Ara Arzumanian
Who Knew? The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 4
It seems that everyone knows about our woes except us. The first three pieces in this series came mainly from my own experience as a youth work professional. I thought it might be interesting to look into what other people know and so the pseudo-academic in me thought that we should do some research. I spent a little bit of time on the Internet and found a few things.
continue reading »Criminalization: The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 3
I got suspended,” said Ara when he called his mentor.
“For what?”
“Smoking. A teacher caught me smoking on the street next to the school.”
“Who were you with?”
Dropping out: The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 2
They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump out immediately. On the other hand, if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and then boil it very slowly, it won’t know to jump out. It will stay in there and die. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never boiled a frog, but I have seen scores of kids go through the slow, creeping process of dropping out of school, killing their own futures.
continue reading »The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 1
“Every Armenian girl I know is a slut, a whore or she wants to kill herself,” a 19-year-old Armenian boy tells me in the parking lot of a Glendale motel late on a Friday night. “It’s really sad. I wish I could do something to help,” he says as the smoke wafts from his mouth. It’s an unusually chilly fifty degrees out, and he stands there almost chain-smoking under the multilayered lights of this little big city we call Glendale.
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