Having left his Roma parents' care as an infant, 18-year-old Ion Demetr spent most of his adolescent life at various orphanages, which included seven years at homes for the mentally disabled.
When he turned 18 this year, workers from the Dombokivska Specialized Boarding School for children with mental disabilities took him to Mukachevo, a city in Zakarpattya Oblast, Ukraine’s westernmost oblast. He was given his high school diploma and a lump sum of Hr 5,000. His diagnosis of having a slight mental disability didn’t qualify him for welfare benefits.
Not knowing how to handle money, Demetr spent most of what he received in the first two weeks on tasty yet expensive food. When money ran dry, the teenager wandered the streets or stayed in his unheated room at a social dormitory slowly dying of chronic pneumonia.
It was in this state that social workers found him.
“When we came in the dormitory, the staff explained to us that he wasn’t moving or speaking because of his mental disability,” said Natalia Kozyr, project coordinator at Rozvytok, a local human rights center. “But it’s impossible to move or speak when you’re lying only in a cardigan (sweater) in January when it’s minus 30 Celsius outside and if you haven’t eaten for two weeks,” she added.
Kozyr said a state social worker believed the best solution for Demetr was to attain the status of being mentally disabled, which would allow him to live with a full room and board at a hostel for mentally disabled people for the rest of his life.
But the problem is Demetr is as normal as anybody can be who lacks an elementary education. Social workers said the teenager is illiterate at the age of 18.
Zakarpattya oblast has the biggest Roma community in Ukraine, at up to 100,000. Kozyr said up to 30,000 Roma live in a camp in Mukachevo, with only one-sixth of them officially registered. Only a tiny amount of Roma children regularly attend school.
Local doctors often diagnose Roma children who enter orphanages with mental disabilities, added Kozyr.
Human rights activists claim there are hundreds of children like Demetr in Ukraine, deprived of any future because of a useless state social welfare system.
According to Ministry of Social Policy data, there are about 95,500 orphans or children, whose parents were deprived of parental rights. About 20,000 are reared in thousands of boarding schools, often facing negligence and abuse by staff workers.
Demetr said that normally there were around six daily classes at his boarding school, but nobody taught the children there. “We were drawing or watching TV during the lessons,” he said.
For disobedience or wrongdoing, violators “were sent to a sports hall and beaten,” he added.
Children are also punished by being sent for psychiatric treatment. Demetr visited the mental hospital six times for epilepsy and mental disability, which social workers say he does not suffer from.
Vasyl Yugas, deputy head of Dombokivska boarding school, said he cannot comment on the diagnosis. He denied students at his school face any harassment or graduate with no knowledge, but agreed something needs to be done to better the social adaptability of children like Demetr.
“But I think it is a state-level issue,” Yugas told the Kyiv Post by phone.
After four months of regular lessons Demetr is now able to read and write simple words. Social workers believe they will manage to prepare him for admission to a specialized school, where the teenager could study culinary arts and become a chef, Demetr’s dream job.
“He has perfect visual memory,” Kozyr said. “I can’t understand how it was possible not to teach a child like him to read or write.”
Demetr is lucky to get another chance at a normal life against the backdrop of many other children whose destinies remain under question, since the entire social system provides only shelter and food to them without preparing them for life outside the orphanage.
Andriy Chornousov, director of the Association of Independent Monitors, an NGO that monitors the work of boarding schools for people with special needs, said these institutions try to keep their clients inside as long as possible.
“The boarding schools are not interested in letting the children out as this will decrease their number and subsequently lead to decreased state financing,” he said.
Although human rights activists have reported violations at the Dombrovsky boarding school to the ombudswoman, they don’t believe anybody will be punished. “There’s no proof, there are no cameras that record children being beaten, there are only his (Demetr’s) testimony and the scars on his hands,” Kozyr said.
Chornousov called for volunteers to help survey the work of state boarding houses, which has recently been made possible by allowing advocacy groups to visit and check these places without prior notice.
“In every oblast there are about 30 to 50 boarding houses about which people are mostly not aware, and where horrible things take place,” Chornousov said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
