Toward Independence: NGO offers orphanage alumni life experience

It was for the first time that the 19-year-old girl prepared pizza by herself. On the weekend Sima Gharaghazaryan, with her conventional mother (the social worker of the ‘family’) ran to a shop. They bought the necessary things and food for the week and returned home. Sunday evening was passed eating pizza with the whole family – in a family for which the word and the occasion has special meaning.

Four months ago Sima got the apartment as a provision of her “graduation” from a Vanadzor orphanage. Now, she and others are learning to live an independent life in a sort of “half-way” house preparing for their adult lives.

‘Aravot’ (morning) NGO (non-governmental organization), in Vanadzor, had the idea of providing 10 grown-up children from the orphanage with such an opportunity.

The program is implemented to the order of RA Ministry of Labor and Social Issues and by the financing of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The program is experimental, and it will last a year. Its aim is the formation and development of the idea of a family among the former alumni of the orphanage.

“It is important for us have something like a family, so that the idea of a family is correctly developed among our children,” says Docent Margo Shahverdyan, Doctor of Psychology, and president of ‘Aravot’.

She adds that such models are implemented in Armenia, but this one is a precedent, since a child who gets out of the orphanage must independently organize his/her own life.

Three apartments are rented within the framework of the program, the eight girls and two boys live there. All the expenses, including the rent bills are paid by the NGO; it allots the children a fixed amount of money per month to take care of their expenses.

“They were matured biologically at the orphanage, but as for the social aspect, they still have some problems to overcome,” says Shahverdyan.

As she assures, if a child being brought up in a family obtains all the necessary skills to organize his/her further life, then children living in orphanages, do not have such an opportunity no matter how hard their orphanage tries to settle all their problems.

“We do not try to create a new viewpoint for them; simply we hope that possessing those skills they will change their attitude towards the public and themselves, objectively estimating their own abilities,” says Shahverdyan.

Narek Sargsyan, head of the department for children’s rights protection of the Lori province administration thinks that people, being brought up at orphanages, lack living skills, no matter how hard those institutions work for them. This is one of the reasons why Sima and the others do not yet live in their own apartments. (The government provides free apartments to orphan alumni; however these do not live in theirs yet.)

“I do not work yet, I still study, and I do not earn my money; that is why I decided to be included in this program. Besides, now I studied cooking,” tells Sima.

She lives with her five friends in a three-room apartment. They knew each other since living at the orphanage. They left the orphanage near the end of last year. After becoming adults the girls did not want to leave their orphanage not only because they love it very much, but also because some of them have not got apartments yet, and the others cannot continue their life independently.

The young ladies are attended to by social workers of the program help them. They clean the apartment together, they go shopping together, and they pay the bills together.

“I like comrade Voskehat very much,” says Sima who prepared the pizza with social worker Voskehat Muradkhanyan.

She remembers that their educators at the orphanage were teaching them, for example, to iron, to clean the room, however, only the social workers taught them cooking.

“We help their small family settle problems,” says social worker Muradkhanyan, and she remembers that at the beginning of the program, for example, the girls were consuming more natural gas than now; they have already studied how to economize and to spend their money wisely.

During the last months 20-year-old Gohar Hayriryan learned how to do shopping: “At the beginning I could not save money for everything, but now I manage to do so,” says the girl who has neither a mother nor a father.

The Government has not provided her with an apartment yet. Gohar hopes that she will live at her own apartment alone by herself one day. However, she likes sharing an apartment with another orphanage alumnus – Tehmineh.

“It was hard to leave the orphanage, I lived there for ten years; however, I overcame it. Last Sunday I was washing the clothes, I cleaned the house, I cooked,” says Gohar.

“This program gave me self-confidence; now I am more courageous. If previously I did not manage to do something, now I can.”