At the top of a twisting, eight-kilometer-long dirt road in northeastern Armenia lives a man with a vision for his mountain village.  The concept is simple: See opportunities in obstacles. “We do not have a [paved] road, and there isn’t even a shop in the village. There are many problems,” 36-year-old archeologist-biologist Robert Ghukasyan says of his village, Kalavan, about an hour’s drive north of Lake Sevan. “If we look at it from that angle, it is simply impossible to live here.”

Fourteen-year old Tigran Gharakhanyan walks to school in a crouch, flattening himself up against buildings on his village’s main road. He has good reason. His village, Chinari, is barely a kilometer away from Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan, directly in the line of fire of the Azerbaijani armed forces.

They call it “home.” And for many of Mer Doon’s 16 female residents, the two-storey, beige-stone building in the Armenian town of Etchmiadzin is truly the only home they’ve ever known. The sole facility of its kind in Armenia, Mer Doon (Our Home) is a non-profit organization that accommodates women and girls from orphanages and low-income boarding housesthroughout the country. They live at Mer Doon for four years while pursuing an education in Echmiadzin or the capital, Yerevan, about a half-hour’s drive away.

Six years ago, 45-year-old economist Nerses Ter-Petrosyan and his brothers and sisters, natives of the Armenian village of Goght, erected a monument to their grandfather and 16 other villagers who died or were exiled during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s 1936-1938 Great Terror, a gruesome time when hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Soviet Union were executed, imprisoned or sent into exile; often for little or no reason at all.