IN ONE ARMENIAN village, 98% of the male population has migrated abroad looking for employment.
In Dzoragyugh, it is the women who remain, doing everything from ploughing the fields to raising children, all the while holding their families together, an article by Gayane Abrahamyan for EurasiaNet explains.
The men have migrated because of high unemployment, with an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 of the Gegharkunik region’s residents migrating abroad every year to find work.
With up to 8 percent of its of 243,000-strong population leaving every year, the area has Armenia’s highest rate of labour migration.
About 1.1 million people are believed to have left Armenia since 1991.
Some of these men return home every autumn, but some never return, says Abrahamya.
One woman, school principal Heriknaz Khachatrian, a mother of four, told her that when her husband leaves for work: “The whole burden of the household falls on my shoulders, and the worst thing is that you never know whether your husband will return or not.”
In Gegharkunik, a second marriage for a woman is prohibited by an unwritten law, but many of the men have girlfriends or ‘wives’ in Russia.
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