FOOTSTEPS TO A CONFRONTING PAST
By Darren Devlyn

Herald Sun (Australia)
August 27, 2008 Wednesday
C – TVGuide Edition

FAMILY Footsteps delivers the best kind of reality TV.

It takes participants out of their comfort zone, but does not trade
on exploitation or ritual humiliation.

But the show does force people to confront who they are and where
they’re from.

The first episode of the second season illustrates the life Joanna
Kambourian might be living if she’d been born and stayed in her
ancestral homeland, Armenia.

We see Kambourian, who lives on the NSW coast, travel to Armenia to
live with a mentor family in the small village Ohanavan.

Kambourian’s greatest and most confronting challenge came in exploring
her family’s dark past.

Kambourian, 30, is the first in her family to visit Armenia in 90
years. Her great grandfather left the village in shame and Kambourian
is desperate to find out whether her family can lay to rest the ghosts
of the past.

Kambourian was overcome with emotion when visiting a genocide museum. A
historian told her that in 1915, under the cover of World War I,
the Turks began a systematic genocide of Christians and Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire.

Kambourian’s great-grandfather was the surgeon general in the Turkish
army and to save his family he converted to Islam.

Kambourian learned how there was honour and dignity in refusing to
convert, which is why her great-grandfather was made to feel he’d
brought shame to the family.

Modern interpretation of her great-grandfather’s actions, however,
lifts the veil of guilt. He is now seen as someone who simply did
what he had to do to survive.

"It’s about resolution," Kambourian says. "It (the trip to Armenia)
has filled in a big hole I’ve felt for a long time".

Sadly her father died in May after a prolonged battle with cancer.

SERIES

Family Footsteps, PG ABC1, Thursday, 8.30pm Tracing ancestry Duration:
1 hour