by Hrag Vartanian
Yerevan's Mayor Edmond Avakian was the only Soviet mayor to respond to a strange request from the City of Cambridge's Peace Commission to establish sister city ties across the iron curtain. Mayor Avakian encouraged the pairing but made it clear in his letter that while Yerevan is a capital city, Cambridge is, well...only Cambridge.
Mayor Avakian's remark caught the attention of the Peace Commission and after an official visit to Armenia the Cambridge-Yerevan Sister City Association (CYSCA) was established in 1987. It became the first Boston-led initiative to foster non-partisan connections with Armenia. Other programs would join CYSCA in bringing the communities closer, including Boston University Medical Center's Armenia Medical Partnership Program, the Armenian Health Alliance and the Armenia Tree Project—all four guided by the hope to encourage professional, civil, medical and environmental education in Armenia.
CAMBRIDGE REACHES OUT TO YEREVAN
Susan Pearce, CYSCA President, remembers that the year following its establishment CYSCA faced its first crisis, "During the earthquake we only did relief efforts...we had a telethon at the Public Library and there was a big jar in city hall where kids could put pennies. We raised $60,000."
Post-earthquake all public funds in Armenia for cultural exchanges and other sister city activities shrank until they completely disappeared after independence. CYSCA adapted, as Pearce recalls, "Afterwards we went onto a different footing and clearly we had to raise the money."
Unfazed, they would organize the first Armenian film festival in America, support the tuberculosis hospital in Abovian, host various official Armenian delegations, mount art exhibits, organize lectures, host student and professional exchanges and in the last few years raise over $100,000 for the Armenian School Assistance Program that funds special repair projects in Armenia's schools.
A few years ago, CYSCA discovered a source of funding to establish professional exchanges through Sister Cities International. Vice-President Jack Medzorian explains, "In 1997, we got into a new field called Community Connections—funded by Sister Cities International which receives money from the State Department. This is for the training of professionals from Armenia that includes private business people, educators, environmental experts and employment specialists. It combines both hands-on internships and academic training."
To ensure that CYSCA's work reaches as many as possible, Medzorian encourages the participants to share their knowledge with others, "After they return I tell them that it takes 50 people in the U.S.A. to host 10 of them, so it's not enough to do all this for ten people. They have to promise to spread the word. I tell them that I may be able to fund their programs if I have money left over from other grants. I solicit ideas, choose the best ones and get approval from Washington."
Medzorian insists the approach has proven successful, "For example, the business group that came last April responded with a business skills training program. Organized by CYSCA alumni, it will take part in two towns of the Siunik Province and between the two training sessions a hundred people will be reached."
Educators from Gyumri suggested a rural teacher-training program. "The village school teachers are very poorly trained," explains Medzorian. "Every Sunday for four months, two teams of educators went to 56 villages in the Shirak province and tutored 940 teachers. We provided them the most current textbooks and teaching aids. The Gyumri teachers felt the job wasn't done and are reaching out to another 50 villages."
While currently Cambridge offers CYSCA moral support, Pearce believes it may be time to reevaluate CYSCA's relationship with its home city. In CYSCA's early years, Cambridge was a regional center of Armenian intellectual and cultural activity with the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, the Armenian Library and Museum of America and Project Save all headquartered in the city. Today, the institutions have moved and the bulk of local Armenian support comes from neighboring towns. "It could develop into another agency helping Armenia if it drifts more into the Armenian community, but I have an instinctive desire to bring it back to Cambridge," she says.
Regardless, CYSCA's ability to adapt has proven to be its strongest asset. It has been a guiding light for others in the Greater Boston community to bridge the divide with Armenia. Dr. Carolann S. Najarian, who lived in Cambridge at the time of CYSCA's founding, remembers taking notice of the project led by non-Armenians. She would soon discover her own bonds with Armenia.
DR. NAJARIAN'S ODYSSEY:
The Armenian Health Alliance
A native of New York City, Dr. Najarian admits that the first challenge to her discovery of Armenia was discarding her preconceived notions of what Armenia was for her, "Armenia didn't exist for me [growing up], it was the old country where my parents were from and that was gone. I used to think of Lebanon more as Armenia because all the people I knew who were Armenian and came from abroad came from Beirut."
In 1988, she made her first trip as a result of her husband's insistence and realized she had more in common than she thought.
Things quickly changed post-earthquake. At the time, Dr. Najarian was investigating a possible CYSCA medical project when the earthquake hit, "There was no question about what needed to be done and I flew in on January 2nd on the first cargo plane the Boston community sent. From there on out it was, 'When do I go back?'"
She made seven trips to Armenia in the following two-year period and in 1989 established the Armenian Health Alliance (AHA), "It's a small volunteer group. We started shipping supplies and changed our focus to helping hospitals. In 1994, we trained three doctors and opened a small primary care center in Gyumri."
