Dear Friends,
On a wet Friday afternoon in August, I saw the worst of it: We had come by ourselves in a bus and not in the “Social Patrol” van as we usually do. There were six of us: Ann, my translator and assistant; Claudio, the Italian; two polish girls recently out of college; Alex, a college student from Holland, and myself. We came upon them from the other side of a wall: a small band of five boys and one girl living next to a tall, concrete wall, gathered like wounded soldiers under a tree.
I looked first, standing on my toes on a board, placed there by them to crawl over. With one arm I hooked the wall and with the other hand I held my heavy camera high and began making images without looking through the lens. ”Robert, no photo,” they said, and I knew it was because they were using the Baltushka.
The wall was not difficult to scale, but I took care because of the rain and wetness. I was careful also because I had injured my shoulder and left arm in a bicycle accident, and the grasp of any object sent pain from my elbow up and down my arm. I climbed over first, then Ann, Claudio and Alex. The polish girls walked some two hundred meters to find a break in it and then back across an empty lot to where we gathered.
Lena, the girl, and three of the boys sat on the mattresses, the rain coming down lightly, not like earlier when it fell in a steady shower. Their blankets were wet and mixed with the dead branches and leaves of the tree; beneath the mattresses and branches, the dirt was turning to mud. There in the dirt and mud, fallen through the branches I saw the empty plastic bottles and wrappers for food, discarded needles and syringes. I saw t-shirts and pants hung on branches in the rain; I saw a large sheet of plastic taken perhaps from a local building site. They could have held it over their heads but they did not; they did not care.
One boy, Tolik lay, his pants half down to his crotch, readying himself with the needle in his hand for when we would leave. Then he would slide it into the thick vein on his upper thigh, and Lena or Miroslav would attach the syringe and drive in the Baltushka. “I am finished,” he said, looking up at Ann.
“I am using Baltushka ten or twelve times a day,” Lena said to Ann, as they sat together later when the rain came in spits and the sun burned between the clouds. I stood first at a distance, photographing the group, but the tree blocked my view, so I climbed a mound of dirt and stood some six or seven feet above the group and shot the kids as well as the volunteers who came. Then I came in closer. They were not shooting the Baltushka, but they had the needles in their hands and I could see they were looking around as if to convey some impatience with our being there.
For the Polish girls and Alex it was their first time to see boys and girls living on the streets. They moved carefully, standing at first a little apart, and then moving in to squat on the dirt and blocks of concrete. They could speak some Russian and began conversations with the boys and Lena.
I lose all sense of time in these situations when I am photographing and conversing and thinking of what to do. It could have been ten minutes or thirty before we decided to buy food and juice for them and some antibacterial ointment for one boy with a gash in his head. We parted promising to return.
We walked across the concrete and mud expanse of the lot, through the break in the wall, to the food stand first where we bought two liters of mixed juice, bags of fat brown cookies; we had already given them water and bread. At the pharmacy, the girl recognized me from times before buying medicine. She told us of a priest named Michael who also came to buy medicine for this band of homeless youth.
As we approached the wall again to pass over the food and medicine, I could see through the spaces between concrete slabs. One boy held another’s arm with the needle inside. I centered the viewfinder so that the automatic focusing would spot the needle and the arm, leaving the walls out of focus on both side. But he moved so that I got only his face and a cigarette; I had made only one frame before my batteries died.
Now my schedule in the states for the fall of 2009
Aug 31- Sept 9 Central and North Florida
Sept 10 Atlanta
Sept 11-14 Ft. Worth Tx
Sept 14-21 Portland Or
Sept 21 Atlanta
Sept 22 Birmingham Al
Sept 23 Athens Ga
Sept 24 Reidsville, NC
Sept 25-28 Washington DC area
Sept 29 Wellington Fl
Sept 30 Vero Beach Fl
Oct 1 St. Pete Fl
Oct 2 Daytona Beach Fl
Oct 3-4 Newnan Ga
Oct 4 Decatur Ga
Oct 5-7 Memphis Tn
Oct 8-10 Farmington NM
Oct 10-11 New Orleans
Oct 12-19 Asheville NC
Oct 19 Fly back to Ukraine
There are also photos from Camp and pictures of volunteers from Holland, Poland, Estonia. Claudio from Italy, came back for most of the summer, brought his brother, Duchio, and also 3,200 euros raised at a rock concert he orgainized last summer in sienna , italy.
Another volunteer, Igor, an American, adopted from St. Petersburg, Russia at age 8, is great to have because he speaks some Russian. He's a former Marine, having served two tours in Iraq. He now studies International Relations in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Tanya Foltz also came, she's from DC. She looked at the problem of violence against women, met with women interested and designed an instrument for interviewing women who have been abused. It is sad and remarkable that in a city the size of Odessa, there is not one shelter for abused women. Eleanor Clegg came from Wales to do an art project using only material from nature.
In one photo I show you Olya, who ran away from us last year. it's a long story but she's back. In another you see me and a family and a boy with a crutch. There is a young woman also. That's Gallina, the former Ms. Odessa. This was the first partnership between This Child Here and local business people. We split the cost of a new prosthesis (leg) for Sasha. in one photo, I am trying to explain the next shot.
Finally, those aren't my hands and finger... or my ears.
Robert
the group at camp
bicycles
alex from Holland
up on the top right is where kids are living
