The cat jumps on the table. I say to Vahan: “Vahan, aren’t you scared of swallowing cat hair and getting sick?” He gets offended and says: “I love them very much. I will not take them out. Once they took my dog and lost him so that he could never return. The dog made its way back to Charbakh, found our house, but he eats whatever he finds out on the streets.” He brings me his grades for me to see: he has As and Ds and the As are mainly in physical education. He says: “Don’t write my name in the newspaper. My friends will know about it, tease and laugh at me and then I will fight with them.” I tell him: “What are you going to do when you get older?” He says: “I am going to kill Robert Kocharyan”. Why? He says: “I will kill him so that I can sit in the big seat and help the people.” “How are you going to do that?” I ask him. “I will feed the needy,” says Vahan, “or maybe I will be the manager of a meat or bread factory and give food to everybody. I don’t like Kocharyan. I like Putin; I will go to Russia. Putin helps the poor.” I ask him: “What do you want from Kocharyan?” He replies: “Well… I don’t know….I want a bike. Kocharyan will not give me a bike, but Putin will, so I will go to Russia.” Vahan’s mom interferes, but the child does not let his mother get sad and whispers in her ear not to let anyone know that they are poor because the kids at school will know about it. Vahan is proud of himself-so proud that he fakes that he is not hungry and that he has 100% eyesight. But as Vahan goes outside to play, his mother tells us that he can’t see with one of his eyes. Vahan is the seventh child in the family. The oldest of the seven children is serving in the Karabagh army. He will complete army service in December and return home. Nobody has visited him during his service. I ask his mother Nina: “How come you don’t apply to the military commission? After all, you are a mother of seven and they can send you to see your boy for no charge.” She says: “Who can I apply to? What law is there? If it were by law, my son was not even supposed to go to serve in the Karabagh army, but rather somewhere near the home. What will happen if I apply to them? How can I go there without buying something from the store as a show of hospitality?….soon it will be two years and they still haven’t sent him on vacation. Why?-because we are poor and we have no money to give them.” Vahan will not go to the army as his brother did because his one eye is blind. Even the doctor said that: “I didn’t know that he had that problem. He is nine years old but it had never crossed our minds that he had an eye problem. The doctor said that if Vahan was born with one eye blind, then that could not be cured. But if it had just happened, then he had to go through an operation.” Vahan’s mother doesn’t know for sure whether his eye has been blind since birth or got blind during the years. The doctors do not confirm anything. They count how many family members there are because treatment is free for families consisting of seven children. The mother of seven tells that ever since birth, Vahan has been ill, has always had high temperature and he suffocates when his throat gets filled. Recently, Vahan loses consciousness, he swallows his tongue and the family barely saves him. The doctor assures that it will pass, however, it continues. Vahan loses self-consciousness, turns blue and swallows his tongue. Doctors say that those are just epileptic attacks, but his mother does not take him to the doctor anymore, claiming that they just do a headcount.
Vahan comes home. I ask him: “How is your eyesight?” He gets confused, bites his teeth and looks at his mother: “It is fine, fine, everything is fine. I can see with both eyes. I see everything. Mother is just lying.” I ask him: “Do you have the flu? Why did you get sick?” “I always have the flu and am always sick. I am a virus. Be careful not to contract me.” Vahan’s other brother is in the 7th grade. He has not gone to school starting from September 1 and had decided not to go because he has nothing to wear. His mom did not force him to go since she understood that he could not go to school wearing nothing. Now he goes to school; some people gave him worn clothes. His mom was clever enough to tell her son to tell the others at school that he was sick for the past two months. He did just that and currently attends school on a regular basis.
This nine member family lives in inhuman conditions. Seven children grow up in a shack, hungry and wear other people’s clothes. Their mother is Russian by nationality. She met her husband in Russia when he was serving in the army, they fell in love, got married and came to Armenia. Nina has not seen her parents for decades. They have gotten old and Nina can’t go see them because her children are starving and they don’t even have money for a loaf of bread. She hasn’t heard from her relatives. They either survive or don’t during the cold winter in the shack. They have neither warm clothes nor heating. The children sleep on the floor, on the cold cement; they don’t even have beds. They have some jackets which are worn out and they use that as blankets. They lie on the floor, cover themselves with the jackets and sleep freezing; the cold keeps their eyes from shutting. An 80 year old grandmother living next to them died. The neighbors decided to give the woman’s bed to the family instead of burning it. Now, two of the children sleep on the woman’s old bed. Mrs. Nina’s face is solid and she tells us cold-heartedly that the other child used to go to karate. During practice, he felt bad. They checked him and told the mother that the child has a heart defect. The mother of seven tells us that they have discovered some illnesses in the child’s organism. This woman even thinks about feeding her children while she talks with us. There is no electricity and she can not bake bread. Vahan says that his throat hurts and he is suffocating. Nina does not respond; she is silent and ashamed. Her husband works in a rock factory. He says: “I have gone to the Shengavit district. They don’t send me away, but they don’t help either. One time they said that they would help us. I used to go the district for 4-5 weeks and I used to spend money each time I went. In the end, they gave us 3,000 dram but I had already spent double the amount for going and coming back.” Vahan tries to cheer his mom up by his mischievous acts; however, there is no smile on Nina’s face. She says: “Vahan has attacks from nervousness. The doctor told us that that illness starts from nervousness. He said that it would pass, but it continues. The more he grows, the more the attacks increase.” Vahan puts his sister’s metal rings on his fingers. He gets pleasure by doing this and says: “I have a bride, but I am not going to say who. I will marry her, take her to Russia, introduce her to Putin and we will help the poor. I have friends at school, but they can not tease me because I will beat them up.” Nine year old Vahan can defend himself, but he becomes aggressive when he gets into a fight. He conscientiously defends himself every second and forbids anyone to feel sorry for him.