May 2025 – Last summer, Lelya, a nurse, was invited to work at our camp and help Armenian children. I knew she was a refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh, but I didn’t know her story. Please pray with and for us as we share the love of Jesus with people like Lelya, who have suffered so much. Pray that the MP farm will be a place of healing and renewal for the people of Armenia and the Caucasus.
This Story Is Told By Lelya
My mother told me that April 10, 1992, was a lovely sunny day in our village of Marakha in Nagorno-Karabakh. No one, she said, knew that this day would change their lives. I was 16 months old, and my brother Narek was 3 years old. Though I don’t remember, my mother says those days will never be forgotten.
When the massacre began, no one was prepared; no one expected it. It wasn’t a war; it was an attack on civilians. Dad immediately went to the front lines to defend our village. In town, without our dad, civilians were shot, and innocent children were slaughtered. Mothers screamed as my Grandpa helped several families hide in the basement.
Mom says that we hid silently in the basement, waiting for death. She held us tight, every rustle or footstep outside causing more fear. She said it seemed like all the clocks in the world had stopped. Everyone was hungry, cold, and scared. She prayed as the shots got closer, footsteps approaching the basement. Azerbaijani soldiers shouted.
Lelya paused telling her story. “Mom always stops to pray when talking about this, even today. I try not to ask too much about it,” she says.
The basement door swung open, and angry soldiers burst in, tearing the children away from their mothers. That was the last time we ever saw our grandfather. Our village had been overrun, and my mom never saw our father again.
We, the children, were taken away. Mom didn’t know where we were, whether we were alive or not. For three painful days, she wept and tried to have hope. Then, she learned that Narek was alive. The Armenian troops traded a captive for him. My mother was reunited with her son, but nobody knew anything about me, her baby girl. Mom begged them
to return me, too. She contacted the Red Cross and asked random strangers if they had seen me. Narek never gave up hope and always looked for me when playing outside.
Mother always met returning prisoners of war and showed them my photograph, asking about me. One day, she learned about a little Armenian girl in an orphanage in Azerbaijan. She cried and hoped, not knowing what to expect. On October 21, 1993, a prisoner-of-war exchange took place. 18 months had passed. They exchanged me at the border, a 3-year-old child who didn’t know my birth mother. They said I cried as I didn’t want to go to them.
I didn’t understand Armenian. My mother’s nightmare somehow continued. Her long-lost child didn’t know her and didn’t respond to her. Narek was almost 5 years old and said he remembered me. After the exchange, my mother took me to the hospital for a check-up. I appeared perfectly fine, my hair and nails trimmed, clean, and healthy. My father and grandfather were still missing, and my mother found safe passage out of Karabakh. We moved to northern Armenia as refugees.
Note: During the breakup of the Soviet Union, from 1988 to 1994, Armenia captured the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The ceasefire lasted 26 years. In 2007, Narek returned to Shusha in Karabakh for higher education. My mother and I moved as well. Our homeland was calling us. I put myself through school to become a nurse. I also married Arkady, a military man and friend of Narek, in 2014. Our first daughter, Ani, was born in Shusha two years later.
Narek got married, and we had two beautiful families. My mother could now live in peace. But in 2020, the war broke out again and we were forced to move. The active war subsided, but not for long. Three years later in 2023, my husband Arksay was called to fight. Narek took me, Ani, my 1-month-old little Yana, and my mother in the middle of the night and rushed us out to Armenia along with 100,000 other refugees.
He then returned to join Arkady and fight for our homeland. I felt just like my mother did 30 years earlier. We are so thankful to God. Arkady and Narek escaped and somehow made it out alive. Our homeland and our culture no longer exist in Karabakh.
We lost our homes, our father and grandfather, but we have my husband, my brother, my mother and my children. My mother said we are, “three times a refugee.” But the truth is that we are not forgotten by God.
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