"Matronin House"

Report from modern almshouse near Rostov

In the Rostov region, a shelter has been working for several years, in which homeless people help each other to survive: abandoned women take care of the old people who are unnecessary, and they are nursing with their children while mothers are at work or busy with households. All of them to one degree or another are not visible for state assistance, and some run from it like from prison. Left without grants and donations, here in their own way they interpreted the concept of “social entrepreneurship” and opened a sewing workshop ...

The shelter in 2012 organized a simple Rostov nurse Olga Pivovarova. It would be possible to write that life prompted the idea, but you won’t wish such “tips” to the enemy: Olga lived with her husband-warrior, who beat her and their two children, drove out to the street, and nobody cares about their suffering. Olga suffered, worked in a nursing home and treated herself with mercy - the soul burnt out from life adversity was slowly filled with them, like a lamp, with new oil. And then - caught fire.

“It's hard there,” she recalls not her family life, but the everyday life of the elderly house. - It’s not difficult that it is necessary to take care of the weak old people, wash them, feed them. No. It is difficult to watch how no one needs them there. First - relatives, then to the staff. How they scream at them, humiliate.

Old people are the same children. Maybe they don’t understand any things, but they feel and suffer resentment. And I suffered with them.

The woman was looking for comfort in the church, and both of them were lucky: Olga turned out to be a woman enthusiastic and responsible, quickly mastered the affairs of mercy at the church in honor of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Koksovy Belokalitvinsky district, 160 km from Rostov-on-Don. The church went to meet: Olga entered the Holy Tikhon Theological Institute-went to seminars, learned to provide social assistance. After some time, their thoughts appeared on this subject, stated them in the project and received the first grant-immediately 1.5 million rubles from the Synodal Department of the Russian Orthodox Church for charity. The second grant was allocated by the Foundation of St. Vasily the Great.

With this money, Olga was repaired by the former mining sanatorium in the same Koksov - an abandoned building was transferred to her free of charge by the local administration. They brought the gas, established heating, purchased equipment and began to take unfortunate women to the height of husbands and life, pregnant women, with children, without a penny in their pockets, often without documents.

“I know what it is when you and children at night are expelled naked in the cold,” the woman recalls. - And I know that in such cases there is nowhere to go.

"The Belokalitvinsky district charitable public organization of protection of motherhood, childhood, family, disabled people and people who fell into a difficult life situation," multifunctional assistance ", without the organization of a legal entity, with the blessing of the bishop of the Volgodonsky and Salski root, is named after the Holy Blessed Matrona of Moscow." And if simply - "Matronin House."

Belaya Kalitva is one of the areas of Russian Donbass. After closing the mines in the blue and wretched there is no shortage here, so the beds of the “Matrony House” are rarely empty. Throwed women with children find them themselves, some - bring them. Once, Olga recalls, a mother in an expensive car brought a pregnant “scum” - a native daughter here. The same mother sent another mother with two small children to live in a shelter for the fact that the grandchildren behaved badly and scratched a new TV. The older girl at that time was 4 years old.

-This is all the 90s so spoiled people,-

Olga is convinced, who herself graduated from school in the mid-90s. - People were thrown by the state to the mercy of fate, survived as they could. They did not engage in children. And then these children grew up, they have their own children, but they do not know how to educate them or love them: they did not have a positive example, they do not understand how it is to be a normal family.

There are always children in the "Matronin House". Previously, when the shelter was listed as a charitable organization, he received donations, won grants, there were many children. Now - four, including Sasha. In the living room, where women gather at a common table, the children's corner is the most elegant and bright: with toys, pencils and small multi -colored chairs on thick legs. Looking forward, Sasha tells the poem, women applaud him and laugh - Sasha is satisfied.

The current building is the third in a row where the shelter had to move. In 2016, in Koksov, Matronin House began to crumble - a common thing for Donbass, where the land was lifted with mines.

“I had to evacuate on an emergency order, and there were about a hundred people,” Olga recalls. - The Cossacks arrived by the locals, helped to urgently load.

From the coke, the shelter moved over 40 km to the village of Sholokhovsky, where he also changed the second building - the philanthropists helped.

17-year-old Nastya came to Olga in Sholokhovsky in May last year from Sinearka-a nearby farm. In January, she gave birth to a daughter, but social services were afraid to give a child to a minor mother without a roof over her head.

“Mom had drank before, now not,” sitting in a common girl-guard, a general girl, says Nastya. In the living room, her one -year -old daughter is sleeping, on the shelf in front of the mirror - rows of combs, deodorants, stumps, gels. - When I gave birth, I had nowhere to return: my husband is not, my mother also has no housing. But I did not want to hand over the child in an orphanage. I was transferred to a social bed to the hospital, I stayed there for five months, then I had to return. Mom drank, she and my brother and sisters lived in a rented apartment. When they were driven from the apartment, they brought me here. I really like it here.

According to the law, poor Nastya can not help: local officials could only invite her to send the child to the orphanage and continue to slide to the bottom. Suddenly helped ... Putin, who in January last year ordered to issue maternity capital not only on the second, but also for the first child. So "Pregnant in 16" saved the family. For 420 thousand rubles, they bought a cottage in Sineark, started repairs, and Nastya waits from day to day when the real house will return to his first life.

