Doctor Lisa: fighting windmills

Somehow my last couple of days are full of stories about extraordinary people living in our time. Yesterday, it was Shavarsh Karapetyan (http://www.peopleofar.com/2014/02/08/true-story-of-a-real-life-superhero-shavarsh-karapetyan/) who made invaluable sacrifices to fight the death.

Today, the story is different: Elizaveta Glinka (more famous as Doctor Lisa) fights the death of those who are destined to die. She builds hospices for incurable patients and organizes medical and psychological help for people dying at home. Many in Russia don’t understand palliative therapy (mitigating the pain and psychological tension of incurable patients) and call it pure quixotism: why waste expensive drugs and doctors’ time on fatal cases?

That’s why in Russia many incurable patients become “outcast”: hospitals refuse to take them and hospices are rare animals in the government system. At best, these people are left to die in arms of their relatives who neither have appropriate medical equipment at home, nor got specific psychological training.

For Doctor Lisa, everything started from her mother being in coma for two months before she died in Moscow. Elizaveta, who studied palliative therapy in the US and already organized her first hospice in Kiev, experienced this negative attitude to incurable patients in Russia in full. In 2007, she established a tiny fund Just Help that just helps everyone who wouldn’t get support from anywhere else.

That was the moment when Elizaveta Glinka turned into Doctor Lisa and started a blog that soon became a link between people from all around Russia who wanted to help and those who needed this help. People started donating small sums of money, clothes, toys for kids, pampers, medicines, etc. Doctor Lisa posts not only list of needed things, but also pictures of her patients, their letters and stories. 

Doctor Lisa often says I’m not a journalists, I’m a doctor. But in fact, she is more than a doctor: she is a master of last wishes. Listen to favorite music, write a letter to the president and get a response, smoke a last cigarette, dress up very nicely – she always finds the way to make patient’s last days the happiest ones. One man with cancer used to live in a village and really missed his farm: Doctor Lisa brought a real kid to his ward. He was stroking the kid and crying from happiness… He died in a week.

Glinka helps not only dying people: those living but helpless are all her patients. Her fund gives food and medical help to homeless and other people in need every Wednesday near one of Moscow train stations. And every Friday these people can come to a tiny, basement office of Just Help and have a real party with food, poems, songs, and stories. Doctor Lisa has volunteers to share many responsibilities but she still personally bandages up dozens of drug attics, alcoholics, and ex-criminals at Paveletskyaya Square. She knows them by names, nicknames, and their stories: “amorous” Carmen who often gets bruised by her lovers, mentally disabled Maxim who helps Doctor Lisa to distribute food, Chechnya war veteran who dreams about writing a book, and many others.

Since last summer Doctor Lisa, doesn’t get much time to write in her blog: she transports sick and injured children away from the war zone in Eastern Ukraine and brings humanitarian aid to kids who are left behind. Doctor refuses to make any political statements. It doesn’t matter for her to which side she brings rescued kids: she just believes that children should never see a war. So, every time she succeeds to negotiate a short ceasefire, she takes a driver with her and hurries to those who are waiting for help.

Maybe, Doctor Lisa does fight the windmills and her patients will die sooner or later either from incurable disease or from harsh Moscow winter and off-grade alcohol. Even from the war, she can save maximum 5-10 children every raid… And still, Doctor Lisa kills a fear of death: she gives hope and love to people who were left alone face-to-face with their merciless destiny. 

Orphans "off-the-books": Children of labor migrants

Children wait in line in the dining room of Straseni's orphanage (Moldova). From the project "Behind the Absence".

They are average kids, they have mother and father who love them endlessly. But they see their parents at best once a year. “Mom is at work” describes their everyday life. They are called “social orphans” and their parents are labor migrants.

From the project "One Family, Two Places".

Zhang Jianfang and his wife (on the picture: photo project One Family, Two Places) moved to Shenzhen ten years ago to seek work. They left behind two children, and have only been back four times since then.

The situation is typical not only for China: according to research conducted by My Family, a UNICEF-funded NGO in Bishkek, only 6% of the 11,000 children in Kyrgyzstan orphanages are there because they have no living parents. The number of children growing up without parents in many countries around the world increases every month: 58 million children are left behind in China, 9 million in the Philippines, 1 million in Sri Lanka. 

These parents are not egoists who left their countries for beautiful life abroad. They save every penny to send back to their children and try to give as much love as they can on rare occasions of being home. They would go through any hardships with visas or finding the place to live, but often they are barred from bringing their families with them by their employers or by registration rules.

