my battle for karabagh

It’s been a while, but the last week has been jam-packed with getting through the last of my research interviews, dealing with IRB consent form signatures (which meant going back to all the people I interviews in June. Not fun.), and generally running into people I haven’t seen in years and didn’t realize were in Armenia. So now my social calendar is full.

I finally got to Kharabagh this weekend…just barely. I figured it would be an adventure when three of my friends decided to rent a car and drive the 350 km ourselves over mountains, and bumpy roads. But I wasn’t expecting what happened three hours after we left Yerevan.

We were taking turns driving (everybody wanted to say they’d driven in Armenia). We stopped off at a field in Sisian to admire the view and Mary got behind the wheel. About 10 minutes later, as she was driving, she got distracted, realized she was veering off the road, overcorrected, resulting in a nasty fishtail across the two-lane highway before the car took off over a sloped embankment and banged into the field.

It felt pretty awful and probably could have been much worse. We flew over several sizable piles of rocks that probably would have caused the car to flip, not to mention the fact that the three of us in the back weren’t wearing seatbelts, a la Armenian style.

I got banged against the passenger door pretty hard and probably clenched my jaw because it’s been sore ever since. A few cuts and bruises cover my elbow and my right arm and leg have been really-strenuous-workout sore the last few days. I asked a doctor friend who’s in town to check me out and she proclaimed me paranoid, but lucky. Also, it appears I’m not bleeding internally. Apparently if I was, I would have passed out a few hours after the accident. Good to know, eh?

So we call the rental car company, which drives out from Yerevan with a new car for us to destroy…errr… drive. Of course, since we’re three hours outside Yerevan, we had to wait. In a field. With no food. Or bathroom. And it was so windy outside we couldn’t even really stand outside the car. The phrase “bonding experience” doesn’t it justice.

Finally the rental people arrive, are incredibly kind, and send us on our way. Only to call us the next morning in Shoushi to insist that we return to Sissian right away so that Mary can take a blood alcohol test. 24 hours AFTER the accident. Uhh. No. We didn’t go.

Instead, we had a wonderful weekend in Kharabagh. (Even if we did get there four hours after we planned on arriving.) Saturday night was a party at a Kharabaghtsi’s house with the Birthright volunteers who were also there for the weekend. Sunday morning we attended services at Shoushi’s beautiful church, which when Shoushi was held by Azeris during the war, they used as an ammunition depot.

Then we drove down to Jugulduguz (not sure if I got that right.) Basically a giant beautiful gorge in Shoushi. Then we drove to the town of Aghdam, a village that was completely annihilated by the Armenians during the war to ensure that the Azeris wouldn’t and wouldn’t want to capture it again.

Driving through the ruined buildings and homes felt like going through a ghost town. A few squatters had taken over some plots with horses and cows. But we saw very few people in a village that probably once was home to thousands of people.

The eeriness continued when we reached the mosque in Aghdam, which the Armenians allowed to stand, but desecrated inside. Now it’s the home for several cows and pigs. We climbed to the top of the minaret for an amazing view of Kharabagh and, to the east, Azerbeijan.

To ensure my own safety, I insisted on driving back. It was a pretty incredible feeling to be driving the streets of Stepanakert, through the Lachin corridor, and the fields and mountains of Armenia.

Now I’m working hard to get through the last of my grant requirements in my last days here.

Back to DC on Sunday!

(For my odar (read: gringo) friends, a primer on the war in Kharabagh. And here’s another on Kharabagh in general.)