Civilitas board members Vartan Oskanian and Vahe Aghabegians, Director Salpi Ghazarian and staff members Artashes Darbinian and Hayk Petrosyan traveled to Goris and Meghri to closely view the Civilitas Rural Economic Facilitation Program projects being implemented in Syunik.
The Swiss Development Cooperation has partnered with the Civilitas Foundation to help provide improved water capacity for the villages of Alvank and Shvanidzor in Meghri, just kilometers from the Armenian border with Iran. The support of the Diocesan Council of the Iranian-Armenian community is an important component in this program.
Meghri, across three serious mountain ranges, is nearly a day-long trip from Yerevan. At just 400 meters above sea level, by the time snowmelt reaches these village fields, it has been absorbed over meters and meters of rock and field and sand. What remains cannot be wasted or left to fortune.
So for centuries, these villages (and villages throughout the region in Iran and Azerbaijan and Turkey as well) have met their water needs by maintaining underground wells connected to each other through a series of tunnels. Functioning wells and clean tunnels mean adequate water supply during the summer months. Wells with damaged walls and tunnels where tree roots have intruded means insufficient water for man and beast, from June to October.
At the end, everything comes back to water, not just for man and beast, but for produce and markets and livelihood as well. In the sunny, warm fields of Meghri, insufficient water also means that Meghri’s famous apricot, fig and mulberry trees will not produce at capacity. And although getting Meghri produce to Yerevan is an expensive and laborious effort, Meghri produce can be sold across the border in nearby Iranian markets.
Therefore, water is essential for a dignified lifestyle as well as for economic development. In Meghri, this means caring for the wells and tunnels which are the source of that life-giving water.
However, mastery of maintaining a functioning well-tunnel system (called chahrizes) is disappearing. Civilitas, the SDC, in cooperation with the Iranian-Armenian community is bringing experts from Iran to teach the local communities to self-maintain these irreplaceable water sources.
On May 3, the Civilitas team arrived in Meghri to meet with the Iranian-Armenian experts as well as the mayors of each village.
Vahe Aghabegians explained that in Shvanidzor, the problem is not simply maintaining the capacity of the wells, but also installing a water tank in order to store water during the spring months. There, there is already some effort at self-maintenance of chahrizes and it is important to stress the need to institutionalize the maintenance process in order to introduce predictability into the economic life of the village.
At an initial exploratory meeting held in the fall, Vahe and Hayk met with the village heads and the village communities to determine the needs. This was followed by several meetings together with the Iranian Armenian leadership, who had already committed to supporting the needs of these and other southern border communities. The Swiss Development Cooperation is also present in Syunik with several economic support programs. Their engagement in this particular program, however, is a bit unusual in that although the focus of the program is building water infrastructure, the purpose of the program is to encourage the village communities to organize and take ownership of this and other processes in their communities.
Towards this end, the Goris-based Partnership and Cooperation Organization is convening public meetings in the villages to help create formal processes and structures for self-reliant management of their own water resources. This same experience and practice is expected to also be applied to other local needs.
“Each time I drive to Meghri from Yerevan, I realize that for such out-of-the-way communities, maximal effective self-reliance and creative cooperation is the only chance they have for economic survival, and the only way those villages will remain vital. Today Shvanidzor has 400 residents, and Alvank a little less. They are two of four villages along the Araks River. One cannot but help look across the border at the green fields on the Iranian side. This is what we can do on our side, with more examples of this kind of tripartite partnership,” Vahe observed.