid of the police. Vilik hasn’t gone to school. He has worked from his early childhood to earn for bread. People say when someone buys something from this guy and refuses to take back the coins he gets offended and says that he doesn’t need that money.
Siranush grandma had cried so much that her eyes were all red. She said, “When Vilik was a small child, we used to call him a giant because he started working when he was 5 years old child. He worked in cold weather. He sold chewing gums in winter. You see where we live, I am losing my child, I am begging for help”. Siranush grandma has been left without any help and does not know what to do. “We don’t have any money, we called a doctor, she said that we had to take him to hospital and said that she would arrange a treatment on the basis of state order. She was very kind to us,” says Siranush grandma. She says that they took Vilik to 3rd hospital for children, and he stayed there for two weeks, during which doctors didn’t give any good treatment and said different things concerning the sickness and eventually they didn’t figure out anything and just told that Vilik had to be taken to the hospital of Kanaz. The doctor said that the medicines we needed were very expensive and they could not give such medicines to us. Siranush grandma told us this story in confusion and did not remember what the doctors had said the sickness was. I asked her whether they had taken him to another hospital. “No, they will do the same at other hospitals too and will ignore us. The kid is weak, and we have no one to take care of us and get normal treatment”.
Vilik says that it is along time that he has pain in the legs and suffers at nights. He moved the blanket away and showed his legs, which were swollen and he couldn’t move them. He hardly pronounced the words of the doctor that he could become disabled. Siranush grandma says he doesn’t eat anything, she cries all day long, when she tries to make him eat something, he says to his grandma not to convince him because he is dying and asks her grandma to let him pass away. When Vilik heard his grandma whispering, he cried to go to him and speak in his presence.
We talked to Vilik for some time and his face became better. He asked me whether I like dogs or cats. I said I do like both dogs and cats. He said that he likes dogs and cats very much and said that he could give a small puppy or kitty to me. He said that he had found those dogs and cats in streets and kept them. He showed the small kitties and puppies too. Vilik says he likes them much, and they make him be kind, but now, when he is sick, he can’t take care of them any more. Vilik’s cats and dogs were freezing, but they were guarding their sick owner.
The past and present of this guy are so sad, that when you are listening to the stories told by his grandma, you get more convinced that soon or late this guy would become sick. Their bad living conditions and sad past could not stay without such results.