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Yesterday while in Stepanagert, Jeff Ryan of Nungi ceramics, Rafik from Shushi and his son Bela-Kevork and I went too Express Bar for pizza.

Thought the service was horribly slow and the pizza seemed tasteless, the bathroom was clean and “fresh” smelling.

We had a good laugh over the fact that anyone could even want an air freshener that smells like tobacco, especially in a place where everyone smokes. Go figure.

The only thing I didn’t care for too much about Tango is that it’s Turkish made.

While about 50% of the Armenian population are regularly undernourished, this news comes in from Moscow:

RFE/RL Press Review, 2 December 2003

Citing a weekend report by the Russian NTV channel, "Haykakan Zhamanak"
Says President Kocharian's younger son Levon was seen last week partying at an exclusive night club in Moscow. NTV viewers were told, for example, that a bottle of champagne costs $1,000 there. The Armenian president's press secretary confirms the report. "Levon Kocharian was recently in Moscow and went to that club with friends," he tells the paper. "Haykakan Zhamanak" recalls that Kocharian said a few years ago that his son's favorite hangout is a popular water amusement center in Yerevan. "But the golden youth has already been bored by the water park," it says. "Probably because that is not an elite place and the prince has to mingle with ordinary mortals."

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Not to say that the president's son should not have friends to party with, but he needs to remember that he comes form a poverty stricken country and these things are nothing to be proud of.

This reminds me too much of Kocharian’s visit to New York in 2000, where he insisted on going to a very expensive store that sells suits that his friends in Moscow told him he had to visit. He picked out a $12,000 suit and then told his Armenian-American escort to pay for it. The escort only had $3,000 and called a rich Armenian-American who was not home, whose daughter gave a credit-card number to charge it to. The rich Armenian-American when learning what had happened went through the roof.

In short, the Kocharian’s have very expensive taste. For the president to have such a small income from the government on an offical level as he does and he and his son having such expensive taste, makes him a liability and prime to taking bribes to support his families taste.

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I had a glass of orange juice today to help me with a recent cold and after drinking a number of different juice brands, this one had to be the best…NOT!!!

The only thing orange about this juice was the color. After taking a swig, I thought I was going to die!!! It tasted just like Tang with a large amount of saccharin added.

Armenia is defiantly a buyers beware market or maybe it’s a buyers run for your life market, I’m not sure.

I guess what should have been the warning to me is the picture of the seal under the cap that was not there.

The “orange juice” came from the same store that I once purchased a bottle of Coke, but it was not real Coke, but Armenian cola.

I think this time I’m going to go back to the store and purchase a unopened bottle and take it to the sanitation office here in Martuni, though I’m not sure what will come of it. Nonetheless the investment just to try to correct this wrong is worth it I think. At least it gives me something to add to my never-ending list of problems we have to correct.

I need your help.

The picture to the right is the latest product coming out of Nungi’s ceramic studio.

What we need to know is what would something like this sell for in the US?

This lidded pot is 4.5” in diameter and 4.5” tall.

It was carved by my cabinet maker/wood carver Jerig.

If the market in the US will bare a reasonable price, you may soon find these pots from Nungi in stores near you.

Tonight was beer batter onion ring night.

There really was nothing to make tonight for dinner, at least anything I was interested in eating and Jeff Ryan, the director of the NK Arts Nungi ceramics project said that he wanted to make beer batter onion rings.

He went off to the corner market and returned with a few beers and began to whip up some batter. I didn’t realize how simple the batter was to make and how tasty this Americanized dish was?

I guess the secret behind the batter has to be Gold Meal All-Purpose Enriched Bleached Presifted Flour. This is the flour that is sent over from America to Armenia as aid, but somehow ends up in the stores and 2.26kg (5lbs.) sells for a bargain 500 dram (less than $1). I don’t think you can get it in America that cheap on sale. Only disadvantage to making your purchase here is the New Children’s Cookbook Offer that sells for $2,50, would cost you a small fortune to have shipped over here.

So Jeff fried up onion rings and peppers and I have to tell you that it’s been over 3 years since my last visit to the states for onion rings and I now know what I’ve been depriving myself of. They were great!!! I could just sit around and eat them until my blood clots!!!

