New Program Trains Social Workers to Deal with Artsakh’s Needs

Poghosyan was captured by Azerbaijanis during the war. He was among the last inhabitants of Avetaranots, a village in the Askeran Region. Until the very last minute he didn’t know that Azerbaijani soldiers had occupied his village. In captivity for more than a month, Valeri was sent to Armenia, through the efforts of the Red Cross, on December 15, 2020. Soon after his arrival, he underwent heart and then brain surgery.

Through Beglaryan’s support, Poghosyan has resettled in a house in Ivanyan Village. Recently he received some furniture too. “Narine helped me to rebuild my life, both by strengthening me and by making use of social services through government entities. To me, she is part counselor and part aid facilitator,” he said, beaming.

“I feel well now and do not need any more help. What I need the most is a small business to busy myself. Narine promised to help me apply for such programs,” he notes, adding that he has a garden in front of the house and is planning to grow tomatoes and cucumbers next year.

I Am a Refugee in My Own Country

“I am a refugee in my own Artsakh,” says Armine Arzangulayan, 30, with her eyes betraying the months-long exhaustion. “But as a social worker I have to be strong to help other displaced families.”

Arzangulayan, along with at least 40,000 others, has no roof over her head. She fled her home with nothing but the clothes on her back and some personal documents in a hastily packed bag. She is now renting an apartment in Stepanakert where she lives with her two children, her husband, her grandmother, and her father-in-law, a wounded veteran of the first Artsakh war who participated in the 1994 battles to liberate Shushi. He lost his right arm in an explosion.

The kitchen window of her apartment overlooks Shushi, which looks like a ghost city in the darkness of the night. At that window Armine often reminisces about her childhood in the village of  Khtsaberd and later in Taghavard, where her in-laws lived. Taghavard, in Martuni, was divided by an Artsakh Defense Army checkpoint. Azerbaijani soldiers now stand beyond the boundary line.

Arzangulayan was among the first volunteers to offer help for the post-war chaos. She helped other displaced people find lodging in the middle of winter. “Before the war I would have never thought that one day I would become a social worker, because I thought it was not important. When I came back to Stepanakert after the war, I began to feel this nudging in my soul to do something. Displaced myself, I had a desire to move beyond distributing food, and to become a part of a systematized social protection unit, which was non-existent in Artsakh. Soon a Facebook announcement grabbed my attention and I applied for the program,” she said, as she turned yet another page of a thick notebook where she records information about the displaced families. So far, she has interviewed around 500 families and is currently working with 70 of them.

Psychosocial Support

This new project, launched in February 2021, focuses on psychosocial support free of administrative bureaucracy. The system is based on human rights principles and is intended to build resilience and restore the psychosocial health of vulnerable, displaced individuals and families.

The project aims to place a part- or full-time social worker in every remote village of Artsakh. Social workers would work directly with families to identify their needs and provide support through targeted intervention. While social workers work to solve social and psychological problems on a community level, case managers will work together on a regional level to analyze the big picture.

The Artsakh Ministry of Social Affairs, together with the FAR Children’s Center, have interviewed more than 300 candidates to be social workers in the initial phase of the project. Ninety applicants who were selected have received training to work with displaced people. In June 2021, the ministry hired 22 of them as full-time employees.

“This was an evidence-based concept that was generated based on our observations in post-war Artsakh. We saw chaos, desperation, and incomprehensible human suffering. We saw thousands of people in lines in front of the Artsakh Ministry of Social Affairs waiting for humanitarian support packages. Violence against women and children required immediate intervention too,” said FAR Children’s Center Executive Director Dr. Mira Antonyan.

In the 1990s, during the first Artsakh War, Antonyan worked with displaced people from Artsakh and refugees from Baku and Sumgait while also hosting 14 displaced persons in her own three-room apartment. More than 30 years later she faces the same challenges as the newly-trained social workers do.

“My role in social work is new and I still have to establish myself and my responsibilities. The biggest challenge was dealing with families who lost their close ones in the war and/or have POWs,” said Armine Arzangulyan. “At first, we didn’t know how to knock on their doors, introduce ourselves, or start a conversation. It was hard to gain credibility with them and try to understand their needs.”

“Back in the 1990s when I started my career in this field, people would hardly trust me. Every time I entered a home, people would ask: ‘Are you his/her relative? Why are you so concerned about his/her issues? Why do you want to help him/her? What is in it for you?’ Having said that, this is quite a familiar challenge for me and, in the course of these years, I have learned how to deal with it.” said Antonyan. “On one hand, these families have been facing insurmountable problems. They feel dehumanized and need time and support. On the other hand, social work is a new phenomenon in Artsakh and people have to understand the need and its importance,” she notes.

Developing Institution of Social Workers of Artsakh

Although a substantial number of displaced people have been linked to appropriate resources, including charitable organizations present in Artsakh, many have fallen through the cracks.

“There has also been poor mobilization of government resources to facilitate displaced people’s social and psychological recovery and their integration into new realities,” said Antonyan. “In the past, the essence of the support to people in need was limited to the provision of monthly allowances, which were given to them year after year. That approach has developed a culture of dependency and did not encourage them to become self-sufficient. Our greatest impact would be that, starting in 2022, with our support, the Artsakh government will use an integrated and holistic approach to provide social and economic support to people in need. This approach will help the population of Artsakh to achieve self-sufficiency by starting their own enterprises or family businesses.”

The newly established Master of Social Work program at Mashtots University of Artsakh has also changed the field. Arzangulyan and Beglaryan started the hybrid program in September.

“This is my dream job,” said Arzangulyan of her social work career.

Added Antonyan, “Our approach to helping Artsakh is based on the concept that, in this post-war phase, every citizen of Artsakh, young or old, needs encouragement, understanding, and psychological support. This applies to professionals as well as to doctors and healthcare providers who have suffered from burnout, to teachers who find it difficult to formulate clear messages to children, to servicemen who have been injured both physically and psychologically, and to those burdened with other losses. This applies to families who are still searching for their captive and missing relatives, to parents who are suffering, and to children who are struggling to cope with trauma. Everyone needs to be supported.

“People who are experiencing the most vulnerable time in their lives — which relates to almost the entire Artsakh population, and not only to the displaced — should have anchors to rely on, to connect them with resources and find solutions to their complex problems. It is these anchors that we want to develop through our project.

“That is why we believe that there is a need for a social worker in every village, in every region. Artsakh needs psychosocial community centers, family support, child protection, and family strengthening programs. My dream is to be able to help more people than we can today.

“In other words, the overarching goal of our project is to train our beneficiaries to grow and become good, professional social workers so that not only will they acquire the skills and knowledge that a social worker needs, but so that they also become the ambassadors of the new mission in Artsakh, a moral mission of empowering the people of this wounded republic and addressing both private and public issues,” concluded Antonyan.