24:15 On The StreetsВпечатления от Кирова

Premise

In February 2008 I conducted a brief and unusual experiment: I spent 24 hours and 15 minutes ‘on the streets’ of a Russian city called Kirov. I set out to drop myself in an unknown place both physically and psychologically with no frames of reference and no real plan.

The purpose was twofold: to understand myself better and to understand in a more practical way what the first day of homelessness must be like. Lacking in many aspects, the experiment still proved to be a strong contribution to my changing perspective about how to tackle homelessness and poverty. I hope to develop and share this changing perspective with you in the future.

In Kirov I was able to grasp, if even just superficially, the feeling of being lost and scared in a new world: ‘Where will I sleep’, ‘where will I go’, ‘will it be hard to stay warm…

Of course I had the privilege of perspective and a sure exit out. What must that very first day on the streets be like for a small child, 8 years of age running away from an orphanage and arriving into an unknown city in the heart of winter?

I was 30 years old and doing an experiment that would end in a few hours, for them it would become their entire lives.

Love’s Bridge

This br ief essay is being written to promote Love’s Br idge: www.lovesbridge.org an organization that I have worked with in different capacities for over 8 years and am proud to be a board member of since 2003. It is also being written to promote a film about youth homelessness in Perm called ‘A Russian Fairytale’ by an extremely talented and dedicated young filmmaker Jake Mobbs. The film features a number of young homeless adults who have been involved with Love’s Bridge for many years: www.arussianfairytale.com

’24.15’ is dedicated to the memory of Kostya Shevchenko who died last year. Kostya lived on the streets for much of his childhood and became one of the first resident’s within the Love’s Bridge ‘Chakolava’ homeless shelter. He was in jail when the rest of the Chakolava shelter came to Ireland in 2002. A hard life on and off the streets and serious health complications that included HIV and hepatitis led to his eventual death of pneumonia. He was 23 years old.

“A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age;

he dies of being a man”-P Arland Usher

The Story

How I prepared:

So I was in Perm, and it was early February, the winter had been up and down temperature wise: Some days it would be a very tolerable –8c, other days –23c and lower. Preparing to spend a day and a night on the streets as a ‘bum’ gave me an opportunity to spend time with the boys (long time recipients of Love’s Bridge services) in their native environment – the streets. From securing a weapon to learning how to beg effectively, observing their group dynamics and survival mentality I felt this is really where my focus should be: Understanding the structure of their lives from the inside out not the outside in.

All the clothes I would wear with the exception of my own footwear would be dirty odorous street worn clothes that these young men had in a shack they were squatting in at the time and is featured in Jake’s film. Kostya Shevechenko orchestrated the securing of all my items. One night I passed a homeless man near to where I was staying and I asked him would he swap his metal sticks for my crutches, he said yes and the ‘street costume’ was complete.

Choosing Kirov

Kirov is a small city a few hours west of Perm. Being closer to Moscow it is not as cold as Perm in winter. I choose it at random, not knowing anyone there or what it was like except that the temperatures were mild. After making the choice I consulted with Vanya (a former street kid from the Love’s bridge project) about how to stay safe. Vanya being prone to exaggeration demanded that I not go without him because Kirov was where bandits from St Petersburg would stop on route to Eastern Russia via the Trans-Siberian rail road. These archetypal thugs referred to in Russia as “bandit’s” regularly beat and / or rob “bums” and even murders are not out of the equation.

It was clear however that Vanya was just exaggerating out of concern for my safety and that the intensity of his warning was unwarranted. There are ‘bandits’ in every Russian city, but no other person described Kirov as being an epicenter of danger. I felt quite sure that Kirov would not be like what Vanya with the aid of some beers had suggested.

Getting There

I took a night train from Perm Station straight to Kirov, and if my recollection is correct it was about 4 hours of a journey. My plan would be to spend the first night in a hotel (or rather the few hours of the early morning since I was arriving in at about 2am) and then begin the project the very next day, spending that night on the streets and returning to the hotel exactly 24 hours after I had left it. I took my ‘street costume’ and metal sticks that I had gotten from the homeless guy in a sports bag with me whilst traveling to Kirov.

Cheating

Hotel checked into and an adequate amount of sleep acquired I spent exactly two hours in the morning, in my normal clothes with my good crutches, checking the place out. I was trying to see if I could get a basic layout of the city and hopefully spot an abandoned shack or an open pothole leading to an underground tunnel. These underground places are commonly referred to as ‘sewers’ – They are not sewers as such, they are more like filthy concrete tunnels with hot water pipes running through them. They are as hot as a sauna - making every germ known to mankind

airborne inside. Anyway they are better than the cold and that was my mind-set.

No potholes were open that I could see, but I did spot an abandoned wooden house near the central market with signs that homeless people were living there. I was momentarily excited by the prospect of joining a marauding band of Russian hoboes ~I went back to the hotel for a cup of tea and to get my stuff.

Soviet Changing Room

I left the hotel with my Nike sports bag full of gear (‘just do it’ right?). Behind the big soviet style apartment blocks next to it I got down onto the ground and took apart my good crutches (each one came apart into two pieces). I then plunged the parts as hard as I could into the compacted pile of snow beside the doorway and covered up with some more snow to hide the handles. The snow was about 4 feet high and so I was able to completely cover up the crutches.

