....human relations, human values, dignity of the spirit is the most important and they do keep the world today.

Human life is like a huge ocean. There are so many different islands, large and small, reefs, even huge icebergs, and without all this diversity, and even without the pitfalls, the world would not be so beautiful and unique. That is why  it seems to me that  meeting many different people in this enormous ocean of life stays  sometimes unnoticeable to anyone but firmly lasting impression  sometimes accompanies you throughout life, as a matter of course, and stored in  the memory carefully as jewelry that  belong only to you and no one  else. And, perhaps, we should not live such a small segment of life,  that one day, suddenly turning back, to remember those who are no longer in this world, but who  played in your life, at times, a  very unexpected role.

When I was one year old, my mother and father went to Volgograd and left me with my grandmother. I became sick as ate something wrong and could die.  My parents quickly came back. I was in the hospital, pediatrician Taisya  Aznauryan did not leave me any single minute. She,  as my mother told, actually saved me, even though there was little hope. Since then, she  became our family friend, and as soon as I got  high temperature, I was taken to her. I remember her smile and manner of speaking, almost squeaking voice and, of course, her hands. And always remember that she saved me. Many years later, already  being a mother myself, I got into our children's hospital with my son and met her there, an old women , but still the same intelligent and elegant. We met then, not even as old friends, but as relatives who lost each other in some  period of  life.

At school, our teacher of English Berta  Lamm was  one of the best, who taught us   absolutely inexplicable to love  English and her  special  strong  teaching of    grammar so that even her weak students  got good marks at the  university. It was a teacher by vocation. She did not miss any lesson and we respected her. But most of all I loved our teacher of Math Nina  Shcherbakova. And let none of my classmates deny that she loved me more than anyone else. Algebra I learned so well as  only because of  love and respect for her. When I entered the department of foreign philology, she did not talk to  me at school  on February school parties, until one day I was with my son and  met her in the bus. She smiled at me with so familiar kind smile and asked if my son had learned algebra as well once I did. So she suddenly came back to me in the middle of life, in the bus, and at that time gave me a sea of ​​warmth and love.

But in my life was one more person who played a crucial role at a time when I chose the profession of litterateur. In spite of everything, often I regret that I left my dream, and perhaps in the next life will become what I wanted then, in my 16 years. Augusta  Evdokimova, a famous  Sukhum English teacher, persuaded my mother to send me to a foreign branch. I fought with my mother a few days, and suddenly she uttered a phrase which persuaded me and I agreed. My mother said that I would  be able to read foreign literature in the original, and I would be able to feel the beauty of it, and I  would like it, and I would  certainly be happy. It so happened that  due to the English language, I learned the world better, and even it helped me to survive in  our hard times,  I met a lot of wonderful people. And I think: why  the nationality matters if  the main is the person’s  culture, education and life credo.

In the mid eighties I went to graduate ship of TSU, and my supervisor appeared beautiful, smart, talented scientist, intelligent to the core, noble, whose father was unjustly killed in Stalin-Beria torture prisons with his brothers and  she  taught me how to know a lot to have a strong base in order to come into science and be able to defend my own  point of view.

She gently instilled in me a love for linguistics, different courses,  studied  rare books, and I really fell in love with this complicated subject and then  I was strongly attracted to my  thesis. On  September 30, 1993, I returned to  my  spoiled and  broken home. And I saw scattered, trampled pieces of papers with  English  and Abkhaz words, hundreds of scribbled  sheets, notebooks and so never went back to my thesis writing. But one day, when I had to lead at  the university a special course, I pulled out my  notes and books, remembered my Leila Carlovna and  reading students lectures about the arbitrariness of linguistic sign and the meaning of the word I was  innerly proud that I could do it easily  and understanding fully  that pain and suffering  gained from the damn war did not  completely wiped me out.

Later, working in the organization "Doctors without Borders" (MSF), I met my Elise Clement, with whom we established a program for access to free treatment for  the most vulnerable groups, and which suddenly opened up in me the ability of a social worker. And she taught me what life summed up itself. There I learned and saw actually what life is really, I learned that  the nationality of the person did not matter. There were   people with their troubles, hopelessness, despair, life trampled, but  they did not lose dignity. I became friends with them: with Iranian Nabiya, an Armenian  Vartush, a Georgian Cleopatra Ilinichna and 90 - year old Russian Anna Isacova, a tall  old woman with big and kind blue eyes living in the  a room full of icons and icon-lamps, that God saved by sending her MSF and the ICRC. They told me about their  life,  they were  so surprisingly strong, but   but so  lonely, women whose troubles, setbacks, and diseases could  not embitter and  break.

 In those  hard years, I was lucky to get acquainted with an amazing American lady  Margery Farrar,  which  almost three years with her friends sent money for  running the mini-house for  elderly women,  in which different lonely  women  found comfort, care and love. Margery hit me with her humanity and compassion for strangers, and  yet remains for me as a mystery, a person of immense kindness and soul. She believed that the establishment of a house for  elderlies, even if only for women,  would make   our war-scarred society  healthier and people helping the destitute, themselves would  become stronger.

But the Internet so strangely  enough, in spite of my skeptical attitude towards internet  acquaintances, by chance introduced me to a wonderful man, an intellectual, which I had never seen in my life, but know now quite well. He was a Spaniard. And he lives in the house with windows on the very mountain of Segovia, which Hemingway described in his famous novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls". So, thanks to my mother’s translation of the Abkhazian " Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery, we met and stay friends to this day. And I must say that this is probably the most fantastic:  when someone who lives so far away, in a distant beautiful Spain, suddenly brought into my life, into one of the most complicated of its moments, human understanding, confidence and told me a lot interesting things, and every day sent the best version of the classic works, films and books. So, after the war, many years later, I began again  enjoying  music, Serenata of  Schubert, poems, Spain, and even once in  summer walked  in the high mountains to  the Lake  of Mzy,  the Abkhaz mysterious jewelry in the mountains,  which I saw only once  in my happy youth.

This is so.  I do not want to say that Abkhazians did not play an important role in my life, they have played, certainly. And it's my unforgettable parents from whom I inherited I hope all the best - their humanity, a true devotion to their country and the people of Abkhazia and my dearest friends. 
It is not easy to say about all I met in my life. But this is life, and it is so, and it so happens that, not belonging to any nationality, but human relations, human values, dignity of the  spirit is the most important and  they  do keep the world today.

 Asida Lomia 

Newspaper Association of Women of Abkhazia "Dialogue of Cultures", December 2014