Bella Stepanyan and her six minor children gather in a room of the house during the day, where an electric stove is installed and the room is heated. They do not have the opportunity to heat the entire house with electricity, and at the end of the month they have great difficulty paying the electricity bill.
“We light the stove. We pay 100 thousand drams only for electricity [about $250]. We gather in one room during the day to spend less, but at night we turn it on in the girls’ room as well so that they can sleep,” the mother of six children said in an interview with Forrights.am.
Bella’s children are 5, 7, 12, 14, 16, 18 years old, all of them are schoolchildren. The mother, who was forcibly relocated from Artsakh, is having great difficulty covering the expenses for the children’s education.
“I don’t get benefits because we have a car, my income is only 50 thousand drams. I don’t get any other support, but they say they’ll cut it from April, they’ll only give the children’s share, it’ll be hard for us. We need food, a table and chairs, stationery, hygiene products,” said the mother.
The family lives in Vanadzor. They pay 80 thousand drams for an apartment. In addition to the support provided by the state, the family also receives a small income from Bella’s husband’s job: he drives a taxi in Vanadzor.
“I don’t have a job, my husband drives a taxi, but he pays a lot of interest, he barely buys bread, cigarettes, some oil, a couple of kilos of shugar, we somehow manage,” she says, noting that her husband is also unable to do any other work because he was injured during the 44-Day War. “During the 44-Day War, my husband was wounded, the shrapnel is in his head. He volunteered to participate in the war, he participated in the battles of Shushi.”
The Stepanyans first were displaced from Shushi, then from Stepanakert.
“We were engaged in animal husbandry in Shushi, we kept chickens, ducks, pigs, and we were engaged in farming. I had a good vegetable garden, I left everything and came,” says the woman, who found herself in the grip of poverty as a result of forced displacement.
They spent difficult days in Artsakh during the blockade. On September 19, when the Azerbaijani army attacked the peaceful residents of Artsakh, Bella was in the forest with three minor boys. Having no more food supplies in the city and villages, she decided to pick mushrooms to save her children from hunger.
“There was nothing to eat, I went to the forest with the children to pick mushrooms. My husband also came to collect wood, to bring it in a bundle so that we could light a fire: there was no electricity. We were in the forest when they shot, the children hid under the trees. They were shooting at us. The children started crying out of fear. I barely brought the children home. My three sons were with me. When we arrived at the village, we saw everyone was confused, the children were crying, running around in the fields. We stayed like that for three days, then we left the village,” she said.
Narek Kirakosyan