We’ve made more than two dozen trips to Meghri since the start of our Bringing Water to Syunik’s Border Villages project, but this trip was different, it felt different. Never before has the road to Meghri been so colorful. Never before have we seen so many cars and trucks on the road, and all of them full, transporting fruits and vegetables from and to the region.
It felt like all of a sudden something happened and Meghri is connected to the rest of Armenia. It seems to be at the center of everyone’s attention and people are in a hurry to get their share.
The answer to this sudden shift is the harvest. It’s amazing how many small cars “filled to the throat” with persimmon, and big trucks with boxes of the same orange fruit (carrying probably 3-4 tons per truck) are traveling through the region, adding to the already marvelous views of the highways that climb over mountains and through forests and hills.
Andre, our intern from the US, is traveling with us this time and this is his first visit to this part of Armenia. He is enthusiastic and full of ideas: to build ski resorts on the high mountain slopes of Syunik, to invest in wide highways to connect Meghri and the Armenia-Iran border to the rest of Armenia. Throughout the trip, he was throwing different infrastructure initiatives at us which, in his opinion, would help to develop the region and achieve its true potential. I was trying to bring him down to the level of mere mortals and tell him about the realities and obstacles and the history behind different initiatives implemented so far. It was an interesting and amazing mixture of day-dreaming and conviction about the myriad opportunities not even considered.
After countless arguments, discussions and the casual “look at that mountain” or “wow, this is a beautiful turn” we arrived in Alvank, one of the two beneficiary communities we work with in the Bringing Water to Syunik’s Border Villages project, supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
The project has already accomplished some of its goals: cleaning the wells and underground tunnels (chahriz) that supply these communities with potable water. The construction-rehabilitation work is completed and now is the time when we are trying to assist these communities with the creation of management systems that will empower them to manage their water resources. The communities have already taken the first hard step: elected water management boards that will participate in the decision-making process together with the community mayors. These boards already hold regular meetings and are in the process of putting together the long-term plan for sustainable management of all water in both communities.
We held meetings, too, and received an overall update about the progress with the community water management plan. We suggested to the mayor of the community and the board to consider creating a separate position in the community administration for a chahriz clean-up specialist and repeated our willingness to develop local capacity for clean-up and maintenance by sending local experts or willing young residents (one from and for each community) for training in Iran. The Alvank community was able to increase the water fee it has been collecting from the community from 100AMD to 300AMD accumulating almost 250,000 AMD annually, which is barely enough to pay the salary of the water maintenance employee whose main task is to regulate the water flow between different parts of the village. They still have a lot of work to do. They know that in their long term planning, they should aim to increase the fee for water (within a feasible timeframe) to realistic amounts that would provide enough funds for the community administration to deal with maintenance and training issues.
Shvanidzor, our second community, undergoes almost the same processes but with two important differences. The mayor of this community has more experience in running different types of projects with various donors, which basically means he will do everything to appease a donor or a project implementing organization and it is a bit harder to find the reality between his efforts to keep you happy and get more and the actual on-the-spot situation and the overall progress of the project activities. The second difference is in the background of the population living in the community. Shvanidzor is one of the oldest communities is Armenia and the people residing here are locals who have been living in this community for generations, while Alvank, used to be Aldara, an Azeri village, repopulated by refugee Armenians from different cities of Azerbaijan. This last aspect makes a lot of difference, as the people in Shvanidzor are more receptive and are more aware of the water supply issues and problems. They also feel that they belong. Their families have been villagers here for generations. The residents of Alvank were city folk until two decades ago. Neither these issues nor their possible solutions are familiar to them.
With an agreement to return and participate in the community meeting that will be discussing the long term water management plan we set off toward Yerevan, with a secret desire to have another opportunity to witness these spectacular views of Syunik in fall.