Integration Center for Orphans with Disabilities

As part of the summer and winter camps held at the Belskoye Ustye Orphanage for physically and mentally disabled children, Step Up always strives to recruit volunteers from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds. Many of these volunteers go on to run master-classes for the children based on their specialist skills or talents.

One particularly successful example of this was Darya and Marisha, architectural students at a prominent Moscow architecture university.

During Winter Camp 2017, Darya and Marisha put-together a master-class with an architecture theme, designed to make the kids learn new arts and crafts tricks, develop their motor skills, and think about space and how you can use different materials.

Darya explained the idea behind the master-class: “The task was to build a tower by folding along the lines on the cardboard provided and then using different materials to transform a 2D picture into a 3D one. They had to think up how it would be supported, whether it would fall down, and whether it could be made to look beautiful.”

Step Up provided lots of different materials for the master class including colored tape, colored card, corrugated cardboard, cotton buds, toothpicks, thread, and tinsel.

“Above all we wanted to create conditions in which the children were not forced to work. For the first 10-15 minutes the kids couldn't understand what we wanted from them! But then they got caught up in the creative process and began to think,” Darya said.

During Winter Camp (which lasts for just under a week), Darya and Marisha worked with 7 groups of children and ended up with about 30 different towers made by kids, which they put all together in one display — a whole street of buildings.

Stas is a young man living in the Belskoye Ustye Orphanage for physically and mentally disabled children. He is one of the most active participants in the summer and winter camps that Step Up runs from Novopetrovskoye.

Twenty years old, he has only lived in Belskoye Ustye for about the last two years after he was transferred from another orphanage along with his older brother, Denis. He is one of a group of young men and women in the orphanage who will shortly move to a special sheltered accommodation “village” the orphanage is constructing nearby.

We asked one of Step Up’s regular volunteers, Tatyana Melnikova, who has worked closely with Stas, to describe this remarkable young man:

“Stas is more of a gentleman than many young men you come across in “normal” life - he is very sensitive to everything. He has noticeably aged since we first met, although that was just over a year ago. He doesn’t know how to read or write and he says he has already finished school. When you ask him about it he readily talks about it, although, as you listen, you begin to understand that he is slightly embarrassed about his inabilities. Stas never complains about life at Belskoye Ustye but, like many of the children there, he fantasizes about how he will switch into an “adult life” where he will start work.

Stas has an irrepressible energy and he can’t sit still for even a minute. You have to constantly seek ways to interest him, although this is not very difficult because he is interested in everything — and if something is happening he has to be the center of attention. He doesn’t spare himself when he wants to achieve something. Naturally, he is particularly interested in anything that involves physical activity – press-ups, flips, pull-ups. It’s difficult to imagine the discos that are put on during summer camp without his enthusiastic dancing amid a circle of applauding children and volunteers.

Despite his energy, Stas is also a responsible person. He knows the rules of the orphanage – both those that are enforced by the carers and teachers and those that exist independent of these, among the children and young adults that live there. He knows what is good and what is bad, and he understands the consequences of his actions. It wouldn’t be a mistake to call him one of the favourites of the staff and volunteers at Belskoye Ustye. He has a bright character and is a kind and active person, simple and spontaneous.”

Step Up launched a new project in August this year – the Second Generation Summer Camp, which took place at Step Up’s Integration Center in Novopetroskoe village.

The project ran between July 24th and August 3rd (directly after the annual Summer Camp with children from Belskoye Ustye orphanage). A total of 19 people took part, including five mothers (involved with Step Up’s projects for orphans in Moscow) and nine children (aged 2 to 9 years old).

Second Generation Summer Camp was designed to help students and graduates of Step Up improve their parenting skills, to strengthen the relationships between parents raised in orphanages and their kids, and to boost the children’s intellectual and emotional development.

Financial difficulties generally prevent families of former correctional orphanage residents from having a proper vacation with their children. And stress-free time when they can enjoy each other's company is very rare.

Volunteers and Step Up staff organized a series of activities for the mothers and their children (both separately and together) during the camp. These included yoga, theater, cooking and drawing. Novopetrovskoe's location deep in the countryside meant there were frequent outdoor activities including swimming and short treks. Step Up also arranged for the mothers and children to take part in a day trip to nearby Pskov and get acquainted with some local firemen!

The success of the project means Step Up will look to repeat it next year — as well as using it as a model to help implement and develop other residential camps at Novopetroskoe.

At Step Up, we place a high value on the work we do with volunteers — young Russian professionals and students.

Inna, who works as a manager in Moscow, is one of Step Up's brightest volunteers. She used her annual leave to attend Step Up's Summer Camp at the Belskoye Ustye orphanage in 2014 — her first experience of volunteering and working with physically and mentally disabled children — and she has since taken part in all Step Up projects at Belskoye Ustye.

In her free time Inna is interested in yoga and, last year, she enrolled in an intensive children's yoga training course in Moscow where she learnt the basics of the discipline.

Staff dismissals at the Belskoye Ustye orphanage means that the institution does not now have a single physical education teacher. During Winter Camp 2016, Inna ran a series of yoga masterclasses for the children at Belskoye Ustye, which were very popular among volunteers and children.

Here is a something Inna herself wrote about the experience:

"The classes were even more effective than I expected. Many became seriously interested in yoga, and kept asking when the next class would be. One older girl, who has cerebral palsy, said that, at first, she thought she wouldn't be able to do anything but she quickly realized there were a lot of positions that she could hold even in her condition. After the successful classes during Winter Camp I have continued running classes in Moscow, this time with autistic children."

Inna is currently in discussions with Step Up's Summer Camp coordinator about the possibility of holding a whole series of yoga classes during this year's Summer Camp for children, volunteers, and staff at the orphanage.

Over the course of New Year and the first week of 2016 a group of 20 volunteers from Step Up organized New Year celebrations and a week of developmental activities — the second ever Winter Camp that Step Up has put on the Belskoye Ustye orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children.

The programme included individual presents for all the children, a visit by Father Christmas on New Year's eve and a meal and celebration of the end of 2015 that included all the older children and volunteers.

Other activities included master classes, a Winter Olympics, interactive plays and a final show to coincide with the departure of the volunteers and Orthodox Christmas celebrations on January 7th.

The majority of the volunteers who took part in the Winter Camp had already been to Belskoye Ustye for Summer Camp 2015 but there were several new volunteers who were taking part for the first time. Winter Camp serves a key role cementing relationships between volunteers, children and orphanage workers — and there would otherwise be very little for the children to do over the New Year holidays when the orphanage is run with a skeleton staff.