- He's warm! - The girl claps with eyelashes. - There are two floors. Very, very good there. And mom does not drink anymore.

There are few places in the shelter, girls live in two or three in the room. In the neighboring, passing, Olga Tripput with a four -year -old Sasha lives. She was brought four years ago to a shelter from onion plantation in the Krasnodar Territory. The farmer, for whom she worked until childbirth, did not want to keep an employee with a child. Relatives 33-year-old Olga was not needed. So she remained in the shelter. Helps to care for the elderly, removes, works in the kitchen.

In 2014, the warfare was added by the war in the southeast of Ukraine, from the Matrony House to the border-two hundred kilometers. Only according to official figures, about 40 thousand refugees came to the Rostov region, how many of them came and remains forever - it is not known how much through the shelter, Olga also does not remember. At some point, more than 120 people gathered under the roof of the Matrony House. They were fed, treated, collected certificates for receiving documents, organized registration. Helped to receive Russian citizenship.

Since then, in the office of Olga Pivovarova, a portrait of Putin, the coat of arms of Russia and the state flag have been hanging: former Ukrainian citizens have swore to the allegiance of the Russian Federation.

Now there are fewer such guests. Only the stream of homeless people does not run out.

“To save many people, it is much less than it seems to us,” Olga explains. - For example, make documents. If there is an unpaid fine, they will not give a new passport. It seems that 1,500 rubles are a trifle, and someone’s life collapses because of such a little thing. Many have no money to pay a state fee. We help to restore the papers, after which many get to their feet: they receive a pension, maternity capital, someone gets a job, begins a new life. We are not a nursing home, we are the same family that a person returns when he is very difficult and where he is helped.

Until last year, the Matronin House existed on donations and grants, but at some point the public organization lost this status: the tax service found an arrears and without any special undertakings, without even calling the founders to clarify the causes and eliminate contradictions, initiated the exclusion of the Matrona House from the list of organizations providing gratuitous social services to the population, says Olga.

She believes that “dark forces” interfere with her, who are very attracted to homeless pensioners with ready -made documents and monthly payments from the state.

In the "village", as the nursing houses are called here, the guests take 75% of the pension.

And they are deprived of freedom, 47-year-old Olga Kislitsyn believes, chained from childhood to a wheelchair.

“I feel good here,” says Olga, who spent almost his whole life in the "village". - Here I am doing what I want. Here is freedom. And there (Olga nods towards the hated "village" in Rostov) there is no freedom. Here I - what: I want - I listen to prayers, I want - I read, I want - I watch TV. In the "village" is not so: there you can only do what they allow. They can take your thing without demand. You, people who live in their homes, do not understand what freedom is. When you can do what you want.

Two years ago, Kislitsyna unexpectedly jumped out. But after some time, her husband asked her to get out.

“His wife died, and, as he told me, I was his temporary comfort,” the woman says with a smile, laying out sewing on the table by the window.

Church chants flow from her phone; outside the window, the wind drives frosty land. Olga chooses which drawing will embroider.

“For the sake of people like her, I started it all,” says Pivovarova. - I have no dreams of opening a private nursing home. I want those who do not have money to receive decent care.

At some point, she recalls Kislitsyn.

- Oh, we have afternoon procedures! - The former nurse is delirted and goes to shift the woman from a wheelchair on the bed, spreads diapers, goes for water ...

Care for the elderly and weak - the best educator, Olga believes. &

- Whatever woman in the past, no matter what lifestyle she leads, when she gets up in the morning and goes to change the old diapers, she changes. Mercy changes people, ”says the philanthropist.

Now five young women of her shelter are taking care of four pensioners. The most formidable of them is Weslav Ilyinsk.

- Oh and a harmful grandmother! - the girls laugh in an undertone.

The nee Polka 72 years old with a family with a heavy, as fate, character, does not tolerate such jokes in his presence. In 1958, she came to the USSR from Poland with her mother in 1958, but she could not socialize in the full sense of the word. Ilyinsk was not even a citizen of the USSR.

- I had a Polish passport, but in the USSR all the nations were equal. I did not pay attention to this, ”the pensioner explains.

After the collapse of the USSR, she also failed to become a citizen of Russia: she changes her Polish passport every 10 years. According to him, even a Russian pension is paid to her - a few years ago, a corresponding law was adopted in Russia. For the past 15 years, Veslava Ilyinsk worked in the Rostov shelter for homeless animals, rented housing. When it became unbearable, good people suggested where to look for help. Now her dream is to get into a real nursing home. State.

- Why? - I'm surprised. - Are they bad about you here?

“No, not bad,” says a stubborn polka. - Girls clean us, wash us, but they are not obliged to do this. They give me mercy. And the state is obliged to do this. I understand so.

She shows her outlandish Polish passport, with which she has nothing to do in her homeland.

“I don’t have pensions there, no one needs me there,” she says, but just in case, she asks the correspondent to tell her story at the Polish embassy, ​​“they suddenly remember the lost compatriot there.”

