Retrospective: Homeless in Armenia

New readers of this blog might be unaware that it is the third. The first two were hosted on free blogging platforms until I started this one on my own server. Therefore, from time to time, The Caucasian Knot will look back on posts or projects featured on the first. This is especially poignant given that many of the issues covered there have so far not been continued here.

One such example is the continuing problem of growing homelessness in Armenia. After working on poverty and social vulnerability for many years and taking RFE/RL’s Emil Danielyan to a crumbling hostel in the Erebuni district of the capital, we decided to take a brief look into the problem given that nobody else was.

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.

“You may not see many homeless people on the streets, but the number of marginalized people keeps growing because social bonds are increasingly weakening,” she says. “That is, those people stop feeling themselves citizens, full-fledged members of the society. And there will come a moment when they find themselves outside that society.”

Later, after mentioning the problem to Edik Baghdasarian, I worked with him and other Hetq Online journalists as well as Yerkir Media TV for a number of winters to document the problem in more detail. As a result of this work — especially after a Hetq Online special edition was accompanied by an exhibition of my photos and the presentation of documentary by Yerkir Media TV — a homeless shelter was finally set up in Yerevan.

Last Saturday, Hetq Online’s Edik Baghdasarian, A1 Plus’ Karine Asatrian and myself visited Yerevan’s first ever homeless shelter. Our visit was particularly interesting given that for two winters running, we’ve been working on the issue of homelessness and pushing for a shelter to be opened. Despite the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor stating that there were only 13-15 homeless people living on the streets of the Armenian capital, the shelter already accomodates over 30. However, there are dozens of other “bomzh” that we know of, as well as others I’ve seen for the first time in the past week alone.

Much of the work from 2004 to 2006 was blogged about on my previous blog and is available under the homeless category here and here. Unfortunately, the problem of homelessness in Yerevan still persists and the number of those living on the streets appears to increase with each passing year.

Photo: © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2004