As Lena Baburyan, a 62 year old woman, is preparing the food for her grandchildren she recalls fond memories of living in Bediani with all her friends and family. Bediani is the small town in Georgia where she spent all her youth filled days. She remembers all her chores that were apart of her daily routine, whether she was cleaning her bed or tending the garden in their backyard with her grandmother. She feels that the government was a lot more interested in the education of the children than they are now. She does however feel that children have it easier today than before which factors into the discipline that is missing in children today. She had to work for what she wanted just like all the other children, whether it was for toys, clothes, food, or even freedom, and she was grateful for it all.
My name is Lena Baburyan. I was born, I.. I was born in umm small town in Georgia called uh Bediani in 1946, it was pretty small town, my… my home town. I liked my town. Georgia was under Soviet Union during the time I lived there, uh, it definitely was affected by the Soviet Union‘s rule to a great extent, because it was like part of the fifteen uh republics in the Soviet Union.
Umm, I was born in uh… in an accountants family, my parents were, umm, educated people we lived in a small town umm, my father was very known person in the town, and umm, by his occupation, and they were not like working as farmers. I had very happy childhood, Georgia was part of Soviet Union, let me just tell you one example, hardly you will see in the United States, well the city that we live in currently, that the children will go and will play freely outdoors its, you always have a parent watching you. We had very close relationship with family uh, especially with my uncle and aunts. We all lived close by and we always play together, children, my cousins I played with them and one of my cousins actually is my favorite person in the world, but its just he lives back in Georgia and I live here, we were very close, to each other. His name is Boris, we just contacted through the phone but other than that we hardy in touch Very close, very close to each other. He was my first cousin and he was my best friend.
Nobody needed to protect us nobody, unless you are in the woods and then you know there is a wolf to attack you that’s different, you know, but being afraid of person that was never issue for us so um yeah we were we, we had lot of, lot, lot of, so many adventures together. Wolves only got closer in winter time. We had like hunters, they would say like we’ve been in this place that’s pretty close to village so beware that wolves came down to that place so don’t go that far.
I was a very good student, very rascal though but very good you know, I was always getting along with teachers. One thing that I really, really like about our Soviet Union schools that everything that was provided in favor of kids that they will become more educated it was free, we were really blessed in those times. The government took care of everything the teachers were happy with their jobs and the students were happy with their education and when we were going to school it was different because we were there to learn rather than just spend time it was really fun to be in school. Reading, that was yeah that was my favorite umm thing to do when I was you know spare time. Books were supplied to us, however if we wanted to have lets say new books it was on us, we purchased the books but the price of the books was very, very cheap nothing to compare to the prices in the United States, like you pay about like hundred dollars for a book but there, you pay lets say just pennies for those books.
We never ever paid for, uh the health insurance was free, we never paid for um doctors visits, any surgery was free to people, you know . We weren’t paying anything. I remember when my father and my mom were basically they were building the house and they would only pay for materials that they were getting to um build the house, we had all these furnitures and everything, and then we just living in that house. I had four siblings, I had one brother and three sisters, and my grandma was also living with us. I like to help my grandma um with you know home tasks like helping with the with our land with the, we had a very big backyard I would say about fifteen to sixteen thousand square feet, and we had a lot of trees there, we had I am not sure how you call that but we grew like tomatoes and potatoes and cucumbers things like that.. My parents were just like there to provide needs for us, but we couldn’t talk that much with our parents, we were very disciplined.
Our village was surrounded by very beautiful nature, forests and mountains very green, it was just beautiful it was its like heaven. We had this playing uh area, which was on the top of a mountain and the mountain was like kind of like flat so that was our best area I would say like favorite area to play, and the kids of the town that we knew each other very well basically the classmates um we’d get together and play volleyball. Sometimes when we were playing as kids some of the Turk guys they would come and they were just communicating in Armenian they would come and they would um just say hi hello, and then they would ask if they can play and definitely as kids we were playing together. We were all Christians, and, we were not, because as soviet kids, we were not into religion, we just know we are Christian, that’s all because going church was not a practice for us at that time. We had like church close by umm and just that was very close. We had Muslims as well, yeah we had Muslims as well, because we had some Turks, I would say um living in the town but they were like kind of separated they were living on the other side it was like separated into two parts. We were kind of segregated, they were living in the other side of town.
We had um this um pagans tradition that we celebrated every year, like in the time in a time when Armenians were not Christians they had like this multi umm they worshipped different goddesses, gods and goddesses, so that kind of Armenians were pagans so and um and new year for Armenians they were celebrating in august so uh they called this Navasart, so at that time we the kids would get together and we had this, go door to door collecting candies, whatever and some foods as well and we would get together go to our mountain. A lot of people kept cows and lambs, goats, so I, see as a child, you know, all these animals just, you know, taken away from a flood, and that was a scary experience and I still I think that had a negative experience on me that I cant be around water. We had animals as well we had lambs and we had like dogs, ducklings chickens and we had a lot of, I remember we had about more than fifty umm, how do you call those.. Rabbits? I believe, yeah, we have a lot of rabbits and we have turkeys as well and umm we had goats not a lot we had like three four and then like four five lambs, two dogs like two cats, basically whatever we needed to live and to live very well we just got it from our backyard you know we had our own pets you know. We never paid attention to electronics, um we had radio we had television, um we had different channels, we didn’t have like so many channels like here but we had like three four channels but we had so many radio stations, but we were more we were mostly listening to Armenian and Russian and Georgian radio stations, music mostly. I’m living with those memories, they’re memories that are very.. I treasure and I live with those memories.