7-H Lajos Gavro Street

Sometimes a short stroll or a casual purchase creates a history of sorts, which then becomes part of your life.

In my May 11 column I wrote about an exhibition-cum-fair that was held next to my house by the Iryda Social and Psychological Rehabilitation Center for functionally impaired children. It was just an ordinary sketch of city life: I visited a wonderful fair of toys and souvenirs made by children and bought Dmytro Kharlai’s splendid decal picture.

Two weeks later I received an e-mail that journalists dream about. (The Ukrainian original contained a lot of spelling and stylistic mistakes, but this is one case when errors and misprints are far more precious than glib, well-styled, and hypocritical panegyrics):

“Hello! I came across your article quite accidentally and was astonished. Emotions are bubbling over because I am the mother of this boy, Dmytro Kharlai. As I read the article, my eyes filled with tears. I am so glad that someone really liked my son’s work. At that center children try to make things with their own hands. Because of their physical impairments, they sometimes fail, but the very fact they are doing something is great. Dear Mr. Desiateryk, many thanks to you. The article that you bought is a trifle for you but it is a real fortune for us. I’ve printed out the article and I’m going to show it proudly to all my relatives because, for my child, this is a small but important victory in his difficult life. I am very grateful to you. Thank you very much.”

Afterwards I realized that I could not just sit down and write another article. So I went to the center.

Just a few hundred meters away from the Obolon subway station and the adjacent supermarkets, construction sites, and traffic circle, there is an altogether different reality. Lajos Gavro Street goes deep into what looks like the coziest nook in the neighborhood. As you approach Lake Opechen, the landscape seems even greener and quieter. The Iryda center (7-H, Lajos Gavro St.) is located in a run-of-the-mill Soviet-style kindergarten building almost on the lakeshore. Inside there is a big room in which several kids are sitting around a table, concentrating on fashioning mosaics out of beads. There are all kinds of pictures, appliquОs, toys, and bead compositions hanging on the walls and propped against them, as well as in cupboards. You instantly want to buy all these funny, cute, and eye-catching items.

Liudmyla Kviatkovska, the main caregiver specialist, who is in charge of social work with handicapped children, immediately fills me in.

“We’ve got an art studio here, and on the first floor we have renovated a hall where we conduct music-therapy games. Our kids are very hard-working. They are now doing mosaics out of tiny beads. They also do paper cutouts, and here the kids knead dough, which they then dye and varnish. (Ms. Kviatkovska shows me a dazzling human-shaped piece of relief work). We also make pictures out of melon, pumpkin, quince, and cranberry bush seeds. Every year we hold a festival called “Colors of Hope,” where we exhibit all these works and arrange local talent shows. We try to create beautiful things out of anything we can get our hands on: we pick up used thread, rope, and all kinds of other scraps and make pictures with them. This is what we do in our studio.”

“But you don’t confine yourselves to pictures, do you?”

“We have boys who love playing soccer, so they spend time out in the street. We also hold competitive games. Now the kids have come back from a movie theater. Coming up, we have an excursion to St. Sophia Cathedral. We write letters to everyone around here and, as a rule, our requests are not rejected. So we can take our children free of charge to the movies, theaters, exhibitions, and museums. They have already visited a lot of places. This year the district authorities have been subsidizing not only our kids’ meals, as they did last year, but also excursions. So we’ve planned three outings.”

“Where?”

“We can’t travel too far away, just to Feofaniya or Kytayeve. We walk across the ancient part of Kyiv so that the kids will know at least a little bit about the history of their city. We have visually-impaired kids, two of whom are totally blind. All they can enjoy is music, so our music classes are always very lively and cheerful. We accepted blind children this year for the first time because they are very inquisitive: they try to make up for their inability to see by means of other impressions. We even take them to the movies.”

“You do?”

“Before, I used to feel guilty: we know only too well that they can’t watch films. But you simply can’t imagine what effect this produces on the kids, when a seeing child sits next to a visually impaired child, recounting the plot, and the child pictures all this in his mind. They feel so happy after ‘watching’ a film like this! They say they enjoy it a lot, especially if it is a film with loads of humor.”

“And what else do you do, apart from therapy?”

“We have a lot of specialists here. Now that the district administration has given us more money, our rehabilitation center is implementing two programs. One is the city-sponsored Turbota (‘Care’) program (we have a remedial gymnastics specialist, a speech therapist, and a psychologist). The other new program provides for a skilled rehabilitation specialist to deal with the kids’ locomotor skills, as well as for a psychologist and a music teacher. So we offer very many services: although children never spend a whole day here, they can still see several specialists in the course of a few hours. Here you can see our rehabilitation room, which clearly needs renovating — we hold remedial gymnastics classes in here.”

