Humiliation the greatest pain for kids in St Petersburg

Small Russian Program Doing Its Best

Both Svetlana Oskina and her Swedish foster father, Kjell Gerdin, are happy people - their dreams are at last coming true.  By the time she was 12 years old, after six years of begging on the street, sniffing glue and living in a manhole, Oskina, who is now 19, had two dreams - to have a father, who would protect her from the hardships of her street life, and to study.

For his part, Gerdin dreamt of being able to help Russian street children.

Six years after she showed up at a shelter for homeless children run by Gerdin, Oskina goes to prep courses at Herzen Pedagogical University three times a week. She says that she wants to become a psychologist, complete at least two degrees, learn a number of foreign languages, and build a successful career.

"Romance is of less importance," she says.

"Today's Svetlana and that girl who first came to our shelter in 1996 are like day and night," says Gerdin, the founder and head of the St. Petersburg Child Protection Society.

"My goal is to prove to myself and to other street children that there is a better life," says Oskina. "And to prove that everything depends on the person!"

Looking at the ambition flickering in Oskina's eyes as she discusses her plans, it is clear that her strong character and intelligence helped her to escape the temptations of the street - to quit smoking and sniffing glue - and to complete a program of four elementary-school grades in just one month.

But, she says, her ambition was not the main reason she finally gave the life up. "It was constant humiliation that made me leave the streets," Oskina says.

According to Gerdin, St. Petersburg has around 130,000 street children - including children who spend a lot of time in the street working as menial laborers, collecting bottles or begging, even if they still live at home. About 1,500 of them are street children in the purest and harshest sense - they live on the streets full time - he says.

In 1995, Gerdin, a former Lutheran pastor and a psychologist, shocked by the growing street-kids problem in Russia, organized a society to protect the children. He says the move came from his belief that "the proper human and financial resources invested into the problem" could return the children to living normal lives.

Gerdin's society runs two shelters - the "Nadezhda" ("Hope") center for boys and the "Masha" center for girls - that have spaces for 25 children. He also provides aid to street children and poor mothers.

"Many people ask me why I bother doing this," Gerdin said. "Of course, I could have been making much more money if I was working in Sweden. However, at some point of your life, you realize that you can't buy happiness. You can only get it by giving."

Oskina has became one of many proofs of his philosophy.

She left home at the age of seven, together with her three-year-old brother, when her mother simply stopped coming home regularly, and she and her six siblings rarely had anything to eat. Theirs was a hard life. They often received burns from heating pipes they huddled near at night to keep warm, were abused by teenage street kids, and had policemen put glue bags on their heads to make their hair stick together.

Some girls were raped by strangers, while others resorted to prostitution.

"It was always a necessity to be able to take care of yourself, without anyone to protect you," Oksina says. "I just wanted to study so badly!"

Oskina says that she and her best friend, Alyona, used to watch children going to school in the morning, and even hung around schools sometimes just to feel as if they were part of the atmosphere.

But Oksina says that, despite her desire to become part of something more concrete or stable, the way of life on the street had its own attraction, a feeling of freedom.  "It's the feeling you have when you can have money and spend it any way you want. It's when you don't have to wake up at certain time and don't have to follow any schedule. You can just do what you want," she said.

Gerdin and his Russian colleagues at "Masha" managed to help Oskina finally move in a different direction, as they have with many others.

Vanya Kudinov, now 18, is another of the society's success stories. Kudinov, along with his two brothers, began his life on the street at the age of 9, after their mother left them alone in a communal apartment. He also found it hard at first to make the switch away from the street.

"It was very embarrassing when I went to school, in the first grade, at the age of 12, when all my classmates were seven years old," Kudinov says. "But I made myself go on studying." Now he is studying shipbuilding metalwork at a technical college and is doing his apprenticeship at Admiralty Verfi.

But, for all the success stories, there are also failures, and the attachment to the sense of freedom among many street kids is one of the major obstacles the organization faces.

According to social workers, although street life is uncomfortable, cold and dangerous, it is still extremely difficult to convince street children to give it up. "You can't pull a child away from the street without treating the child as a friend," says Olga Zemlyakova, a social worker with the society. "Words alone won't work with these children. You have to make a child really like and trust you."

The process of befriending street children usually takes a long time. It starts when the society's red minibus goes on what the society calls "night patrols" to metro stations where the majority of the city's street children hang out. The social workers bring tea and pirozhki, or pies, to feed the children, but feeding them is not the point of the practice.

The social workers' aim is to establish contact with children, find out who they are, what their family and general life situation is, and gradually start trying to get them to decide to give up life on the street in favor of life in a shelter.

One such night patrol took place Wednesday night. The society's red bus came to its last stop of the night, at Ulitsa Dybenko metro station, and a group of street children surrounded the vehicle that is well known to them, waiting for food.

Most of the children were dirty, some had lice, while others clearly smelled of some of the industrial liquids that many of them sniff. One boy, Pasha, 12, was given the last of the pirozhki, six or seven of them, in a plastic bag.

He said that he would take the bag home but, before he could make his escape, a bigger boy, Sergei, tried to wrestle the bag away from him. Only intervention by volunteers and the proposal of giving two of the pies to Sergei allowed Pasha to make his escape successfully.

Zemlaykova says that, in the group of about 10 children who met them at the metro station, only one, named Kristina, is psychologically more or less ready to move into a shelter, but still hasn't decided to do so.

While the society is doing what it can with limited resources, Gerdin says that the situation continues to deteriorate with each passing year, as the number of street children increases, and the situation in which they live becomes more complicated.  "A large part of the new generation of street kids comes not from the city, but from the Leningrad Oblast, and there are more and more substance abusers among them," he said.

Gerdin said that, given the situation, what makes him particularly sad is that, more than a decade after this problem really began to hit Russia, little help comes from the Russian people themselves, particularly from Russian businesspeople.

Funding for the society comes in the form of allocations from various foreign charities, located in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Australia. Gerdin says that it costs as much as $100,000 per year to operate the society, with the maintenance of each shelter running from $3,500 to $4,500 a month. Running a night patrol costs $50.

Leonid Osipov, the general director of the society, said that the group's finances sometimes get tight and it appeals for help to different Russian companies, but rarely receives response. He said the society was really moved when Russky Khlebnyi Dom, a bakery, agreed to donate bread and pryaniki, a sort of gingerbread cookie, and when a collective farm just outside of Pushkin gave them two tons of potatoes and 1 1/2 tons of cabbage for the winter.

"Now we are looking for money to equip a small fitness center for the shelter's children and to hire more social workers," Osipov said.

For Svetlana Oksina, who wanted so badly to have a father, the fact that Gerdin and his wife Liisa decided to become her foster parents was a dream come true. "Papa always protects me, and I feel so happy," she said.

Gerdin says that they have developed into a family. And he has even found a bit of humor in acting as her guardian. "You know, now she is at the age where she has started going out on dates. So, once, when she came back home in a car with her boyfriend, I couldn't resist asking the young man for his passport," Gerdin laughs. "I said 'You have my daughter in your car, so please let me see your documents!'"

And Oskina says that she still has one more dream to come true. "I want to create a good and secure life for my future children, who should definitely have a good father," she says.

By Irina Titova, St Petersburg Times
Source

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