Natalie Sanchez and Ashley Etheredge's voting project: Armenia

In globalization, we were assigned a project that required us to make connections with someone from a foreign country and have them conduct "voting day" interviews on their country's election day and share their findings with us. In the past year, Ms. Laufenberg had already assigned us to conduct voter interviews in our districts, but now it was time to branch out. The objective of this project was to 1.) learn how to make global connections via internet social sites and more importantly, 2.) to learn how the voting process and opinions towards the same differs in different countries other than the United States. The country that Ashley and I picked was Armenia. The hardest part of this project was making connections with people halfway around the world. We tried to contact a Philadelphia local of Armenian decent, Lavan,  who could possibly connect us with his family members or friends in our voting project country, but he could not get back to us. We also tried emailing many Armenian-American institutions in the country, like The Yerevan International school of Armenia, the American University of Armenia, and European regional academy of Armenia, among others, but we did not receive a reply. It was only until we messaged Ms. Karen Abalyan, an employee of the communications department of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America in New York that we actually got a hint of communication flowing, but in the end, this did not fall through. After this, Reverend Hakob Gevorgyan of holy trinity church recommended Greg Bilazarian as a good contact point. We emailed Greg several times and found that he was very helpful; he was even going to find a student to conduct the interview for us, but we could not get a reply from Mr. Bilazarian after the Armenian voting day (May 6, 2012). After a couple of weeks of hearing nothing back from our contact, we sent him an email  to follow up with his progress. It wasn't until we ran into an online article about the Armenian voting day that we found out that  there was a voting protest in Yerevan, Armenia in support for Ter-Petrosian because of suspicions of flawed voting. The protest became a violent demonstration that might have proved dangerous for the students that were going to do the interviews. Ashley and I assumed that this was the reason that Mr. Bilazarian was not able to send us a reply. In conclusion, we ended up not receive a reply from our contact, but learned the how bad Armenia's political system is at the present.