Armenia's Central Bank allowed its currency, the dram, to float against the dollar this week, causing an immediate twenty per cent drop in its value and a wave of panic buying.
Armenians weren't exactly prospering to begin with. In 2006, we visited with our travel agent in her Yerevan office. Noune was new at her job. Only some months.
She had been a violinist but resigned herself to the need to get paid. She complained, “Our only pension is ten, fifteen dollars a month. Electricity is expensive, sometimes more than one hundred, but some people make less than one hundred.”
“In the U.S. I know, you can make five thousand, ten thousand dollars in a month, it is depending on what you do, but here? Maybe two hundred.”
That’s a big difference. There’s also a difference in what she says Armenians expect from their leaders.
“We take care of each other, we can not expect the government to,” she told us.
I'm guessing that's still the feeling on the streets of Yerevan this week.
(Photo of the central Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia. More in the Armenia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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