Will Englund and Kathy Lally
By Will Englund and Kathy Lally
A country doctor, a tiny, dilapidated village hospital, an indifferent health bureaucracy — and now, coming to the rescue, volunteers from distant Moscow, bringing furniture, equipment, money and, maybe most important, good cheer.
In the background, though, is the parliament — weighing a law to bring any volunteer activity under the purview of the state, on the theory that people who organise themselves to do good work are a threat to the state’s power.
The past year or so has seen an upwelling of a trend unprecedented in Russia — people getting together on their own to help others in need. Personal initiative, always suspect here, is suddenly taking off. Drivers deliver medicine to shut-ins. Women cook meals for hospitals. Volunteers use rubles and hammers to renovate shelters for battered women, teenage orphans and abandoned pets.
And here in Itomlya, a decaying farm village a five-hour drive west of Moscow, a group of young men led by Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a former news photographer, is trying to help save a 15-bed hospital.
“If I can help, it will show people they can help, too — that it’s time to stop sitting around and doing nothing,” he said. “I put my little brick in the wall.”
The rapid emergence of volunteer efforts, fuelled in large part by social media, coincides with the eruption of public political protest — and that’s not by happenstance. There is an overlap between the political opposition and those who have become fed up with a corrupt government that delivers little and who have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Legislation to regulate volunteers has been introduced in the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Backers say it will ensure that volunteer activity conforms to the government’s priorities and doesn’t conflict with Kremlin policy.
Officials aren’t the only ones hostile to volunteerism. Russia’s Soviet past, when the government controlled all aspects of life, has left it with a population accustomed to the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and suspicious of volunteer organisations. A 2012 poll found that more than half the population disapproves of them, said Boris Dubin, a sociologist with the Levada Centre in Moscow.
The legislation reflects “an absolute lack of understanding of the whole nature of the social phenomenon,” said Yevgeny Grekov, who helps run a drivers’ group called Volunteers on Wheels. It’s a Facebook community where people with needs and drivers who want to help can find each other.
“They want volunteers to be walking in columns and support the authorities,” Grekov said. “But programs such as ours have no lists. If you want to help, well, help.”
The drivers help all kinds of people. Say a group has gathered toys and equipment for an orphanage but has no transportation. Volunteers deliver the items.
Periodically, someone will drive a doctor to Kaluga, three hours south of Moscow, to see a patient who requires a specialist’s attention. A babushka has to come to Moscow for surgery: They’ll pick her up at the airport or train station. Actors need scenery transported for a charity performance.
“This is our theory of small deeds,” Grekov said. “I’m really in love with this project. It’s pure human energy.”
A volunteer group called Tugeza, which is an approximation in Russian of the English word “together,” has grown in two years to include 3,000 members on Facebook. Oksana Prikhodko first got involved in volunteer work with cystic fibrosis patients, because her daughter has the disease. She found she liked helping people so much that she has moved on to other causes.
She has worked on a support group for a teenage shelter in Pskov, nearly 500 miles from Moscow. And, most Friday evenings, she gets together with a dozen or so other women and cooks hearty meals for a children’s hospital, which Volunteers on Wheels deliver.
“We’re people who love cooking,” she said. “We want to do this. So we do — together.”
There’s a tension, though, that won’t go away. “Why should we do the state’s job for it?” Prikhodko asked. “On the other hand, why should our children suffer? It’s a constant debate, and we’re always on the edge.”
Aleshkovsky, the former news photographer, heard about the hospital in Itomlya from friends of friends. The Health Ministry plans to downgrade it to a recovery centre, where no treatment could be offered. The hospital serves a district of 112 villages, or about 3,000 residents. The next-nearest hospital is 30 miles away, in the city of Rzhev. A bus goes there — on Saturdays and Sundays.
Sergei Vishnyakov, 55, has been the sole doctor in Itomlya since 1981, when he was assigned there fresh out of medical school. Although the hospital has an annual budget of about $25,000, which includes his salary, Vishnyakov has come to love his work. He knows all the families in Itomlya and supplements his pay with home-grown potatoes, pickles and about 20 chickens.
