You're reading: Documentary tackles life of Ukrainian street children

When Andrej Naterer from Slovenia first visited Ukraine in 2000, he came simply to visit friends. He had no idea that he would end up spending every vacation for more than a decade in the eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Makeyevka, making a documentary about local street children.

“Friends
of mine were working with children in orphanages and also knew some street
children,” Naterer, an assistant anthropology professor of the University of
Maribor in Slovenia, said. “I saw them and got very interested.”

His movie
“Bomzhi: Street Children in Makeevka” premiered on Nov. 21 in Slovenia. He
wants to make it available on the Internet and by DVD. The official trailer of
“Bomzhi: Street Children in Makeyevka” is available at movie’s website www.bomzhi.si with English subtitles.

During
his 12 years in Makeyevka, a city of 358,000 people in Donetsk Oblast, he
followed dozens of street children who tell their stories.

After his first 2000 visit, he came away shocked by the scope of the problem, which persists today. According to a UNICEF report published in September, the nation still has 100,000 street children.

In early 2002, when Naterer returned, he started filming what street children were doing. He did that until 2011, when a street kid named Kolya suggested that he turn his study into a documentary. “People should know the truth about us,” Kolya told Naterer.

Andrej Naterer (far right) in Makeyevka with street children featured in his documentary.

With no financial
support, Naterer used his vacations to spend up to 12 hours every day with
street children in abandoned buildings. “At first they thought I was some
strange guy who wants to see where they sleep and what they eat. They called me
American, though I’m Slovenian,” he said.

Naterer said
he won the children’s acceptance and trust by being neutral and by not trying
to influence what they did. Every year, his work got easier and “we became
friends,” he said. “They’ve taught me Russian.”

Viktoria
Fedotova, head of Martin Club, a children rights protection nongovernmental
organization in Makeyevka, accompanied Naterer in Makeyevka. She says there
were four major groups of street children in the years of Naterer’s work, each
numbering about 20 children.

Fedotova
says most of the children weren’t interested in returning home or living in orphanages.

Naterer
said he didn’t notice any stealing among Makeyevka’s homeless children. He said
they usually got food and earned money by helping traders in street markets.
Some of the money went for second-hand shoes or clothes, but a lot got spent on
ingredients for substance called “boltushka,” a psychotropic stimulant usually
made with a mixture of cheap pills, vinegar and water. It is taken intravenously,
raising more health concerns because of unsanitary needles.

Drug
addiction is a big part of the documentary. Martin Club says that most homeless
children abuse drugs. Naterer says that not all of children he met during his
years in Makeyevka injected “boltushka,” but every one sniffed glue. He didn’t
witness children smoking marijuana or taking other drugs, probably because they
were too expensive or hard to get.

Street child injecting “boltushka” – a psychotropic stimulant made with a mixture of cheap pills, vinegar and water.

If there is any reason for optimism, it’s
that Naterer thinks Makeyevka has fewer homeless children today. Fedotova of Martin Club agrees. “You can see
one at the street from time to time, but there are no groups like there used to
be,” she says.

Fedotova
said government policy has helped. She credits the work of the local policy and
government policy of shifting emphasis from big orphanages to placements in
families, where children tend to get better care.

Unfortunately,
some of the children featured in Naterer’s movie didn’t live to see those
changes. According to Fedotova, half are now in prison while the other half
died of AIDS, drug use or other causes.

She sees
Naterer’s movie as a warning to the nation. If conditions deteriorate, Ukraine
will likely have even more street children than in the first decade of the
century, she predicts.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be
reached at [email protected].