While adults dawdle, teens help street kids survive
On a weekly sortie into a rundown Kyiv suburn, a small group of teenagers lugs bags full of bread and bouillon cubes to a street corner where some younger children stand waiting. The contrast between the two groups is stark. The first is clean, well-dressed and smiling. The second is dusty, rumpled and ill-clad in oversized sweaters that don’t keep out the chilly spring air.
The older group has come from schools, homes and youth clubs around Kyiv on a charitable mission that has evolved into regularly scheduled meetings with the younger kids, who have clambered out from under a railway platform. ‘I’m already tired of bouillon,’ sighs 7-year-old Yura, lowering his grubby face to a steaming cup nevertheless. The orphan has been living beneath the station platform in Svyatoshino district for three years, he says. ‘If you’re used to it, it’s OK on the streets,’ he says. ‘But getting used to it is hard.’
Yura’s teenage benefactors can’t get used to leaving Ukraine’s street children to their fate. Since January, the group has trudged out each week to offer motley crews of drug-addled and abandoned youngsters sympathetic ears and some hot food.
‘I like children, and I can’t stand seeing them feeling bad,’ says volunteer Andrei Tvardievich.
Many of the teens helped gather information for a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report on Ukraine’s street children that shocked social workers and government officials last November with statistics on physical and sexual abuse, drug use, illiteracy and other hardships. One third of the 350 children questioned in Kyiv and Odessa said they were hungry every day. Ninety percent said they relied on prayer, vodka or glue-sniffing to get them through illnesses. Most startling was the discovery that only a small minority were orphans. Most came from dysfunctional families where alcoholic or abusive parents had either thrown their children out or driven them away. Moved by the facts of life learned surveying street children, the teenage volunteers are now leading a campaign to bring some immediate relief to their almost-peers. ‘The best way to help them is to teach them how to survive in such conditions,’ said Anton Shklyar, 16. ‘If they don’t want to return to their families, we give them information and help.’
The outreach group operates with no budget or sponsors, gathering clothing and supplies from various youth clubs around the city. Sergei Bakharev, a university student who leads the team, pays for food out of his own pocket, to be reimbursed by UNICEF at a later date. The volunteers plan to distribute medical kits supplied by the Red Cross in the near future; another project is to teach kids how to sew. Their ultimate aim is to help the children get back into school. The group is seeking corporate sponsorship. Since the UNICEF report was released, street children have been in the headlines quite a bit. Many of these youngsters act like mini-celebrities around journalists. ‘Don’t you want to ask me any more questions?’ asks 12-year-old Sergei in disappointment. ‘Ask me about my dreams.’ It turns out this orphan and veteran of the street has been interviewed several times before. ‘You can photograph me if it’s like in Kievskie Vedemosti, with a black bar over my eyes,’ he says, like a young media darling before a horde of paparazzi.
They are disarmingly open, and some are young enough to still see some glamour in their marginal lifestyle. Yura nonchalantly describes stealing Hr 40 from a drunk the night before. ‘I’m not scared of the police,’ he says. ‘I just run away, and when if I get caught, there’s one inspector I can call and then they always let me out.’ Yura has no wish to give up the freedom of the streets for the certainties of a state-run shelter.
‘You can’t leave an internat, and there are lots of police and bad boys,’ he says. ‘Here with the guys we’re like one big family. We’re all friendly, we all help each other.’ Kyiv has only one temporary shelter for street children, a 50-bed facility opened in January. Otherwise, the city relies on a drastically underfunded network of orphanages and internats, boarding schools for underprivileged children and wards of the state.
Social workers acknowledge that children used to living on their own do not adapt well to controlled environments, from which they regularly escape.
‘When children go to the shelter they can get food, clothes, medical aid, education,’ said Bakharev. ‘But they still leave because they feel they’re limited, they can’t earn their own money, they’re imprisoned by four walls.’ Nevertheless, UNICEF and the city social services department have drawn up several more long-term plans to cope with the growing problem of street children. The proposed solutions range from returning them to their families under the supervision of teachers and social workers to sending them to internats. A new system of foster families is at present being tested in Donetsk, said Bakharev.
Some children find the idea of shelter and schooling appealing, but are prevented from getting help by the rules of the system. Another 12-year-old named Sergei said his parents refuse to enroll him in an internat but regularly throw him out of the house.
‘If my parents need me, I live at home. If they kick me out, I live here on the street,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be in an internat. There you don’t get any homework, you get five meals a day, sometimes you even get sweets from humanitarian aid.’
Sergei’s idealized picture is a long way from the reality of state-run homes, which are overcrowded, understaffed and perpetually short of bith money and the wherewithal to prepare children for life outside of an institution. ‘The internats are in terrible condition,’ Bakharev said. ‘Children get beaten there. Then there is the problem of what to do with them after the internat. These institutions don’t provide the children with any profession to secure their future. What happens is that many internat graduates don’t even know how to pay for their flats.’ Sergei of the Kievskie Vedomosti fame ran away from an internat after eight years because he was beaten there, he says. The dreams he offers to share have happy endings inspired by the glue he’s regularly sniffing. But one sounds like it’s been in his thoughts for a long time. ‘The only thing I want is nice parents,’ he says. ‘if I get in a nice family, I promise I’ll quit smoking, sniffing glue and using bad language, and I’ll study hard. If I promise them to quit, and if I respect the family, they’ll take me.’
