Nerkin Hand village is being “closed”

02/10/2005 Armine AVETYAN

The Nerkin Hand village of the Siunik region has 37 economies. The
electrician of the village Rafik collects only 50000 drams each month.
Though there is one person from each family that earns a salary,
however, this is not enough even for solving small problems in their
lives.

There is no more money to buy clothes, a TV set, a fridge. They live in
ruined houses with smoke-dried walls. They use “centuries old” stones
as legs for the furniture in order to keep them standing. They make
food by using fire wood. The houses are so deep in the forest, that it
seems to people that they are on the island of Robinson Crusoe. But
then again, this is Armenia, which is moving towards a democratic and
developed nation.

Only 82 of the people living there have the right to vote. The officers
of the region and the authorities visit the village every now and then
during elections. The villagers don’t consider these people as very
promising and they don’t pay attention to their promises. And the
Ministers from the capital visit this place only for enjoying the view
of Basuta river, eating barbecue and taking a breath of fresh air. “We
come here to see more exotic things”,- say the villagers with irony.
These villagers watch only soap operas on TV, they gather around in a
house where there is a TV set and fall into another reality for at
least one hour. They think, that news and other programs are not for
them, because whatever happens in Armenia and the world doesn’t concern
Nerkin Hand at all. There are six teachers and seven school children at
Nerkin Hand school. The school has an eight year system but there are
no students in the second, 6-th and 7-th grades. There was only one
first grade student this year. The other grades have one or two
students. Anahit Voskanyan is a homeroom teacher, but she also teaches
history, because the school doesn’t have a historian. The English
teacher is an army soldier in Kapan and visits the school three days a
week. Homeroom teacher Gasparyan teaches the students of the third and
the first classes together and works for 22 minutes with each of them.

“After finishing these eight years everyone leaves for Kapan, only old
people stay here. This village is very far from the city and there is
no transportation here. There is nothing here to keep young people
stay”,- says Gasparyan.

The last wedding party in this village was four years ago and the last
child born was two years ago. More people die here than live. If they
expect to have a birth they take that woman to Kapan one month before
the birth date, because her pains may start unexpectedly and they may
not find any car to take her to the city in time. The local people
think, that their village will be “closed” very soon. You can hardly
find anyone here who hasn’t been bitten by a snake. In case there is no
chance to take them to Kapan, they suck the posion out of the body.
Still, Nerkin Hand is an important village, it is the last village of
Armenia, after which it is the territory of Zangelan. It is in the
territory of “Shikahogh” preserve, near the well-known Pine park and
Basuta river. And in this wonderful corner of this natural land it is
not clear whether the village entered into the forest or the forest
moved down from the mountains to the village. In 1985 the village was
removed down that territory for 3-4 km with the purposes to strengthen
the border with Azerbaijan. Azeri people conquered the village on April
24, 1993. In six months Armenians could take Nerkin Hand back from
them, but it was fully collapsed and burnt.

“We had about 4000 books, but they burnt all the books. Now I have
collected 600 books from different places, I have made a new library, I
have 17 permanent visitors”,- says librarian Anahit Babayan.

It is going to be the election for the village head position on October
9. All the villagers are going to vote for Khachatur Baghdasaryan, who
is the current head of this village. They are satisfied with his job.
They say they don’t care about Robert Kocharyan and the others, because
they don’t know how they do their job, they don’t know anything about
them. No one comes here from other places. Only sometimes a couple of
representatives of environmental protection NGOs come here working in
the scopes of grant programs. The villagers go to see new people only
with the purpose to know something new. They have no other
expectations. The Nature is lavish to them here, they collect fruit and
nuts from the forest. They collect wood and broken branches from the
forest for making fire. They grow everything in their gardens. But they
can’t cultivate much grain, because the only tractor in their village
was made in the 1950s and after that they use it for one hour. They
have to repair it for six hours.

“To tell you the truth, there is no money to pay for it. We buy flour and our wives make bread”, says electrician Rafik.

The villagers don’t cut “healthy” trees, they know what the “forest
good” means for them. They have heard, that the ministers have sent
people from the capital to cut the oak trees of Mtnadzor.

“I work here all day long, I am a watchman, and I don’t let anyone cut
trees. I will not let anyone cut those trees”,-says the watchman of
Pine park, Grandpa Hayk who is at the age of 80.

He gets 13000 dram each month for doing his job.

“It is not enough to pay for electricity and for sending the child to
school (he points on his third grade grandchild), we can hardly take
care of him. He will leave for the city as soon as he grows up”.

Derenik Hovhannisyan has created nursery gardens and is going to enlarge his own pine garden.

“The darkness of the forest doesn’t let pine trees grow well. I collect
seeds and cultivate them. Later I will plant the trees on both banks of
the Basuta river.”

Sos Sargsyan helps Derenik a little in the scopes of his “Green
Country” NGO programs. He does most of the job on his own. Despite the
reality of the village, Derenik tries to keep his village alive. He
wants to found a farm enterprise and create vacancies for the
villagers. He left for Italy last autumn and participated in trade
exhibition of agricultural food production. The vodka and conserve
types, which he had taken with him, interested people very much. But
since he doesn’t have any resources, he cannot produce ecologically
clean agricultural food in his motherland, sell them and help the
village, which is close to the border, rise on its own two feet.

Other villages that are in the same situation invlude Tsav village,
which has 100 economies, and the other three small villages of
Shikahogh.