vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #549 / Social life / Reading article...

When walking to my office today I met an elderly woman in the street dressed only in a sweater on a minus 12 Celsius day, she was collecting food leftovers from the garbage. I stopped to give her some cash I had with me though she did not beg for it. When I opened my computer later in the day I discovered that social organizations worldwide consider December 19 as the International Day of Helping the Poor.

Vladivostok, a port city in the Far East of Russia which officially accommodates some 650,000 residents and tends to reach one million if we consider students, migrants and temporary workers, has not allotted a single apartment to shelter the homeless.

Nether the state government nor Primorye's authorities and Vladivostok's city officials care for those in trouble. Pushed to the streets by either unbearable family relations or real estate fraud the homeless children or elderly people, the two most vulnerable groups in Russia, have to survive on their own in the cold and in the dark starving for aid from those who enjoy comfortable and protected lives.

Russia has many problems and I think that homelessness is one of the most unforgiving. The country can not be considered civilized if it does not care for its citizens. Children should be cared for and the elderly should be sure they would not die hungry in the streets.

Homeless people in Russia fall into two categories - those who have lost everything including their homes in the pursuit of alcohol and those who had been deceived either by the state or by property dealers when the country was fighting its way through economic crises after the collapse.

The first category consists of the bums who can be easily found even in the central streets of Vladivostok asking for donations during the day and drinking them off in the evening. Another category includes the elderly women and men who had lost their flats in the process of privatization. Some of them were simply forced out of their flats either by unlawful privatization or by fraud. Some signed the give-away documents under threat of death from criminals engaged in apartment deals. For example: the cost of a one room apartment in Vladivostok varies from $40,000 to $75,000. Pensioners residing alone with no relatives to care for them in their flats are an easy target for criminals.

The question is though not how one becomes homeless and unprotected but how the government deals with such people. It does not.

In Vladivostok the homeless children are sometimes taken by police to the rehabilitation center Parus Nadezhdy (The Sail of Hope) but one center is unable to feed and shelter all desperate children.

What about those elderly women and men seeking for food in garbage containers? Police do not care for them unless they commit a crime, or become victims of angry youngsters in the streets. Sometimes they are taken to hospitals where doctors wash and feed them but soon they have to leave since hospitals are not designed for keeping the homeless.

One of the surgeons in the city's hospital once shared, "People from the streets are brought to us frostbitten and festered and we do complicated surgeries to cure them …just to send them back to the street in a few days."

I hope that one day Vladivostok will become a civilized city by setting up specialized centers where the homeless and the poor could receive help and where everyone could bring donations or volunteer services regardless of the day - whether it has been deemed a day to help or not. Any day seemed appropriate for the woman I met today.