YEREVAN — The last time I met Ashot and the Moonq team was in Artsakh in 2022. A group of young, motivated compatriots of Artsakh, thanks to crowdfunding and the Nagorno-Karabakh government input, set up a modern-looking high-tech school in the village of Haghorti of the Martuni district of Nagorno-Karabakh (NK). In about 15 months of its existence, the school educated 250 local students and even got some international contracts for software programming. Everything ended in September of 2023 when Azerbaijan launched another unprovoked attack against Armenians, which destroyed the millennia-old Armenian presence in Artsakh. The Moonq team left behind everything they had created, and along with nearly 100 thousand Armenians of the Artsakh Republic, found refuge in the Republic of Armenia.
“It took as four days to arrive in Tashir, Armenia,” says Ashot Avanesyan, recalling the painful days of exodus through the only and heavily jammed highway that connected NK to the Republic of Armenia last fall. “The desire to relocate our tech school in northern Armenia was perhaps the main motivation that helped us survive those hard days. Even before we left, some of our friends were already working on reviving Moonq here,” recalls Ashot.
The Tashir Foundation helped 1,500 Armenian refugees from NK settle in Armenia’s northern Tashir town and the neighboring villages. They allocated food rations. “Each of our team members assumed certain responsibilities, and in a matter of a month, we basically reestablished our school here,” noted Ashot.
The Moonq team members were able to grab some laptops and other technologies with them, but the rest was left behind. However, as Ashot says, first of all, school is the people and second of all, the technology. As the Tashir Foundations charity allowed the young professionals to stay together in their new hometown, the revival perspective became more feasible. Then, the Hovnaninan Armenian-American Foundation pitched in. “48 hours after our initial application, the Hovnanian Foundation agreed to cover all our expenses in Tashir for the first several months. This allowed us to reestablish Moonq almost fully and start the expansion in a month,” he said.
With continuous crowdfunding, the school kept growing, setting up branches in Syunik and elsewhere. By the end of 2023, the school had about 370 students. The Washington-based Americans for Artsakh assisted with getting a US-manufactured 3D printer that was printing three-dimensional figures when I was visiting Moonq.
“Look at the quality of the products,” said Ashot, pointing to the colorful figures of the iconic We Are Our Mountains monument that the printer was producing in front of our eyes. “This is day and night compared to what we could manufacture with our outdated devices,” he remarked.