We enter a room filled with odd objects, such as brightly painted pyramids, cubes, and balls that seem to be from a Lego game but are many times larger and made of soft rubber (as Ms. Kviatkovska explains, “all items should be big-sized, so that the kids can really feel them”). Rosy-cheeked Yaryk, his glasses flashing triumphantly, is rolling around on a huge letter C, which is twice as large as him. He doesn’t know what these wonderful things are called, but he definitely likes them. I can barely resist the temptation to join him. Next to this room with “Gulliverian toys” is an exercise hall with a small trampoline and special go-carts for children with cerebral palsy. Ms. Kviatkovska becomes lost in thought, remembering everything that has to be restructured and expanded. “We would love to be up to the mark and have children here all the time,” she says. I ask her what is standing in the way. Her answer clearly shows deep concern.

“Did you walk here from the subway station? Did you notice the distance? Not everyone can afford to take a shuttle minibus, so we are trying to solve the transportation problem with the district authorities. We’ve written them a letter, which they forwarded to the municipal authorities: the idea is to open a special circular route with new-generation low-floor buses that can handle wheelchairs. It is very difficult to solve the problem of specialized transport, you know. So far we are in no position to set up a full-fledged rehabilitation center because this should include busing children from Obolon here and then back home. If we solved the transportation problem, maybe we could solve a lot of other problems in one fell swoop because getting to this place is the main difficulty. We want to establish a center with all kinds of services, including physical rehabilitation, and there must be a doctor to supervise the rehabilitation process. When a child comes to us, s/he must not only receive qualified medical treatment but also enrich his/her personality.”

Halyna Kuzmivna joined our conversation to talk about what parents like her think of the center. Her daughter, who had serious problems with her health and has undergone several operations, is applying to university this year.

“Here children find a little island of joy, love, and understanding. And we, parents, are delighted with this center; we’re very glad. Unfortunately, our children find it difficult to mix with other teenagers: they don’t always understand them and never find as much compassion out there as they do here. Our children are not just very talented but also wonderful. They are sometimes even better than healthy kids who walk the streets and destroy their health. So we are eager to find people who would understand our golden kids, support this center, and help our wonderful instructors, who spend their office and out-of-office hours, their entire lifetime, for the benefit of our kids. Our heartiest thanks to them!”

More than 100 children, not only from Obolon, attend Iryda. There are tiny tots like Yaryk (Yaroslav) Kolosiuk, who are doing the Piznaiko preschool course, after which they can go on to attend a standard school and study with their peers. Ms. Kviatkovska adds emphatically:

“We are trying to get our children to mix with others. We are negotiating with School No. 168: it wants to organize mixed classes for handicapped and able-bodied children. We have met them halfway and given them the database; we’ll be very glad if they don’t back out. Naturally, this place is a home for our children, where they feel adequate among their kind, but our aim is for them to feel equally adequate among able-bodied children. We can only achieve this if we start work when the children are still pre-schoolers. It is important for a psychologist to work with healthy children and persuade them not to be afraid of our pupils and to treat them as peers, because there is a popular prejudice that invalids are horrible and should be given a wide berth. So you have to start with first-graders, otherwise it will be too late to take our children to ‘normal’ classes — I am afraid that it is not so much the children as their parents who will take a dim view of the handicapped.” The oldest pupils, a group of intellectually handicapped adults, mostly live nearby and have no other place to go to but Iryda, where they feel completely at home. Although they are 26-27 years old now, the center is sure they will continue coming here. They know that as long as this house still stands at the lakeshore, there they will find at least some love and care — and they highly appreciate this. Little wonder, for the center is always organizing something: themed festivals, cultural outings, concerts, regular “Home Fires” events at the House of the Artist, as well as charitable fundraisers similar to the one that was held near the Minska subway station, about which I reported in the May 11 issue. Iryda is trying to attract the attention of our society, which is still distancing itself from the problems of the handicapped.

This gulf between the healthy and the handicapped is all too obvious today, when no actions are being taken. The center lacks the basics: transportation (many more wheelchair-bound children could be rehabilitated if it were available), a video player, television, and stereo music system. The latter is indispensable for attracting volunteers. Ms. Kviatkovska herself began as a volunteer (her daughter also has a minor disability), so she knows what she’s talking about. It is a universal practice to get young healthy people, especially senior school pupils and college students, involved in volunteer service. This rewarding but difficult work is carried out in the form of games, special interest clubs, with discotheques, traveling workshops, etc. But the center is severely cash-strapped and therefore cannot set up a system of volunteer work. In the past, a young volunteer could at least get a letter of recommendation that came in handy when s/he was applying to universities, but this is no longer done. In fact, even the center’s program executives work on a wing and a prayer: they perform low-paid, part-time jobs without vacations but with boundless enthusiasm, uplifted by an eternal and indestructible stimulus for all decent people in this ungrateful country.

While we were talking, the studio room filled up with noisy, carefree children of all ages: a serious and very beautiful girl in a wheelchair, some panting boys with a ball, the ubiquitous Yaryk — a wonderful tribe from the house by the lake.

The powers that be, all you healthy and successful adults: help them! Help renovate the center, arrange convenient transportation, buy a television and a video player, and organize some volunteers and specialists, so that not just these children will feel good, but every one of us.