Marine Ohanjanyan. Letter to Aurora Prize Hero - Mediamax.am

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Marine Ohanjanyan. Letter to Aurora Prize Hero


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Dear Dr. Tom

 

The story of your selfless devotion made me once again think about what it means taking responsibility for other people and doing good for no reason. It also made me recall a lesson on accepting responsibility for other people that I’ve learned when a child.

 

Back in the late 80s, when I was a 10-year girl, there was a popular book “Timur and His Squad” written by a Soviet writer A. Gaidar. The book told the story of a boy Timur and his friends who voluntarily helped elderly and people in need. Like many other Soviet schools, our school also joined the Timurian movement to support distressed families and people. The school administration divided us into groups of four-five students and assigned to various elderly people living in the vicinity. My group was supposed to help a veteran of the World War II, a lonely old man without family. For some time, we visited him regularly, did minor house chores and ran errands for him. Though we felt very important and proud to be Timurians, we were actually of little help. The old man could pretty well handle all this on his own. But he offered us sweet treats each time we dropped in and entertained with interesting stories. Deep in my heart I felt that the old man was happy to see us not because of all the fuss we were making about his kitchen but rather because of the emptiness in his life we filled. We came to replace the family he didn’t have and the friends he lost during the war.

 

This didn’t last for long, however. While the school management wasn’t very diligent in tracking our performance as Timurians, eventually our visits became less frequent until one day they stopped altogether. It was not until the end of the school year that we remembered our “mission” to assist the old man. Imagine our surprise when we learned that the poor man had died a month before. I’ll never forget the feeling I experienced: a miserable remorseful girl struck by the idea that she failed her first ever task of taking responsibility for another person and, in our case, of making someone happy. I thought of the hours he had probably spent waiting for us and of lonely last days of his life.

 

Later on, as I grew older, I often thought about that piece of my life. How could it happen that a group of children was so indifferent in their attitude to an elderly man? Was it because we lacked basic human values? Were we too young to have such values and, if so, at what age are we supposed to start taking responsibility for those who need us? Was it just lack of motivation? Maybe what we really needed was not a book hero Timur to look up to but a real person with a true story of his deeds. Could a story of a real hero be a better incentive for us to be humane? And, paradoxical as it may seem, should humans be taught to be humane?

 

These are the questions I still can’t answer. But stories like yours give me hope that younger generations will look up to true heroes like you, nurture human values seeing the example you are setting and do their best to make this world a better place to live. This is why I say thank you, thank you not for the things you’ve done but for all the future good deeds that will be inspired by your story.

 

Sincerely,

 

Marine

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