When the Primary Care Center introduced a new treatment for stomach ulcers, it changed the lives of many. Dr. Najarian explains, "We have treated hundreds of patients and cured them of their stomach ulcers which is a debilitating disease. It was a first when we started it in Armenia and a miracle for a lot of people."
Dr. Najarian explains that another AHA facility, the Arpen Center for Expectant Mothers in Stepanakert, Karabakh, grew out of local needs, "Early in 1994, the chief of the Maternity Hospital in Stepanakert kept saying 'our women don't have enough to eat' and we wanted to help. We didn't want to compete with the Maternity Hospital but to help pregnant women. We opened a center that would help them financially with hope that it would go towards fewer abortions. We've had 4,000 babies go through the center and we've had women say that the only reason they had the baby was because they knew they were going to get the assistance."
Arpen's storefront operation costs $100,000 a year to maintain and is funded predominantly by Armenian American donations. The Arpen Center provides food and medical supplements to ensure a healthy pregnancy.
Along with her husband, Dr. Najarian has helped renovate the Malatya Hospital intensive care units at what is now called the K. George and Carolann Najarian Medical Center. The couple's philanthropy is not limited to the medical field as they are funding the renovation of a 3rd century church in the Lachin region through government help.
Dr. Najarian is confident knowing that it all continues to be worthwhile and recalls one expression of gratitude that deeply affected her, "In Shushi, a woman found out I was the sponsor of the Arpen Center that supported her during her two pregnancies, and she decorated our car with roses. When I saw that I broke out in tears. It was beautiful."
In 1999, she wrote a memoir of her experiences in Armenia entitled, A Call From Home, which has recently been translated and published in Armenia. "I never thought of myself as a risk-taker but I have been during my work through the difficult years in Karabakh. I never thought of myself as a writer but I wrote the book," she says.
Another health initiative that developed almost contemporary to AHA has been Boston University's Armenian Medical Partnership Program (AMPP). AMPP has taken on the mammoth task of upgrading Armenia's emergency medical training and procedures and it may just help turn Armenia into a major medical center for the region.
PREPARING ARMENIA FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCIES:
Boston University Medical School's AMPP
In 1992, the American International Health Alliance (AIHA) approached Dr. Aram Chobanian, the Dean of Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), to be part of a team that would travel to former Soviet republics and assess existing health care systems determining if there was room for collaboration with American institutions. Dr. Chobanian wasn't interested in going to all the former Soviet republics but replied he would go to Armenia—they agreed.
"I was part of a small team that went into Armenia for ten days evaluating the major hospitals. I observed that there were many qualified physicians in Armenia but their Soviet medical education needed upgrading. After we got back, I was asked by AIHA if we would consider developing a partnership in Armenia picking whatever we wanted to do at the Emergency Hospital, which is a major hospital in Yerevan. It was the approach which allowed us to pull together a team from our Medical Center," Dr. Chobanian explains.
"I was raised in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in a small Armenian community. My parents, both originally from Van, gave me the standards by which I live, the work ethics—that was how we pleased our parents. My brothers and I were the generation that had to produce."
Dr. Chobanian arrived at Harvard to study medicine and later made his way through the ranks of BUSM until becoming Dean in 1988. As Dean, Dr. Chobanian has helped to build BUSM into a large campus that ranks in the top twenty for biomedical research nationally.
AMPP is currently a multi-disciplinary collaborative program uniting the BUSM and the Boston Medical Center with University of Massachusetts Medical Center (Worcester) and the Emergency Scientific Medical Center in Yerevan.
The Project's Coordinator, Kirsten Levy, attributes some of the success to its clear focus, "At one time there were 40 AIHA facilitated partnerships developing in many different ways. We went in with one idea, emergency medicine, and we stuck with it because Boston Medical Center has good people in the field."
The Partnership has developed curricula for emergency medicine, an emergency nursing course, training for ambulance professionals and a Nuclear Accident Preparedness initiative. The Soviet system was strongly centralized and this historical factor has helped AIHA's work in transferring the developed curricula to other former Soviet nations using the train-the-trainer model. Currently 14 regional centers use parts of the curricula developed in Armenia.
Dr. Chobanian is pleased to see the partnership develop into regionally sensitive aspects of emergency medicine, "We have a large contract for training programs on the medical aspect of radiation accident preparedness. We received the contract from the International Atomic Energy Agency because we were known to have been very successful at doing emergency medicine, trauma and disaster planning for Armenia. With Medzamor and reactors built on the Chernobyl model throughout Eastern Europe, they have funded us to train medical personnel in the event of accidents. We've always used Armenia first to set up the system. We've raised $3 million in funding, some of it from Armenian foundations."
