paul chaderjian

Cafesjian Family Foundation takes the lead in organizing Smile Network mission to Armenia by Paul Chaderjian Published: Tuesday October 07, 2008 Yerevan - Every morning, four-year-old Gayane cries and begs not to be taken to school. She covers her mouth so that people don't see her lips. But they do, and they often react. Gayane was born with a cleft lip - a genetic defect also known as cheiloschisis. In Armenia, they still call it a "harelip," a pejorative other cultures and nations have already retired from their languages. No matter what it's called or the age in which we live, people on the streets here often stare at Gayane. Kids at school don't want to be around her. Some classmates make snide remarks. Others tease and bully her. Some adults here think of the split in her lip as a curse or a sign that she is mentally disabled. Unfortunately, Gayane's story is not unique; but this weekend, Gayane tortured life will change forever thanks to...

by Paul Chaderjian Time continues to speed up, perhaps just for me, but I hear it from others too. There's never enough time to do all the things we have to do and want to do. There's never enough time to keep ourselves with the news of the day, process the hundreds of e-mails that come through, look at the websites that attract us, watch the shows we want to watch, and hear the radio stations we want to hear. Let's not forget those nasty text messages. There seems to be too much happening around us in the information age, and that makes each moment more valuable. This stimulus overload should also make us question where all this information is coming from and what motivates those who send it to us or make it available to us. News channels want to make you continue watching, and there is always a natural reaction we'll have to someone else's action of a text message, phone call, or e-mail. All this should make us wonder what we should be listening to and really ...

Asbarez 100th by Paul Chaderjian Words are what I am. Words are what I have. Words are what I can offer. They are at my core, in my ink and on my paper. They are from my heart, from my memory and from my soul. They are what define us, make us and drive us. They are what awaken us and put us to eternal rest. Words are our prayers, our religion and our aspirations. Words are our harmony, our discontent and our collective dream. Words have come naturally, have come with sacrifice, have come at great financial cost. They have flowed and flow with thought and with an agenda, a program. They are mine because I write them for the moment, and yours for reading them well into the future. We write them together because the words come to us, and we read because these words are our gift from you to us and from us to you. It's what we share. It's our passion. It's what creates our communion and our community. We read words, reread them and can never have enough. We...

Asbarez 100th by Paul Chaderjian During the great catastrophes being inflicted on the Armenian people early in the 20th century, perhaps it was divine intervention that created two voices that would incubate and protect the soul of an ancient culture well into the 21st century and beyond. In the same year, 1908, in the same month, August, and in the same small farming community in Central California, Fresno – William Saroyan is born in Armenia Town. Down the street on what is now known as the Fulton Mall, also born is the newspaper which you are reading now – the Asbarez. In concert, independently and prolifically, these two voices would tirelessly work on re-establishing the Armenian identity, creating a new homeland in the Diaspora and recommit themselves to the ancestral lands around Ararat. Call it divine. Call it mythical. Call it the result of cosmic alliances and astrological forces. Call it fate. Call it destiny. Call it history that in August 1908 in Fresno two great ...

Asbarez celebrates one hundred years of dedication to the Armenian Cause and community-building by Paul Chaderjian GLENDALE, Calif. - While much has happened in the world since the first issue of Asbarez was printed 100 years ago, the newspaper’s mission to keep readers informed has never veered off course.  Since August 1908, when each individual letter of the alphabet was hand-picked and positioned on a printing plate, and well into the 21st century, when the Internet makes instant electronic newsgathering possible, Asbarez has continuously chronicled the global Armenian experience with ever-increasing velocity. Asbarez Editor Apo Boghigian credits this century of existence to the volunteers who have rallied around the paper since its first days. “ Asbarez wouldn’t have survived without the resources of its vast community of correspondents,” Boghigian says. “It also wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for the generosity of the individual volunteers and tho...

by Paul Chaderjian The 23rd melted into the 24th, 1915 became 2008, and I’m wide awake at the intersection of Atwater and Minneapolis in the metropolis of Los Angeles. It’s April 24 at 2:22 A.M., and I can’t sleep. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this; this wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. Twelve hours ahead in Yerevan right now, thousands are making an annual pilgrimage to Tstitsernakaberd. But what’s the point? Later this morning, the bluetooth-wearing, 7-jeans-clad, chain-smoking young people will get into their cars and drive around with the tricolor hoisted out their windows, take over Hollywood Boulevard and then shout for justice at the Turkish Consulate on Wilshire, but what does that have to do with me? Can our genius only do this much 93 years later? U.S. proclamations, being pandered to by politicians seeking office, political speeches, and lots of songs and poetry recitations can’t bring back the dead, erase the trauma, erase the nightmare, vocalize Mun...

..two decades back, some six years before we would hear about the Internet, when big hair was fashionable and English literature was focused on apathy and indifference in the affluent America of the Reagan era, a group of young Armenians, fresh out of college, picked up their Hi8 cameras to show their community what was ravaging the homeland and what the diaspora needed to confront. There had been an earthquake, massacres in Sumgait, and talk of independence, and a weekly show called Horizon would bring these stories to KSCI TV in Los Angeles every Saturday at 5:30 P.M. courtesy of the Armenian National Committee. In those days of a somewhat lost innocence and naivety, when the sons and daughters of the diaspora were tipped that there was a homeless Armenian living on the streets of Hollywood, the would-be filmmakers and reporters took the cameras out after midnight to track down a man named Hagop. We gave him food, interviewed him as if he was an exotic animal in a zoo, then reporte...