Winter is over. What’s next?

Early in the morning the kitchen of Kyiv’s Social Care House is already bustling with activity. Cooks are preparing food, making tea, and slicing bread. Meanwhile, warm clothing — felt boots and padded half-coats — are being brought in. The food is distributed among the three teams that feed street people. The Day ’s correspondents accompanied one of these teams.

WHAT PARTY ARE YOU FROM?

Social patrols appeared on Kyiv’s streets late last year. Every day three teams of social workers head for various parts of the city (there are 21 sites in total). The volunteers joke that they have already found regular customers. “Some of the homeless have learned our schedule and know what days and where we go,” says Mykola Pikovy, director of the Social Care House to which the patrol is attached, “and now they are chasing us everywhere.”

Our team was assigned to Taras Shevchenko Square, by far the most popular hangout for the homeless. As we pulled up to the curb, we took a small table and chairs from the car and laid on a big casserole of groats and an urn of tea. We also put out a garbage bag, so that the street sweepers would not have to pick up the disposable containers. We thought we had enough food for almost 200 homeless people. “It is more than enough,” said Lesia Freieva, a member of the team. “This is not the most crowded spot. There are far more ‘clients’ at the railway station and Pechersk.”

The ‘clients’ were not exactly enthusiastic: at first the volunteers had to make a bit of a sales pitch. Instead of beggars, pensioners and market salespeople were eager to get a free meal. This triggered a strong, usually negative, response from passersby. Some asked what political party we belonged to, and their questions didn’t sound too friendly.

But some people, especially pensioner Vira Khrystiuk, approved of the way the social patrol worked. To her it represents good support and an opportunity to save some money. “Don’t you know? Pensions are negligible, we are cash-strapped,” she says, “and now they’ve raised the rent. My World War II veteran mother and I get a pension of 850 hryvnias and pay 350 for housing and utilities. How on earth can you survive on that?”

Social workers offered a meal of groats, canned meat, poor man’s caviar (zucchini ratatouille), bread, and tea. The cost of a meal should not exceed two hryvnias: this is what the city authorities allot for feeding the destitute. “We have a standard menu,” Pikovy says, “consisting of groats, canned meat, and vitamin-rich ratatouille.”

Strange as it may sound, the meals are well-balanced and suitable for the homeless. For example, no cabbage salads are made, although the social patrol can afford to prepare these vegetable dishes. “What homeless person has teeth to chew them?” Pikovy asks.

Meanwhile, warm clothing is not handed out to everyone. The team leader asked almost everyone who approached for food if they had documents with a residence registration stamp. This question put many of the homeless on guard: what if they call the police to check up on them? But they were simply told that if a person lives in Kyiv but is not formally registered, i.e., homeless, he or she can claim a pair of warm felt boots and an anorak, in compliance with municipal recommendations.

“In general, very few homeless people have documents,” says Zoriana Maksudova, another social worker. “There are also people who try to cheat us and take clothes more than one time by saying that the first batch of clothing was for a friend.”

AN ELITE TRAMP

In a while more people began heading for our table, eventually forming a line. Then our regular customers arrived. Some of them form what social workers call an “elite” category of tramps. One of them is 32-year-old Stanislav Vladymyrsky: to all appearances he is an ordinary young man, clean-shaven and neatly dressed. But he lives in a basement.

“Actually, I am a Kyivite,” Stanislav says, “but my mother married an ethnic German and went to her husband’s native land. She sold her apartment, leaving my brother and me on the streets.” For the last ten years Stanislav has been sleeping wherever he can cadge a bed: at his friends’ homes or in front entrances of buildings.

“Why don’t you find a job?” I could not resist asking him. “Do you think it’s that simple? I have no residence registration, and nobody will offer me a decent job — at best, I can get one on a construction site, but they pay too little to rent some type of housing.”

So Stanislav and a few of his friends have to seek refuge in basements. The guys say they are not being turned out of there because they behave well and do not look like tramps. But the awful thing is that they do not know what to do and how to find a way out of their predicament.

Our team leader, Yurii Krasnykov, has been in Stanislav’s shoes. He is also a Kyiv resident. He recently sold his apartment and taking the advice of an “expert” broker, did not rush right out to buy a new one: he waited for prices to go down. But prices skyrocketed by 35 percent. “Now I don’t have any to buy an apartment, and I’ll be denied credit because I have no residence registration,” Yurii says.

Like many other homeless, at first he stayed with friends and then lived for a time at the Social Care House. There he was invited to join one of the social patrol teams. His salary is low, but at least he has a place to live. “You have to be homeless to know what homelessness is,” Pikovy says in praise of his “comrade-in-arms.”

Many of the members of the three social patrol teams work for purely altruistic reasons. For example, Maksudova is a volunteer and doesn’t earn anything for her work. She says she decided to help the destitute only because she wanted to do something good. “I don’t feel any disgust for the homeless,” she says. “I just get scared sometimes, because they tend to pick fights and they can infect you with a disease. Most of these people are sick in one way or another.”

TO FEED OR NOT TO FEED?

Pikovy agrees that in forming the social patrol, the city authorities did a really good thing. But in the heat of the moment they failed to take several factors into account. For example, unemployment is the most crucial element of the problem of homelessness. On the one hand, when we minister to the homeless, we encourage them to be idle. But, on the other, one should first create conditions for these people to be able to obtain employment. But employers demand documents and registration, while most beggars do not have either.

According to Pikovy, it is difficult to obtain documents. The internal passport desk is not exactly bursting to help the homeless. At the same time, street people are loath to make an appearance there because some of them have police records for minor infractions or crimes.

“Only about 60 percent of all homeless people want to work,” Pikovy says. The problem is there are no conditions in Ukraine today for rehabilitating such people. After living for a few months in institutions like Social Care House, the homeless usually return to the streets.

Pikovy believes that the vicious circle can only be broken by setting up a Social Care House-run business where homeless people could work. In addition to producing food for themselves, they would also be gainfully employed. Experience shows that many of them have a serious work ethic. Forty-five former Social Care House inmates are now employed.

Unfortunately, Pikovy’s ambitious projects are a pipe dream. “It is not as simple as it seems because to get the ball rolling, you have to get a bank loan, and it is quite difficult to find a vacant plot of land in Kyiv.”