It's Friday night, and hundreds of people are gathered at the Nazarian Hall of the AGBU Marie Manoogian School in central Buenos Aires. There are no speakers, and no entertainment not even bingo.
For a visitor the event looks like an ordinary banquet, complete with traditional Armenian food, but there is a lot more than meets the eye. The "waiters" and "waitresses" are young high school seniors and the "cooks" in the kitchen are their parents and grandparents.
The patrons are their relatives, friends and neighbors, including dozens of Argentineans who come not only for the gourmet Armenian cuisine, but also to encourage this unique event the 20th anniversary of AGBU Marie Manoogian school's traditional Friday night dinners and bid farewell to yet another class of high school seniors before their departure to Armenia.
For 20 years now, senior class after senior class and their parents have organized Friday night dinners without interruption to raise money for the graduating class to spend a week or two in Armenia.
Patricia Basmadjian-Balyan, an engineer and herself a mother of two young children, was among the more than 450 people at the Friday night dinner. She graduated from the AGBU Marie Manoogian School in 1983 and that same year joined her senior classmates on the trip to Armenia.
"1 did this for one year myself back in 1983," she said. "The whole process was in itself an experience. We had an objective and we worked for it. It was and still is a senior class activity," she said. "It brought not only us students, but also our parents together. Imagine, Friday night after Friday night, month after month, the parents of dozens of high school seniors working together to give their children an opportunity to see something which they have heard about throughout their years in elementary and high school."
Like other high school alumni present at a recent farewell dinner, Ms. Basmadjian-Balyan said visiting Armenia was a turning point in her life. "What made a great impact on me was the fact that after hearing so much and taking all those classes on Armenian history and culture, I had the opportunity to actually see everything with my own eyes," she said.
"Another important factor for us teenagers at the time was that we were part of a process along with our parents. We had a clear objective throughout our senior year. We had something very special to look forward to. It was more than a graduation present. It was a visit to Armenia to discover our roots," she said.
Armenia was still a communist country then, and for many of the young seniors the visit was a cultural shock and a time for reflection.
"I cried a lot every time I saw something I had read about. There was Mount Ararat which I had heard so much about. Every song I heard acquired a different meaning. I understood my past history and culture, but I also realized that my past is Armenia and my present and future is Argentina. I was able to understand and separate the two realities in my mind. I returned a better person," Ms. Basmadjian-Balyan said.
Cecilia Dicranian, now a financial administrator in a major Argentinean accounting firm, was in the 1987 graduating class that followed Ms. Basmadjian-Balyan's footsteps. "When we went to Armenia with my graduating class in 1987, Armenia was in the midst of the Gorbachev glasnost and perestroika years.
Things were changing slowly but we could not imagine that independence was that close," she said. "We had worked every Friday and there was no way we were going to miss the opportunity. Armenia was a mirage at first, but when we got there, it became a reality. Throughout my ten years at school, we had heard so much and actually arriving in Armenia was the most emotional experience of my life. Everything 1 had heard at school or from my parents was right there in front of my eyes," she said.
The Armenia program, as some people now call it, has become an inseparable part of the education process at the AGBU Marie Manoogian School, and this year even the elementary school students were involved. They organized an amateur cultural event in July and raised over 1000 pesos (same as U.S. dollars) which they gave to the departing seniors to take to Armenia as their contribution to helping other children in the homeland.
"We want our children to start getting involved at an early age," a parent told me as third graders took to the make-shift stage to sing and dance to Armenian tunes. "It is like a sort of snow ball effect which brings both parents and students together. The Armenia project has become a tradition. It is now part of the whole learning process, or even an objective in itself which the students cannot separate from their senior year here."
The elementary school event attracted several hundred parents, but what made it unique was the participation of a large number of children of immigrant families.
In recent years an estimated 5,000 plus Armenians from Armenia have settled in Argentina and out of a student body of 340 plus students, the AGBU Marie Manoogian School has 43 Armenian immigrant children. Almost all 43 students are on AGBU scholarships.
Hundreds of students have made the Armenia trip in the past 20 years, and many of them have not only kept their ties with the community, but remain actively involved in the community infrastructure.
They are on youth committees, some have entered the teaching profession at their Alma Mater and others are married with young children attending the same school and who will soon follow in their parents' footsteps going through the Friday night banquet ritual which has survived the test of time. Costs of maintaining the program have climbed over the recent years, but the yearly trips have been so deeply entrenched in the school calendar that ending it would be impossible.
"We will have a revolution on our hands if we tell the seniors there will be no trip to Armenia," a teacher said when asked what would happen if the program is cancelled.
