The young boy sitting on a broken couch with the legs crossed is going looking at pictures, which make him either smile or get frown or sometimes he murmurs some words. The boy’s name is Sargis, 12, who constantly looks around and his surprise joy makes his eyes shine. He smiles the way that makes me want to hug him because of his joy. “How are you?” I ask him. Sargis gets a little angry and starts to scornfully turn his back to me. His look gets frozen and he looks at me in anger. There is some frost between me and Sargis, which causes the little boy to ignore and disrespect me. His mother, Heghnar, offers me to sit but when realizing that there is no chair she offers me a chair-like wood and puts all kinds of soft, dirty and worn out cloths.
Then the mother of four children starts to tell me about their difficult life and desperate conditions. Sargis is both with us and without us. I approach him wordless and sit on the coach next to him. He slowly turns his look to me and shows me his photo. Me and his mother look at Sargis without saying anything. I know for sure that my word will distance me and Sargis once again. That is the reason why I leave my questions and words only for the mother. Me, Sargis and the silence communicate with each other to the point when Heghnar starts to tell me the story of the boy. Number 48 wagon on Muratsan street of Spitak city of Lori region drives me crazy. When opening the doors of these wagons, which were put there after the earthquake, the ground runs from your feet. Behind each door there is an awful story. Behind each door there is a crippled child… 12 years ago Sargis was born in the same wagon, which doesn’t even have water and they save the electric power to save money. Heghnar tells, “My daughters are older and Sargis is my only boy. You can see all that – thin walls, inhuman conditions. We live like animals.” The child, who was born in horrible conditions, had pneumonia at the age of 20 days. After being cured in various hospitals the doctors have found autism in him. The mother says that there are numerous reasons for disease but none of them is clear for sure. “You know the earthquake caused a lot of stress and fear. After the earthquake many families broke up because they wouldn’t be able to live together as they got mad. Many people died because of nerves and heart diseases. Those were very stressful years. Now many kids are born handicapped. You open the doors of the wagons of Spitak…” It has been ten years since Heghnar Harutyunyan started to raise the kids on her own. The husband left them and they got divorced. She says the reason for that was the very hard living conditions, the child’s disease, starvation… “The men can’t stand these conditions. So the women get to deal with the hard conditions and take care of the families. The men either got mad or became alcoholics after the earthquake. They were never able to overcome witnessing the dead bodies of their children taken out from the rubbles. That pain is not going to relieve. That pain is killing you.” The husband, which has left them, doesn’t support the family with anything. Heghnar said that she was recently operated on. She had some female disease and for that reason she was not able to work. They live with the welfare worth 33,000 AMD. She wasn’t able to explain how she takes care of the family with that money and how she can pay bills. Spartak attends #2 dormitory school. He returns to their wagon-shack twice a year during winter and summer holidays. Despite missing the mother and sisters he feels much better while being under the constant inspection of doctors. In home conditions he often experiences strokes. “When he is angry with something he becomes very aggressive. He breaks stuff around, hurts the sisters. He appears in a terrible state and becomes furious,” says the mother and assures that even a minor tension of Sargis may continue for days. The mother gives him medicine to appease Sargis. Besides that she tries to calm him down with books and pictures. Heghnar says that she has lost her hope of having an apartment. “They neither give me a house, nor improve our conditions. This is not a life. This is a suffering and torture. After the earthquake we believed that our life in a wagon is temporary but now we lost our hope. We were hoping that at least our children would live well… but their lives were sunk just like ours,” she complains while the neighbor gets into the shack and starts to tell horrible things about Heghnar’s children. “The state should understand that in the disaster zone sheep don’t live. Here we have people, who live with a cruel life and get to raise children for the army. How much longer can we wait for apartments? Then they say that the nation is being lost and fewer boys join the army. How much longer can they wait for an apartment? They say there is nobody to serve the army. Let the state give me an apartment and I will have twin boys to send them to the army. We live in a wagon and I have 5 kids. Can you believe that? We all sleep in the same room. I have skipped man and woman relations for years now because of that. Can the government of our country live in a wagon like this? Look at this sick child. Is this a life?” says the neighbor of Heghnar, a woman named Narine. The specialists have advised Heghnar not to keep Sargis in a wagon by telling her that these conditions very negatively affect the psyche of the child. The mother says that after returning home the child starts to act very nervous in a few days. The boy who’d sit for hours on the couch would start to speak to himself. He assembles words and starts to talk very fast pretending that there is nobody in the wagon. The mother says that the boy often sits like that for hours and speaks to himself. “He speaks to himself without any reaction. He speaks and listens to himself.” Sargis doesn’t have any contact with the outside world but tries to ask himself questions seeking answers. When he doesn’t find those he gets really nervous and smashes everything around.