Seryoja, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

This year’s special edition on homelessness in Yerevan by Edik Baghdasarian and Karine Asatryan of Hetq Online is now available. The investigation follows up a series of reports by Baghdasarian as well as a documentary film produced by Hetq Online and Yerkir Media TV last year.

Excerpts of this year’s update along with links to the full articles in Armenian and English can be found below.

Exactly one year ago Hetq Online published its special issue on homelessness in Yerevan. As a result of our research we discovered that approximately fifty homeless people in Yerevan die needlessly each year from the cold, and have done so for the past four years. There is no state body or even one single NGO that deals with the problem of ‘rough sleeping’ in Armenia. There is nobody that even attempts to address this issue during the cold winter months.

Each person that appears on the streets has their own story to tell. Many couldn’t survive the misfortunes of their past lives, some were abandoned by relatives, and others lost their property and homes in the most unlikely of circumstances. All found refuge on the streets.

Full Introduction: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Seryoja, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

Seryoja was born in 1948 in the village of Artsvaberd in the Shamshadin region of Armenia, but now lives with two others, Susan and Russian Sergey, in a dilapidated boiler room near the main train station in central Yerevan. “I was one-year-old when my father went to the army and came back with another woman. Then he took me to Baku,” he remembers.

“My father constantly beat me, and my stepmother argued with me,” he says. “I was trying not to go home, but missed my classes and was sent to juvenile prison. When I was released I didn’t return to my father, but instead ran away to live with my mother in Armenia. I worked at the railway station, and for a while was a conductor on a train.”

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Sergey, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

For the past two years Sergey has led the life of a vagrant in Yerevan, and sleeps wherever he can. In the summer he sleeps on the streets, and in winter under any shelter he can find. Now he lives with two other homeless people, Seryoja Vardazaryan and Susan, in a derelict boiler room in the yard of a building near the central train station.

“I’ve known Sergey for two years, ” says Servoja.” We live together and have became close friends. When the weather is warm we find work in construction, but when there is no work, like now, we collect bottles, empty bags and exchange them for money.”

Sergey says that people in Armenia treat him badly in the streets. They humiliate him when they see that he is homeless.

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Aram, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

Aram was released from prison five years ago and worked in construction. He even rented a place to live, but during the last two years has slept on the streets. “My health is too bad to work in construction now,” he explains. “I collect bottles from rubbish tips instead, but not from people’s homes because they don’t treat me well.”

When the New Year comes, Aram’s business gets better because the number of bottles in rubbish bins increases. He says that the number of people that live like this in Yerevan is not small, and puts the number at more than a thousand.

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Ira and Svetlana, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

For Ira Kritina and Svetlana Golubkina, the New Year came a few days later on January 3 when their friend Vika visited with food and drinks. She didn’t come for a few hours, but agreed to spend the night with her two Russian friends in the open air underneath a polythene tent at the Komitas Pantheon. The women don’t remember when they fell asleep that night, but they do remember waking up screaming.

[…]

The homeless Russian women were accepted by the Centre, and were In fact the first homeless patients admitted this year even though the Ambulance Service brought four homeless patients to the Burns Centre during the first week of 2006 alone. According to Hovsep Shamakhyan, Head of the Burns Department, there were 19 cases of frostbite — predominently amongst the homeless — last winter. Six died.

Ira and Svetlana might be more fortunate, however, and have certainly received first aid and the opportunity to bathe. Their ragged and burned clothes went into the rubbish bin, and they’ll receive treatment for at least 22 days at the hospital. “What happens after that?“ jokes one doctor. “We can’t take them to our homes.”

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Yura and Nadezhda, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

This is already the second winter that Yura and his mother have spent living outside, although it’s difficult for him to explain how they came to find themselves in this predicament. ”We used to have an apartment in the 2nd District of Nork, but then it was confiscated,” he says. “Some people came and told us that we had no right to live there, and so we left the apartment.”

Yura says that the apartment in the Building #8 on Moldovakan street was sold by his sister who was registered there with her three children. Both he and his mother didn’t receive anything from the sale of the apartment even though his mother was one of the co-owners. “Life is difficult, and our situation is very complicated,” she says. Nadezhda used to work at a Chemical factory and has lived in Yerevan for 35 years.

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Vika, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

Seryoja found his wife, Vika, in the Komitas Pantheon. A Russian by nationality, she was living there with two homeless friends, Svetlana and Ira, but moved to live with Seryoja near the “Vstrech” bridge in a tent near a dried up lake four months ago.

“We love each other,“ says Vika, who turned fifty long ago. Vika is divorced, but Seryoja doesn’t want to speak about his family. He only says that his wife and children have known how he lives for two years now. “There are plenty of people like us in Yerevan — more than one thousand,” he says.

Vadim, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

Vadim’s mother died from a serous illness last March, but he continues to visit her friends, and sometimes takes them food. Although Vadim is not a homeless, he nonetheless also needs food and clothes. He lives with his uncle at #32 Smbat Zoravar Street. His uncle is over fifty, divorced, and hasn’t got any children of his own. His uncle’s former wife, Vika, is one of the Russian homeless in Yerevan.

Vadim’s mother was Russian, but his father is Armenian. He never knew his father because he left for Germany before his son was born. He does, however, know that his father’s name is Armen. Vadim doesn’t attend school and doesn’t know how to read and write. He says that he studied for a few years at Boarding school #2, but he has already forgotten what he learned there.

Vadim wants to attend school, but only if it is the type that he can return back home to in the evening. In the meantime, Vadim helps his uncle. “Sometimes I work,” he says, although he doesn‘t receive any allowance or assistance for his labor. Instead, he collects bottles from rubbish tips in order to buy bread and cigarettes.

Full Article: [ English ] [ Armenian ]

Homeless, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online

None of the homeless in Yerevan will be able to spend even one night in a shelter originally intended for them despite the fact that 85 million drams was allocated for its construction in the 2006 budget. Nevertheless, Jemma Baghdasaryan, Head of the Department for the Disabled and Elderly in the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, says that “the Ministry is concerned about the problem of ‘these people.’”

“We had planned that the every needs of those appearing on the streets for whatever reason would be provided for,” she says when speaking about a Center that doesn’t even exist. Construction of the shelter should start in April or May, although towards the end of last year, the government said that it lacked the financial resources to do so.

Full Article [ English ] [ Armenian ]

For the full edition in Armenian and English, please access the Hetq Online web site. There are also links to some of the articles via photographs posted on the Hetq Online Photoblog. More images and links will be uploaded when I can find the time.

A six minute excerpt from last year’s documentary film made by Hetq’s Editor-in-Chief Edik Baghdasarian and Yerkir Media TV is also available for viewing online in Windows Media Format. Armenian and English versions of the full 28 minute broadcast quality documentary are available from Hetq Online in Yerevan.

There’s also another shorter excerpt from the documentary film below. It’s of Gor, another homeless person encountered during last year’s investigation and who unfortunately died three days after this video was shot.

Hetq Online is published every Monday by the Investigative Journalists of Armenia at http://www.hetq.am. Video excerpts © Hetq Online/Yerkir Media TV