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Gevork and Hasmik were born in town of Leninakan in northern part of Armenia. The earthquake killed all of their family. They are the only survivors. The Russian government relocated them to the special campgrounds somewhere in Russia where they stayed for two years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and independence of Armenia, Gevork and Hasmik so as another 800 Armenian orphans were brought back to Armenia. Due to the lack of the budget funds all orphans were dispersed among existing orphanages that led to overcrowding up to 3 times.
Araxia Harutunyan and her sixteen-month-old daughter Lusy survived two days in their collapsed building basement. They survived only with two cans of peaches that were in the basement nearby. Very low oxygen and dust made the mother sick and she lived only 5 days after she was rescued. Lusy lives till now with damaged lungs and is in need of constant medical care. Her neighbors were taking care of her for six months. But hardship and a cold winter led them to the decision to take her to the orphanage.
Hovik Sarkisyan was born on October 21, 1999 in children’s hospital .. 4 in Yerevan. The cost of the hospital was $500. His mother left him in the hospital to get the money and never returned. He was placed in orphanage on November 10, 1999. He is a very smart boy and his dream is to become the president of Armenia, but the lack of classrooms, teachers, and books is keeping him away from his education.19 March 2001 -- Armenia's institutions for children are filled to overflowing, and not equipped to meet the growing numbers of abandoned and impoverished children. The deaths of thirteen institutionalized mentally disabled children probably from malnutrition, in winter 2000, was a brutal reminder that Armenia's institutions for its most vulnerable population are in serious crisis. It was by no means an isolated incident. But the hard reality of life as a vulnerable child is beginning to effect more and more children as Armenia's chronic poverty bites ever deeper, and increasing numbers of otherwise healthy children are being committed to state institutions by families who cannot afford to feed them. Poverty is dividing families.Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this landlocked southern Caucasian country which borders Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, has begun to fray. An earthquake in 1988 killed 25,000 people and destroyed industry, and a protracted war with neighbouring Azerbaijan during and since independence drained the economy and killed an estimated 20,000 Armenians. The collapse of the Russian economy in 1997 shattered fragile Armenia's resources. Citizens are emigrating en masse; corruption is pandemic; unemployment is driving families apart as husbands seek work abroad; women are turning to prostitution to support their children; the health and education systems are starved of funds and supplies, and often on the point of collapse; and the population of institutionalized children has grown tenfold in as many years, with no sign of slowing down. Yet of the estimated 10,000 child inmates, approximately four of every five are there because their families can no longer afford to feed, clothe, school, or care for them.The Republic Special Boarding School in the capital Yerevan, is one of the best-run children's institutions, chiefly because it is supported by UNICEF and Medecins Sans Frontiers. Rima Haroutunyan, a social worker employed at the school, says that increasing numbers of children are there purely because of poverty. Most are from divorced families where the parents are unemployed.Separated by povertyAccording to every social worker interviewed for this article, the vast majority of institutionalized children come from families who would gladly care for them if they could afford to. It is a new phenomenon in Armenia, directly attributable to the sudden worsening of the economy over the past two years. In the corridors of the school a mother tearfully embraces her four children whose ages range from three to eight, and whom she hasn't seen for a week. An old woman breathlessly explains that she has travelled one hundred kilometres with a fare provided by a charity in order to visit her grandchildren. Two of thousands of such families throughout Armenia who are separated by the scourge of simple poverty. This most fortunate of Armenian children's institutions is, despite its relative good fortune, a bleak house.Many children have fathers who went abroad for work. Thirty of the Republic Special Boarding School's 100 children have mothers who have "gone abroad to work," most often a euphemism for leaving Armenia to work as contract prostitutes in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East (according to a recent report, Armenia has become a "point of origin" for sex workers). A number of the children have suffered abuse, such as being forced into prostitution by family members, or sold. One social worker who asked not to be identified said that she has heard of other children being taken abroad as part of the trafficking of women feeding the burgeoning sex industry, and the Armenian Ministry of the Interior has established an investigation into the trade."We didn't know child labour before," says UNICEF Officer Naira Avetisyan. "But it has emerged. Visit any market, and children are working instead