InternationalApres Apres
by Vincent Lima
Published: Friday August 21, 2009 in Editorial Notebook
Apres Zohrabyan and campers in the Mets Tagher village of Hadrut, Nagorno-Karabakh. Vartan Melikyan
Yerevan - Every summer the Armenian Reporter's mailbox is filled with stories about journeys to Armenia – school trips, church trips, young professionals' trips. People travel to connect with their roots, to discover or rediscover the country and its people, to make themselves useful through organizations such as the Armenia Volunteer Corps, the Fuller Center for Housing, or Habitat for Humanity, and sometimes to proselytize.
I do not tire of the stories. Every new group and new initiative has its own energy, and it is interesting to see how expectations and reactions have evolved over the years.
I made my first trip to Armenia in 1992, returned a few times over the years, and moved here with my family three years and some months ago. I bought and renovated a house I enjoy living in. My children go to school here. I work with a wonderful group of creative, industrious, and interesting people I recruited to help bring you the Armenian Reporter. So perhaps I should consider myself beyond the connect-discover-make oneself useful stage.
But during the Reporter's two-week vacation, I seized an opportunity offered by Apres Zohrabyan and his Bnatachar initiative, and went camping in Karabakh. Once again, I was back to connecting and discovering.
The new middle class
For the last three years, I have accompanied Apres from time to time on hiking trips in various parts of Armenia. The first time I went, I was surprised to find Rusan Avetisyan, the Armenian Reporter's chief accountant at the time, and her nephew on the bus with me and my family.
The fact is, however, that Rusan typifies the participants in Apres's excursions.
Almost everyone on the Karabakh trip was born and raised in Armenia. Most were women, with a couple of mother-daughter pairs. Many of the participants worked in the banking sector. Two were computer programmers. In short, it was Armenia's new and relatively small middle class taking a break to discover the homeland. Besides my two daughters and me, the only noncitizens of Armenia in our group of 26 were a graduate student from Ann Arbor and a teenager raised in Belarus who was spending the summer with his aunt in Armenia.
And that is the main point that struck me about the camping trip. Trips to Europe and various parts of the United States are popular with Armenians in Armenia and America alike (one participant in the Karabakh trip had just returned from South Africa, another from Detroit), but diaspora Armenians are not alone in feeling a need to discover the homeland.
Karabakh revisited
It was a comfortable ride and the driver, Aksel, was safe and risk-averse. If you have been in Armenia, you know he is a member of a rare breed.
Our first destination was Hadrut. There, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, we arrived at the New Life resort. It is a business, but in a sense, it is owner Artur Aghabekyan's gift to the people of his native village of Mets Tagher and to the people of Karabakh. Mr. Aghabekyan was a commander of Hadrut forces in the Karabakh War, and was seriously wounded in combat. He served as deputy defense minister of Armenia, a post he resigned to run (successfully) for parliament on the ARF ticket. He served as chair of the parliamentary Commission on Defense, National Security, and Internal Affairs until his party quit the governing coalition this April.
We pitched our tents there and headed for the enormous swimming pools to cool off.
The next day we went to Gtchavank. It was an arduous climb, but my four-year-old Arev made me proud and made it all the way up. When Arev and I arrived, my eight-year-old, Noor, was already there, picking wild blackberries, which she shared with us.
Strong women
That was the sweet reward for the hike. The inside of the church was covered in graffiti, much of which was left from the Soviet era. When Arev climbed on the altar to grab a couple of candles, one of the young women on the trip said the little girl was not allowed to be on the altar because she bore Eve's original sin. That evening Noor and I had an interesting discussion about misogyny and the church.
In many ways, however, this trip sought to break such traditions that discriminate against women and girls. Looking at Noor and Arev, two of the young women on the trip told me that they wished they had been raised to be so strong and free and self-confident. They said they had only learned to swim over the last year. All I could say was, Look at you now: you're camping in tents, swimming, hiking, speaking, and living with verve and confidence and I have no doubt that's how you will raise any children you may choose to have.
Soon we were in Mets Tagher (which, I later learned, was home to our Washington editor Emil Sanamyan's forebears), where we visited the house-museum of Marshal of Aviation Sergei Aleksandrovich Khudiakov. Khudiakov (Armenak Khanferiants) rose to chief of staff of the Air Force of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. (He was executed in 1950 and rehabilitated in 1954 after Stalin's death.) So this far-flung village had generated one of the most distinguished members of the Allied force that my daughters' two grandfathers had fought in as American soldiers.
I will not try readers' patience with an exhaustive account of the trip. Everyone fell in love with Shushi (though Arev was disappointed to learn that it was a place rather than the raw-fish meal she had hoped for).
The church of Amaras had been renovated as if it were a restaurant, with stucco on the inside walls.
And having relocated to Gandzasar (in Mardakert) for the last night of camping, our tents were flooded and we were soaked to the bone by endless rain. Amazingly, everyone was upbeat about the incident, saying it added to the memories. (We had endured quite enough rain camping in Quebec last year, so we could have done without.) But much of the beauty of Karabakh is in its verdancy, so I suppose the rain is necessary.
