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Music and Art at the Ukrainian Institute of America
Posted by Mr Potato head on March 17, 2006 at 14:45:29:
Mitya's most striking feature is that he has stumps for hands: all of his fingers froze off during a particularly difficult winter. He is 14. Mitya is a 'street child' in the most literal sense: he spends his time living in sewers and cellars in the city's slums. He's also a legend among the kids who live at the shelter because he's totally independent. In the absence of role models, he's become someone they look up to. Attempts have been made repeatedly to entice Mitya into the shelter, but only on the condition that he kicks his glue-sniffing habit for good. It's a sacrifice he's unwilling to make, so he continues to live in Perm's decaying wooden slums.
When Andrei told me his life story, he started with, "Well; my mother killed him, you see, so it became impossible to live at home anymore:" He is now in his mid-twenties and moved out of the shelter a couple of years ago. Like several other ex-shelter kids, Andrei is a regular visitor back to the place he once lived, even though he has no real reason to loiter. Perhaps it's because Love's Bridge is the only place he ever felt welcomed. He's currently unemployed and expecting a child with another of the shelter's graduates.
Sergei's Ukrainian mother abandoned him and his father when he was ten. But his father had remarried and wanted nothing to do with his first-born son, so Sergei ran away. He started hanging out at the central market, where he picked up a glue-sniffing habit from the other homeless kids and eventually landed in the Love's Bridge shelter. Like many kids whose parents are too drunk to care for them, Sergei still harbors fantasies of reuniting with his mother in Ukraine. It's not going to happen anytime soon: Sergei isn't technically a Russian citizen and doesn't even have a passport. Furthermore, after she abandoned him, his mother has never attempted to contact him, and nobody knows where to find her.
Aleksey's mother is an unemployed alcoholic trying to raise her seven children in a one-room apartment. Not surprisingly, Aleksey had problems with authority from a young age. Because of his strong temper - and because the government doesn't have any way of dealing with kids like this - he was put in a mental institute several times. Ironically, after all the time he spent locked up in a psych-ward, he actually began to develop mental problems. Aleksey, now 17, lives in the shelter and is one of the most reclusive and anti-social children there. Part of the reason may be because the shelter keeps him medicated in order to help him control his temper.
Olga earns 30 rubles an hour (about a dollar) for looking after the children in the shelter, and regularly works 72 hours straight just to make ends meet. She's in her late 20s, unmarried and rents a tiny room from a babushka in the outskirts of Perm. Olga left her village home when she was 18 to earn money in the city that helped support her parents and four sisters. Even though she doesn't have much contact with her family now, she still sends money home. Love's Bridge, for her, is just a job; she doesn't enjoy spending time with the kids and believes that they'll all end up just like their parents. She doesn't make enough money to go out more than once a month and one of the few activities she seems to enjoy is writing poetry during the night shift.
Dima, 12, only lives in the shelter around half the time, and he spends the rest at home. When he's in the shelter, he always begs to get sent home to his beloved mother. However, whenever he gets sent back to his parents, he turns up a couple of days later in a cellar or a sewer somewhere, covered in bruises and lice, reluctant to talk about what has happened. Dima's interests include smoking, playing computer games, listening to death metal and playing with the small children in the shelter.
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