Where there's a will there's a way

 

Recently a friend of mine forwarded to my attention an email he received from Armenia. The content is a first-hand account of the tragedies currently our fatherland/hayrenik is experiencing, and an “exposé” of what heroic souls are doing to alleviate the excruciating pain of those who are stuck in the abyss of despair.

Lara believes that we can all do something constructive to rescue Armenia from the humiliating disaster that claimed the lives of thousands of Armenian soldiers, and the litany of hundreds of children who became orphaned because the bread winners sacrificed their lives to stem the tide of an Azeri aggression determined to impose Azeri hegemony on the entirety of Artsakh and eventually on Armenia.

Read Lara’s dispatch from Yerevan and do not allow your personal indifference to complement what the Azeri army failed to achieve.

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Hold up the Light

By Lara Setrakian: #9 Dec.2020

Dear Friends,

It was foggy this week in Yerevan, a metaphor for how we feel. This country needs to find its way out of a thick fog.

But then on Friday, the sun came out. We could see not just Ararat but also the white foothills around it with crisp clarity. It was a reminder that the sunlight finds us, eventually.

There's no empty hope in being Armenian. It’s actually a very grounded hope, hard-earned hope, hope squeezed out of the dark. During the first weeks of the war, a time when many of us found it hard to sleep, I lay awake at 4 am haunted by the suffering, loss and future implications. I only could see the light, ironically, once I accepted the following: this is a horrible situation and my task is to make it a little bit less bad. Recognizing that actually gave me some rest.

We sometimes find ourselves in the midst of a disaster so big that all we can do, in the short run, is make the situation a little bit less bad. In the process, as we gather ourselves bit by bit, we can start aiming for a greater good.

That is what's happening in Yerevan right now. Scores of people, good and motivated people, are working to make this situation a little bit less bad for the people around them. Then bit by bit, they are starting to imagine a better future. Big ideas for positive, systemic change are beginning to brew and take shape.

Geopolitically, Armenia desperately needs a vision for how it coexists with its neighbours without being subject to their every threat and whim. Every arena from energy security to cyber security to education reform needs to be analyzed and strengthened. This is already on the minds and agendas of many people, and they're starting to get organized around it.

More people in more places are stepping up to stake responsibility for the development of Armenia proper. They know they have to keep making progress in whatever areas that can move forward, while the political turmoil plays out. The last thing this country needs is to have its social, educational, and economic development work fully paralyzed by the fears of the moment.

At this particular time there's a lot of what I call retail philanthropy: individuals and small NGOs mobilizing to provide people-to-people support. Alongside the big charitable organizations, everyday Armenians are buying warm winter coats for kids who don't have them, or delivering cribs and supplies for pregnant mothers who lost their husbands to war. Critics and cynics might say that those acts won't solve needs at scale, and it's true that using after-tax dollars to buy winter coats at shopping mall prices isn't the most financially efficient form of aid. But such activism meets an immediate need. It also feels damn good to deliver, connecting givers and receivers in an act of connectedness and hope. With any luck, the wider structural support will kick in for these people and the state will figure out a way to finance it all. For now, however, small independent charities are asking us to help fund bulk purchases socks and underwear for refugee children. Retail philanthropy is keeping their toes and tushies warm for the winter.

Many Armenians do feel they are their brothers' and sisters' keepers and have always acted that way in times of need. In doing so they've held up a light in the darkest moments. They personify this quip that my friend, the author Adam Grant, recently posted on LinkedIn:

Pessimist: The glass is half-empty! Optimist: The glass is half-full! Proactive person: Actually, the glass is full. I refilled it while you were arguing. You're welcome.

One of the things these proactive people have launched: Books for Armenian Soldiers, which has stocked the shelves of hospital recovery wards. The group also delivers handwritten letters of support from Armenians around the world to wounded young men in the hospital. If you want something to do that doesn't just involve making donations, you can write your own letter of encouragement and resilience, in any language, photograph it and email it to BooksforArmenianSoldiers@gmail.com  They will print, translate, and deliver the letter to soldiers receiving their books. You can see the soldiers reading some of those letters and books on their Facebook page.

A handful of new initiatives are creating jobs for refugee women and educational opportunities for their kids. One foundation, called Future is Now, has put Artsakh's famous dish of Jengyalov Hatz on permanent sale in the center of Yerevan. The group's leader, the indomitable Hasmik Gasparyan, is also the founder of Nairian, natural skincare products from Armenia that are supremely beautiful and set a high standard for ethical business in Armenia. You can buy products from their US website and from Amazon, on time for Armenian Christmas, if you'd like to support their great work.

