The man overboard: how do people in the capital help people in difficult situations?
Being homeless is a difficult ordeal for a person. Once upon a time, the homeless were socially branded "homeless", but today they are helped by both society and the state. The E.P. Glinka Center for Social Adaptation in Moscow annually helps hundreds of such people to return to normal life. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
You have to ask for help yourself.
An employee of the reception of the E.P. Glinka Center for Social Adaptation looks through the glass at a young black-haired man on crutches sitting on a bench. "You say you came from Orenburg, you have a common-law wife there, and they promised to give you a prosthesis at the Burdenko hospital, but they haven't done it yet, so you came to Belorussky and waited there. Is everything right? May I have your documents? How are you feeling?" — she says to the interlocutor. He holds out a neat new Russian passport, from which it follows that his name is Andrey Panichev, he has no children, he is 33 years old, he was born and registered in Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Whether this man had contacted the Center before, whether he had told the truth about Orenburg and his pregnant common—law wife who had been left there, what exactly had been promised to him at the Burdenko hospital and why his right leg ended in a knee - all this will have to be clarified by the staff of the Glinka center in the near future. At the same time, their colleagues will help the new guy to wash, give him clean clothes, take him to a psychologist, show him to doctors, feed him and provide a sleeping place. This is how, according to the rules, urgent assistance is provided to all those in need who have remained in Moscow without housing, work, or any external support. However, a homeless person should ask for help himself by coming here to the Center in Lyublino on Ilovaiskaya Street or to the Dmitrovskoye branch on Izhorskaya, or by asking for an escort from the staff of the Social Patrol mobile brigades department, who brought the homeless Panichev here today.
In the accompanying documents, homeless people like him are called "recipients of social services," and they can come here to eat and wash, spend the night, talk to a psychologist, receive serious medical care, assistance in restoring documents, or even help finding work and housing. For this purpose, the reception department of the center and the Dmitrov branch work around the clock.
The number of homeless people at the Glinka Center strongly depends on seasonality: in late autumn and winter there are many more of them than in summer, as the center's staff has seen many times over the 28 years of its operation. "However, there is no seasonality this year: the contingent has leveled off. About the same number of people passed through us both in winter and summer," says Gulnora Rastegayeva, head of the center's reception department, showing us the reception room, the shower room and the overnight room.
It seems that God himself ordered us to make a place for homeless people here in Lyublino, next to the Pererva station. Once upon a time there was a simple flophouse on the site of the center on Ilovaiskaya, there was a foul-smelling queue for food and clothes. Now, in addition to the rooms on Ilovaiskaya, where there are 306 beds for overnight stays, there are also 94 beds in the Dmitrovskoye department on Izhorskaya, and 500 more places for temporary accommodation on Ilovaiskaya Street, in Yasenevo and Vostryakovo.
The main three buildings of the center are located in Lublin. As soon as you enter the territory, you will immediately see an urgent social primary care center, where homeless people can simply warm up and eat with the onset of cold weather. Those who wish to receive more substantive assistance go to the emergency department, wash up, talk to a social worker, get clean clothes and just get some sleep. They usually gather here at eight in the evening and stay until seven in the morning. There is a special room for them on the ground floor of the building. There is also a hospital where those who have nowhere to go actually live, and they are waiting for different things: the restoration of documents, courts, housing rights, etc. and just the coming of day. Each of the people we met got here in their own way, and almost all of them were accompanied by a social patrol officer.
We'll get you there.
The social patrol works around the clock, its employees work on a shift schedule, three days a day. Usually, their shift begins with an eight-hour morning meeting in the administrative building of the center on Taganrogskaya St. in Lyublino, where he learns his patrol route from the head of the unit. A shift usually employs six to seven teams of 10-13 people. Usually, these specialists patrol all Moscow train stations, and they often go to places where homeless people congregate upon a call from the townspeople themselves, who do not want such a neighborhood and call the Center's control room or 112 with a request to remove them, after which this place is entered into a special list and a patrol is sent there. The patrol route is always different and employees are not assigned where the shift supervisor will send them, they do not know the day before. "We can explore one area from a week to a month. The same territory may be included in the patrol route several times, depending on the presence of volunteers, abandoned buildings, and heating mains. When there are fewer people in this contingent, we temporarily do not go there," says patrol officer Alexander Abramkin.
He visits his current facility, the Belorussky railway Station and platforms, in two hours and communicates with the homeless people he finds. According to the instructions, he has no right to force them to follow him to Ilovaiskaya Street or take their personal data. If necessary, they can call an ambulance, offer to accompany them, or offer assistance. The work of Abramkin and his colleagues is monotonous and painstaking, involving people and documents. An unbalanced and inattentive person will not last long here. Abramkin served in the army, worked as a programmer, but, as he says, missed communicating with people, he came to work at the center eight years ago. Communicating with him inspires trust, he is exactly in his place.
He and his colleagues identify homeless people in different ways, often they come out to them themselves, or they are already in their homes, for example, in the station waiting room on the second floor. They are determined even before the meeting by the specific smell of unwashed bodies, dirty clothes, alcohol and cigarettes. Olfaction leads Alexander Abramkin up the steps to the second floor of the station waiting room — and here you are. Two men and two women are sleeping opposite each other in six chairs by the window. After a few minutes of communication, it is possible to find out that they are in perfect order, their difficulties are temporary, they will not go to Ilovaiskaya yet. "You can wash there, tidy yourself up, get medical help and eat," Abramkin says in a calm voice to a middle—aged woman with matted hair in dark pants and a T-shirt. "Yes, it doesn't hurt to wash up," she says. The smell of alcohol hangs in the air, and the specialist shakes his head. No, this lady is not going anywhere, because one of the rules of the Social Adaptation Center is not to bring drunks, there is another special service for them. The lady can come to the center with another team, but not before she gets sober.
