Orange County Register , CA
March 27 2005

Strength that could rebuild a nation

Armenia’s 1988 quake took a girl’s leg and lent a woman resilience to
pursue dreams of practicing medicine.

By ELEEZA V. AGOPIAN
The Orange County Register

YEREVAN, ARMENIA – When two young boys rushed into the emergency
room at Yerevan State University’s Children’s Hospital with mangled,
bloody hands, the men on staff recoiled in horror.

Firecrackers had exploded in their hands, which had to be amputated.

But Dr. Armineh Lambaryan – the only woman surgeon in her hospital –
soothed the frightened boys with her natural, gentle concern. She
coaxed them to relax so she could clean their wounds and prepare them
for surgery.

“I know how to communicate with children,” she said simply, but it
goes deeper than that.

It was 16 years ago that Armineh herself became an amputee.

Her left leg was mangled in the devastating December 1988 Armenian
earthquake. The country was left in ruins, more than 25,000 people
were killed and thousands more were injured and left homeless.

Armineh spent six months in hospitals around the world. When she
finally returned home, she decided to follow in the footsteps of the
doctors who healed her.

Armineh, now 31, walks with a limp and is acutely aware of the eyes
that follow her unsteady gait. When she dons her white coat, she is
treated with deference in the halls of her hospital. In that white
coat, she possesses a confidence that captures your attention more
than her uneven walk.

At our first meeting in December, I forget her amputated leg and
instead see her glide into the lobby of a hotel in Yerevan, Armenia’s
capital. She greets me in her soft voice and with a warm embrace. Her
story inspired my journey here, halfway across the world to film
a documentary about her life, a life that mirrors the story of the
new Armenia.

The documentary meant more than sharing Armineh’s story, it would
help me find my way home.

Armineh’s life was crushed and rebuilt, just like Armenia. It is a
nation in transition, and Armineh experienced every twist and turn.

In a region still recovering from the strains of 69 years of Soviet
life, Yerevan has blossomed into a bustling metropolis. The streets
are crowded with sidewalk cafes, tea houses and high-end boutiques.

Though Armineh now calls Yerevan home, she was born and raised in
Spitak, a smaller city about an hour’s drive north of Yerevan. It
sits in a valley among the mountains. It is where, 16 years ago,
Armineh lost her leg and Spitak lost its soul.

Dec. 7, 1988

Spitak was unusually warm the day that changed Armineh’s life. The
sun shone strong and bright on the city of 15,000, like the day we
visited 16 years later.

Armineh stood on the third floor of an old sewing factory with her
class on a field trip. A supervisor at the factory told the class to
go home because no work was scheduled, but the teacher insisted on
staying. The students climbed up to the third floor. Heavy equipment
surrounded them. At 11:43 a.m. a rumbling began, louder and more
unsettling than the noise of the machinery. The floor beneath her
feet violently shook, and Armineh looked up to the ceiling.

“I remember seeing the open sky,” she recalled. “The building
opened up.”

Children screamed. Equipment toppled. Armineh blacked out.

When she awoke – she’s not sure how much later – Armineh was lying
about 50 yards from the piles of rubble where the building once stood.

Armineh felt lost in the chaos. She did the only thing a 14-year-old
girl could think to do – she called out to her parents. It was some
time before her father found her.

Halfway around the world

On that day in 1988, I sat in my fourth-grade class at A.G. Minassian
Armenian School in Santa Ana. Teachers explained to us that a
6.9-magnitude earthquake had rattled the northern part of the
country. Thousands were dead, and there would probably be more. The
school’s annual Christmas pageant was canceled.

We were hustled into the church next to the school for a prayer
service. Sitting on a pew, I looked over at my best friend and watched
tears stream down her face. I stared up from the cold, wooden bench
and tried to imagine a little girl, my own age, crushed to death.

At home that night, I watched the evening news with my parents. For
the first time, I paid attention. The lead story was the earthquake in
Armenia. I saw my parents cry. I was only just beginning to understand
what was happening.

Over the next several months, I spent hours in the car with my mother
every day after school. She helped organize a collection drive for
the earthquake victims. We visited churches, synagogues and temples
all over Orange County, dropping off and picking up donation jars.

An image of a little girl, just like me, haunted me. She shivered in
the tents of Spitak that winter.

