Stas Kuznetsov

Here's the story about Stas by Georgia Williams

I met Stas almost three years ago, when I first visited Belskoye-Ustye psycho-neurological orphanage. Stas was a wild 15-year-old who used more swear words than normal vocabulary in his average sentence. Dressed in stinking clothes in which he had obviously urinated multiple times, he was suspicious of me and everyone around him. (But who could blame him - he was a chronic bed-wetter - brought on by nervousness that often develops in children deprived of love and treated like animals. The orphanage didn't have indoor plumbing - these were his only clothes, and what was he to do if the children were only allowed a bath once a week - on Tuesdays?)

That was three years ago. I was back in Belskoye-Ustye again this past summer. ROOF's educational programs had been running there for just over a year and I was there for our third developmental summer camp, to which a group of hard-working teachers and volunteers from around the world migrate annually, in July. Stas saw me coming. He met me on the road and asked for a private meeting. Very organized, I thought!! Is this the boy I remember?

Politely, and with arguments as well structured as most legal arguments I've heard, Stas explained to me that he turns 18 on 12 Feb 2003. He is scared. He knows that if he is transferred to the "closed" adult mental institution at that time, his life is over. He's begging for our help.

His approach is simply this: How can he impress upon the ROOF staff that they need to choose him to participate in ROOF's "social hotel" program? He knows that short of a miracle, we won't be able to accommodate all twelve of the students that are due to "graduate" from the orphanage this year. The best I could do was to tell Stas to make sure that he didn't ever use foul language (an area in which he has greatly improved) and to dress in clean clothes - always.

I saw Stas every day over the next two weeks. He never smelled. But we still don't have the funding to open another "social hotel" program and pay the staff that could save Stas and his friends. The "social hotel" program already in existence is in a three-room apartment which is already filled to capacity.

Read next report by Sergey Moychuk

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