LATEST HUMILIATION
NAIRA HAYRUMYAN
Lragir.am
31 Jan 2011
If you want to see how people can be humiliated, go to post offices
where law-abiding citizens take cash for winning cash receipts.
The long queue of pensioners and bad-dressed people does not move.
People stand there for hours to get 2000 or even 500 drams for their
“winning” checks. According to the rules that the government set if a
cash register receipt has 2 coinciding digits, then you can get 500
drams, 3 figures – 2000 and so on. Almost no one has a coincidence
of more than 3 digits. And so pensioners stand in queues for their
2 thousand drams.
Besides Ararat Bank, the other banks seem to have refused to exchange
cash receipts with money. Post office workers are constrained to file
in numerous blanks, take copies of passports, checking each number
and the queue grows.
People are standing calmly because for many of them 2000 dram is the
10 percent of their pension. They collect each cash receipt hoping
to win something.
Many say they have never been so much humiliated before. “I am 75
years old, I have taught in school whole my life but I get a pension
of 28 thousand drams”, said one of the elderly people in the queue.
Those who enter post offices to pay for utilities, skip the queue.
“They pay to the state, and we “take”, and therefore we have to
stand in line”, says an elderly man with a smile, a former driver,
who was waiting for receipt of 2500 drams- 2 checks won.
Many houses have a vase, in which received checks are thrown. Then
they check whether they have won, and then, with a sense of trampled
dignity they go to get what state should pay.
Queues at the post office for the 500 drams are the final touch to
the picture of the humiliated Armenia.
From: A. Papazian