Oxfam: From loss to prevention in Armenia

On the International Day for Risk Reduction, Oxfam Armenia’s Disaster Risk Reduction Coordinator Zara Tonoyan describes a childhood tragedy, and her efforts to prevent such suffering from occurring again in her country.

Earlier this month I and several colleagues and Oxfam partner staff had the privilege of being appointed an “observer” of an Armenian government and NATO-sponsored emergency response simulation exercise in Armenia, one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. Vulnerable to such phenomena as devastating earthquakes, regular landslides, mudflows and flooding, Armenia was chosen as this year’s location for dozens of rescue teams from all over the world to gather and take part in the three-day exercise, simulating all sorts of potential disaster responses from multiple car crashes to chemical spills and earthquakes.

The occasion was no ordinary event for me. As a child I survived a great tragedy in my country that will never fade from my memory. It was a tragedy that I believe eventually led me to leave my previous job in the private sector and take on my current role as Oxfam’s Disaster Risk Reduction Coordinator in Armenia, a position which allows me to help communities in Armenia prepare for disasters, decreasing the suffering caused when they strike, and even help them prevent disasters, such as small-scale flash floods or mudflows, from damaging crops and community infrastructure. I don’t want others to suffer the way those around me did in the northwestern Armenian city of Gyumri, where I’m from. Gyumri was still part of the Soviet Union, named after the country’s founder, and on 7 December 1988 it was struck by a natural disaster beyond all imagination.

The last time I saw my sister

That morning, I and my older sister Naira were rushing around the apartment as always, getting ready for the school day. I remember thinking as we left the building that it was a warm day for that time of year, even though the darkened sky was threatening rain. On the way to school, Naira and I were unusually quiet, as if we were reflecting on something. We arrived and made plans to meet up during the break, then Naira ran off to join her classmates while I joined my own for our Armenian literature lecture. She was 15 and I was 13 at the time – the final years of the Soviet Union. It was the last time I ever saw my big sister, who wouldn’t live to see an independent Armenia.

As I was sitting with my friends and classmates at my desk, an alien noise broke the calm of our studies and the floor began to shake up and down, back and forth. The windows burst from their frames and a large crack ripped through the wooden floor. We all began to panic; students were running from every direction towards the staircase. Some were so frightened they jumped from the fourth floor windows straight onto the asphalt below.

Then, just as so many pupils were running down the staircase, part of the building collapsed. I immediately realised my sister and her classmates were directly below the rubble but I was lost in the screaming and the confusion, and I was just trying to escape the building. A thick and nauseating haze of dust added to the overall chaos – I could hardly see anything, and we all began to have trouble breathing; the dust even coated the inside of our mouths.

“They will never be able to describe what they felt”

By some stroke of luck I found myself outside, my clothes, face and black hair turned grey with the dust. I saw Russian soldiers running into the building (most students and teachers at the school were the children and wives of ethnic Russian soldiers based in Armenia). I was crying and screaming as I saw the faces of my friends and fellow pupils who were on the ground bleeding or being carried from the building by solders. There were also pupils that were motionless, already laid out next to each other on the ground of the school. They will never be able to describe what they felt within those short minutes before they died.

My parents found the body of my sister only the next day, after spending a sleepless night at the school, working with soldiers who used projectors and dogs to help them find the bodies of pupils under the ruins of the school building. My grandmother and younger brother were trapped in our apartment, but were luckily found alive by the rescue team.

The scars of the earthquake

The scars of the Spitak Earthquake remain very raw in Armenia. Almost everybody from my region of the country lost someone close to them. 6,000 more schoolchildren died along with my sister on that horrible day, and more than 25,000 people in total lost their lives as a result of what would come to be known as the Spitak Earthquake of 1988. Thousands of jobs and livelihoods were lost (and never recovered) and over 40% of the country’s manufacturing capacity was destroyed by the earthquake. 515,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and 19,000 people were injured. Thousands of families, including my own, lived in containers for years. Some families are even still living in containers – such as Hakanush and her daughter, who receives assistance from one of Oxfam’s partners and recently told my colleagues in Gyumri that she’s been waiting for a government-provided home for more than 20 years now.

They were hard lessons we learned from Spitak. Thankfully, today in Armenia we are somewhat better prepared than we were in 1988. The Ministry of Emergency Situations opened in 2008; it’s comprised of various departments to help respond to, prepare for, and mitigate the effects of, disasters. However, there remains much to be done at a local level and to build awareness among the country’s younger generations who do not remember Spitak. This is why, although we hope for the best, Oxfam is working with community groups in disaster prone areas to help them prepare, at the grassroots level, for the worst.