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Armenia: A Woman's World In One Mountain Village

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  • Armenia: A Woman's World In One Mountain Village

    ARMENIA: A WOMAN'S WORLD IN ONE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE

    EurasiaNet
    http://www.eurasianet.org/node/63019
    March 8 2011
    NY

    March 7, 2011 - 10:16am, by Gayane Abrahamyan and Justyna Mielnikiewicz

    Each year, International Women's Day arrives on March 8 in the Armenian
    village of Dzoragyugh amid a dark cloud of irony.

    Ninety-eight percent of the village's male population --nearly half
    of its population of 5,000 people -- has migrated abroad in search
    of work. Those residents left behind jokingly call their village
    "a women's club," a place where women do everything - plough fields,
    raise children, officiate at funerals and somehow, through sheer grit,
    try to hold their fragmented families together.

    Labor migration's impact on Armenia's economy has long been the subject
    of international studies, but its impact on the families left behind
    has largely escaped study. In Dzoragyugh, though, and other villages in
    the eastern region of Gegharkunik, that impact is difficult to ignore.

    With an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 of the region's residents migrating
    abroad each year to find work, Gegharkunik boasts Armenia's highest
    rate of labor migration - up to 8 percent of its total population of
    243,000, according to the National Statistical Service.

    Most of these migrants, overwhelmingly men, return each autumn,
    but some simply vanish.

    "Every time I close the door behind him, I feel like the house walls
    are collapsing," said school principal Heriknaz Khachatrian, a mother
    of four, who, on her own, ploughs and sows fields, and tends cows
    and pigs when her husband leaves for Moscow each spring. "The whole
    burden of the household falls on my shoulders, and the worst thing
    is that you never know whether your husband will return or not."

    Accidents, often at construction sites, frequently claim lives;
    Russian women pose another threat, assert some of Dzoragyugh's
    left-behind wives.

    Thirty-two-year-old Zabel Hovanian, a mother of five girls, was 16
    years old and pregnant when her husband left to find work in Moscow.

    She has as many children as her husband's visits home. The youngest,
    a three-year-old, has never seen her father.

    In the 16 years since he left Dzoragyugh for Russia, Hovanian's husband
    has found another "wife," a term used for a man's girlfriend who lives
    with him outside of marriage. Hovanian recalled how her enraged husband
    reacted when she called his Russian girlfriend to talk with her. "He
    said 'I told her that you are my sister. If you dare call one more
    time, I'll come and kill both you and the children,'" claimed Hovanian.

    Despite such threats and her husband's ongoing absence, Hovanian,
    whose sole income comes from 50,000-dram (about $130) monthly
    welfare payments, says that she still will take her husband back if
    he ever returns home. "I will accept him for my children's sake," she
    explained. "If I don't, the whole village will blame me; and I have
    four daughters to marry off. My disgrace would become their disgrace."

    Hovanian's case is not unique. While many such men bring their
    Russia-born children to meet their Armenian half-siblings, and
    attempt to support both families, many others simply disappear,
    related Russian language teacher Laura Hovhannisian.

    "It's hard to stay a woman in a village," Hovhannisian continued. "We
    till the land here, work like men, and our husbands often feel
    enchanted by Russian women's beauty and carefree spirits, and are
    unable to return to village life."

    Breaking their legal ties with vanished husbands is not an option for
    the women of Gegharkunik, one of the most conservative and traditional
    regions in Armenia.

    While Armenians generally frown on a second marriage for a divorced
    woman or widow, "in Gegharkunik, it's simply prohibited by an unwritten
    law," commented sociologist and pollster Aharon Adibekian.

    "Especially if the husband is alive, but has abandoned his family."

    The economically viable options for these men to stay in Gegharkunik,
    though, are not many. Farming is not profitable in the region's 49
    highland villages; winter can last for up to six months. Soviet-built
    industrial plants that once offered area residents an opportunity to
    earn an alternative living have long since closed.

    Faced by dire unemployment, about 1.1 million people are believed
    to have left Armenia since 1991, according to the United Nations
    Development Programme. Labor migration remittances on average now
    surpass Armenia's annual government budget by 10 percent.

    To Artsvik Haroutiunian, a 51-year-old resident of Dzoragyugh, the word
    "migration" is synonymous with loss. When her husband left 20 years
    ago for Russia to find a job, she believed his support would mean
    she would live without want. In the end, Haroutiunian lost to labor
    migration not only her husband, who dropped contact with the family,
    but her 23-year-old son, who died in an accident.

    Now Haroutiunian focuses on trying to convince her remaining
    16-year-old son not to follow his father and brother to Russia.

    "Every time I hear the word migration, I feel like dying of pain and
    anguish," she said with a sigh. "If only our country provided jobs,
    my husband wouldn't have left, nor would have my son."

    Editor's Note: Gayane Abrahamyan is a reporter for ArmeniaNow.com in
    Yerevan. Justyna Mielnikiewicz is a freelance photojournalist based
    in Tbilisi.




    From: A. Papazian
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