The police do not escort homeless people out of the train halls if they do not violate the order. That is why it is so common to find a person sleeping in a prominent place in public places. Sometimes there are very strange characters among them, least of all like homeless people. They have one thing in common — at first they proudly reject any help from the staff of the center, some ignore any questions. A blonde woman in black clothes sleeps on five trunks at once, on the steps of the Belorussky railway station, who does not immediately wake up from a pat on the shoulder. When she learns that "people who follow homeless people" have approached her, she closes in on herself, folds her arms over her chest and looks into the distance with blue eyes. The blonde did not tell Abramkin who she was, where she came from, or why she was sleeping on the stairs. She froze like a stone statue with an unkind expression on her face. The pigeon sits on the step, takes a couple of steps on lame paws, the woman looks at him and smiles for a second. Then he freezes again, making it clear that the audience is over.
Like hell, a very young Asian guy pops out of a snuffbox and after a couple of seconds starts begging for "at least 100 rubles to get to Noginsk," where, according to him, his mother is waiting for him. "Come with us to Lublin, take a shower, change clothes, eat, they'll buy you a ticket to your Noginsk," Abramkin calmly tells the guy. He babbles something about the urgency of the trip, that the train to Noginsk is about to leave, but he's still here, and that he's only been on the street for one night. However, torn, smelly clothes and worn cheap sneakers, shifty eyes and general nervous mobility suggest a long stay in unsafe conditions.
Homeless people are masters of telling stories about themselves, they are able to create whole legends about themselves, and the center's specialists are authorized to check information about them in several databases to find out if a homeless person is listed as deceased and is hiding from criminal liability. A person who applies to the center once is recorded in the accounting information system. They take pictures of him and check his personal documents, if any. Add additional comments. If the person comes back, they will be identified in a couple of minutes.
"More than once, a couple of years later, homeless people came to us, they called us a different name, but we quickly identified them from our database. You can't fool us. No, we still provide assistance to these people, we just have all the data in order and many are surprised when they find out that we know the first name, last name, and date of the first visit," says Gulnora Rastegayeva, head of the reception department.
Anyone can become homeless
People become homeless in different ways. The answer to this question can be formulated as follows: how many people from this category have passed through the center, so many paths lead to this way of life. "If ten years ago tramps who love to just walk around the country prevailed, now our main visitors are citizens who lost their apartment due to various circumstances and lost their foothold with it. Cheating on housing has become more common," continues Gulnora Rasstegaeva.
The cramped office is adjacent to the equally cramped and stuffy rooms of the stay. The very first one has four beds under the walls. A slender female figure in a black suit with a floor-length skirt and a hat stands out against the background of white sheets. This is also a resident of the Center on Ilovaiskaya named Marina. "My son wanted to get into show business, but he owed a lot of money, which he did not have. He was threatened, and then my husband and I sold the apartment to save him. But the son was killed anyway. So we were left without a son and without an apartment, but we couldn't buy a new one. My husband died, and I'm here. Why are you looking at me like that? I've always lived very decently. I worked in the machine shop at the ministry, and we made good money. And now here it is... Well, what is it? And people live here," the woman says in correct Russian.
It is almost impossible to verify whether she is telling the truth, there are no relatives left. She has nowhere to go, she's been living in these walls for days. She has a surprisingly well-delivered speech and a cheerful mood, but her neighbors are very sullen, do not want to talk, just stare in front of them, frowning like children. They also have their own social subgroups here. There are about fifteen people in wheelchairs huddled in the corner of the gazebo, looking in our direction. And here is a thin man sitting separately on the sports field in a T-shirt, sweatpants with large scars on his left arm from cuts. "Well, I've been living on the street for 10 years, now I live here, at least I have a roof," he says in a broken voice. Few people like to remember the past. For example, a tall, gaunt man with a stick in his left hand says that he first lived in Biryulyovo. "Then they kicked me out of the apartment, I stayed in my clothes, I lived on the street, I froze my fingers off in winter," and proudly shows a palm ending in four phalanges of fingers. He is emphatically independent, though he can barely walk, and he avoids questions by barely moving his long legs.
There are different ways to lose an apartment. For example, you can sell it and lose all the money in the slot machines. This happened to a Muscovite. Now he is a middle-aged man with blue eyes, dressed in jeans and a purple T-shirt. He became an employee of the Glinka Center.
"Well, yes, ludomania has led to this. But now I work here, I help others, I get paid," says the young man. The assistance system is being improved every year, the staff say. Some of the wards are offered jobs at the Center, and this is a good start.
Of course, not everyone stays here to work, but every year the assistance mechanisms are being improved, his staff say. Very soon, biometric data will be taken from visitors to the center, then information on the Moscow homeless will begin to be processed faster. In general, the work at the center is slow but steady, and its staff has managed to re-socialize many people in recent years. If 220 people returned to normal life in 2023 with the support of the center, then in 2024 301 people were able to cope with difficulties and gained confidence in the future, says Gulnara Rasstegayeva.
A call interrupts our conversation. The information about the newcomer Andrey was confirmed: he really is from Orenburg and came to Moscow to get a prosthesis at the Burdenko Hospital. He didn't cheat. Now the Social Adaptation Center will help him get the necessary help.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
