Water Security in Border Villages

The villages of Alvank and Shvanidzor are located in the Meghri region at the border with Iran. The total population of the villages is 692 inhabitants. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic system water problems became

It’s Friday morning and a cold shower in the Mirhav Hotel reminds me of the not so distant past when a hot shower in the morning seemed like a far-away mirage. Fortunately it is just a matter of a phone

It is harvest season in Armenia. The rural development team makes regular visits to villages to monitor Civilitas programs. The individual stories are representative of the dilemmas facing individual farmers and Armenia’s rural economy in general. I get excited about

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

Today I had an unusual visitor. One of our beneficiaries, Vardan Ghalechyan, (who has completed the payments of the milking unit we provided almost a year ago) came to our office in response to our offer to start a second

It’s been several months (of meetings and proposals) since our decision to put together a project that will assist the Bardzravan community in Syunik in securing a market for their milk and help them get on their feet. Everything seems

We head to Meghri at least once a month to oversee progress on our community organization project, supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. To break the drive into manageable pieces, this usually means a three-day trip. The

During the several trips we have made to the Meghri region – down, way down, three mountain ranges away from the nearest city, at the southern edge of Armenia on the border with Iran – we have come to know