Homeless, Northern Avenue Construction Site, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2004

Well, not really, as a few of the homeless people I’ve photographed in the past two years died as well. Former actor and Karabakh war veteran Gor, for example, died a few weeks after taking the photo above despite the best efforts of myself, Hetq Online’s Edik Baghdasarian, and Yerkir Media TV. And Bash, another homeless person living in the park surrounding the Chamber Music Hall, died a few days after his 60th birthday.

Bash, whose real name is Samvel, died on 14 January 2005 . A week earlier while preparing the first draft of an article about him on the occasion of his birthday, I had written that this was definitely his last. My colleagues, however, suggested that to say such things about the living was inappropriate and so, I took the line out.

[…]

His body was languished. For eighteen days he hadn’t eaten anything. In hospital Bash couldn’t even sleep on a bed. Instead, he put the bedding on the floor and lay there. This person, who had slept on the ground for nine years, couldn’t even lie on a bed. “I am falling down from the bed on to the floor without even trying,” he said.

Yet, on his last day on earth he finally lay on what would become his death bed. Gasping and helpless without any energy at all, doctors tried to revive him so that they could operate on his frozen feet which needed amputation, but with no success.

Indeed, dozens of homeless people die on the streets of Yerevan in lieu of proper social and psychological services or even any international organization or local NGO that gives a damn. Regardless, today was when I saw my first corpse of a homeless person so perhaps I should have entitled this post “The First Dead Bomzh of Winter” or something.

Wasn’t expecting it, to be honest — the man, somewhere in his mid-40s, was just lying there in the middle of the street as I took my son to kindergarten. He was just sprawled out on the pavement face up outside the American Taxi office in Komitas with a single sheet of newspaper placed over his face. A group of policemen who stood several meters away cursed me when I eventually walked past them. “Why did you take your son past the dead body,” one snarled. Hmmm, let’s think.

Firstly, because I didn’t know there was a dead body in full public view in the middle of a main street until I almost walked on him, and secondly, because you guys are all standing in a group at one end rather than positioning yourselves on both sides. If you had thought to do that you’d be able to warn parents with children on their way to kindergarten that someone had snuffed it and nobody could be bothered to find a blanket to cover the body before people actually stumbled upon the corpse.

I suppose I could have also added that it’s usually customary for policemen to be polite when addressing members of the public, but as I was more concerned with getting my son to his pre-school class I couldn’t be bothered. On the way back, however, I spoke to the policemen who had moved to the other side of the body leaving the other way down the road now unguarded. The newspaper had since blown off his face and poor old John Doe was just lying there with both his eyes and mouth wide open.

Well, all but one of the policemen were in plain clothes and didn’t seem too happy to talk about the dead body, but had no choice after I identified myself as a journalist who had worked with Hetq Online and Yerkir Media TV on the problem of homelessness for the past two winters. However, they didn’t really have any information on the guy even though the area around where I live is full of bomzh because the rubbish at the local market provides them with rich pickings.

Thanks to the work we did at Hetq Online from 2004-6, there’s now a homeless shelter that finally opened by the Government after a massive Homeless Special was published by Hetq last January. Ironically, we had to actually transport most of the homeless we knew to the shelter, but anyway, this is Armenia. Don’t expect the authorities to care. Yet, even with the shelter, the problem of homelessness in Yerevan is still acute. Why?

Well, first, because there are significantly more homeless people than the shelter can accomodate. Then, because the shelter is situated so far away from almost anywhere in Yerevan, it’s a bugger for anyone to get to. It’s not like the homeless can catch a bus or two to travel all the way out of the city to the shelter. Thirdly, there is nobody working with the homeless on the streets to offer them psychological assistance or even inform them about the shelter, and finally, many are still convinced that it’s really just a prison anyway.

Please note that I haven’t even gotten into the other issue of extreme social polarization in Armenia, and all the related ills that go with it in a country unable and sometimes unwilling to concern itself with the welfare of its citizens. However, in the case of the homeless, a lot of the problem is psychological. There’s no doubt about it.

In Komitas, for example, I’ve spoken to some of the homeless here since the homless shelter opened. Some know about it, but of those that do, many don’t trust it and would rather take their chances on the streets in the winter. Of course, most are also dependent on alcohol and have extreme psychological problems which is why some kind of social services offered by an international or local NGO is as urgently needed as it ever was.

There’s the need to work with these people outside the shelter, and not least because there are more still on the streets than in the warm this winter.

In the meantime, I’ll just wait until this evening to explain to my five-year-old why someone died on the streets and was just left there for him and the other children at his kindergarten to see first thing in the morning. And as for me, I’ll just reflect on why this situation still exists. Indeed, before Edik and I looked at the homeless in Yerevan, myself and RFE/RL’s Emil Danielyan and Anna Saghabalyan had done so a few months beforehand so there’s really no excuse for this to continue.

Actually, the article was written by Emil after I took him and a visiting academic from the Diaspora to a crumbling and totally decrepit TB-infested hostel in Erebuni. It was then that we decided to look into the problem of homelessness in Yerevan and we started in my neighbourhood. Two months later, after mentioning it to Edik, Hetq started looking into the problem. Probably, it’s worth ending this post with a few quotes from Emil’s article for RFE/RL written in October 2004.

Homeless people like Vartan and Tatyana form the most underprivileged class of Armenians still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet command economy. Their number may not be large given the scale of poverty in the country. But its seems to have increased in recent years amid an accelerated economic growth that has done more to increase income disparities than to reduce poverty.

According to Eleonora Manandian, chairwoman of the New Armenia youth organization engaged in social work, prolonged misery is eroding Armenians’ traditionally strong family bonds that have cushioned post-Soviet hardship and curbed poverty-driven phenomena like homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction.

[…]

The social polarization is particularly eye-catching in Yerevan whose glitzy center filled with restaurants and luxury cars increasingly contrasts with rundown suburbs. Real estate prices in the downtown have skyrocketed since 2001, fueling a housing construction boom — another indication of increased wealth.

Yet enormous contrasts can be found even here. Alla, a 47-year-old lone woman, has lived in a dry fountain pool of a public park flanked by apartment blocks for the past four years. She broke a hip joint last winter and can hardly walk.

[…]

Alla, who lost most of her relatives in the 1988 catastrophic earthquake in northern Armenian, says not a single government official has ever visited or offered here any assistance. In fact, neither Armenia’s Ministry of Social Affairs nor any other government agency has programs to help the homeless. An RFE/RL inquiry found that there are even no officials dealing with such people.

Incidently, Alla apparently died last winter as well, and yes, before someone out there tries to rationalize the situation, I agree that there are homeless everywhere in the world. However, in London I was used to numerous charities and government bodies working with them when it was needed, but in Armenia there is next to nothing. Even the soup kitchens won’t let them in because they’re too down and out even for them.

Anyway, more on the homeless from last winter can be found on this blog under the appropiate category. I wonder how many more will die this winter even with the homeless shelter now functioning albeit not as it should.

Homeless, Chamber Music Hall, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2005