Through the use of the latest teleconferencing technology the initiative mounted an innovative real time simulation in five regional emergency medical training centers [Yerevan, Armenia; Moscow, Russia; Kiev, Ukraine; Tallinn, Estonia; and Chisinau, Moldova] to gauge the medical response to a radiation accident, including peer-to-peer relationships and interregional cooperation. The simulation received an Award of Excellence in 1999 for Best Application in Audiographics/Multimedia by the International Teleconferencing Association. AMPP has also used the teleconferencing technology for other purposes, including consultations and training.
"I think there is potential for Armenia to become a major regional resource for the Caucasus and the former Soviet region. The only impediment is financial resources," insists Dr. Chobanian.
As to AMPP's greatest accomplishment, he says it is the concept of training-the-trainers, "Take a group of individuals and bring them up to a high level of performance and they can train and transmit the information with multiple effect over time."
Carolyn Mugar agrees with Dr. Chobanian in the need to use individuals as conduits of knowledge. Her Armenia Tree Project aims to do for environmental education what AMPP continues to accomplish in the field of emergency medicine.
IMAGINING A GREEN ARMENIA
The Armenia Tree Project grew out of Carolyn Mugar's own frustration for a chronic environmental dilemma, "I started going frequently to Armenia after the earthquake and people kept saying, 'Gosh, this place has no trees,' and every time I went somebody would say that. I decided, 'Enough talk, got to do something about this.'" Which is exactly what she did.
"When everything else in my life is a problem I think and rest my mind on the Tree Project in Armenia," Carolyn Mugar says about the project that is now six years old.
The daughter of Star Market entrepreneur Stephen Mugar, Carolyn is a maverick whose activist résumé includes the anti-Vietnam war movement, the plight of Appalachia's poor, union organizing, serving as a board member of the Armenian Assembly of America, President of Farm Aid and an organizer of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, also known as "The Battle of Seattle." Successful at combining the diverse aspects of her life, she's a vocal advocate of human rights, justice and environmental issues.
A Watertown native, Carolyn recalls that she didn't grow up particularly 'Armenian,' "I didn't go to the Armenian Church, my mother wasn't Armenian and my neighborhood in Watertown wasn't Armenian. All that mattered to me was our block. When my grandmother died and I was about seven, my dad stopped speaking Armenian so I stopped hearing the language. That's why I don't speak the language—I still have to learn," she remarks and pulls out her notepad jotting it down as on objective among pages already overflowing with other 'to do's.'
Carolyn would eventually be turned on to her Armenian identity during a trip she took at the age of 18 to Greece where her father asked her to look up a relative. "All of a sudden I realized I was Armenian," she says about what can only be described as an epiphany.
Her interest in social change began in high school when she discovered that the House on Un-American Activities Commission was questioning her father's friend. The event heightened her awareness of social injustice and she joined the anti-Vietnam War movement, "For years, I organized anti-war GIs. We had a newspaper at a base and we did a lot to stop the war from within the services. Long-term struggle is what I learned from the period. The older I get the more I believe that change takes a long time and I'm willing to invest the time."
The Armenia Tree Project is the latest of Carolyn's efforts to increase social awareness and community activism combining her passion for environmentalism and Armenian issues. Individual $10 donations allow the project to plant a tree in the donor's name and to date a quarter of a million trees have been planted in the small nation.
The project's goal is very ambitious explains Carolyn, "To reforest Armenia and hopefully this project will go on for many centuries." Confronted by the working remnants of Soviet-era industries and weak economic conditions the challenge to preserve Armenia's environmental resources continues.
Is Armenia winning the environmental war? "No, but we're in the right direction," Carolyn responds, "Our goal is eventually to be organic but I don't know how long that will take. We have a Fruit Drying Project where we've built solar fruit dryers in villages, taking a group of farmers who are guaranteed a return if they participate."
She explains that an important aspect of the project is working with Armenians so that they themselves will integrate the work into their lives, "At first people didn't know what it was like to be part of a communal project, it was a foreign thing to the previous Soviet culture, We sign a social contract with the people who plant the trees to care for the trees. We do many social plantings around institutions like hospitals and schools. When we go into villages we also offer a tree for the yard of those who help plant."
Guided by her belief in long-term change she offers some thoughts on the future of Armenian American identity, "I think they are going to relate it to what we can do to ensure that Armenia survives as a nation."
What would she consider the Mugar legacy? "Energy maybe," Carolyn ponders and then continues, "Do as much as you can. He [Stephen Mugar] believed in Armenians and the need to think for the future—what needs to be done next."
All four organizations continue to respond to the future needs of Armenia and demonstrate a community's creativity in maintaining the ties between the Boston region and Armenia. One Yerevan student who was asked to write an article on his observations during the CYSCA student exchange program noted, "And I think, that it [the U.S.A.] is a very good system: if you want to have something, you can work and have it. If I become a government worker, I will do everything so that the same system works in our country." It is this optimism and potential for change that encourages these programs in their efforts to offer Armenia a helping hand.