of attending classes."Aid workers tell stories of parents literally lining-up outside directors' offices to gain admission for their children into one of Armenia's 51 state institutions for children. In the Vanadzor orphanage for socially vulnerable children, teacher Marina Davtyan says that this year the number of abandoned newborn children has steeply increased, and that their 100 children are all from families who cannot provide food for their children.But in a country in which health and education services are, in the words of UNICEF's Naira Avetisyan, "on the point of complete collapse," institutions for children perceived as socially undesirable are low on the list of priority for state assistance. They are almost all dilapidated, often badly-run, and inadequately staffed by poorly-paid personnel.A daily struggleIn most institutions there is a daily struggle to find food and clothing for the children, many of whom have no shoes. None of the staff, according to a 2000 report by UNICEF Child Protection Officer Josi Salem-Pickartz on Armenian children's institutions, have had any form of specialist training for the last twenty years. In a number of institutions, gifted children from poor families learn alongside the mentally disabled, studying curricula designed for the latter. Buildings are in a state of dangerous disrepair. There is little or no heating.The running of these institutions is, according to one investigative journalist who has spent the past two years researching them, "institutionalized cruelty." Edik Baghdasarian, who has made a number of television documentaries on the abuse of Armenian children and the disabled in government care, says that initially he targeted the staff who ran the institutions, until he realized that they were largely unqualified for their jobs, and living in conditions of extreme poverty themselves. "How can you blame people for neglect, when they are worried about feeding and educating their own children?"Furthermore, there is a threadbare level of co-ordination between responsible ministries and the institutions themselves. Various government ministries order the severing of electricity, water, gas and telephone lines as bills are not met, unpaid because other ministries have failed to provide funds. In theory, the government provides money for food and salaries and basic upkeep: In practice, directors often borrow money or beg for food on credit, and unpaid and impoverished staff have been known to steal it. One director was recently taken to the court for unpaid bills (a six month bread bill for the orphanage in question).UNICEF's is advocating with the Armenian government to improve the sometimes appalling conditions of children's institutions, and to ensure that Armenia abides by its international treaty obligations for the protection of children."We have excellent laws, based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child," says UNICEF's Naira Avetisyan. "But no proper regulations to ensure enforcement." She emphasizes that many of the orphanages and schools are full of good intentions. "But good intentions will not buy food, heat a room, or educate a child. That's the responsibility of good government."Armenia's disintegration blackens outlook for its children19 March 2001 -- Post-earthquake, post-war, and post-Soviet Armenia is a country beset by aftershock: Its citizens are leaving in droves, and its children are bearing the brunt of failure.Naira Avetisyan's memory of the Armenian earthquake: "I will never forget the smell of sugar mixed with blood. All these horribly injured people on the helicopters, covered with coagulating sweet liquid, the streets filled with sugar."It was midnight, 7 December 1988, the first night of many airlifts to come, and as a young medical intern Naira was airlifting casualties in military helicopters from the ruined town of Spitak for treatment in the capital. "Many just died during the flight. We had no drugs. There was nothing left in the town, nothing apart from bodies and grieving people."The once prosperous manufacturing town of Spitak was at the epicentre of an earthquake that killed 25,000 people in this southern Caucasian country a dozen years ago. Around 16,000 people perished in Spitak as flimsy Soviet apartment buildings caved in on one another and the town's sugar processing plant imploded in a cloud of white icing sugar and concrete slabs.Today, the rebuilt quarters of Armenian towns are reminiscent of the help that poured into the country at the time - the Italian, French, and Uzbek quarters, the Czech School, the Italian hospital, the British Lord Byron School. The world gave generously to pull people from the rubble, to clear the shattered buildings and to rebuild houses.But there is something unchanged about the brooding groups of unemployed and unshaven men hugging every corner of every town and village in this region, as if the earthquake had occurred only a year or two ago: The growing malnutrition; the desperate poverty; the flimsy metal huts that house half the population in towns like Spitak; the general lack of security that seems to pervade daily existence for most people: all these factors conspire to give an atmosphere of numb shock and sadness.Yet Armenia receives one of the highest levels of American government aid, second only per head of population to Israel. And it is clear from what one writer has called the "enclave development" of