Learning her strength

Armineh woke up in shock. She felt pain but couldn’t tell where she
was hurt. Her sister was dead – she had suffocated in the collapse
of her school – but her parents wouldn’t tell her for months to spare
her the shock. Gone, too, were her uncle, classmates and friends.

Emergency workers quickly took Armineh to a hospital in Yerevan,
where she learned her left leg had been badly crushed and likely to
be amputated. The bones in her left arm were shattered, and numerous
cuts covered her face and body.

Just as abruptly as Armineh’s life was interrupted, so too began her
path to recovery. Two days after the earthquake, Armineh flew to Moscow
with her mother for three months of surgeries and rehabilitation.

“Armineh, you’re going to walk,” her mother, Susanna, kept insisting,
but Armineh fell into a deep depression.

In Moscow, she was quiet and withdrawn. She could barely eat. If
not for a tough Russian woman surgeon, Armineh would have withdrawn
completely.

“From the moment the doctor (in Moscow) told me that amputating my
leg would save me, I accepted the fact that this would be my life,”
she said. “I’ve always thought that even if I hadn’t been hurt,
my life would’ve been worse in some other way.”

A month after her return to Armenia, she traveled again, this time to
the United States with six other Armenian children who were seriously
injured in the earthquake. She came to Los Angeles for three months
of treatment at Centinela Hospital.

In a foreign country where she didn’t understand the language or the
culture, alone, without her family, Armineh learned to be strong and
independent. She was 14 years old.

“To go to America, it was a totally different world,” she said. “It
was frightening.”

When she returned to Spitak in the spring of 1989, she was one of the
first children to be cared for by Pyunic, the Armenian Association for
the Disabled. The nonprofit Pyunic, which means phoenix, was founded
after the earthquake to aid the newly disabled children. In the early
days, Pyunic served about 140 children. Now, the organization aids
about 3,000 children around the country.

Pyunic helped Armineh come out of shellshock. She was a troublemaker
again – rough-housing with the other children and playing pranks. As
one of the older children, she mentored the younger ones who hadn’t
yet found their own strength.

Hakob Abrahamyan, one of Pyunic’s founders, said whenever the children
started acting mischievous, he knew Armineh was the ringleader.

That same leadership drove Abrahamyan to hire Armineh years later as
the director for Pyunic’s early intervention program.

“Not many girls in the world are like her,” Abrahamyan said.

Recapturing her strength

Armineh had multiple surgeries, was fitted with a prosthetic leg and
learned to walk again within a year after the earthquake. Armenia
was rebuilding and so was Armineh.

She returned home in the spring after the earthquake and began to
prepare for her college admissions. Her family still lived in a tent.
Armineh always dreamed of being a doctor and refused to let her
disability sidetrack her ambition.

“After the earthquake, I said, ‘Armineh, being a doctor is going to
be so tough on you, why don’t you be a kindergarten teacher?'” her
mother Susanna said. “But she said no. She was going to be a doctor.
She was determined.”

Less than two years after her family was torn in half and her own
body ravaged, Armineh moved from home. Armineh was 16 when she started
studying at Yerevan State University.

“There are women who always stay close to home,” she said. “For me,
my independence is very important. I don’t want anyone to force me
to do anything.”

Soon after starting college in 1990, Armineh began work in a
hospital. Most women working in Armenia’s hospitals are nurses. Few
are doctors.

When Armineh started medical school, she encountered a new kind of
chaos. The Soviet Union was crumbling.

In September 1991, Armenia declared independence from the U.S.S.R.,
becoming the 12th country to formally break from Moscow. Independence
came with a price. Unreliable gas, electricity and water made harsher
the already cold, hard winters. Unstocked market shelves sat bare,
while bread lines stretched all across the country.

Armineh often found herself studying medical textbooks by candlelight
and scrounging for food in the city’s few remaining open stores.

Through it all, she pursued her goals at school and the hospital where
she worked. The doctors there – familiar with her story – asked her
to speak with a young boy’s parents distraught at hearing the news
their son Edgar, 9, needed to have a leg amputated.

Armineh told them her own story and her plans to go into medicine.

“My speaking to those parents is what made them understand that
Edgar’s life wouldn’t end without his leg,” she said.

