I joined the AYF at 23. By then, some of the people around me had already spent more than a decade growing up within it. My husband has given 17 years of his life to this organization. I have been a member for about five.
Five years feels painfully short when you begin counting what you have left.
This year’s Senior Seminar was my last as an AYF-YOARF member. I arrived at Camp Haiastan knowing that, carrying the quiet ache of a goodbye I was not ready to make. It followed me through the weekend: during lectures, between conversations, beside the bonfire. Even while I was laughing, some part of me was already missing it.
Camp greeted us with its familiar cold, the kind that finds its way through every layer you packed and makes you question whether you have ever owned a sufficiently warm jacket. I came home with a cold of my own, which feels like a very Camp Haiastan souvenir. Given the chance, I would go back and do it all again.
There are conversations I would gladly freeze through a second time.
Senior Seminar brings together a small group of people willing to give their weekend to learning, questioning and thinking seriously about our people’s future. That willingness creates a particular kind of closeness. You can offer an unfinished idea and find someone willing to help you work through it. You can ask a difficult question without having to explain why you care so much about the answer.
And somewhere between those conversations, you become friends.
Anyone who attended probably learned a million unnecessary facts about me and received at least a few of the many hugs I had to give. I have never been especially good at holding back affection. This weekend, I felt even less reason to try. When you know your time somewhere is running out, you want the people beside you to know how much they mattered to you.
The lectures gave that feeling a deeper purpose. U. Gev Iskajyan, U. Alex Galitsky, U. Khatchig Mouradian and U. Robert Krikorian each asked us to look more closely at what we inherit and what we are responsible for doing with it.
One lesson has stayed with me most: memory can be a compass.
I keep thinking about how something so intimate can carry so much power. A family’s account of the village it came from. A name spoken in Armenian. A story repeated until a child knows it well enough to tell someone else. These may seem small beside the machinery of states, borders and political power. Yet people have worked relentlessly to silence those stories, erase those names and sever those connections.
That effort tells us something about their strength.
To preserve our history as our families lived it, as our ungers have carried it, and as we continue to uncover it is to resist the convenience of our disappearance. It means refusing to let someone else decide which parts of our existence deserve to survive.
But memory also makes demands of us. We have to learn enough to carry it honestly. We have to ask questions, seek out the accounts we have never heard, and make room for the lives that history has pushed to the margins. We cannot ask the next generation to remember what we never took the time to teach them.
Our discussions of geopolitics brought that responsibility into the present. We considered Armenia’s place within competing interests, the influence of American politics, and the calculations of powers for whom our homeland can become a question of strategic advantage.
It is difficult to sit with the distance between how we understand Armenia and how it can be discussed in the language of international affairs. We think of people, homes, churches, families and the possibility of a future. Elsewhere, those same places can become routes, resources, leverage or territory.
That distance should trouble us. It should also push us to study.
Caring deeply does not excuse us from understanding the forces shaping our people’s lives. If we want to advocate effectively, we need the patience to examine what is happening, the discipline to question our assumptions, and the courage to keep working when the answers are painful.
If we want to advocate effectively, we need the patience to examine what is happening, the discipline to question our assumptions, and the courage to keep working when the answers are painful.
U. Khatchig’s lecture opened another part of the Armenian world to me: the Armenian community in Manchuria, China. I was especially moved by the thought of Armenians there reading The Armenian Weekly, a publication I now contribute to myself.
I had previously written about Paul Chater and the mark he left on Hong Kong, where his name remains attached to public places. Learning about another Armenian community so far from the places we usually associate with our diaspora made that earlier work feel part of a much larger story.
I kept imagining the newspaper in someone’s hands.
Someone far from Armenia, reading about a people they still understood themselves to belong to. Someone following events, recognizing names and finding a connection through the printed page. I cannot know exactly what those readers felt. But as someone who now contributes to that same publication, I felt the distance between us narrow.
It made writing feel like a responsibility I had inherited.
U. Robert’s session asked us to put our judgment to work. In groups, we took on the role of intelligence analysts, examining pieces of evidence and trying to determine whether Armenia might be attacked and what a response should involve.
The exercise made uncertainty tangible. We had to weigh information, consider what was missing and explain why we believed one conclusion over another. It is easy to feel certain when you already know how a story ends. It is much harder to make a responsible assessment while the outcome is still unknown.
I left thinking about how much our community needs that habit of mind: people who care enough to be careful, who can hold urgency and uncertainty together without surrendering to either panic or indifference.
Of course, the weekend also held the moments that will return to me without warning long after the lecture notes have been put away.
My husband, our friends and I signed Camp Haiastan’s 75th anniversary table together. There was something deeply moving about leaving our names in a place that has been part of so many Armenian lives. We were there together, adding a small trace of our own to everything the camp already carries.
There was tavloo, a bonfire, s’mores and traditional Armenian dancing. There were conversations we kept extending even as the cold gave us every reason to go inside. There was also the new laser tag activity, with headsets that made watching everyone almost as entertaining as participating. It is difficult to maintain much dignity while waving your arms around with virtual-reality headsets on, and I am grateful we apparently agreed to stop trying.
I want to remember that laughter as clearly as I remember the lectures.
I want to remember what it felt like to learn something difficult about our people’s future and then spend the evening beside people who were willing to care about it with me. To dance with them. To make plans with them. To discover that the work ahead felt more possible because I knew who would be standing nearby.
That is part of what makes leaving so hard.
The AYF has given shape to my days and weeks. It has given me responsibilities, friendships, questions and places to put the love I have for my people. I am nervous about what it will feel like when that familiar rhythm changes. There is an emptiness in imagining a calendar without the things that have come to mean so much.
I wish I had joined earlier. I wish I had known at 10 what I found at 23. I wish I had more years left to say yes.
I wish I had joined earlier. I wish I had known at 10 what I found at 23. I wish I had more years left to say yes.
But I am grateful that I found my way here while there was still time to give something of myself.
Thank you to the Central Educational Council, the Central Executive, Camp Haiastan and every person whose work made this weekend possible. Thank you to the lecturers who trusted us with their knowledge and challenged us to become more thoughtful in what we do with it.
And thank you, U. Rosdom Mkrtschjan, for bringing me into this part of your life and helping me find a place within it. You introduced me to something I now struggle to imagine my life without. I do not know whether I have ever found words large enough to explain what that has meant to me.
When I think about the children I hope we will have, I think about giving them more time. I imagine them joining the AYF at 10, finding their own friends, asking their own questions, and slowly discovering the responsibilities that come with belonging. I hope they will grow up surrounded by people who teach them to love their heritage deeply enough to work for its future.
I hope, years from now, they will understand why their mother had so much trouble saying goodbye.
For now, though, I still have Junior Conferences on Nov. 6-8. I still have work to do, young people to show up for, and one more AYF event into which I intend to put everything I have.
Perhaps the most meaningful thank-you I can offer is there: in the care I give to someone whose AYF life is still beginning.
I arrived at 23. Someone else will arrive at 10, at 16, or later in life, perhaps wishing they had joined sooner, as I do. I want them to find the welcome I found. I want them to discover that their questions matter, that their effort is needed, and that there is a place for them in the work of carrying our people forward.
And when I finally leave through those camp gates, I hope I will have helped give them a reason to stay.
