Kyiv street children brace for winter
When
most Kyiv residents have their dinners at homes or city cafes, these children
are sharing their meals in an unfinished car park, warming up by a bonfire in a
chilly November night.
With a hoarse voice, Oksana talks to gloomy Sergiy,
addressing him as “my son.” He calls her “mom” in return. No matter that Oksana
is 17 and Sergiy is 21. Street rules allow discrepancies.
Sergiy said his real mother died while giving him
birth and his father turned him away, while Oksana remembers that her mother once
“left for work and didn’t return.” Her father died in jail.
Sergiy traveled to Kyiv from Rivne Oblast and Oksana
from Zhytomyr Oblast. Both of them spent several years at orphanages, the
places they hated, preferring the cold and sometimes dangerous life on the
streets.
Ukraine has 100,000 homeless children, according to estimates
by the United Nations’ UNICEF agency. With winter looming, they risk freezing
to death on the streets, as more than 100 homeless Ukrainians did last
February. They also risk dying of alcohol, drugs or dangerous diseases or becoming
victims of violent crime, often from other homeless people.
If there’s a note of optimism, it is that the
situation appears to have improved somewhat in recent years, partly due to a
change in government policy away from large state-run orphanages to more
welcoming foster family setting.
But still, children are running away from broken families
and orphanages. Many of them seek better lives in big cities, but instead they usually
start earning for their lives by begging, while most of the street girls get
involved in prostitution, social workers say.
“These children have an extremely distorted value
scale, where health is” not a top priority, said Igor Dmytrenko, a social
worker of Kyiv city center for children and youth. “Illness, death – these
concepts are too abstract for them. They are ready to die tomorrow, [valuing
more the ability] to eat, dress up, inject or try glue.”
Sergiy said he was sniffing glue for a long time as small
child. It is favored by street children because it is cheap and “they have
nothing to eat in winter.” Eating mandarins brought by social workers, he pets
a stray dog named Gerga, one more member of this strange “family.” Oksana
confessed that she sniffed glue as well, but now prefers cheap wine and vodka,
the empty bottles of which were piled just by the fire.
Oksana introduces a 17-year-old grimy girl sitting
next to her as her sister Zhenia. They consider themselves siblings because of
Zhenia’s late mother, who used to care of both girls for years before she died.
With a nasty cough, Oksana said winter is the biggest danger of street life.
Children find warmth at the local train station or on warm water pipes under
covered parking lots.
Another problem is rival teenage gangs or older
homeless. “Police don’t touch us, as they know us for many years,” Oksana said.
“They could take some boys [to the police station] and register them for the
report, but then always let them go,” she added. But social workers claim that
police offers always look to charge street children in their attempts to clear
cases.
Years of glue sniffing have left 21-year-old Sergiy
with the mental capabilities of a 13-year-old, said social worker Katia
Parkhomenko. Despite his studies at secondary school, Sergiy is unable to
write, she added.
Wearing plastic boot covers, Parkhomenko walks along
the piles of rubbish and crushed glass, bringing the homeless children food,
condoms and persuading them to get tested of the infection deceases. “The most
often they have syphilis,” she said. Less often it is HIV, which an estimated
four percent of them.
Leonid Krysov, who has a long experience of work with
street children, remembers that several HIV-positive children were murdered by
the homeless after their status became known. “The street is a very aggressive
and cruel area,” he said.
Krysov, who said he’s managed to reintegrate several
homeless children into society, said that many others refuse help from social
service agencies. “There are groups in Kyiv, where all of the children are drug
addicts,” he said, adding that often they die very young after injecting the
handmade drug cocktails like “boltushka” or “krokodil.”
Ania, 23, is a girl who looks a bit tidier and speaks
more coherently than others. The social workers proudly admit that after living
on the street since 8, she is one of few who managed to change her life and
return home. But Ania said it’s not totally true.
After the birth of her child, she tried to live with
her grandmother, but that didn’t work out. Ania send her child to live with a
friend’s family and returned to street life. Now she regularly visits her kid
and actively assists social workers.
Ania regrets her grandma refused to allow her adoption
by an Italian family when she was a little child. She also remembers horrible
conditions in the orphanage. Ania spends most nights with her homeless friends,
partly because she has no other place to live and partly because she likes it.
“The street is better for us, because there are no
rulers on the street,” she said. “We are used to living in freedom.”
Kyiv
Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at grytsenko@kyivpost.com.