The hospital was set up in Soviet times to serve the huge collective farm that included Itomlya and the surrounding district. Workers grew flax here, but the farm has closed, the fields now full of saplings. Most of the men who haven’t taken up illegal logging have drifted to Moscow in search of work.
wp-bloomberg
By Will Englund and Kathy Lally
A country doctor, a tiny, dilapidated village hospital, an indifferent health bureaucracy — and now, coming to the rescue, volunteers from distant Moscow, bringing furniture, equipment, money and, maybe most important, good cheer.
In the background, though, is the parliament — weighing a law to bring any volunteer activity under the purview of the state, on the theory that people who organise themselves to do good work are a threat to the state’s power.
The past year or so has seen an upwelling of a trend unprecedented in Russia — people getting together on their own to help others in need. Personal initiative, always suspect here, is suddenly taking off. Drivers deliver medicine to shut-ins. Women cook meals for hospitals. Volunteers use rubles and hammers to renovate shelters for battered women, teenage orphans and abandoned pets.
And here in Itomlya, a decaying farm village a five-hour drive west of Moscow, a group of young men led by Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a former news photographer, is trying to help save a 15-bed hospital.
“If I can help, it will show people they can help, too — that it’s time to stop sitting around and doing nothing,” he said. “I put my little brick in the wall.”
The rapid emergence of volunteer efforts, fuelled in large part by social media, coincides with the eruption of public political protest — and that’s not by happenstance. There is an overlap between the political opposition and those who have become fed up with a corrupt government that delivers little and who have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Legislation to regulate volunteers has been introduced in the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Backers say it will ensure that volunteer activity conforms to the government’s priorities and doesn’t conflict with Kremlin policy.
Officials aren’t the only ones hostile to volunteerism. Russia’s Soviet past, when the government controlled all aspects of life, has left it with a population accustomed to the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and suspicious of volunteer organisations. A 2012 poll found that more than half the population disapproves of them, said Boris Dubin, a sociologist with the Levada Centre in Moscow.
The legislation reflects “an absolute lack of understanding of the whole nature of the social phenomenon,” said Yevgeny Grekov, who helps run a drivers’ group called Volunteers on Wheels. It’s a Facebook community where people with needs and drivers who want to help can find each other.
“They want volunteers to be walking in columns and support the authorities,” Grekov said. “But programs such as ours have no lists. If you want to help, well, help.”
The drivers help all kinds of people. Say a group has gathered toys and equipment for an orphanage but has no transportation. Volunteers deliver the items.
Periodically, someone will drive a doctor to Kaluga, three hours south of Moscow, to see a patient who requires a specialist’s attention. A babushka has to come to Moscow for surgery: They’ll pick her up at the airport or train station. Actors need scenery transported for a charity performance.
“This is our theory of small deeds,” Grekov said. “I’m really in love with this project. It’s pure human energy.”
A volunteer group called Tugeza, which is an approximation in Russian of the English word “together,” has grown in two years to include 3,000 members on Facebook. Oksana Prikhodko first got involved in volunteer work with cystic fibrosis patients, because her daughter has the disease. She found she liked helping people so much that she has moved on to other causes.
She has worked on a support group for a teenage shelter in Pskov, nearly 500 miles from Moscow. And, most Friday evenings, she gets together with a dozen or so other women and cooks hearty meals for a children’s hospital, which Volunteers on Wheels deliver.
“We’re people who love cooking,” she said. “We want to do this. So we do — together.”
There’s a tension, though, that won’t go away. “Why should we do the state’s job for it?” Prikhodko asked. “On the other hand, why should our children suffer? It’s a constant debate, and we’re always on the edge.”
Aleshkovsky, the former news photographer, heard about the hospital in Itomlya from friends of friends. The Health Ministry plans to downgrade it to a recovery centre, where no treatment could be offered. The hospital serves a district of 112 villages, or about 3,000 residents. The next-nearest hospital is 30 miles away, in the city of Rzhev. A bus goes there — on Saturdays and Sundays.
Sergei Vishnyakov, 55, has been the sole doctor in Itomlya since 1981, when he was assigned there fresh out of medical school. Although the hospital has an annual budget of about $25,000, which includes his salary, Vishnyakov has come to love his work. He knows all the families in Itomlya and supplements his pay with home-grown potatoes, pickles and about 20 chickens.
The hospital was set up in Soviet times to serve the huge collective farm that included Itomlya and the surrounding district. Workers grew flax here, but the farm has closed, the fields now full of saplings. Most of the men who haven’t taken up illegal logging have drifted to Moscow in search of work.
wp-bloomberg
