The following is a partner post by Global Voices’ partner Chai-Khana.org. Text by Monica Ellena. All photos by Jacob Borden. Miguel Mkirtichian’s passport is grey, just as his life has been so far. “It’s in Georgian. It has my name, my date and place of birth,” says the softly-spoken 22-year-old, pointing to the document. “I don’t like to show it. It’s not red, like everyone else’s, and next to citizenship it says ‘None.’ I do not belong here or to anywhere else.” Miguel Mkirtichian’s ID document allows him to travel, but does not show any citizenship. He’s now awaiting the last stage of the process which will grant him full Georgian citizenship. Mkirtichian is stateless, one of 595 individuals without a nationality registered in Georgia, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s a tiny fraction of the estimated 10 million stateless people worldwide, but the consequences are no less dire. “Not having an ID makes you a non-citizen,” explains Johannes Van Der Klaauw, the UNHCR representative in Georgia. “It means no access to health care, education, or job opportunities. You cannot vote, you cannot open a bank account, you cannot marry, you cannot drive.” It even means no right to an official burial and a death certificate. Miguel never had an identification document until 2015. When he was granted stateless status, he was 20-years-old. Mkirtichian does not know when, in the eyes of the law, he became a non-person. Born in Moscow to a Nigerian father and a Tbilisi-born, ethnic Armenian mother, he had a Russian passport until he was three. When his mother came to visit her family in Tbilisi, Mkirtichian’s grandfather reportedly destroyed that passport. He didn’t want his grandson to be Russian, the boy was told. It was a fateful decision. At first, Mkirtichian and his mother lived with her parents. But when a family argument broke out, they had to leave, Mkirtichian recounts. He runs through his memories while staring at his hands, avoiding eye contact. He has learnt that can be dangerous, as can asking questions. “I just remember that my mother and I left and started sleeping in the street,” he continues. “I was 11. I stopped going to school and just followed her.” Mkirtichian’s paper trail, apparently, simply vanished. Born in Moscow, 22-year-old Miguel Mkirtichian moved to Tbilisi with his mother at the age of three. His father, reportedly a Nigerian national, disappeared before he was born. A chance encounter in 2015 with an acquaintance, a lawyer working with UNHCR’s statelessness-eradication program, brought him back into official existence. His case was referred to the Georgian justice ministry’s Public Service Development Agency, and, a year later, Mkirtichian gained an ID card as a stateless person. The card gives him all the rights of a citizen except the right to vote and work in public service. Now living in a Tbilisi homeless shelter, he is awaiting a final decision on his citizenship in 2019. For Mkirtichian, a Georgian passport means more than just a document, however. “It’s written on my face that I’m different,” he says, sitting on the edge of his bunk bed at the shelter. “I speak Georgian, but I don’t look Georgian. I speak Armenian, but I don’t look Armenian. I speak Russian, but I don’t look Russian. Citizenship is all I need to heal the scar of not belonging.” Without documents, stateless person Miguel Mkirtichian struggled to find work. In 2017, he got a job as a cleaner in a gym which lets him use the facility free of charge every morning before opening. He is not alone in that desire. Hundreds of thousands of people in Eurasia became stateless overnight in the 1990s after the Soviet Union disappeared and state boundaries were redrawn. They became “aliens” because of administrative hitches, territorial conflicts or simply because they could not track down documents from an extinct era. Over the past several years, Georgia, which contains thousands of Internally Displaced People from separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, has tried to help stateless people regain that sense of belonging. After years spent living in the streets with his mother, Miguel Mkirtichian was accepted into a Tbilisi homeless shelter run by a religious institution. He shares a bedroom with two other people. It has signed on to United Nations conventions granting stateless people basic rights and protections and pledging to reduce statelessness. It has streamlined the process for people to gain citizenship and, with UNHCR’s help, pinpointed the number of stateless people and trained civil registries to handle requests for stateless-person IDs.