So, orphanages sometimes become the only option: especially, in countries like Kyrgyzstan where government uses most of its funds to finance children’s homes instead of low-income families. “It turns out that needy families cannot compete with the government, and they are forced to take their children to orphanages”, says Nazgul Turdubekova, the director of Bishkek-based League for the Rights of the Child, an NGO.

Grandparents seem a better option only at first: they are getting older and sicker every year. Children often become breadwinners and caregivers themselves, exchanging happy childhood for early adulthood. Not to mention a huge generation gap when children don’t find any common language with their grandparents and just retire into their shell. 

From the project ”Behind the Absence”.

Iulia from Moldova (on the picture), 10 years old, lives with her grandmother who takes care of a girl and her two brothers while their mother is working in Germany. A year ago, this elderly woman was diagnosed with uterine cancer and it’s getting harder and harder to look after three grandchildren when having constant pain.

Nowadays, it is still only Human Rights organizations that raise an alarm about millions of children who don’t get to be children. Some Chinese NGO created parent-to-child telephone cards, or 'love cards', to help regular communication between migrant workers and their children. But how can telephone calls possibly make up for warmth of a real parent?

These are just drops in the ocean without crucial changes in the system of legal and social protection of labor migrants, as well as without some improvements of economic situations in their home countries.

These kids might not die from starvation, but they face a keen hunger for parental love. 

5 reasons why I want to be broadcast journalist (rather than write for papers or magazines)

Reason #1.

Visualization vs just verbalization: anything hits you much stronger when you see and hear about it than if you read it from the lifeless piece of paper. Even a photo captures only single moment of the event or emotion: it cannot express the whole range of life’s nuances. You can say so much more with just five seconds shot than you would read in a whole-page article.

As a public, we feel it deeper when we see something with our own eyes, we “believe” in it. The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was written about in newspapers at length for some time, but with little reaction. Only when BBC Television beamed the horrors of starvation to the West’s meal tables did the public sit up and take notice.

Reason #2.  

Moreover, there is so much more for creativity and originality in the playful combination of words, moving pictures and sounds. Got bored with dull news you have to report? Create your own masterpiece by mixing up the words with controversial picture or getting a shot from an interesting angle. I noticed it when interning with a TV news station: even the most tiresome piece can be transformed into Mona Lisa with a nice flow of information and beautiful close-ups.

Reason #3.  

Newsroom is a huge family living under one roof and intercommunicating every spare second. Recommendations, rumors, dramas, jokes, pranks – you can find anything in the electrified atmosphere of a TV newsroom. People are bond to work together as their final piece is a result of a team work: it takes at least, a reporter, a photographer, and a producer. In short words, communication and relationships are vital components of broadcasting which brings us to …

Reason #4.

 99% of the broadcasting employees are naturally positive and energetic. Thousands of people watch you on their screens every day: you got to be cheerful and easy-going. Even if you are behind the scene, how can you be down in the crowd of smiling reporters and anchors? Every time I would enter a newsroom in a horrible mood, two minutes later my gloomy look would disappear without a trace. I still miss all the jokes and pranks of our photographers (you can’t survive at this profession without some sarcasm in your blood) and shining eyes of our reporters when found a great “pitch”.

Reason #5.  

Just one word. Adrenaline. None of the breathtaking stories and investigations to write about for newspaper can compare with racing to catch the police speaker-man making a statement about the “just-happened” murder and to manage to put him on air before any other station. Or this moment when a kidnapped girl was returned to her parents just 2 minutes before 5pm show right in front of the reporter to be on air.

Job where you never know what’s going to happen in the next minute. For me, that’s a description of perfect job.

National peculiarities.

I’m a big fan of French cinema with its vagueness, mystery, and open ends. First, I like when the movie makes me think and get to my own conclusions without explaining me what and why. Secondly, I like when the life is shown as beautiful, dramatic and complicated as it is, instead of the world of special Hollywood effects. However, even French cinema sometimes contains way too explicit stories.

Movie “L’enfant” (Baby) is a banal story of two careless teenagers who don’t really care about money and where to sleep, until the girl got pregnant and they get a 9-days-old baby. She comes back to her boyfriend, irresponsible petty criminal, who at some point decides to sell the baby for adoption without even telling his girlfriend. He explains that they “will get another baby” if they want. In short words, the whole idea of the movie is that this guy is actually a baby.

