IN ARMENIA, TOWNS WITHOUT MEN AS MIGRANT LABORERS LEAVE TO FIND WORK
Washington Post
Feb 13 2015
By Karoun Demirjian February 13 at 9:30 AM
LICHK, Armenia — From late November through February, the stone
church in this rural community in the country’s poorest province
churns out new couples with the frequency of a Las Vegas chapel.
Winter is wedding season in Lichk because as soon as the snow melts,
all the adult men here — and in the nine other towns served by its
little church — leave to work in Russia.
For years, these villages have been like countless others in former
Soviet republics, where able-bodied men are lured to Russia by
seasonal work and higher wages. But stiffer laws for foreign workers
and Russia’s worsening economy are making many migrant laborers
reconsider their annual journey. For the men of Lichk — and other
Armenian workers, who as members of the Eurasian Economic Union don’t
need special work permits in Russia — it has meant working abroad
longer but sending less money home.
The years of migration have also reduced local industries around
Lichk to practically nothing and left local women to choose between
their increasingly difficult lives in a manless world or following
their husbands to Moscow.
“If these great men would not go and work in Russia, we would not
have this church as they built it,” Father Simon Kahana Ter-Mgrtchyan
said in a special blessing to the town’s dependence on Russia, now so
ingrained it has become part of the standard wedding ceremony in Lichk.
“Our women, they understand that this is the way it is,” Ter-Mgrtchyan
explained later. “The men will go earn money outside, in Russia. And
everything else is going to fall on her shoulders.”
‘There are no men here’
“The women are like men here,” said Gayane Shakhverde, as she watched
the sheep and cows she and her friends brought to the roadside market
on the main highway outside Lichk one recent Sunday morning.
Raising and selling animals is just one non-traditional responsibility
women have assumed in their husbands’ absence. They also till gardens
for food, organize family finances and even work construction projects
as they arise.
“The men send money,” Anna Kaleshian said. “But if there is no man
or boy in your house, it can get very hard.”
Kaleshian and Shakhverde, now middle-aged, barely question the system
anymore. They’re so used to doing everything that even when their
husbands come home, they are reluctant to hand over their manly
responsibilities, including chasing skittish sheep frightened by cars.
Some of Lichk’s younger women do manage to steal a girly moment when
their husbands return.
“Everything happens in seasons here. There are weddings in the winter,
and all the babies are born in the late summer or the fall — for
obvious reasons,” said Angela Bunyatyan, 33, who cuts, curls and
sprays hair for 12 hours a day or more during the winter months in
her small salon at the edge of town.
For more than a decade, her husband, Araik, 34, has been traveling the
1,400 miles to Moscow with his brother to find jobs in construction
or laying asphalt — two industries Armenian workers have dominated
in the Russian capital.
Bunyatyan worries about running their 10-person household — the
brothers’ families live together with their parents — on whatever they
are able to send home. She also worries about the kind of accident
that incapacitated her neighbor Barsegh Vartanyan, 42, whose family
is in massive debt because he can no longer work. Almost every family
in Lichk is one misstep away from a similar fate.
But when Araik goes, Bunyatyan trades her hair dryer for a shovel
and plants potatoes in the family’s fields.
So does Tatevik Ispiryan, 28, who also taught herself to drive, fix
irrigation systems and work a threshing machine so she can harvest
the wheat her family grows more efficiently.
“Everything is resting on my shoulders, and there are times when I feel
I am extremely in need of my husband and father’s help,” she said. “But
I feel that I’m stronger when I’m alone because I make the decisions.”
Ispiryan, who was married at 15, now tries to pass that independent
spirit to her 11-year-old daughter, pushing her to think about a
career and not to get married before she turns 30.
But that message hardly matches the realities of life in Lichk.
“There are many cases when women start to think and do something
independently, people start to gossip,” said Anahit Gevorgyan,
director of the Martuni Women’s Community Council.
Only a few women like Bunyatyan have businesses — and her salon
shuts down when the men go, as people would wonder who her customers
are primping for. Bunyatyan won’t even wear sunglasses, she said,
because it draws too much negative attention.
Gossip can have serious consequences in a place where, despite
women’s unisex work roles, men still call the shots from thousands
of miles away.
“Our husbands can get very jealous,” said Dzaghig Melkonian, 27,
explaining that even when her husband was in Russia, she had to ask
her mother-in-law’s permission to leave the house for any reason
except to pick her kids up from school.
Many women also grapple with the nagging worry that if they upset
their husbands, they could be left alone. Gevorgyan estimates almost
half of the men have mistresses or second families in Russia, and
some have abandoned their families entirely. Without the remittances,
a local woman’s ability to work like a man counts for almost nothing:
It is still a below-subsistence existence that needs to be supplemented
to support a family.
Such fears keep women’s aspirations of independence in check.
“Our main concern is if the young unmarried boys go and get connected
to Russian women. That’s why many parents make their sons get married
early,” said Melkonian, who was married at 18. In the process, the
practice locks the region’s daughters into their support role.
Nothing at home
Armenia is not the only former Soviet republic sending migrant workers
to Russia: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s national incomes depend even
more on Russian remittances.
But in the area around Lichk, there really is no other option.
Some Lichk families renovated their houses and purchased cars with
their Russian earnings, leading people in the region to refer to
Lichk as “Putinka.”
Now, even if they wanted to, it is difficult for Lichk residents to
break their Russian bond.
“We will have to work double now, because the ruble isn’t worth as
much,” Araik Bunyatyan said. “I worry about my wife very much. Each
man is supposed to provide for his family. The longer I’m gone,
the more my wife and mother will have to do all the work here that
I should be here doing.”
Facing the possibility of months or even years apart, the Bunyatyans
are starting to talk seriously about leaving Lichk behind.
“We cannot have any expectations. We just have to wait until the
spring,” Angela Bunyatyan said. “But if life would be better in Russia
than it is here, I would like to go.”
Marianna Grigoryan contributed to this report.
Karoun Demirjian is a reporting fellow in The Post’s Moscow bureau.
She previously served as the Washington Correspondent for the Las
Vegas Sun, and reported for the Associated Press in Jerusalem and
the Chicago Tribune in Chicago.