Asia suffers from cerebral palsy. In the space of three years, her family twice had to flee their home during attacks by Azerbaijan on Nagorno Karabakh. Now they are settled in Armenia, where Asia receives home visits from the team of the CSI-supported Caroline Cox Rehabilitation Centre.
On a trip to Armenia, a team from Christian Solidarity International (CSI) were able to visit Asia, a young girl from Nagorno Karabakh with cerebral palsy. Asia is non-verbal and does not walk, but when the Rehabilitation Centre staff walked through the door of her room, she gave them an enormous smile, and did not stop smiling for the whole visit.
Asia’s grandmother, also named Asia, has lived through four Azerbaijani attempts to conquer her homeland. When asked how she is, she responds, “The same as we came here: homeless.”
Having lost their home in Nagorno Karabakh, the family now live in a high-rise flat. It is better than the first place they lived after their displacement – that place, Asia’s grandmother says, was bitterly cold.
Before Azerbaijan’s 2020 attack on Artsakh, Asia’s family lived in a town called Hadrut. But Hadrut was captured by Azerbaijani troops in 2020, and any Armenians found there were kidnapped or executed. Asia’s family escaped to Stepanakert, and lived there until September 2023.
Azerbaijan’s siege of Nagorno Karabakh in 2023 hit the family particularly hard. It became much harder – nearly impossible by the end – to buy medicines and nappies for Asia, and there was no fuel to transport her to the Rehabilitation Centre for treatment.
Two days on the road
There were 22 inpatients, more than 30 outpatients and 50 employees at the Rehabilitation Centre in Stepanakert when Azerbaijan launched its invasion of Nagorno Karabakh on September 19, 2023. The staff and patients were having lunch when the attack began.
“Everyone panicked and went down to hide in the basement, without finishing their meal. Some ran to the schools to look for their children. The patients all arrived safely in Armenia, some in a better condition than others, and most of them settled in Yerevan,” Vardan Tadevosyan, director of the Centre, tells CSI.
The entire Armenian Christian population of Nagorno Karabakh fled the region at once. For Asia’s family, the journey into exile was difficult. So many people were trying to leave at the same time that a journey that normally takes two hours by car took the family two days.
Home visits
In Armenia, the staff of the Rehabilitation Center continue to pay regular visits to the family, and to provide medical supplies and consultations for Asia, as they do for the other former patients.
“We try to visit every patient at least once a month,” Tadevosyan, the Center’s director, says, “so every day we are traveling somewhere to visit patients. Our patients appreciate these visits so much. When they hear our specialists speaking the Artsakh [Nagorno Karabakh] dialect of Armenian, they find it very comforting.”
Asia’s winning smile testifies to the truth of that.
