ARMENIA - Anait's greenhouse

project testimony

Anaït (let’s call her so) has been a teacher in the only school class in his small village of Artsakh (which we call Nagorno-Karabakh) for nearly thirty years. She loved her job and her students like her children. During the last push of the Azeri army at the beginning of 2024, her village is hit, and two students, brothers, died, out of the six children in the school. Not only does Anaït have to flee quickly with her octogenarian mother, daughter, and stepson, but the event traumatizes her. She can no longer enter a classroom, she can no longer and does not want to teach anymore. Every day that passes, she cries in front of the photo of these two children. The rope is broken. They take the children’s bodies with them to be buried in Armenia.

In her mountainous homeland, almost everyone has their garden to live on. "Traditionally, we grow aromatic herbs (parsley, chives, onion, other plants unknown to us), and eat them in kinds of small crepes" (photo). Arrived in the region of Yerevan, much warmer, she decides to transform herself into a breeder of herbs to sell them in the neighborhood. The NGO "Table Ronde du COE", which runs a mobile social support programme for refugees throughout the region, decides to support her. She rents a house abandoned for years by a couple who went to Russia, but which charges her an exorbitant rent, when it is at best worth $100. The NGO buys her plastic greenhouses so that she can produce all year round, as well as a fridge, the neighbors of the village give her useless used furniture, she regains hope.

Today she sells throughout the region to private people and to restaurants who like to cook these traditional recipes. But her heart remains in Artsakh, as shown by her T-shirt worn that day. (photo). “I don’t have the right to let myself go, I have to be strong every morning and keep going".