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I’d Rather Eat Dry Bread with My Children Than Send Them to An Orphanage [June 4, 2007] Twenty-nine-year-old Zhenya is the mother of six young children. Three of them—Arayik , Arman and Armine—are in school; the others—Mariam, Edgar and Erik—are still too young. Zhenya's husband, Samvel Ordubekyan, is in prison for a crime she says he did not commit. Zhenya lives with her children in a rented apartment on 8th Street in Nor Halberd. She does not have a job, and pays the rent out of her children's government allowances. “We always had a problem with housing; when we married we were living in a rented apartment. My husband worked as a guard at his friend's café, and I sometimes cleaned rich people's houses, so we survived living from paycheck to paycheck. My husband's brother lived with his family in their father's home. They had financial problems and were forced to sell the apartment. We got two thousand dollars from the sale. We had debts and we paid them, and with the money that was left over we left for Russia. This was in 2002. We worked there. In 2003, Edgar, my fifth child, was born. In 2004 we decided to come back to Armenia, to see our relatives. We came but couldn't go back since we had spent all of our money. At that time, we moved into the summer house of a friend of ours who was in Russia. In 2006 my sixth child, Erik, was born. On May 31 of that year a boyhood friend of Samvel's visited them with some other men. They ate and talked, but after several hours the conversation turned into a fistfight. Samvel and his friend were beaten up. The friend was taken to the hospital with serious injuries. “During this fight, my husband's was injured, and my husband was injured, too. The other people involved in the fight went to the hospital and somehow managed to persuade my husband's friend to give false testimony against my husband, saying that my husband had beaten him up, and not they. The friend, who had known my husband for 35 years, agreed. My husband was arrested for something he didn't do, and imprisoned for three years and four months.”
Zhenya and her six children stayed on in the summer house, but a little while later the owner of the house returned from Russia and when he found out that her husband was in prison he asked her to leave the house. “ I didn't want to bother my relatives, so I decided to find housing myself. I couldn't find an affordable place to rent; because of the six children no one agreed to rent their house. I had an acquaintance in Nor Kharberd, and I asked him to let me live in his summer house. He provided us with a shed next to his house. The shed had a dirt floor. In the winter, the water would trickle from the roof and we would get wet, and the children would shiver from the cold. There were no proper accommodations; we would lie down to sleep on the dirt floor, and we didn't even have electricity. At that time I was advised to send some of the kids to an orphanage, but I would reply that I'd rather eat dry bread with my children than send them to an orphanage. We lived for a year in those appalling conditions. One month ago the landlord came and asked us to leave that place. Fortunately, I was able to find this apartment, whose owner agreed to rent it to me. I have to pay 25,000 out our 45,000 dram allowance.” For several months now the family has been receiving aid from the NGO Mission Armenia. According to Anna Martirosyan, who works for Mission Armenia, Zhenya learned about the organization and came to them for help. “Three times a week Zhenya receives dry food from our soup kitchen in Erebuni. They have been recently included on the organization's list and still have many unsolved problems, but their biggest problem is housing and we have already sent a letter on their behalf to the president of the Diakonika Charity Fund, to provide them with an apartment from the fund's apartment procurer, “Anna Markosyan said. “We need that apartment like air and water, because I cannot pay the rent and the children are hungry. If there was a caretaker for them, I could work. Every month I visit my husband, and that's an expense, too. Also, his condition is not good; last year he swallowed a spoon to prove his innocence. There was even a small article about that in the newspaper Aravot on November 17, 2006. His lawyer wrote a letter to the director of the prison, asking for his client to be moved to the Central Hospital, but he received a reply stating that that during an examination no spoon was found in his stomach. I'm sure the spoon is still in his stomach, because my husband has convulsions on a daily basis and his condition is quickly deteriorating. I have to demand that he be examined again, and if the spoon is still in his stomach I will sue those responsible.” Ani Gasparyan |
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