Marina Avetisyan from Artsakh lives with her six minor children in difficult social conditions. She wakes up at 5 am every morning to get into the car that goes to the fields. She is engaged in farming for a daily wage. She receives 6,000 drams for working until 8 pm. However, this income is not enough for the 45-year-old woman to take care of the needs of her minor children.
“We have a fuel problem; we need a lot of fuel. We have a food problem, we already owe 270,000 drams to the store,” the mother said in an interview with Forrights.am. She has been deprived of the opportunity to work in the fields, due to the season.
Marina lives with her children in the village of Dalarik in the Armavir region, Armenia. They moved here a month ago. Before that, they temporarily lived in five different villages. The family is from the village of Getavan in Artsakh; the mother left the village with her children on September 19, after the Azerbaijani attack.
“On September 19, the situation was terrible. I was not at home; I had gone to Drmbon with my son to find food. I had left the children with my sister. She called and said that the fight had started. I walked back to the village to reach my children. My sister had taken them to a shelter. When I came, I saw that some of them were almost naked, some were barefoot. I went home under the gunfire and brought clothes and shoes to dress the children,” she said, noting that they had to hit the roads even at night to be as far away from the armed Azerbaijanis as possible.
“The situation in Getavan was terrible, the enemy had already entered the village. The last person who came out saw how their tanks entered the village. When we were in the village, the shooting had already increased, we had no hope of getting out. My sister’s daughter fainted from fear: she is a 15-year-old. We spent the night on the roads until we reached the airport,” she said.
The road from Stepanakert to Goris was also unspeakably cruel. The mother had to watch how her children got wet in the rain, hungry and half-dressed. “We left Stepanakert in a Kamaz car, the situation was terrible. We were all in a truch body, the rain was pouring on the children until we reached Goris. The children were hungry, there was nothing to eat, I took some bread from the neighbors to give to the children.”
Marina was being displaced for the second time. She was seven years old when her family left Baku, fearing death [when they were massacring Armenians]. “They started throwing stones at our windows, and we realized we couldn’t stay,” she said.
Narek Kirakosyan