Hayastan All-Armenian Fund Telethon 2003 Update

I had reported on the 28th that $4,538.790 of the money pledged came from 31 major donors. There were 2 donors that did make my list and those were Gerard Gafesdjian, $500K and Ara Abrahamian, $200K. This means that $5,238,790 came from 33 major donors. This also means that only $833,767 of the $6,072,557 was possibly donated from 1 million+ Armenians found in the United States.

This is very sad for a telethon that was organized with the primary aim of soliciting funds from the financially best off Armenians found in America on their day of thanks. If that’s not a vote of confidence to the Armenia Fund, I don’t know what is. I know Armenian-Americans (being one of them myself) and if they really thought their donations were going to go where they were intended, they would give until it hurts.

“Around 55,000 Karabakhis partook in the fund raising”, said Karabakhi leader Arkady Ghukasian. More like 54,998 Karabakhis were forced to partake in the fund raising, having their unwilling donation automatically deducted from their already meager salary that undoubtedly will end up in the pockets of some corrupt officials. From the results of the telethon, the 99% of Diaspora Armenians that didn’t partake understood this. What a joke.

The following are my edited version (cutting out things that are not relevant to Armenia) of Radio Free Europe's Nov 28 2003 article titled "UN: Despite Pledges, Report Finds More People Going Hungry", written by Askold Krushelnycky

A United Nations report published this week says more people than ever are going hungry, despite pledges to reduce by half the number of the world's malnourished by 2015. The UN report says that noble ambition is probably now unattainable.

Prague, 28 November 2003 (RFE/RL) -- More than 840 million people, one out of every seven people on Earth, will go to sleep tonight gnawed by hunger.

That was not supposed to happen following a 1996 UN conference where the world's richest countries vowed to halve the number of the world's malnourished by 2015. However, a report published on 25 November by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that goal is now unattainable by the original deadline.

The report finds the number of hungry people actually increased by 18 million in the second half of the 1990s. Most of those who are malnourished are from the Third World, Africa and Asia. But 34 million live in the former communist countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

FAO spokesman John Riddle says someone who is malnourished does not have enough caloric intake to expend the energy necessary for a normal productive life. He said malnourishment can lead to death but that it is difficult to measure how many deaths it causes directly.

"They can die from undernourishment, but generally they die from other things caused by the fact that they weren't healthy enough to fight off those other things. So they get sick or they get an infection or something along these lines, and they're not really well fed enough to deal with it," Riddle said.

The report says Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia had levels of malnourishment of between 20 percent and 35 percent of their populations. The worst affected were Armenia, with around half of the population regularly undernourished, and Tajikistan, with 70 percent not getting enough to eat.

Gurkan says the study shows hunger declined in countries where the economies are developing well. "This report indicates that there have been a number of factors that have been instrumental in differentiating between those who have done well and those who have not done as much or as well as the others," he said. "And amongst them is indeed the economic performance, not only of the overall economy, but also of the agricultural sector, which suggests that those who have achieved higher growth rates -- as far as agriculture and overall economics are concerned --- have done better."


He says the FAO has proposed a new antihunger program that learns from past mistakes and targets assistance more accurately. The proposals include improving agricultural productivity in poor rural communities, developing and conserving natural resources, expanding rural infrastructure and market access, and ensuring access to food for the most needy.


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According to everything you read with economic development and growth in Armenia and Artsakh today according to government statistics, we should be doing much better than Georgia and Azerbaijan, but as you can see, they have 20 to 35 percent malnourished, while we have around 50 percent.

So where do these inconsistencies come from?

Well to start with, Armenia has too many clans and monopolies that are directly tied to the government that control all sectors of industry. They are headed by persons who are only looking for their own personal gains, are usually uneducated and in most cases, exploit the common person. For the most part, they pay starvation wages, thus you end up with around 50 percent of malnourished persons.

One thing I'm not sure of from the UN report is what number about 50 percent represents? I say this as if they use the official population figure of 3.5 million (?), then this would mean that our malnourished rate would be much higher (which is what I suspect since there have been other reports reflecting higher numbers).

