Armenians together in spirit and electrons
A Glendale telethon unites the globally dispersed community to help the
homeland.
By James Ricci, Times Staff Writer
November 24, 2006
For 12 hours on Thursday, the world’s Armenians ? from the 3 million in the
Republic of Armenia to the 1.4 million in the United States and maybe even
the eight in Vietnam ? held each other in an electronic embrace, defying a
thousand years of being geographically scattered by the forces of history.
The occasion was the ninth annual Armenia Fund telethon, whose tentacles,
reaching out from a studio in Glendale, spread throughout the world via live
television and Web casting, gathering pledges from all corners.
"This is an incredible network of people that comes alive for a 12-hour
period, all over the world," said a harried fund chairwoman Maria Mehranian,
who served as sometime on-air hostess and full-time overseer of the hundreds
of volunteers, honored guests, Armenian entertainers and security guards at
Glendale Studios. "There are people who might never meet, who might not even
like each other if they did meet, but it’s so much fun to create this
vehicle of unity. We have wanted unity for 11 centuries."
The fund, which is based in Glendale and has chapters in a score of
countries, raises money from the world’s approximately 10 million Armenians
? which includes, according to the website armeniadiaspora.com, eight in
Vietnam ? to build roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure in the
Armenian Republic.
In the 15 years of its existence, it has raised $160 million. Thursday’s
telethon, which ran from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and had a goal of $13.5 million in
pledges, ultimately added $13.6 million. About 92% of funds pledged are
ultimately collected, fund officials said. The telethon was broadcast
locally on KSCI-TV Channel 18.
Inside the studio complex was a scene of controlled chaos, as furrow-browed
officials in business suits hurried about, murmuring into walkie-talkies,
marshaling on-air guests around four stages. Security guards were ubiquitous
? not, Mehranian said, because of fear of crime, but to maintain order in
case the studio was besieged by eager donors from Glendale’s heavily
Armenian citizenry, hoping to cop a little airtime.
In an upstairs office, a young man named Greg Boyrazian strove to control
the traffic in live television feeds coming in from distant locales. "OK,
Boston’s gonna come on live," he said into his headset. "It’s now. Boston is
live. This is crazy?. We still have Boston, Armenia, Paris."
On the main production floor early Thursday afternoon, scores of young
people clad in special T-shirts staffed the phone banks, fielding calls from
around the world. Their shirts read: "I [image of a pomegranate with a heart
inside] Armenia."
"It’s a very Armenian fruit," Mehranian explained. "Very symbolic of life,
of survival."
"One thousand dollars from New York," one phone staffer shouted, prompting a
chorus of yelps and hand-clapping. On a large monitor with a red background,
the total pledges edged upward with each round of ringing telephones.
$2,693,644 ? $2,893,644?.
On the air, Hacop Baghdasarian, proprietor of the International Grill at the
Glendale Galleria and a man who’d pledged more than $100,000 in previous
telethons, announced to wild applause that he was pledging $30,000 to a
hospital in war-torn Hadrut in Armenia’s satellite republic Nagorno
Karabakh.
$3,193,654 ? $3,232,704?.
The international hookup raised the question of fielding calls in numerous
languages.
Not a problem, Mehranian said. "The average Armenian speaks three or four
languages. It’s the curse of not having had a country." For her part,
Mehranian speaks English, Armenian, French and Farsi, "and a bit of
Spanish."
Tamar Artin, a 19-year-old biology major at Pierce College in Woodland Hills
and a phone bank supervisor, said language was not nearly so much a problem
as one might think. "We mostly get English or Armenian," she said, "but we
get lots of international calls, so it’s really important to have an ear for
what language a person is speaking. We know in advance which of our people
speaks what language, and we can direct the caller to them ? sometimes it’s
Russian, very rarely Arabic and sometimes Farsi."
The Armenia Fund’s concentration on infrastructure is aimed at helping the
Armenian economy ? already growing at a rate of 14% a year, according to
fund officials ? grow even faster.
The Armenian diaspora in the wealthy countries is an enormous asset to the
young republic, "a jewel," Mehranian said. The Republic of Armenia became an
independent state after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The work of
the fund aside, Armenians in the diaspora remit about half a billion dollars
a year to family members in Armenia, said Sarkis Kotanjian, executive
director of the fund.
Armenian Americans, he said, not only provide funds but establish goals for
improved quality.
"Take, for example, a backward, Soviet-era hospital," he said. "We want it
to become an American hospital, with all the modern standards. We don’t want
to just put on a coat of paint but to train the doctors and reconstruct the
way the hospital works so that it makes sense."
For those driving the telethon, which is held on Thanksgiving partly because
people are off from work and school and also to give thanks for the
existence of an Armenian homeland, the effort clearly was about more than
raising money or raising standards. Raising the sense of worldwide Armenian
identity was also part of the program.
Narbeh Issagholian, a 24-year-old computer consultant, spent the day rushing
back and forth making sure the telethon’s 50 computers were behaving.
He said giving up the Thanksgiving holiday to work the telethon flowed
naturally from "what my parents have taught me and what I learned in
Armenian schools about our culture and history. I want to do what I can to
pass it on to future generations and make sure it doesn’t die.
"This ties you in to the entire Armenian community in the world today."
jim.ricci@latimes.com
From: Baghdasarian