Working at Dom Miloserdia

I feel really grateful for the experience to help out at Dom Miloserdia, the "institutionalized foster care" for children who have been taken away from their families due to alcoholism or other bad situations. There are about 50 girls and boys that live there, ranging from age three to age eighteen.

Usually I help the kids with their homework, which I feel odd doing because it is all in Russian and the little nine year olds know Russian better than I do. Sometimes I help the older kids with their English homework.

Two weeks ago, right as soon as I arrived, one of the little girls, Marina, came right up to me and immediately announced that Yulia, this little 7 year old girl that latched on to me especially and wouldn't let me leave and always begged me to come back the next day, "went to the ORPHANAGE because her mom didn't want her any more."

Then Marina started to really latch on to me that day. Also, Marina definitely looks like she could be an Israel. She has the Israel dirty-brown hair, is small for her age, and has brown eyes. I also always thought that Marina seemed to be more mentally stable than the other children, some of whom are clearly psychologically disturbed, but Marina never seemed that way. But one day she pulled up her sleeves and I saw scars that could only be scars of abuse on her arms and I was really sad, because she seems psychologically normal, and looks like she could be my sister! I will have to take pictures of all of the kids and bring them in sometime.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the children who come to Dom Miloserdia in the first place end up in the orphanage, but all of the children are convinced that any day now they are going to get to go back home to their moms. And their parents are allowed to visit once a week, but most of the time the parents don't show up but the children nevertheless wait and wait around for them and then make excuses for their parents.

Last summer I babysat for these three little girls in Irving, and one of their favorite games was playing doctor, and by far the favorite game for the kids at Dom Miloserdia is playing doctor. Well, actually, there are so many of them that they play "hospital." And when you are playing "hostpital," each one of the patients needs a mother to pat their heads and help them recover. And of course there are the doctors, and they usually just go around giving lots of shots and telling their patients how long they have to live. I, naturally, get asked to be the "mother" to the little kids, but every so often I am the doctor and have to perform surgeries. What is also interesting is that the play set of medical instruments is exactly the same set that I played with with the girls in Irving!

Unfortunately, only three students on our program have been interested in volunteering there, which I think is a real shame, because not is it an excellent opportunity to serve, but the children get so excited and feel important that Americans are visiting them, and I get more language practice spending 30 minutes with them than in my 90 minute lectures at St. Petersburg State University. But, the three of us are putting together a "toys for tots" program for the kids there. We are trying to involve all of the foreign students studying at St. Petersburg State University.