wealthy suburbs of Armenia and the banks, restaurants and car showrooms of downtown Yerevan, that a portion of the population is benefiting from the corruption and cronyism that typifies Armenia, along with many post-Soviet societies.People are escapingFrom a population of 3.5 million in 1989, it is thought that somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million people have left the country to try their luck abroad. This includes around half of the 300,000 Armenian refugees displaced from neighbouring Azerbaijan during the three year war fought between these two southern Caucasus countries as the Soviet Union disintegrated. The fertility rate of women has plummeted to less than half it's 1990 rate. Towns and villages are recording zero or negative birth rates. Women are choosing to terminate pregnancy in unprecedented numbers. One aid worker identified a woman who had had almost 40 abortions. People exchange air tickets to Moscow for their apartments.Preliminary indicators from a UNICEF-conducted nutrition survey in Armenia suggest that malnutrition has tripled to 12 per cent of children up to the age of five, reaching almost one fifth among Armenia's huge refugee population. Stunting is easy to ascertain from the ages of abnormally short children.Gohar says she would leave Spitak, and Armenia tomorrow if she could, and if her husband was willing to abandon his ailing parents and impoverished family. She admits that with a husband earning $80 a month she is "one woman out of a thousand in this country, but I would leave tomorrow if I could. I'm so tired of my life." The flimsy and cramped box hut in which she lives, built as temporary refuge after the earthquake, was where her young child was killed, scalded to death by a pot of boiling water overturned from the clumsily constructed stove that sits in the centre of the room.Gohar suffers from a rare genetic disorder, and was meant to be receiving drugs for free, but a medical system in a state of collapse has meant demands for payment for the treatment, which she cannot afford. Nor can she afford the increasing demands of a disintegrating education system for her two step-children.For the first time last year, Armenia's government funded less than 30 per cent of the nation's health budget. The education budget has been reduced to a quarter of its 1990 level. One hospital director freely admits that patients are illegally charged for drugs, "since that is the only way that we can afford to keep our doors open."The steep increase in maternal mortality is directly attributed to reduced health expenditure. Teachers and health workers report of intermittent salaries for the past two years. "Nothing this year. Paid for the month of January last year. And up to August of 1999," says the director of the Gyumri district maternity hospital Dr. Felix Grigorian. "The whole health system has collapsed." Malaria has re-emerged in Armenia for the first time in 30 years, with 2000 cases reported in 1999 (some even on the outskirts of the capital city of Yerevan).The United Nations says that one third of Armenia's population is living in "extreme poverty," surviving on less than $1 per day. More than two thirds of the population is classified as "poor." An estimated 20 to 30 per cent of the population is unemployed. When work comes, it is often short-term, badly paid, with long hours and no weekends, often for months on end.The country relies on remittances from families working abroad. Families are divided by husbands working in Russia, who as often as not never return. According to the International Organization for Migration Armenia has now become a point of origin, rather than just a transit point for prostitution. Women are reported by families and their children as working as "maids in rich houses," or "Moscow," or "on sewing contracts in Istanbul," all probable euphemisms for sex work in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Although no one will say it to her, an aid worker admits that orphanage-bound Lilit's mother might well number amongst those women.UNICEF Communication Officer Gohar Khojayan says that, "The education and health sectors are falling apart, but there is a limit to what we can do." Underpaid, demoralized, and outmoded teachers are using decades-old books to teach children in rotting buildings with no school supplies from the government. Parents are expected to pay for admissions to university. The government's concept of education reform is to divest itself of responsibility for pre-school education and children's institutions by handing formal responsibility over to penniless district councils.Organizations like UNICEF are struggling to meet the demands of increasing numbers of marginalized people. "More and more people are falling through the system," says Gohar. UNICEF has maintained the immunization of children, one of the few sectors of the health system to advance in the past five years, and due to lack of funding is concentrating on advocacy for schools and institutions for disabled and abandoned children. "We carry a lot of weight here because we have been consistent and successful with our programmes, but we have to be realistic, living with the constraints of a society in crisis, where enormous changes are taking place."Gohar sighs. "Not that realism is helpful for children. Ten years of neglect is a short time for a state, but a lifetime sentence for a child."
