Armenian Pregnancy Chronicles #2: Women Solidarity!

I am traveling so much during this pregnancy. And I feel that my baby is enjoying it very much, since she/he is not giving me any hard time, sitting quietly in the warmth of my belly. From time to time kicking vigorously to remind me that he/she is there when I get caught up in a heated discussion during my seminars.

I am now in Shushi, just came back from a dynamic meeting at the Women’s Resource Center here. Gohar and I started this branch of the Center 3 years ago with the help of Gayane that I met in Shushi during the summer of 2001, when I was volunteering with Land and Culture organization. Since then, Gayane and I bonded immediately. At that time her children were very young and I used to visit her with my daughter on my back for coffee some homemade sweets and long discussions. She used to tell me about her life in Karabakh; the war, how she met her husband and then her experience as a young mother in a war-torn city. We used to think together of different ways to improve the life of women here and what were some of the important issues they were dealing with.

Women's Resource Center of Shushi

I wouldn’t imagine that 7 years later we would be working together on developing a women’s center in Shushi. So much changed since then.  It was a real challenge to bring together women and create this unique space where they were accepted fully and given the opportunity to voice their concerns and talk endlessly of their dreams and losses for the past years.

During this trip, I realized how much the center has evolved and how important it started to become to all the women using it. Many contributed to this over the years; Briony and Julia provided the space for free, Tamar gave up her life in Paris to spend a couple of months in this harsh town to help the staff organize, Ani taught English and gave hope, Hasmig introduced non-violent communication, Lusya implemented video workshops, Tatevik, Anush, Gayane, Shushan, Lucine, Nina and other volunteers made endless trips back and forth from Yerevan to help with programs and activities. And many more contributed in different ways. Today the center is open 4 days a week, provides many services to the women in Shushi and surrounding areas. It is also a safe haven for those needing a space to talk and share their problems and find solutions for different issues they are faced with.

Active volunteer discussing with guests from Martakert

Tonight 5 young women from Martakert (border region of Kharabagh) came to visit. The Center is trying to outreach to the regions gradually.

It takes lots of effort and dedication to sustain a women’s center in a conflict region. Resources are scarce and motivation is low, we face many challenges. But it seems that something is changing, years ago it was difficult to find any local volunteers, today Nelly and some others come over after their University classes to help and want to do more.

Many times I was close to losing hope that anything will happen in this town. But today I left the meeting with a huge smile on my face. I felt so good to see how warm and energetic this center has become and how much the women are trying to do things with so little resources. 

to know more about the women's resource center in Shushi go here.

asylum

Note: I wrote this 2 years ago as an introduction text on the activists blog site of www.pushingthelimits.se

While driving back from Shushi, NKR  (a disputed region between Armenia and Azerbaidjan), I was thinking about the long journey that took me back home. I am an Armenian woman born in Beirut, Lebanon who fled away just after the war of liberation in 1989 when general Aoun wanted to liberate Lebanon completely from the Syrian long-lasting occupation. I was 15 at that time and having a blast camping in the basement of our local church every night after 6 with all the neighbors, while the city was bombarded. Even though the adults in that room were stuck to their radio listening every bit of information with frowning eyes and whispering every now and then ‘ts, ts, ts’ (a middle eastern way of saying ‘oh my god it’s so bad’), guessing which part of the city was under fire or which building was collapsing it did not affect as much us the youth in that same room who were more into playing board games, listening to music and falling in love…

After our apartment was hit with a shell bomb and we almost lost everything, my mother packed all our remaining belongings and her jewels who took us, me, my two brothers and my father to peaceful and ‘politically correct’ Canada. And while sitting in a very calm, nicely colored with perfect benches public park of Montreal, waiting for my dad to pick me up after school, it hit me really bad. I almost collapsed under the tears and cried so hard. Culture shock, post-traumatic syndrome, effects of war, depression, nostalgia, fears… different people called it different names; I call it ‘the awakening’. My life had change drastically.

Due to the genocide that took place in the early 20th century, my grand parents had escaped from their homeland, currently eastern Turkey to finally take refuge in Lebanon. My parents were both born in Beirut and they considered both Armenia and Lebanon as their homeland (as every other diasporan Armenian).

The road taking me back from Shushi to Yerevan, is long and tiring full of potholes. I try to find a comfortable position in the small mashrutka (public transportation, soviet mini-bus) and to sleep, but the large mountains mesmerize me, the only thing Armenia has plenty of. I watch the women working in the fields of the Massis region through my small window; everything seems so quite and serene.

I remember how I finally moved to Armenia six years ago with my husband and 2 daughters despite my mother’s tears and father’s ‘ts, ts,ts’.  I was tired of being a refugee, a guest, a foreigner, I wanted to come back to my roots, try to build a steady, sustainable life on this land called ‘home’. It was also six years ago when with two of my feminist friends Gohar and Shushan, we started a drop-in women’s center in a very tight and dusty old soviet room on the Yerevan State University campus. At first we were 3, then we became 10, then 21. Today we moved to a new location and the center’s activities are getting bigger and bigger, the volunteers are growing in number and age.

We started a new Women’s Resource Center in Shushi, a sister branch. I make the 6 hour trip almost every month and I often think about this amazing journey from the heat of Anatolia, through the fresh breeze of the Mediterranean Lebanese seashore, across the colorful benches of the green parks of Canada to the mysterious mountains of the Caucasus.

Armenia – 10 sept.2008