In other news: the Armenian Artists Project is selling beautiful pieces, tax-deductible in the US, to support the country. A woman in Montreal, Canada named Laleh Manjikian, is taking down oral histories from displaced families who want to memorialize their lost sons. For those families who want to speak -- others are in a stunted silence -- it means a lot that she cares enough to call and listen to their stories. Her connection to those families was made possible by a Florida woman, Anna Demerjian. Anna started sending support to her family members in Artsakh, who then asked if she could help support their friends and neighbours, who were all hiding together in the same basement during the war. Through that social chain reaction Anna now looks after 28 families, with help from her own friends in the Diaspora.

At this point in history, Armenia needs both soup kitchens and supercomputers. Through the impact of the war and the pandemic, Armenia has gone back in time in terms of basic human necessities; scores of people need basic housing, schools need heating and there's a widespread risk of malnutrition. These are humanitarian issues that need to be fixed. But in parallel, like a split screen, there are more tech miracles in this country then anyone would have imagined ten years ago. Armenia needs to keep moving forward in the work of advanced technology, in fields like AI, cyber security and supercomputing.

Provisioning both sides -- the soup kitchens and the supercomputers -- will make Armenia a more secure and sustainable country. Both for its own defense and for its economic revival, Armenia's investments in the upper end of technology companies and job creation will be vital to its next few decades.

However threatening the rhetoric from Turkey and Azerbaijan, and however menacing the hate speech on social media, Armenian strength or weakness will be determined by its own actions on the ground. As Raffi Elliot wisely put it to me this weekend, "Armenia's salvation will depend on what we do in the next ten years, not what they do." How Armenians go about building and strengthening their society is the key to the future. And so, this is a time of invention and reinvention.

"Where there's a lot of loss there needs to be a lot of creation," said one of my mentors, Dr. Roberta Ervine of St. Nersess Seminary. That was the mindset of Armenian Genocide survivors in the 1920s and 30s; she studied that generation extensively to understand its discourse, its spirituality, and its ability to pull things together despite incredible odds. Armenian Genocide survivors displayed enough resilience to completely reconstitute a nation from scratch, after their old world was completely annihilated. As Roberta put it:

“These were not weak people. They had lost entire families and clans, lost everything they had, lost a way of life. They had none of the modern communications or conveniences. People tried to find each other by letter or with personal ads printed in Armenian newspapers.”

How did that generation get through the darkest, most depressing moments? Roberta says:

“Whatever was in front of them to do, they did it, without knowing what the result would be. Some people took up the pen, some people used their voice, others used their brain, went to school to become a generation of doctors, lawyers and inventors.”

"Ok, this is a next step. I'm going to take it." That's what they were thinking. You didn't get a guarantee of where it goes, but you had to start somewhere. If you didn't there would be nothing there that lasts [of who we are].


Of particular inspiration to me were two names that Roberta mentioned: Zabel Yessayan, who chronicled what was happening as a nation got back on its feet, and Teotoros "Teotig" Labdjindjian, who managed to publish a yearbook called Amenun Daretsuytsi. With the help of his English-educated wife Arshaguhi, he made it a compilation of news and activities from Armenian communities around the world. It's must have been a great undertaking in the days before email.

Zabel and Teotig were two individuals, finding their way to hold up the light. What will be yours? As another mentor of mine, Galen Guengerich put it, “…there is an optimism that comes from knowing the work that is yours to do, and doing it.”

In his speeches Noubar Afeyan often honors his grandfather, who survived the Armenian Genocide by working on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. Today, we can celebrate his game-changing vaccine technology as the founder of Moderna, quite literally saving the world. That is worth celebrating this weekend, just days after Moderna crossed the regulatory finish line.

So, like all of them, do what you can to make a dark situation a little bit less bad. Have the confidence, the "chutzpah," to know that we are going to make it. There will be brighter days ahead if we can all hold up the light. In parallel, find someone's hand to hold, someone who understands what this community is going through, so that you're not alone in the hardest moments. "Wounded people are best healed by wounded people," I heard from Linda Graham, an expert on overcoming trauma.

Once again, this message was long but I hope it met the moment for you. My apologies for any typos. Let me know if you'd like to "unsubscribe" from these newsletters and feel free to share this note with others. I'm here anytime you'd like to text or talk about what's unfolding in Armenia.

Sincerely,

Lara