Liberian journey #2

My second day started with an early breakfast with my colleagues; Alla from Fund Sukhumi, Georgia, Nino from Women's information Center in Tbilissi and Pervana from Yuva Center in Baku. After breakfast we were greeted by the Kvinna till Kvinna staff in Monrovia to have an intro of the week and a short presentation of their work in the country. Kvinna till Kvinna started field work in Liberia only last year with at first 2 local partners and now supporting and partnering 7 women's orgs in the country and working on many issues; peace and security, 1325 and GBV, Reproductive health, traditional practices endangering women's lives. Kvinna is one of the rare organizations supporting genuinely the local women's groups' needs and working on equal levels with them. You can read more about their work around the world on http://www.kvinnatillkvinna.se/en .

Liberian Journey #1

It is 7am in Monrovia right now. I arrived yesterday after travelling through Vienna and an overnight in Brussels. From snowy cold Yerevan i am now in hot humid +35 C Liberia. The passenger next to me in the plane was a young man from Ivory coast. He was returning from the US to visit his family for a month. He had a green card and was working in a small factory in Ohia for the past 3 years. "i need to work and send money back home to help my mother" - he told me, when i asked him if he liked the US, "you know us Africans, we take care of our moms so they don't work after a certain age. I see a lot of american old women working and i feel bad for them."

Tolerance and Social Activism: Teaching Kids the Basics

How do you create a fair and humane society if you don’t include the children in the process? Who will carry the torch? Who will guarantee its sustainability? How will the next generation learn about social responsibility if we always keep them away from the course of action?

I’ve always believed that raising kids did not only imply ensuring they are well-fed, warmly clothed and get a good educated (school) but also, and most importantly, it’s teaching them how to become responsible human beings; of their person, home, friends, environment, the earth and all living beings around them.

Parks and playgrounds rated by my kids

Yerevan has nice parks and some of them are really interesting for kids and others are not so friendly. Since we decided to spend the summer here this year, we tested most of the popular ones. In this post, I will present my kids’ most preferred green(or not so) areas of Yerevan and one in Ashtarak town.

The process of selection:

After going regularly to most of these places, I sat with my kids today and asked them to rate which one they liked and why? Opinions were different, so you will see at the end of each park the ratings provided by each – (A for  11 yrs old Amassia, V for 9 year old Varanta and Vk for 6 year old Vayk)

Based on their suggestions we formed a chart for parks in our area, here it is:

The “boks” or the hospital of angry nurses

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Right after the birth and especially when it is a c-section, you need to spend some time in the intensive care unit that here, we call the “boks” in Russian, for me it sounded like the “box” and looked really like one. 

During my first birthing experience in Armenia at the Erebuni Hospital in 2005, that “boks” was awful. It was a big room with 10-12 beds. Instead of curtains, the windows were painted in brown so the sun doesn’t bother the patients. There was an old soviet era refrigerator in one corner which was making a horrific trembling sound every 5 minutes or so while water was dripping constantly from the faucet beside the door where I had to spend 10 long dreadful hours. When you just had surgery all these noises sound even worse.  To all this, add the moans of women in pain and their pleas for help, morphine, or something to drink. However, I was trying to concentrate on the idea of meeting my baby and trying to forget all the pain in and around me