Today, Margarit, a social worker at MSF in Armenia, brings me along to visit Ashot, a TB patient. Ashot lives in a village close to the Turkish border. Mount Ararat overlooks the landscape as Armen drives west, leaving Yerevan behind us.

Ashot shares his house with his son and his family but as they don’t get along with Ashot, he goes home only to sleep at night. He spends his days at a neighbor’s house and this is where we are going to meet. Garush welcomes us and I’m soon going to realize that he is more than just a neighbor to Ashot. Garush looks like a younger version of Charles Aznavour, at least as I remember him. We sit around a table under a shady grapevine-covered pergola in front of the garden. Alina, Garush’s wife, brings coffee, pastries and fruits. It is a sunny day and the fruit trees are blossoming. It’s quiet, aside from the singing of the birds.

Ashot is shy and Garush is the one who makes conversation. He tells us proudly about his 15 year old son who is part of a paramilitary organization and has just won a medal in a shooting competition. He finished third out of three thousand. Alina goes inside and brings back her son’s jacket uniform to show us his medals. The army is an essential component in Armenia. Garush explains he did his military service in the Soviet Union armed forces, fighting in Afghanistan. He shows us a picture of him, a young man with bulging muscles, wearing a white tank top and carrying a machine gun. “Rambo” he says with a laugh. Some references seem without borders. Garush’s tone changes as he tells about Alina’s brother who died in the mid-90s, fighting with the Russian army in Abkhazia during the war against Georgia. It reminds me about the ruins I saw there. Armenia is not at peace, neither with the past - the genocide is still on all minds -, nor in the present - in conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan. In all the region, history is like an open wound that cannot seem to heal. 

Ashot opens up as the conversation unfolds and I ask him about his cane. He fell over a year ago and his broken knee was never properly fixed. He fell again a couple of months ago and still has stitches near the top of his skull. He had a concussion and has had memory problems since then. I ask him to tell me his story and he says in one sentence: “My parents died when I was three, my wife died in 1996, I have two daughters, one son and ten grand kids”. Family is a sensitive subject that we leave aside to talk about TB.

Ashot was diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in 2015 and the treatment was difficult to bear at first. The medical treatment for MDR-TB is long (2 years or more) and burdensome. It involves quotidian injections of antibiotics. So, Garush takes Ashot to the medical center with his old Lada, each and every day, and back home. Ashot describes Garush devotion with contained emotion. The relationship between these two goes far beyond friendship.

Alina brings one of the rabbits the couple breeds in the garden. 

I realize I do more group pictures than usual. This story is not Ashot’s only.  He has lost a family to find another one, another kind of family reboot I guess.

I make a last portrait of Ashot and Garush before we depart. The portrait of two lifelong friends who have become brothers.

As we leave the place, Armen drives a little further to make a u-turn. Two boys are playing in front of a gate. “This is Ashot’s house and his grand kids” says Margarit. Family is not always about genes.

You can see more photos of my trip to Yerevan here

You can donate to MSF here