I can only conclude and have always felt that the Robert Kocharian/Serge Sarkisian government needs to go. The big problem is who should replace them so that we can turn things around? And if you think irregardless of who we bring in, things can't get better, your wrong. We need leaders that are not thinking of their personal wealth like Kocharian, Sarkisian and their clan. With leaders that are only thinking of the well being of our people, just from the natural resources our country has, we can eradicate the problem of malnourishment in Armenia and Artsakh.

Winter will soon set in and checking my stats on who visits my site, we have a reader or two from Brazil.

When thinking of Brazil, all I can think of is the warm tropical sun ofRio and this Armenian-Brazilian who attended the 1999 Armenian-Diaspora conference that stole my heart.

When I approached her to ask if she minded if I took her picture, her very proper grandmother intervened and basically chased me off.

I took a couple of pictures of her from a distance, but never caught her name.

If our reader from Brazil could e-mail me, I can send you a copy of her picture and maybe you can tell me who she is and…

Fin culture lands in Maine (USA) and is televised in Nagorno-Karabagh.

Today Jeff Ryan and I were watching satellite TV from Dubai and one of the programs which was in English was a wife carrying contest. The winner who could carry their wife over a 270 meter obstacle course in the shortest time, won his wife’s weight in coins (today’s winner won $650) and also in beer (6 cases). Jeff commented on how it takes a real balance to find the right wife as you want a big fat wife so you get lots of beer, but if she is too fat, you can’t carry her.

Following this program, they had a show with Santa Claus and some talking bricks. It was not in English, so I’m not sure if this was Muslims mocking old Saint Nick, or if this is some indication of the station catering to it’s Christian viewers?

I guess I’m really bored and besides doing laundry, cleaning house, playing with Vartan the cat and watching TV, there really is not much to do.

I was a bit bored today and decided to take a trip down memory-lane. While doing so, I came across this log from Cilicia.com that I thoght you would enjoy.

Saturday, February 23, 2002

Ara Manoogian wrote at 2:12 AM:
FOX SPECIAL: GLUTTON BOWL #1: THE WORLD'S GREATEST EATING COMPETITION

THE BIGGEST EATERS ON EARTH CHOW DOWN ON THE ALL-NEW SPECIAL 'GLUTTON BOWL #1: THE WORLD'S GREATEST EATING COMPETITION' THURSDAY, FEB. 21, ON FOX This gut-busting, eat-'til-you-drop, two-hour special pits 40 larger-than-life contestants against each other in unique competitive eating challenges. In the early rounds, competitors square off in a challenge to see how much or how fast they can consume. The winner in each round earns a spot in the finals, which will be an unbelievable, all-out gorge-fest with a big cash prize. The qualifying round categories will range from huge bowls of mayonnaise to beef tongue to sticks of butter. The final round -- not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach -- will include a surprise "delicacy", and won't end until only one competitor is left standing on the special GLUTTON BOWL #1: THE WORLD'S GREATEST EATING COMPETITON Thursday, Feb 21 (8:00- 10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. (SP-0208) (TV-PG)(READER'S NOTE: FAMILY GUY is pre-empted this night.)

When I'm trying to beat a dead horse to illustrate a point, I can always count on the Internet and it's vast pool of useless information to keep things going.

So did anyone catch this new FOX show, "The Gluttony Bowl"? I can't help but think that America is the only country that has the sheer conceit to devote millions of dollars to television entertainment programming, so they could showcase a group of sloppy yokels stuffing their faces, yet, at the same time, will do very little about helping the majority of people in this world that are barely able to scrounge a meal.

Here's an interesting statistic I read: "Each year, Americans eat 38 billion hamburgers. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of red meat. Cattle consume one half of all the fresh water consumed on Earth. The sixty million people who will starve this year could be adequately fed if Americans reduced their meat intake by just 10 percent."

America's food surplus alone, already feeds the rest of the "civilized" world, and whatever they don't export, they stuff in their over-fed, over-sized, over-weight, faces. I've got a nice idea for a game show: starve the gluttons, and feed the starving. Let these fat slobs get a little malnourished.