Gallery

Step up daily life

This photographs are snapshots of the children, the teacher, the volunteers, who come to Center. Some of them simply have no other place to go, for others these are wonderful moments and new experiences. For some it is a real chance to make it in life. Step Up is an informal school, a community, a family.

The second group

(c) Dmitriy Markov

This story is about the senior group at the orphanage where mentally retarded teenagers coexist with the ‘good to go’ guys, i.e. those who are capable of leading normal life among regular people. Many of them had been sent here from ordinary orphanages in the late 1990s for continuos runaways and bad behavior. An extensive program for rehabilitation and adaptation of such children has been introduced recently (with features such as the family house for the boarding school graduates), however most of the orphaned students do not fall under this program. Years spent in the orphanage had done their deed: they don’t want to study or work and consider it more convenient to remain ‘fools’ and continue to stay in the state care.

There is a mixture of reality and fantasy in their twilight consciousness. Most of these kids do not know how to write and read. They can be extremely cruel with their fellows and especially weak ones, but still secretly love their parents, some of whom are already dead.
They can masterfully put the others to use, they steal constantly, but will give away the last bit to their own people. One of them got to Magadan during the winter on his own on his second try (the first one got him as far as Vladivostok where he was caught), without money or documents.

They are all convinced that after turning 18 they will go home and will live by themselves. They believe it even though their relatives are drunks or detainees, and their shut down houses have been stripped even of the heaters (for the metal).