11/14/2024 Armenia (International Christian Concern) – When we first met an Armenian refugee named Narine, she couldn’t stop crying.

The trauma of her family’s forced exit from their ancestral homeland of Artsakh and the hardships they had faced as refugees had broken her spirit. Sorrow seized her as she watched her husband work long hours attempting to provide for their family, only to earn the equivalent of $5 a day. Unable to use her cosmetics training to earn extra income, she felt hopeless.

Then ICC offered Narine the equipment she needed to start a small business. The sudden gratitude and joy Narine felt was so intense that it kept her awake that night.

“Is there still hope?” she said in a text to her friend. “Could it be that God heard my cry?”

Narine’s family is one of the 24 Armenian refugee families ICC helped this year. These beneficiaries are only a few of the 120,000 ethnic Armenian Christians who were forced to flee Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, in recent years. The genocidal actions of the Azerbaijani military, which targeted Christians during its nine-month blockade of a humanitarian corridor in late 2022, forced the families out of their homeland to find food.

By the end of 2023, ICC provided 120 Armenians with food and clothing. This year, we helped 18 families start small businesses, like Narine’s, to build a sustainable future in Armenia.

A woman named Ani stood in disbelief when she received equipment to start her own business.

“I am not believing that this is reality,” she told an ICC staffer. “I am feeling that I am in a dream and don’t want to wake up.”

Daniel, whose family fled Artsakh in 2020 due to persecution, also expressed gratitude for the small business equipment he received.

“In the past four years, this is the first time that happiness has entered our home after all that we had lost,” he said. “Now, we are feeling there is hope.”

With your generous support, we can create 20 more small business projects to help even more Christian refugee families thrive. Please join us in giving other brothers and sisters of ours in Armenia the gift of hope.

To learn more about giving to the persecuted this holiday season, click here.