written upon visiting Armenia one year after the Soviet Union fell
Against the window pounds the first winter storm of northern California, pelting rain, the rush of wind, a sharp crack. Tomorrow’s news will tell of downed power lines, toppled trees, a crumpled radio tower. But tonight, I sit curled in robe and slippers, my children asleep in their beds, unaware of the storm that rages. I too am warm and safe, as though a child again, although I have left childhood decades ago. And I am grateful that childhood is more a place than a time.
For the many children in Ojantag Boarding School Number 8 in Yerevan, Armenia, childhood is less a place and more a time, a difficult time, a time that must be endured, a precarious time when food is scarce and comfort thin. For them, childhood arrives in letters and packages from across the seas and is fashioned into a safer, kinder place by those who run the school.
Last April, a chartered red bus took us through the streets of Yerevan—my aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, and daughter, and me—through alleys, past marketplaces, across potholed intersections to finally stop at a mottled gray building with concrete pillars at the entry and rows of rectangular windows three stories high. Peering from the bus, we caught our first glimpse of the drab building that housed the Ojantag Boarding School Number 8. The gloom of the overcast sky seemed heavy.
At the doorway, my uncle introduced us to the director of the school. She welcomed us with gusto and in rapid Armenia told us of the government’s attempts to wrest the school from the children. While she was alive, she assured us, the children would always have a school, a home. I suddenly felt grateful for the dismal building. She led us down wide, gray corridors to a small auditorium. Taking our seats below the stage, we watched the room crowd with children, teachers, relatives, many sitting on the floors or leaning against the walls, eager, expectant. Somehow in this room, the walls did not seem so gray.
From behind the curtain, a row of children skipped across the stage, an arc of boys and girls in crisp white shirts and scrubbed faces. A hush fell over the room. I did not need to understand Armenian to hear the passion in their recitations, the bravery in their songs, the sincerity in their prayers.
One small boy, charged with reciting dozens of lines, eyes flashing, voice booming, stumbled over the last few lines, lost his words, swallowed hard, began to cry. A girl and then another, a boy, many boys, the children on the stage patted him, soothed him, spoke for him, rescued his pride. They finished together, in unison, proud, happy. After the applause, lively music brought out the girls in dance steps, skipping, turning, stamping. They had sewn their colorful skirts from donated scraps, had learned their dance steps from a professional ballerina. Again the applause, and then more. The children bowed and glowed. After the performance, we took their photos, patted their heads, congratulated them in broken Armenian. And then we heard their stories. A girl whose father was in prison for killing her baby brother. A boy whose mother had killed herself. Several whose minds were slow but smiles wide. Many without either parent. But all, children reclaiming in Ojantag Boarding School Number 8 that place called childhood.
The school director led us down the gray corridors into the classrooms. As we crowded in through the narrow doorways, the children stood up from their desks in a show of respect, wide-eyed and curious. We welcomed the fresh flowers they offered us, sampled the apricot candies they made us, admired the crafts their small hands had fashioned: paintings of daisies and blue skies, calendars, richly dressed dolls, baskets. We took more photos, spoke simple English with the older children, and hugged the littlest ones.
We followed the school director up two flights of stairs into large, pale green rooms spread with a sea of narrow beds, metal frame against metal frame, each draped with an army blanket and thin towel, drafty rooms with cracked windows and broken wall furnaces. More metal beds lined the hallway to the bathroom, some with two pillows for brother and sister to sleep side by side, some pushed up against window ledges three floors above weeds and concrete.
“These children are fortunate,” the school director told us. “They have beds with mattresses. They have blankets. Yes, we need more. Always. But our children have much more than many others.”
I suddenly felt grateful for the narrow metal beds these children had. “Look how dreary these corridors are,” an aunt said, as we filed slowly back downstairs and out of the building. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to come back and paint beautiful murals on the walls? Fields of sunflowers, apples trees, a rainbow?”
A rainbow. The promise of God to Noah on Mount Ararat. An arc of colors, a spectrum in the sky, the refraction, reflection, and dispersion of light emerging through rain or fog. Just like the children. Rainbows emerging through the rain and fog of broken homes, poverty, and disease, children with childhoods nearly lost but for the dispersion of love from those in the school and from those across the seas. As we boarded the red bus to wind our way back through the streets of Yerevan to our hotel, I glanced back at the mottled gray building with the concrete columns, a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds. Pressed against the rectangular windows, tender and wistful, were the faces of the children, the promise of God.
cover photo from HETQ & BigPicture.ru