From Aug 4-20, PeacePlayers International Fellow Gunnar Hagstrom volunteered at the Our Lady of Armenia summer camp in Tzakhkadzor, Armenia.
Gunnar poses with other volunteers at the camp.
“This is Armenia”, were the first English words I heard when I arrived in Yerevan, Armenia at 4 am. I had just got into the car that was taking me from the capital of Armenia to Tzakhkadzor, a small camp in the mountains of North East Armenia. While I was searching to find how to buckle my seatbelt I heard these words, and was motioned that, no seatbelts are necessary. Right away I knew I was in for a trip that I had never experienced before.
I had signed up to Volunteer at the Our Lady of Armenia summer camp, a camp set up for orphans and underprivileged children of Armenia. The Our Lady of Armenia center was established in 1988, after the earthquake in Gyumri, Armenia left over 500,000 people homeless. For me, this was a chance to get back to my roots and to be able to bring pictures and stories back to my Grandmother from her homeland (my Grandmother is from Kharpert, Armenia, which is currently eastern Turkey). For the children who attended the camp, this was a chance for them to travel outside of their cities, towns, homes for maybe the first time. To get to interact with other children from all around Armenia, and take part in activities that they normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to do.
The campers got to experience swimming for the very first time in Lake Sevan, the country's largest lake.
I was absolutely amazed by the children. While we had many barriers to verbal communication, their enthusiasm and energy was infectious for everyone at the camp. Many of these children came to the camp with just a plastic bag filled with a couple t-shirts and pairs of socks for the two weeks, but that didn’t matter. My role in the camp was ‘Sports Teacher.’ So every morning I had 5 groups of 30 children coming to play basketball with me. It was unbelievable, many of these children had never played or seen a basketball before, so I’d say it was more of a ‘relay races’ station than basketball, but they all seemed to enjoy. What I noticed in the sports stations is that most of the children didn’t have shoes. They had a pair of sandals or a pair of dress shoes, so when it came to sports, they just preferred to go barefoot on the cracked pavement.
One camper is sad to leave after two weeks together.
One of the days, the entire camp took a field trip to go to Lake Sevan, the largest lake in Armenia situated in the mountains. This was eye opening for me, as I was informed early on that almost none of the kids could swim or had even been to a lake before. When we arrived, the counselors and volunteers formed a human barrier that the kids couldn’t go outside of (about waist deep), and we spent hours teaching the kids how to swim. Even though the water was much closer to the Atlantic Ocean than the Mediterranean, the children splashed around in the water for the entire day.
On the last day we said our goodbyes. The 200 children, teary-eyed, gathered their belongings and hopped onto busses to take them back to their homes. For many of these kids, this was their first opportunity to see what lies outside of their daily lives. Even for many of the Armenian counselors of the camp it was their first opportunity to leave home without one of their parents or an older sibling. The work that Our Lady of Armenia does is astounding. The amount of children’s lives that have been saved and been improved because of their selfless efforts is immeasurable.