Now, something more interesting. I wouldn’t think of that movie if just a day after I didn’t read an article about similar story happened to two teenagers in Russian orphanage. A 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old guy, living in the orphanage where they started dating, decided that they wanted to keep the baby from the accidental pregnancy. The story itself is fascinating because in the most Russian orphanages teenage pregnancy is a subject to hide from the authorities to avoid the scandal: girls usually are persuaded to do the abortion.

Somehow, in this case both parents insisted on keeping the baby. However, the hardest part was to decide what to do with a young family after the birth: they can’t stay in the orphanage and they can’t be left alone in the outside world. Luckily, local media started talking about this story and just a month before the delivery they found a host family, a woman who agreed to be their guardian. She already has 7 adopted kids, four of whom are adults and live separately. 
Now, I don’t know what will be the end of the movie, but young parents and their new host mom look happy on the pictures. 

International Law and Pathetic Me

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Story of my life :) 

I was so sincerely excited and inspired to learn about human rights in the world, especially, considering that in my home county they are not very much worshipped by people. You don’t touch the law and the law hopefully will forget about you – the mainstream ideology in Russia.

In my pathetic world, human rights were represented by a nice, beautiful girl with a kind face and a big red cross on the T-shirt feeding skinny, scared African children. Nice, beautiful people and skinny African children were preserved: I guess, just to make me happy. And these nice, beautiful people created nicely sounding words about human dignity and equality; words that ended up being a political project to avoid talks about decolonization and to replace them with less harmful ideals of liberal democracy. And Red Cross in many African cities became known for being corrupted and having certain hierarchy.

However, let’s not spoil my childhood dream: my last hope was humanitarian law with a kind girl still looming somewhere at the horizon. The girl was killed by single professional shot at her back and the sniper calmly explained to me that the girl needed to be killed in order to achieve the military advantage; that it was proportional to the number of casualties required for getting that land. And I shut up, because according to jus in bello he was right to act that way, because there is no standards that say precisely how many people need to be killed to get this land. Someone might say 10, someone might say 15, and it’s completely random choice: who will be among these lucky 5 and among these unlucky 10. And technically, there should be a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, but who knows, who knows, maybe, the girl was diversionist dressed up as a civilian…

Reasonable me still agrees that bad laws are better than no laws and they might be useful to stop armies from destroying the whole land of their enemy. Pathetic me starts thinking that laws in the ancient times were actually more fair: you steal something, people saw you stealing, your arm is cut off, others who watched will rather die from hunger than steal. Simple morality.

Nowadays, with a help of beautiful, incomprehensible for average people words lawyers (and certain amount of money and power behind them) can prove that you were saving the world by killing thousands of people. It’s called progressive humanism.

P.S. Still didn’t give up to find the reason why I should like the law.

Be yourself.

Let me share my personal frustration. Almost every book, every movie, every website about personal development and search for happiness (which already make me throw up) says Step one: be yourself. Apparently, that’s the quickest way of finding the desired harmony in life, and blah-blah-blah. There is one small problem, though. Nobody says what is Yourself.

The truth is, there is no such thing as Being yourself. This yourself-puzzle is made of your parents’ bringing up system; your nationality background; of the way people behaved around you when you were a teen and the way they behave around you now; of these TV show actors that you secretly worshiped; of these book characters that you were reading at night hiding from your parents under the blanket; of these family friends that you fell in love with; of your basketball couch who was extremely successful in your eyes; of this stranger in the subway who looked so decent and elegant that you thought “I should cross legs the same way when I sit, it looks very refined”.

Every single gesture of yours, not talking about the decisions you make every day, is  somebody else’s gesture that once matched with your preferences and principles (that actually were also grown up in you by your family and your community) so that you decided to borrow it. Every one of us is an amazing actor, playing his role spontaneously, thinking that it is himself, that it is what he actually is. But in fact, it’s what he wants to be because he finds it attractive in other people. She is extremely nice and cheerful person because she thinks that is what a woman should be, because that is what her beloved mother was or that is how Kate Middleton looks like. He is a charming asshole because that is what his uncle was (and all the women were crazy about him) or that is how Doctor House behaves and nobody fires him.

Our I was myself / I wasn’t myself, I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t are based on what we find the most attractive in other people. We borrow features from each other adapting them till they become unconscious and call them myself. Meanwhile, the category Pretending includes features that we don’t like in others or we liked for a while but they are not fun anymore. However, this awesome mechanism helps us to avoid thinking too much of what is myself and what is that’s not me! and exploding our minds every time we need to make a step.

In short words enjoy your life and stop feeling obliged to be yourself! It’s a made up creature :)