Red Cross Blogs

Armenia: befriending elderly refugees

By Katrina Crew
February 27, 2010 at 2:30 pm

Karen Young, from Scotland, is spending a year in Armenia as part of a volunteer exchange programme, the international youth volunteering programme.

This is her third post. Her first post is about arriving in Armenia, and her second’s about HIV awareness in the country.

Well, Armenian New Year certainly lives up to its reputation as a long celebration with a ridiculous amount of food! I spent a proper Armenian new year – preparing dolma, hosting and visiting friends and eating more than should be possible! It really was fantastic – every day I visited a different friend’s house and we ate, made toasts and danced (a futile attempt to burn off some of the calories…). It was lovely to experience such an important festival properly, and also to meet everybody’s family and friends and taste yet more fabulous Armenian food.

Unfortunately, the holiday had to end sometime, and on the 11th of January we were all back to work; I felt like I needed a holiday to recover from the holiday! But I’m getting back into the swing of things now and have a lot of exciting new activities to get stuck into.

The next few months are going to be very busy for us here – the HIV programme events start soon and we are having a charity dinner in March, as well as all of our normal activities. If you want to get more information about what we get up to then I can add you to the mailing list for our brand new e-newsletter (available in English and Armenian). If you would like to receive this then drop me a line at arcs.youth.enewsletter@gmail.com.

At the moment, I am mainly involved in the psycho-social care to the elderly programme. My Armenian is now getting good enough for me to sort of have proper conversations with the elderly people I visit in the dormitories outside Yerevan – I have a list of 6 refugees I visit regularly and am beginning to feel like I am getting to know them properly. Their stories are very distressing – most of them come from big houses in the middle of Baku (in Azerbaijan) where they had good jobs and big families; now they live in tiny wee freezing cold rooms in dormitories with no indoor water supply and have lost most of their family. Some people have told me about seeing their husbands, brothers and sons killed as they tried to flee, and about being beaten and terrorised as they themselves escaped.

Most of them have been in the dormitories for around 21 years. It can be quite distressing visiting the dormitories; I want to do something about the conditions there and do something practical to help the old folks but feel completely powerless to do so. It’s the same old problem – no money! But our visits seem to cheer them up, in a way we provide a form of therapy just by listening I think.

This month I am also starting a new project called “Namak im Tatikin” – or “A letter to my Grannie”, where we get school children to write letters to the old people. This will not only give the old folks another link to the wider community, but encourage the kids to do something to help people less fortunate than themselves; maybe we’ll even recruit some future volunteers!

We threw a party for the Smiley Club (which supports disadvantaged kids living in the dormitories) on Army Day – a national holiday – with cake, dancing, and a clown which, as you can imagine, was great fun. Currently we are looking at different countries with the kids, teaching them bout geography, culture and religions. As a result, I spent a memorable afternoon trying to teach them ceilidh dances! This week it’s India and, thankfully, I don’t have to dance!

Things are going really well over here, and I am really looking forward to the next couple of months. 2010 seems to have brought us all some new energy, as well as a few new volunteers and projects. If it keeps on like this, we are going to have a very successful year!

Karen’s time in Armenia is funded through the Youth In Action programme from European Voluntary Service. To find out more, email InternationalYouth@redcross.org.uk

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Tags: Armenia, elderly people, International, international youth volunteering, refugees, volunteer

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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