feeding the five thousand

April 17, 2009 at 11:44 pm | Posted in Life in Moscow | 2 Comments
Tags: impact of economic crisis moscow, moscow homeless, volunteering in russia

Sorry, got distracted with stuff again.

The reason I’ve been feeling better lately is that I’ve finally finally gotten to do some volunteering. I’d been trying to arrange this since january, but the concept is not well developed here and finding something actually useful to do had been difficult. My first attempt got me an offer of going to a children’s hospital and giving *the staff* english lessons, which just seemed to miss the point entirely…

anyway, so I finally arranged through the international womens club to work in a project that focuses on helping the homeless, since i already had plenty of experience with that in oxford, and started the week i got back from georgia. On thursdays I go to the north of moscow, to a night shelter/halfway house for exprisoners. during the day on thursdays other volunteers do activities with them but my classes dont finish in time for me to do this as well…

sandwich making gets underway

When i get there, I sit in a tiny office and around 4 of us make 250 ham sandwiches and pack them into bags. Although the state donated the building and a minibus to this project, it gives no money so there are virtually no resources at all (funding mostly provided by Caritas apparently). No kitchen severely limits the food options, and the lack of prepation space (along with an apparently hostile director) prevents any real expansion of the project. After the sandwiches are all packed up, we get driven with 3 security guards to one of the main train stations in moscow to hand them out, along with cups of tea… S, the woman from the IWC had spent a long time worrying about me and whether id be ok with this project and everyone kept warning me that it would be scary due to the fact that the crowd is so big, and most expat women seem to expect volunteering to be something along the lines of rocking cute orphan babies…S even told me that one japanese woman had shown up in a full Chanel suit and heels with an apron on under her coat and had been deeply cross that feeding the homeless ‘hadn’t been what she’d expected’…

Anyway, so it’s been really nice getting to know the women who work at this place and some of the reasons why they do it (also v. good practice for my russian since only one of them speaks a bit of english and the rest of them nothing)… Most of them seem to be fairly religous, and theres a lot of singing grace over the food before we leave, saying prayers in the bus on the way there for ourselves and the people, and generally hoping god will assist. This is all interesting to me in an abstract way, but i struggle to identify.. last week when i went, the director of the night shelter (who seems to be less than philanthropic in nature and much disliked by everyone else in the place) had felt unwell and had taken the driver of the minibus to drive him back to his house on the other side of moscow, meaning that we were stuck without a driver (who had already been paid for the driving he was supposed to do to the station) and several tons of sandwiches. lots of praying was done to find a solution to this and eventually a taxi was called and paid for with personal money and the rest of us took the metro.. Also new to me is the fact that a lot of the people staying at the night shelter are long term residents and that they are also volunteers in the project, helping make sandwiches and providing the security at the station..

Apparently since the economic crisis the problem of homelessness in moscow has dramatically increased… the woman running the project told me that before last autumn there were between 50 and 100 people waiting outside the station for food, now, the numbers are more like 300… The first week I went, there was also a german journalist doing interviews and taking photos for an article on the impact of the crisis. I’ve been told that most of the homeless people in moscow are those who have immigrated from other parts of russia without documents (you need a special invitation to work and live in moscow, regardless of whether you are russian or a foreigner, more crazy bureaucracy) and couldnt find work but are unable or unwilling to go home a failure and have become alcoholics instead… the vast majority of homeless people therefore are youngish/middle aged men who would be capable of work which seems like a ridiculous situation but one that the state doesnt seem willing to do anything about…

bad photo, but a bit of the queue outside Leningradsky Vokzal

The project im involved in only does this once a week, and only manages to give out a tiny amount of food compared to the thousands of homeless in moscow, and the speed at which everything gets given out means that theres very little opportunity to actually stop and talk to people and find out much about them, which is a big change from gatehouse where you could chat to people for ages sitting down in a warm room rather than standing at night in a cold square handing out food in a conveyer belt to a never ending queue of people.. mind you, trying to understand normal spoken russian is difficult for me at the best of times, understanding drunk people with no teeth has proved nigh on impossible so maybe im being overambitious in wanting to actually have conversations…

anywho, thats the news for now.