From Village Life to the City of Angels

Ofik Mkrtoumian is a very active lady at the age of 66.She was born on February 5, 1942 in Yerevan, Armenia Although she had lived in the small village of Sevan, Armenia for the first twenty years of her life. Sevan is home to the worlds largest Alpine Lake, Lake Sevan. Ofik currently resides in Burbank, California where she lives with her daughter, her daughters husband, and one of her many grandchildren. Life was filled with struggles from dropping out of school at an early age, working in factories as a teenager she said "I would never change anything that has happened throughout those years." She often sleeps through most of the day and does housework until everyone comes back home, however she says that she loves life and enjoys every minute of it. Ofik loves to paint, draw, and as well as sew clothes which was her first job in a factory a couple miles away from Sevan. Here is a woman who loves to live life everyday.

I am the third oldest child from seven sisters. I was born in Yerevan Armenia in 1942. I lived in Sevan, Armenia for about the first twenty years of my life. Sevan, at the time was under rule of the Soviet Union run by Stalin. My childhood was pretty much the best years of my life. Sevan is a small village in Armenia about 70 miles North of Yerevan the country's capital.

I went to Michnakar Lchasan Deprotes (school). I went there from grade school until the eight grade. After the eight grade I dropped out and went to work at a technical school for two years. Everyone who lived in Sevan attended that school, and I remember living about five minutes away. I lived in a pretty safe place nothing bad ever really happen. I remember going to school, coming home, eating, and then playing with my friends until sometimes two in the morning. I was actually a very bad kid; you can say I was a bully. My friends and I bothered other kids a lot, and pushed them around and stuff. The one thing I will never forget while I lived there was when one day I was going to school and this was after I had dropped out of the eight grade so I was taking night classes in the technical school. I was walking there because the buses were never working during the winter and all the time when it was snowing or just when the roads were really cold and frozen. All the roads were closed, and from where I lived in Sevan and so I had to walk about six kilometers just to get to the school. I remember while I was walking my legs were almost completely numb and all I could do, was think about was how cold my legs were, and so accidentally I took a wrong turn, and instead of going to the direction of the school I had gone straight towards Lake Sevan. About three kilometers later I looked up and saw that I was pretty much lost, and so I didn't know what to do I just went to sleep there until the morning came because it was so dark and snowy I couldn't find my way back, and that was probably the most frightening thing that had ever happened to me during that point in my life. Well when I woke up the next morning it was still snowing and very cold, my legs felt like they were completely taken from under me, and all I did was look at the buildings and houses ahead and I walked back, and that took me about a half hour and when I went back I just went straight to the school, where I had spent the whole rest of the day with my legs by the fire and the rest of the time I just spent learning and working. So yeah it was a real scary experience.

Everything that happened in Armenia and in other parts of the Soviet Union we heard all our news from a radio in our house. There were no other lights or electricity. Living in a small own was great because I loved how everyone knew one another and how everyone was like one big family. There were a lot of poor people, and we had really close neighborhood ties with one another, so we just had each others back in time of need pretty much. I worked in a technology school after my first two years after high school and I worked with blind people and taught them how to work with their hands, and I myself worked sewing things, and pretty much making a living off that. Right after that I got married, and I moved to Ashkabat, which was a few kilometers away from Sevan and just a couple of miles away from Yerevan. When I got there I pretty much started to learn the ways of business and I opened up a store in that village. I learned about the business in Sevan but I received my diploma in Ashkabat.

Politics played a major role on Sevan. Since Armenia was part of the Soviet Union it was run by Stalin. After the year 1950 after Armenia was sort of independent; see the communists opened up more opportunities for us in Armenia. They opened up more jobs, more land for the common people, they gave u more opportunities, even though the rest of Armenia was more government owned because of war in 1946. However, people still lived good lives, under the government. I mean I didn't really see anything wrong with it, unless you were really poor that's when it was really hard. However, when Stalin passed away in March of 1953; we had a memorial at school at school and our village we all tied black ribbons on our hands, and almost everyone was crying. We were kids at the time we didn't even understand, we just thought our leader just died and what can we do about it. We didn't know how we were going to get jobs or how everything would be run. We just believed in all that nonsense, but all the terrible things he brought on our people's heads were outrages. We didn't realize how terrible Stalin was until years after his death. We learned that everything we ever worked for went to him. He took all of our army and made them fight for the Russians, and anyone who refused was killed.
All in all, village life wasn't the greatest, but I would never change one thing that has happened to me. If I had the chance to go back and do everything all over exactly the same way I would go back in a heartbeat.

Interviewed by Narek Mkrtoumian