Bordertown project targets 12 houses before winter onset

Eighty-seven percent of the 1,000 or so residents of Khachik, Armenia, a dusty town on a high plateau on the Azerbaijani border, live in shelter so inadequate that their hopes for the future could easily blow out drafty doors and windows or be doused by rain seeping through leaky roofs.

But 40-year-old Tatul Asatryan aims to remove his family of five from that sad statistic by December, if he can just get a little help to buy the rest of the materials he needs to finish the shell of a house he’s already started.

That help – that hope for a simple, decent home of one’s own – is on the way for dozens of families like the Asatryans in this resilient, quiet village where, if lack of maintenance for existing houses weren’t enough, roughly one in every 10 homes still bears signs of damage from bombardment during the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in the early 1990s.

Habitat for Humanity and the mayor of Khachik, Vachagan Poghosyan, signed an agreement to allow Habitat to finish work on 12 incomplete houses this year and to renovate another 25 homes. The agreement endorses Habitat’s self-help and sustainability model of affordable, no-profit, inflation-adjusted home-improvement loans and mortgages.

Habitat has partnered with Yerevan-based Urban Foundation for Sustainable Development to help implement its Khachik project as expeditiously as possible. In addition to a housing needs assessment, the Urban Foundation is helping Habitat investigate economic-development opportunities for Khachik to help grow families’ incomes.

Tatul Asatryan, the prospective homeowner named earlier, was asked to describe what he sees as the difference between the new home he hopes to finish this year with Habitat for Humanity’s help and his family’s rented, $20-a-month shack designated by the government for demolition. A man of few words, Tatul replied simply: “It’s incomparable.”

Like breadwinners in most of the 200 households in Khachik, Tatul makes his living growing fruits and vegetables. Owner of a small tractor, he earns extra money tilling the gardens of his neighbors. The house he is building sits on a quarter hectare of land he secured in 1991, when Armenia privatized property after the collapse of Soviet communism.

For Tatul, progress on the house has been slow because there are no home-improvement or mortgage lenders in Khachik to lend him funds to buy the building materials he needs.

That’s where Habitat for Humanity hopes to step in. In Khachik, Habitat is readying to issue no-profit loans to families in need to help finish houses they have started or to renovate homes that have fallen into disrepair. As the families repay their loans, the funds will be deposited into a community Fund for Humanity, where they will be loaned out again to another qualified family seeking simple, decent shelter.

“We have the chance to wipe out substandard housing in Khachik,” said Irina Vanyan, executive director of Habitat for Humanity Armenia. “Our project shows that when a community’s citizens and its local government support adequate housing for all, decent shelter for everyone who needs it is within our grasp.”

What Habitat for Humanity is undertaking in Khachik with the help of its many supporters is going to make an incomparable difference in the lives of scores of families for decades to come. Get involved in Habitat’s work in Armenia: Donate online at www.habitat.org and designate your gift to “Armenia” and keep an eye out for information on Global Village volunteer building trips to building sites in Armenia at www.habitat.am