A Visit to a
OrphanED AND NEGLECTED CHILDREN
Last
Thursday, May 8, I gave a seminar on teaching American holidays to a group of
schoolteachers who were attending a two-week training course for teacher
recertification. One teacher from that group, Halina, asked me if I would come
to her school to speak with the students.
These weren’t just any students, though. These students were orphans or children
who come from “bad homes” and whose relatives can’t or won’t care for
them. She wanted them to meet an
American and have a chance to practice their English in order to motivate them
to study English. I told her it was an
honor for me as well, since I had a certain image in my head of what Ukrainian
orphanages look like (thank you “48 Hours” and my former co-worker who adopted
a Russian child) and I wanted to know if my image matched the reality. Of course I also felt a sense of sympathy,
and wanted to do something charitable for them. But I was conscious of the fact that if I really wanted to help
them, I had to treat them like regular school children and not like charity
cases or children who needed their self-esteem raised.
First Impression of
the Village and the School
Halina had
insisted on coming to Khmelnytsky at
Anyway,
together we made our way to the
As we
walked, Halina told me about the school.
It used to be a military base but was converted into a school. She talked a lot about the school’s apple
garden (her word for orchard) and about the agricultural work the students do at
the school. She also expressed concern
that the students would be afraid to speak to me. I felt confident that I could draw them out, though.
Soon we
arrived at the school grounds. I saw
two playgrounds and flower beds that were planted and tended by the
students. I saw a brick building which
was the building for “senior and middle-aged” (senior high and middle school)
students. When we walked inside, I
noticed that compared with other Ukrainian schools I’ve seen, it looked pretty
normal. The floor was wooden and painted a rusty color. The walls had colorful
posters and murals of Ukrainian costumes, people, and landscapes. We went into the English language
classroom. Halina had made some posters
about
Halina said
the students were at lunch, the second of four meals they get each day: Breakfast is served at 8, lunch at 11,
dinner at 2, and supper at 7 or 8 in the evening. Halina and I stayed in the classroom for a while. As we chatted, the students started to come
into the school from lunch. A few of
the younger students stared from a distance outside the classroom door. One girl came in and said “hello” in
Russian. I said “hello” in English, and she was dumbfounded. Actually, I want to say she was stricken
with dumbfoundedness to emphasize how the shock seemed to immobilize her.
Other
students came into the room and at Halina’s insistence they asked me my name
and introduced themselves. The
conversation didn’t progress beyond that.
Another student came into the room and brought me two frosted soft cookies.
I thought that was very kind. When the first lesson began, a student
brought me a flower which turned out to be lily of the valley. It had beautiful white flowers and a scent
good enough to be perfume.
The Lessons
The first
students I had a lesson with were in the 5th and 6th
forms (grades). I asked them their
names, and then asked them to ask me questions about families and housing. They were very shy at first. And it was difficult for them to understand
me. Halina and Igor (a 3rd
year student at the pedagogical university in Vinnitsia who was home for the
weekend) had to translate a lot of what I said, and tell them how to say their
questions in English.
Eventually
one student asked if I had a family. (Many
students at the school have never had a family). I said I did. They asked
the names of the people in my family.
One student, Maxim, only knew how to ask one’s age, so he asked how old
every person in my family was. Halina
laughed but I thought it was great that he was so active. When the students ran out of questions
(which happened quickly), I asked them to tell me what was in their room, and
what they see when they look out of the window of their room. Since that involves giving only a one-word
answer, the students were eager to speak, and anxiously raised their hands to
answer the question. Their rooms seemed
normal—a TV, a desk, a chair, a bed, some pictures, boxes of toys, a wardrobe. The main difference is that they have
anywhere from 1-6 beds in a room, and occasionally they see foxes outside their
window because they are near the forest.
I ended by
teaching them the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, which turned out to be
harder than I thought for the students.
“Up above the world so high” is a particularly difficult line to
say. But by the end they could sing it
pretty well.
With the
“middle group” (7-8 graders), I was supposed to talk about the working day
(daily routine) and sport (sports).
When they didn’t ask questions, I asked them what sports they like to
play, and I asked them about their school schedule. Then I taught them the “Hokey Pokey”. The students had a hard time with that song at first, but
eventually they got the hang of it.
Igor thought it was a good technique for teaching children, and he made
some notes.
The final
group was the senior students. Some of
the students in the group had attended the previous lesson because they wanted
a double chance to hear me speak. One
was getting ready to enter
Lunch and School Tour
After the
third class of the day, Halina took me with the vice-headmaster and the
headmaster’s wife (the headmaster was out of town) to the dining hall for
lunch. We didn’t sit with the students, but sat in a private room. I noticed
the bathroom next to the private room had a sit-down toilet, but I’m not sure
it worked because Halina took me down the hall to the kitchen to wash my
hands. I’m not sure if it was in my honor
or not, but they offered me a fresh bar of soap.
Lunch
consisted of shredded cabbage salad, fried potatoes, smoked fish, meat with
pasta (which was actually pretty good) and the obligatory wine (a
After
lunch, Halina and the headmaster’s wife took me on a tour of the school
grounds. We saw the children’s dining
room, which looked like a typical Ukrainian cafeteria. They pointed out the workshop where students
do woodworking and other crafts. We saw
a group of students walking up the hill and Halina said they were coming from
the bathroom. Thinking of the word in
the American sense and having seen the outhouses at the school in Kazatin, I
thought she was referring to outhouses.
