InternationalThe day the earth moved
Published: Saturday November 08, 2008 in Living in Armenia, Earthquake 20 Years On
It had been a long and grueling federal election campaign. We had worked tirelessly for weeks to elect the first Canadian-Armenian to Canada's parliament. We had canvassed door to door throughout the riding, placed campaign signs, organized town hall meetings, made thousands of phone calls, mobilized volunteers, and tried to get out the vote on Election Day. I had been at the campaign office every day, working sometimes till late at night along with hundreds of other volunteers. The year was 1988. Unfortunately all our efforts had been in vain and our candidate had been forced to concede defeat.
I was disappointed and exhausted. I was also five months pregnant, and my mother's constant phone calls over the course of the campaign, begging me to go home, had finally sunk in. So once the campaign signs had been collected and the office cleared away, under the pretext that I needed to rest, I asked my fellow volunteers from our community to kindly leave me alone and not call me. In reality I needed a break from all things Armenian.
The very next day, early in the morning, I received a call from one of our community leaders. His voice was strained but my annoyance at being called early in the morning prevented me from immediately sensing that something was wrong. I was half listening to what he was trying to tell me, muttering under my breath that hadn't I asked to be left alone? Sensing my tone, he came straight to the point. "There's been an earthquake in Armenia," he said. "You have to come." He didn't need to continue. I was at the center in a matter of minutes.
When I walked into the Armenian Community Center in Toronto, the gravity and magnitude of what would become one of Armenia's greatest tragedies was written on every face. I remember sitting around a large table with my fellow Armenians listening to the news reports flooding in and watching the images of devastation, feeling helpless and terrified. The homeland, that ephemeral plot of land that we only knew as Soviet Armenia, was somewhere far away, dreamlike and not within reach. But on this day, we all felt her in our blood. Ten months earlier, when the Karabakh movement had burst onto the pages of our lives, it had brought her closer to us. But this, this unspeakable unkindness of Mother Earth, had knocked the wind out of us and made our knees buckle. But not for long.
My community, like every single Armenian community throughout the globe, came together the day the earth moved under the feet of our homeland. Men, women, children, Armenian, non-Armenian, religious, agnostic - it didn't matter. At 11:40 A.M. on December 7, 1988, every Armenian on the planet felt the tremor. Ramgavar, Hnchak, Dashnak, Marxist, liberal, socialist, communist - it didn't matter. We all came together in the form of one soul, one spirit, one streak of determination. The day the earth moved is the day we put aside our provincial differences and mobilized. We collected money, food, clothes, medicine, equipment, anything that could potentially save a single precious human soul. The kindness of humanity, of our humanity shone the day the earth under Armenia moved.
The days and weeks that followed are now a distant memory to most of us. But I would bet my life that there isn't a single Armenian who doesn't remember where they were when they heard the news. For it was a little much - wasn't there a quota on tragedy and hadn't we fulfilled ours in the 20th century?
Once again, we were all in the service of our community. Just days earlier we had focused all of our time and energy working on an election campaign, thinking that our lives depended on it. And now? Now we were working to save the lives of our compatriots. How the world changed overnight. Each morning I would rise, drive to the community center and work with fellow volunteers making phone calls, asking large corporations to donate whatever they could - everything from peanuts to pudding to dried milk to canned goods. Soon, the small piles of donated clothes turned into mountains. Volunteers couldn't keep up with people walking into Armenian community centers throughout the city donating whatever they could.
We were driven by a need to do the impossible, for the death toll kept rising. First it was hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands. How much more could we afford to lose? Every time we heard of someone being pulled out of the rubble alive was cause for momentary celebration, clapping and laughing intermingled with tears that kept flowing.
On a particularly tiring and difficult day, I remember standing in the doorway to one of the offices in our center that had been converted into earthquake command central. At this point, I was not only showing but was clearly pregnant, wobbling from one end of the center to the other. My mother had given up calling to tell me to go home; she knew that anything she said would ring empty next to the reality of the number of those who had died. That day one of our older community members, overcome with emotion, boldly and unexpectedly placed his hand on my belly and said, "Thank God you are here everyday beside us. The life growing inside you gives us hope, makes us believe that after everything that was lost, there will be new life after all."
Somehow my unborn daughter, unbeknown to her and me, had traveled to the land of her grandparents that summer, Ainjar and Kessab; had suffered along with a most stubborn mother during a federal election campaign; and now was being asked to endure the emotional strain that her people had been asked to bear, all before she was allowed to come into the world.
Carrying her, despite the fatigue and exhaustion, gave me strength and hope, which she bravely continues to do every single day of her life. Her courage, determination, and love for her motherland is so innate and so natural that I am convinced her travails while still in the womb undoubtedly infected her subconscience with all things good and all things Armenian. For me, my daughter, all of our daughters and sons who were born after the earth moved, are the symbols of our country's future.
