CHRISTMAS: I Won’t Be Home for the Holidays

For Travelers, there is inevitably a moment when the exhilaration of discovery gives way to an acute sense of being a stranger in a very foreign place. As soldiers, diplomats and foreign correspondents know, that sense of displacement may be keenest at times of traditional togetherness and homecoming. Here, current and former foreign correspondents share some of their most memorable Christmases away from home.

SOVIET ARMENIA, 1988

The mulled wine, fragrant with cloves, was poured from a jerry can as a tinny version of “The First Noel” bleated from a portable tape recorder. Inside the mess tent in Leninakan, about 50 foreign rescue workers met for dinner on a frigid and foggy Christmas Eve, but there was no joy. “This is supposed to be the best time of year, but that’s impossible,” a German rescue worker, Helmut Meyer, said as he sipped lukewarm wine from a paper cup.

Outside, Armenia’s second-biggest city was in ruins, demolished by a great earthquake that had crumbled high-rises into heaps of concrete powder. The scenes were eerie, apocalyptic. Fires burned through the night as people dug in desperation through ice-encrusted rubble for signs of friends and family. Survivors came to kiss the walls of the Church of the Seven Wounds, whose belfry had toppled to the ground but whose sanctuary stood intact.

For days, photographer Robert Tonsing of Garden Grove and I chronicled the martyrdom of Armenia’s northwest, which so stunned authorities in this ancient Christian land that they canceled Christmas festivities, held in Armenia on Jan. 6. It was hard for us at first to see anything but the sorrow. When a distraught mother buried her 36-year-old daughter in frozen earth so hard the grave had to be dug with a jackhammer, Tonsing’s eyes welled up and he had trouble focusing.

But as well as being a season of unspeakable grief, it was a time of courage and great sacrifice. Tonsing and I slept in the unheated living room of a one-story stone house and ate tripe, a great delicacy in a town where for many, the common meal was now a lump of bread or a biscuit. Our host was Martin Pachayan, 42, a hollow-eyed teacher of French whose wife, daughter and son perished in the quake. By leading us through the wreckage near the Turkish border that had been his town and showing us Armenia’s tragedy, he was submerging his own.

It was in a hospital in Yerevan on Christmas Day that I heard an incredible tale of a mother’s love, a story that would help all of Armenia live through those weeks. Lying on her bed, Susanna Petrosyan, 26, told in a soft and firm voice how she had been ready to give her life so her daughter would survive.

The earthquake had entombed both mother and 4-year-old Gayaney in the ruins of a Leninakan apartment house, with only a jar of jam to eat. When Gayaney repeatedly cried out with thirst, her mother found a shard of glass, sliced open a finger made numb by the winter cold, and gave it to her child to suckle.

“I knew I was going to die. But I wanted my daughter to live,” Susanna Petrosyan told me, as nurses, orderlies and patients crowded into the narrow doorway to hear her story, which an Armenian woman, on the verge of tears, translated for me into Russian. One finger hadn’t been enough for Gayaney, said the mother, showing hands crisscrossed with scars.

After eight days, mother and daughter were dug out and airlifted to Yerevan. There, little Gayaney still had no idea of what had happened. “Bad people pulled down the house where we were, and we couldn’t get out,” she said. “I wanted my father to come and defend us from those bad people. But he didn’t come. Not for a long time.”