Their minds at ease, Armineh pondered her own future. She thought
of the Russian and American doctors who helped her. She thought
of Edgar. She told her advisers she wanted to pursue pediatric
orthopedic surgery – one of the most challenging specialties and one
with few women practicing in Armenia. They tried to discourage her.
She remained steadfast.

“The first time I went to the hospital, it was shocking to the
men that a girl wanted to specialize in (orthopedic surgery). They
thought I couldn’t equal them, but I could,” she said. “Now they
trust me. They’re very respectful.”

She shares an office with nine men, but it doesn’t faze her.

“My hands hurt and shake from the work, but when I finish, I feel
stronger for it,” she said.

Armineh works an overnight shift at the Children’s Hospital, responding
to emergency calls and tending to children on the recovery ward.

She also spends three days a week at Pyunic, helping families cope
with the demands of special-needs children.

gone, but not forgotten

Armineh said she often catches herself looking for Christina, her
little sister who will forever be 8 years old. In her dreams, on
the street, when she meets someone who shares her sister’s name –
Armineh always looks for a connection.

Even, she said, when she meets people born in 1980 – like Christina.

Wandering through the cemetery in Spitak on the anniversary of the
earthquake in December, it seems every gravestone is inscribed with
1988. The cold, black slabs bear the likeness of those buried beneath
them. Young men and women, children in school uniforms, grim-faced
grandparents all stare at their visitors.

The cemetery tripled in size after the earthquake. An aluminum chapel
was built on a hilltop overlooking the cemetery to accommodate the
mourners.

Christina Lambaryan’s grave is near the entrance to the cemetery.
She’s buried next to her uncle, Samuel Lambaryan, her father’s brother.

The little girl with pigtails is wearing a white jumper, but
she doesn’t look young. Her stern look betrays the maturity of a
young woman in a little girl’s body. Christina demanded a voice in
everything, even directing her own education. At 4, she declared she
was well-versed in Armenian and decided to attend the town’s Russian
school instead of the Armenian one, revealing a determination she
shared with her sister. It’s quiet in the cemetery, where a freezing
wind has driven everyone to cover their faces as they pray and huddle
together. Most of the city gathers here. Sixteen years of mourning
have left Spitak’s residents with few tears to shed.

Incense wafts over the graves and the mourners come carrying roses,
turned upside down, the custom when attending a funeral.

Moving from grave to grave, I try to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. I
don’t want them to see the well of tears building, so I hide behind
scarf and sunglasses and keep my head bowed. As I stand, shivering
in the subzero weather, watching Armineh and her family prepare some
incense and say their prayers, I take a closer look at Christina’s
tombstone.

She was born in 1980 – like me.

Going back in time

Though Armineh often makes the trip to Spitak to visit her parents
and younger brother Garik, it’s become a less familiar place. She’s
lived her adult life in Yerevan. Her circle of friends and work are
there. But she’ll always be tied to this town.

She returns every Dec. 7, to visit her sister’s grave. The pain hasn’t
gotten any easier.

“It used to be hard to go to Yerevan, but now it’s hard to come home,”
Armineh said. “My friends who were young are now grown, and I don’t
know them anymore. It’s a completely different world here.”

In the wake of the earthquake, years of political turmoil and a war
with Azerbaijan, Armenia is a new country not only for its citizens,
but for Armenians spread about the world. Armenians like me.

Tourists come to the motherland looking for a connection or a story.
I found a story – the documentary – that took me halfway around the
world to understand what Armenia means to me.

I had been there twice before, but had seen Armenia only through a
tourist’s eyes. Armineh guided me through the growing pains of this
little country and made me feel at home for the first time.

The streets, the parks and the restaurants all felt like pieces of a
familiar neighborhood. Instead of wandering the city like an outsider,
I felt I had a stake in its future.

Like most Armenian-Americans I can point out the country on a map
and recite all the relevant facts. But now I can explain how cold a
city like Spitak is in the dead of winter, freezing the ink in your
pen. I can describe the warmth of a welcoming embrace when you visit
a family’s home. I can understand the resilience that comes with
decades of struggle.

Armineh is one of millions who saw Armenia’s upheaval firsthand. She
experienced the growing pains of a fledgling republic. She made Armenia
a tangible concept, a living testament to a history and culture I’d
only read about in books.

Armenia’s future will grow from her and others like her.

And maybe with a little help from people like me.