www.worldon2wheels.com 2010

View over Shushi/Shusha

I still think there are things to clear in my mind. When I look through my notebook I find I have just put down words to describe what I see. Churches, mosques, doors in arches but the house is gone. Garbage. The first morning the clouds are passing by outside the window, it cleared after an hour or so and the path I’ve walked the night before became details rather that nighttime outlines. Yellow gas pipes, a meter and a half or two over the ground. Little alleys that ends by a cliff. Views are stunning down in the valley, clouds in the distance, hovering over the mountains past Steparnakert. Trees with bare branches, It will be green here in the summer. It will become beautiful.

Snow, loads. will I get out? back to Yerevan? I need a beer, feeling of being overwhelmed by all the information and again, the snow. The trash that litters the streets is covered, the ruins take more round shapes. I slept at Armens, the french man I met the day before on the marchutka, who had paid my ticket and showed me the way. Woke up to the cold bright morning. brilliant hospitality. A house full of books, warming only one room at a time, sitting and listening to Armens stories about how the politics have gone rotten. Education in Karabakh is just a word, not an institution it seems. Armen says, give us jobs, education and rights and we will have democracy.

We were to visit the hospital, 40 people working there. Armen knows the man who runs it and he though I would like to see it for photos. But it is not open, no one there. Armen gets fired up and tells me that they have a hospital for surgery, funded by money from French diaspora, though Shushi does not need surgery, they need basic medical expertise. We pass through parts of the city and there seems to be the same in many places, things are built, people hired but things are not working. With some exceptions of course and in fact the people I meet and spend some time with are all fantastically energetic and very positive. It is the environment that makes me confused. The ruins of houses, again. and the horror of the history. wars for hundreds of years.

I walked with Armen, walked alone later in the day, I climbed around in the ruins and as night falls over the snow and the street lights turned on i took refuge in the art center that has been built with diaspora money for the children in the area. I was there on and off in the three days I was in Shushi, to see the work and to meet the souls that glow in a remains of what is said to have been a great culture center in the Trans Caucasus.

I had to leave before I was quite finished with seeing Shushi, took a taxi in the morning, paying the local bread delivery man some dollars to get down to the bus stop. I want to come back, stay longer, meet more people, get a better understanding. Still confused, but at a distance. always possible to distance oneself as a member of the more fortunate few in the world with roots in northern Europe.

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