Nina Dubovaya, 19, has no job and no money, she shares a miserable dormitory room with two others and she has no idea what her future holds.
Yet she thinks she is fortunate. She is a survivor of Ukraine’s state childcare system, and she says all those she graduated with but two have ended up on the streets, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or in prison. As many as one in 10 graduates commit suicide within a year of leaving the institution where they grew up.
Dubovaya can talk about herself with a kind of confused pride, but when she speaks of her fellow graduates she be-gins to cry.
‘I was lucky,’ she says. ‘Generally, you just leave, and that’s that. They give you some papers, and clothes to wear, and that’s all. They’re glad to get rid of you. Most of the people who leave don’t realize what problems they’re going to face and they can’t cope. You’re totally on your own, the only people you know are your friends from the internat, and they’re all in the same boat as you, or even worse off. Sometimes you can go back to the internat, but all they can do there is talk to you.’
A graduate from one of Kyiv’s internats, or boarding schools, for orphans and wards of the state, Dubovaya and two classmates were the first in eight years to enter higher education after graduating. She has just finished the first year of study at a theatrical institute, but the future is fraught with uncertainties.
She needs to find funding to continue her studies and live through the holidays, but she’s untrained to find work. She needs to find a place to live. At present she shares her single room and bed in a student hostel with two other girls who graduated with her. One of the girls disappeared two weeks ago. It is thinking of her fate that reduces Dubovaya to tears.
Ukraine has 160,000 such children who will graduate from internats and children’s homes in the next few years with equally dismal prospects. ‘They’re destined to fail,’ said Larissa Baida, head of a foundation that is trying to help people like Dubovaya. ‘They’ve been on state provision all their lives. They’ve been provided with food and clothes, they’ve lived under orders. And when they get to 16 or 17, everything stops dead. Suddenly they need to think for themselves. They don’t know what they need, what they’re to eat, where to go if they’re ill.’
Ukraine’s mammoth childcare system provides for genuine orphans (less than a third of those in institutions) and for children who have been given up by or taken away from parents who have been judged unfit to be guardians by the authorities.
Physical conditions in institutions mean they are often poorly clothed and fed and have little access to good medical treatment. But the psychological damage done by an authoritarian system is more long-lasting.
Children are given no idea of privacy or of interaction with people outside institutions, they are inadequately educated to get into colleges or universities or find jobs, many are not even taught basic living skills.
‘No one has ever died in an internat from lack of bread,’ said Baida. ‘But these children don’t see any purpose in life. They have no survival skills and no belief in themselves.’
Of Kyiv’s three orphanages for orp-hans or state wards, graduates from only one are allowed to enter higher education and have no restriction on the kinds of jobs they can apply for. Children from the other two are classified as having mental or physical disabilities barring them from further study.
In the experience of graduates and reformers, even if there are no legal bars, in practice the hindrances to going on to higher education and good jobs are almost insurmountable.
The Canadian charity Help Us Help the Children has found that the education children in institutions receive is so inferior that graduates are not accepted to universities and colleges.
The charity supported three children last year to apply for the prestigious Kyiv Mohyla Academy, only for them to fail the entry test. They are now studying a special preparatory year at the academy thanks to an agreement with Help Us Help the Children.
Dubovaya condemns the systemwhich she says gave her no support. ‘I’ll tell you categorically what we did in the internat; we did nothing,’ she said. ‘Of course there are teachers and counselors, but the whole basis of teaching was built on aggression between teachers and kids.
‘It was up to you individually, to understand that you have to leave and you have to get a profession. We had one teacher who tried to tell us we had to think about the future, but we weren’t trained to do it. It just provoked resentment. Kids say they can’t wait to leave but really they just close themselves off from talking about the future; they don’t want to leave.’
By law, the district authority which referred the child to the orphanage is responsible for providing a job and a place to live when the child leaves. Most authorities neglect this duty, so it is up to orphanage teachers and councilors to try and provide for their graduates – a full-time job for which they are not paid. Neither are they given money to provide the long list of recommended goods children should receive when they graduate; they have to rely on sponsorship.
‘We give them pennies,’ said Svetlana Piluchenko, director of internat 12 in Kyiv. ‘According to the law, we give them the miserly sum of Hr 98. But because they are our children, we can’t just throw them out, and we end up taking care of all their needs.’
Children from internat 12, classified as having minor learning disabilities, are required to leave the internat at 16, but the state does not put them on a list for housing until they are 18. In these two years, unless the internat can find them a job with accommodation, many children end up going back to the parents from whom the state saw fit to remove them so many years ago.
The law says that parents with children in institutions cannot sell their flats, but since privatization many families have sold up and moved on, said Piluchenko. Other flats that have been left empty for children get sold through illegal deals.
Graduates cannot get a job without a propiska; a stamp in their passport stating where they live. Most children are registered by their parents when they are born, but some orphanage children do not have the stamp. Between 16 and 18 therefore, they cannot get state housing which would give them a propiska, and they are not permitted to work. For one 16-year-old girl from internat 12, that leaves her one option, to marry her boyfriend and get a registration through him.
A Soviet state quota required that all state enterprises had to employ 5 percent of staff from such institutions as the internats. While the quota still exists in law, most enterprises ignore it. Even if they do not, they cannot offer well-paid work.
‘The most we can do for our graduates is find them a job that pays very little and provides a room in a dorm,’ said Bohdan Bashtovy, a councilor from internat 12. ‘There’s no way a kid can get by on Hr 150 a month, but that’s the most we can get for them.’
Many children leave such jobs, disillusioned with the pay and conditions and unaware that they are throwing away their only option. ‘They’ve been isolated for so long, they don’t know how hard it is to get a job,’ said Bashtovy. ‘A lot of our guys end up in jail for stealing.’
The future is not all bleak. Charities and aid organizations, as well as many internats themselves, are doing what they can to improve the prospects for these unwanted children. Help Us Help the Children, as well as providing thousands of dollars of humanitarian aid, organizes a yearly summer camp where children from institutions can learn some of the skills they will need to survive in the world, and supports a group of forward-thinking orphanage directors.
Baida’s organization, the Foundation of Youth Culture and Development, has created a center where graduates can learn English and computer skills and get advice on how to look and apply for jobs.
Dubovaya works for the foundation as a volunteer, going to internats to talk to those who will be leaving to find out what they want and need and the best ways to help them. Meanwhile, internat 12 has developed a ‘social orientation’ program and created a flat where children can learn how to live in non-institutional surroundings.
Yet insititutions, as well as charities and foundations, are desperately looking for sponsorship to support such initiatves.
UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) has developed an extensive program to reform the whole system of childcare. One major initiative is to introduce foster families, a practically unknown phenomenon in Ukraine.
While such drastic reform has found some opposition among institution staff, who fear it may cost them their jobs, others, like Piluchenko, have welcomed it, believing it would solve many problems. Children growing up in foster families would learn everyday skills they are denied in an institution and get individual attention.
Another aspect of UNICEF’s program is to prevent so many children ending up in state care in the first place. More and more parents are choosing to put their children in state care because of economic hardship. While it is legally very easy for parents to lose custody of their children, it is very difficult for them to get their children back again.
The increase in admissions to institutions has accelerated from 2-3 percent annually before 1995 to 15 percent annually in recent years, according to Help Us Help the Children. If the system does not change, these children will be turned out on the streets at 16 or 18 to swell the ranks of the unemployed, the substance-addicted and the desperate.
‘Children’s homes have a lot of entrances and few exits,’ said Chris Gardiner, who manages the UNICEF program in Ukraine. ‘And at the end of the process there’s nothing, there’s a huge hole.’