Conventionally, the shelter is divided into a male and female wing, and Olga carefully monitors that the lines of the life of guests on its territory do not intersect.

“It is forbidden to us,” she says strictly.

And apparently, there is something worried about: not all guests are weak and helpless in the men's department. The large bearded 46-year-old Oleg does not name the surname, asks him not to shoot, but tells his story, burning and pacing back and forth around the room where there are four beds-this is the largest male room.

The story is simple: there was a living, sometimes-drank. Like most men of Russian Donbass, picked up without work. He settled in Sochi, at the Olympic construction site. The employer deceived, did not pay money. He went to be called “like a man”-he thundered to prison. He went out, the wife accepted, but there was no work in the village either. Tolerated-terrified, then drove off.

“I am offended and ashamed - not to say how,” Oleg does not know where to put his hands. - The wife is a disabled person, without a leg, but even she did not need it. I even refused me a disabled person!

He hopes that this is his last wintering in the shelter, that he will establish relations with the children, and maybe he will propitiate his wife and will return to his circles. Nobody plans to stay in the shelter forever. But Oleg’s neighbor in the room, 60-year-old Peter Gereev, spends the fourth winter in the Matrony House. He made a passport, issued a pension, and he has nowhere to go. Like other guests, he sometimes works in the village, performs work on the household. He does not want a nursing home.

- I'm still unsuccessful, why do I need a "old"? They take a pension there, ”the man says.

Over 8 years of work, Olga Pivovarova, the bullyers did not accuse of: what she takes away from the old pensions from the old people, that she is making “criminals” who prevents the neighbors from living, what is profitable for humanitarian aid and only for the sake of this the whole booth - with abandoned women, with endless walks in instances, with finding money for food, water, and diapers, and diapers. Food, medicine, utility bills.

A large two -story two -entrance house, which she was given to her in the village of Sholokhovsky under a shelter, costs 100 thousand rubles in winter: almost 30 guests, heating, water, electricity. Having lost the status of a charitable organization, the “Matronin House” went to a desperate step: Olga issued an individual entrepreneur, opened the OKVED to provide gratuitous social services with and without accommodation, taught guests to sew slippers for sale.

- We work for long -range raw materials, cooperate with a company that places similar orders in prisons. She put the cars to us. Not only our guests work, we also give local jobs, we pay the salary, ”says Olga Pivovarova, who discovered the new meaning of the phrase“ Social Entrepreneurship ”for the region.

In a month, the shelter needs to earn at least 300 thousand rubles, so working in the workshop is arguing: the sounds of a popular radio station are heard between the chattering of the machines, the men silently drag boxes with the blanks, the women look at each other. Some of them will receive a penny for their work, everything else will go into a common boiler, because in the kitchen of the “Matrony House” in the boilers there should always be “first, second and compote” for those who are already at their common table, and for those who can come there at any time.

“It is difficult to plan expenses,” Olga laments. - Either new guests, then unforeseen expenses for old ones. Now I had to pay for one woman tickets to Bryansk - back and forth, yes to “live”. There are courts, she beats for the children. If you score - where to go? He will bring here.

Local social services to Pivovarov idol. Deprived of real tools for providing social assistance, they are grateful to Olga for every warmed old woman, every unfortunate woman taken under the wing.

But the higher the official soars above the ground, the less he cares about the scurrying below.

“We came from the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of the region, checked us, persuaded our old people to move to the nursing home,” Olga recalls. - Weslav was not offered, by the way, - she has no Russian passport, they do not need it. And the rest refused. They say: “Why? You will take our pension from us. ”

The old woman confirms the old woman, especially nodding vigorously in words about the pension.

- They feel good here, understand. It’s like in the family: the old ones are watching small ones who can - who cannot - helps around the house. In my opinion, this is the best form of help for the elderly and women who have fallen into a difficult life situation, for whom the state does not provide any other assistance. As if these women are not. And they are, and there are a lot of them! Again - the socialization of the disabled, the children grow and see that people are different, learn to help each other ...

Attempts to receive government or, God forbid, the Presidential Grant, she no longer undertakes, having lost faith in the humanity of the bureaucratic system.

-Some strange people came. They say let's help you get a grant. But it will be necessary to return 70%. Imagine?! - the woman is sincerely surprised. &

В планах у Ольги — прикупить сколько-нибудь гектаров земли здесь же, в Шолоховском, построить большой дом, чтобы места в нем хватало всем, кто придет к ней за помощью. На земле — выращивать овощи, завести домашний скот, поить домашним молоком детей и стариков, которых щедро посылает страна из самых разных своих уголков. Мечтает Ольга торговать фермерскими продуктами, выращенными общими усилиями, на вырученные деньги продолжать спасать живые человеческие души и себя.

— У меня рассеянный склероз, — признается женщина. — Мне как-то врачи сказали, что единственный способ продлить свою жизнь — это постоянно создавать что-то новое: в мозгу формируются нейронные связи взамен утраченных. Вот я и формирую.

Она говорит, что после двух инсультов окончательно убедилась в правильности выбранной терапии. И, взяв полотенца, отправляется мыть новую постоялицу.