This was not the case, however. The
students were coming from the room where they take their bath and change
clothes. Each child gets a bath and fresh clothes once a week, either on Thursday,
Friday, or Saturday. Suddenly the
school was fitting my “48 Hours” image.
It didn’t help that some of the children were wearing cutoff jeans, clothes
with holes in them, and totally mismatched outfits (a striped shirt with a
printed skirt, for example). Some of
the clothes looked pretty dirty.
The images
got worse when we went into the building where the younger grades study. We went into the classroom of one group of
7-8 year old students where an American had recently come and adopted a
child. Some of them were so tiny they
looked like they were 4 or 5 years old.
One student stared at me with eyes so blank I couldn’t bear it. I found myself wondering, were they
wondering if I was studying them and looking for someone to take home? How many times had these children seen
potential parents come into the classroom?
How many times had they not been chosen to go to a family? How do they deal with that psychologically
at such a tender age?
We got out
of there and started walking towards the dormitories. It turned out the TV and desks are in a common room shared by
several children. The bedrooms looked fairly normal by Ukrainian standards—same
wooden cabinets and rug-like bedspreads.
The difference was that the beds were packed in along the sides of the
walls. The room I saw had 7 little beds in it back-to-back around three sides
of the room. There was still room on
the floor for a kid to play with Matchbox miniature cars though. I didn’t see it, but Halina said that the
senior students have sinks in their room to wash out their clothes and things.
We went
back outside and across the street to the medicine room (infirmary). Again, by
Ukrainian standards the nurse’s office looked pretty decent. The rooms and beds looked better than the
hospital I had seen in Kharkiv last year.
We
continued making the rounds of the grounds and I saw children playing with toys
and balls, and a group playing a game of soccer. I saw kids climbing up poles
like monkeys, just as my friends and I had done in childhood.
Wind-up
Halina and
I walked back to the first school building.
We saw the school library. We
saw the electronics room, which was a room with several computers, two Lexmark
computers, a TV and VCR, and a set of historical electronics equipment. As Halina pointed out, it’s not as nice as
electronics rooms in fancy schools in big cities, but for a village school it
was pretty good. Halina said it is her
dream to set up a language lab with tapes and headphones for the students.
We went
downstairs and had coffee and soft cookies.
I said I liked them a lot, so Halina bagged them up for me. I said I didn’t want to take cookies out of
the children’s mouths, but she insisted.
The room we had coffee in had woodwork by the children. The detail and quality were near to that of
artisans I have seen in
Post-Visit Impressions
On the
train ride back, Helina again accompanied me. Her brother lives in Khmelnytsky,
so she planned to spend the night and do some shopping at the bazaar in the
morning. She asked me what my
impressions were of the school. Usually
when I’m asked such questions by Ukrainians, I emphasize the positives about my
experience and hide the negatives that I usually report to other Americans on
the phone or through my Web site. But I felt like I had found a confidant in
Helina, someone I could easily chat with. And I wanted to make sure I got the
story right about the school.
There was
one girl in the second group who seemed unusually short and skinny. I got the sense that she had been
undernourished and would never catch up. But the school gave the children four
meals a day. So I thought the lack of
nourishment must have come from the orphanage for children under 5, the type of
place I had seen on “48 Hours”. I asked
Helina about her. Helina emphasized
that the undernourishment came from her original home. The girl, along with her brothers and
sisters, had been locked in a room for 3-4 days at a time by her mother with no
food or water. I can’t even believe she
survived that. And I can’t believe any human being would do that to any child,
let alone their own flesh and blood. It’s sheer madness.
Helina told
me about another child who had been brought to the school recently and was
staying in the infirmary. His mother
had died a few months before, and his father was an alcoholic. The militia (police) came and took the child
from the home. I asked how the militia
knew to pick up the child; does somebody report behavior to the police (like we
do in the States?). She said simply
that these children come from small towns where everybody knows everybody’s
business, so everybody knows all the “bad families”.
Eventually,
I worked up the nerve to ask about bathing.
To me (as I am sure it does to most people in developed countries),
giving children a bath and clean clothes only once a week seems wrong. I asked Helina, how often do regular
families in a village take a bath? She
said in the summer they go to the lake and in the winter it depends on the hot water
situation. But generally people take a
bath once, twice or “even” three times a week.
When the children who had parents were living at home, though, they got
a bath far less, perhaps only once a month. By comparison, once a week seems pretty
good.
All things
considered, most of the children looked pretty happy. They were exceptionally polite and well-behaved in the
classroom. The teachers and
administrators seem to care a great deal about them. Halina says when she reads
the backgrounds on the children, she breaks down and cries. With so many trees and birds and bushes and
the rolling green hills in the distance, I felt a tremendous sense of peace at
the school. It seems like a safe place
to recover from the horrors they have faced in their life.
If you are interested in donating toys, or
clothes in good condition (preferably that match) for school-age children (ages
5-17), you can send them to:
Tarchinska Halina
Derazhnya District
Khmelnytsky Region 32223
I encourage you to include a letter about your
life; it might be interesting for the children. If you are a teacher, you might consider asking your students to
write letters as a class project.
If you have a church, non-profit, or other
organization that is interested in starting a fund or a collection of materials
for a language lab, please email me at bridgetelf@yahoo.com.