Life in Shabulagh 

The moment that I saw Gyuliz I was just thinking about how fun talking to her was going to be. She loves Shabulagh and this was a great opportunity for her to tell others about her young days. She was born in Shabulagh, and she lived there until she was twenty one. Now she is sixty two years old. She did not have a job because she was too young to work. She usually spent her time on playing together with her friends; if she was not playing, she was either in the farm or at home helping her mother. She was talking about how they would get their good and how they would buy things. When she grew up she moved to Tehran, but she said that she wished that she still lived in Shabulagh. She said that no place can be better than Shabulagh for her and nothing can ever change that. She loved living there and still wishes that she never left that place.

Life in Shabulagh was very fun and everything was going very interesting. We had many different things to do. We could go work with our family and friends in the farm or help to take care of the animals. Usually men had to take the animals to the mountains to get fresh air and eat grass. During those times women had to stay home and do work with the house, like make food and take care of the house. One of the most popular hobbies for women was making mole when they had no work to do. Besides making mole they would make clothes too and make their own designs.

In Shabulagh people were very friendly to each other. We were all Armenians. If there was any celebration for something, everyone just get together and have a very good time. Everyone knew each other because of the size of the city. It was just too small and it had very little people living there.

There were many young children living in Shabulagh. We would always be outside paying some kind of games. We used to make up games, or just play anything that we knew. Sometimes we would go to each others farms and just help each other out there. That was like helping and having fun at the same time. We would also go inside the house too, to help. The children had school times and they always attended it. Some students went to school until 8^th grade and some went until 6^th grade. The grades did not go higher than that. If any of the students wanted to have their future based on their knowledge, they would go out of the small town into another town where people were very serious about education. But in Shabulagh they were not so focused on the education of students.

While the children were learning, grown ups were working. Everyone had jobs and everyone did something to take care of their own family. They would be working at the farm or doing something like that, but they would not get paid for their work.

They would just keep their family with all the food that would get from the farm. Everyone had their own farm and they would just get all their goods from the farm or the animals that they had. They had many farms, and some of them were away from their houses; they also had trees and they got their fruit from the trees. That is what all the people that lived in Shabulagh did to keep their families in shape.

In Shabulagh there were no news papers, but we did have records and with that we would always listen to music. We also had something like radios that worked with a battery. Since we didn’t have news papers or anything it would have been really hard for us to get any news, but the people that worked in the church gave us many news about what was going on outside of Shabulagh.

We all went to church and we were all Christians. Even though we lived in a country that was not very Christiania, we still went to church and they did not have anything against us going to church.People had different ways of dressing. Guys would usually wear something like suite or something, but the girls had to be dress Iranian. The one with the head and all the part of the body covered. No sertan cultural food that we ate. We just ate everything that the farm could give us.  And whatever we learned to make, which was mostly Armenian food.

In Shabulagh we had two to three stores and we would go there and trade some good from the farm with something that we needed to bus from the store. And the store would get all those items from the church people, who went to other cities to trade something with them and instead of paying they would give something from the farm. All the news that we got were all coming from the church helpers, and whenever they would have something good to say and they said it, we would all get together and start to celebrate our happiness. It did not have to be like a good news from the, it could have been like celebration of a wedding or something. We could just get together and have a really good time. Where there was like a celebration in Shabulagh, there was no one that would stay outside of the celebration, we would all come together and have a good time.

One of the most interesting things was making the mole. I really regret not having one with me. I left them all in Shabulagh. I really wish I can have one of those moles that I made with my own two hands. All those I left in Shabulagh and I really do regret that. Now I think that they might have sold it and got money for it. The most important thing is that I had really good time making those moles. I really loved spending my time on that. It was very fun because I was doing that with my friends and we would just sit around make the mole and just start talking. That was one of the most fun things that I did in Shabulagh. I really did not realize that I would be missing everything so much. That is why I never brought anything with me back from Shabulagh. I loved it there, with all my friends and family, I really loved it there and I wish that I can go back and live there again.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  Mariam Maleryan