I took out the metal sticks from the sports bag and hobbled with them over to where 4 big bins on wheels were. I stripped off everything on the top of my body, leaving a t-shirt and then put on the upper part of the ‘street costume’ (1980’s grey disco shirt, wooly jumper, heavy coat and woolen sports hat) I then left on my own tracksuit bottoms and pulled the filthy tracksuit bottoms that I had gotten from Kostya over them, my own shoes were tattered enough to pass. I put what remained of my good clothes in the sports bag and hid it inside the bin. And I was on my way. I nervously hobbled to the city’s main center which had a big digital clock and a temperature reading high up on the outside wall.

Time and Temperature

The clock read 3.30pm and the temperature was an extremely cozy –1c. (-1c with little to no wind and no rain is very warm considering clothing is worn to accommodate lower temperatures). So far so good and vice versa. The conditions I set for myself I adhered to: I took no money, no food and no documentation with me except my hotel receipt in an inner pocket in the case of an accident. The only thing I had was a flick knife procured from Perm’s main market several weeks previous.

First 4 hours approx

What would be the first thing to do? Beg to get money so that eating at some stage would be possible.

I sat down on the wall by the statue in the center of the city. As Ladas and old but still functioning mini-busses passed by on the road in front of the footpath I was on I took the hat off my itchy head, lowered it and put myself at the mercy of the people of Kirov.

Being able to buy food would help me keep warm and would reduce the stress of this ‘mad’ endeavor. It took about 40 –60 minutes to secure 60 rubles (two dollars) from passers by. After this I hobbled down the road on the makeshift crutches stopping at different spots to beg again, adding a few more rubles to the amount each time. Due to the ice layered pavement and the flimsy sticks I was moving at the slowest most labored pace I had ever moved since developing arthritis back in 1997; to add to this the bent metal bits at the top of the sticks that acted as handles were sucking the heat out of my hands. To be crippled and homeless day in day out in a Russian winter must be a heavy burden for the soul.

Darkness was starting to fall and the temperature dropped correspondingly. The Russian’s were passing by me in droves coming from work, presumably going home to a nice warm flat or house. I was heading in the direction of the abandoned wooden shack I had seen earlier… I eventually arrived there after an unknowable amount of time had elapsed, moving slowly through the snow to the back of the building, it was pitch dark and I could barely see anything but the remains of an old fire. Suddenly I saw a cat’s head pop out of the darkness…and then I made out the outline of an old woman who was sitting with this cat on what looked like a wooden rocking chair with big blankets covering them both. Hard to tell her age, I could barely see anything really, but a closer look at her with the help of some moon light and I saw a face that was thoroughly carved up by countless bitter winters. She was still alive though. I could tell by the burnt out fire and wooden crates and general debris with clothing around that there must be a few people staying there. “Mozhno spat tut?” (Can I sleep here?)….her response was unequivocal, a sharp, piercing, sour “NET” (No). At that point I realized I would literally be on the streets all night and all the next day.

The next 4 hours approx.

After exhausting my only option for a place to sleep the rest of the night was an open event. I hobbled back in the direction I had come from. Eventually resting on the bench of a bus stop, here at the bus stop kiosk I would spend 30 precious rubles buying myself two chocolate bars. Starting to get cold and running out of options, with no accurate idea how much time had elapsed I decided that I would ride the busses for as long as I could. Each trip was 10 rubles so I could hopefully guard myself from the cold for a while. My on the spot planning impressed myself.

Having no idea where any of the busses went or when they stopped running I just got on the first one that came. To be able to sit on a soft comfortable seat in the radiant warmth was bliss. Unfortunately bliss would only last about 8 minutes before that particular bus stopped for the night and the passengers ejected. I was back on the street and down 10 rubles. Again having no clue where I was I just crossed the street and waited at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road. 15 minutes into the new journey the bus looked to my mind as if it was departing from the city and heading towards the countryside. I started to panic; icy blue pictures of freezing to death whirled into my mind, the bravado I had privately begun the project with instantly went sour and evaporated in the heat of anxiety.

The bus continued to go further into what seemed like the dark abyss, but then as if some cosmic joke had been played on me the bus started traveling back toward the city lights. That was a delicious slice of relief. And in a burst of good fortune I could see that the bus passed the train station. A train station is a Mecca for the homeless wanderer; that is if you can avoid the cops and security people whose job it is to heartlessly throw you back into the cold.

It seems I wasn’t the only one excited by the prospect of the train station. There were two other disheveled characters, presumably homeless, that had the same idea as me. These two drunken bums sat opposite me. One reminded me of my friend Fergus. The other one was completely out of his mind drunk and called out enthusiastically the name of every street we passed:

“Ulitsa Karla Marxa’ (Karl Marx Street)…raising his voice for the next one shouting: ’ULITSA ENGELSA’…, he then repeated Engels’ name; the second time with a hushed contemplative tone as if emphasizing the

importance of this particular communist hero. I was momentarily enthralled.

So the bus came to its last stop and surprise surprise the only three people left on it were me and the two bums. When you’re cold and have nowhere to go a bus is like a mobile palace. Who would ever want to get off? Unfortunately the conductor wanted us off and was telling us that we had to get off the bus. I pleaded in the words I had to be let stay on until it passed the train station again on its way to the end of the line. I had seen the ‘tour guide’ bum (the one calling out the street names) take out about 50 rubles earlier when he paid his first fair, so he had money and he asked the conductor to let him stay on until the train station and so did the other bum. The conductor agreed to let us stay on the bus as it went to its terminus as long as we paid. So we were all headed to the train station, all of us except one.

The three of us turning up to a train station was bad news for me. It meant that my chances of being able to get in and sit down without being noticed were astronomically reduced. My only shelter for the night was now in jeopardy.

So the’ tour guide’ bum stood by the doors in a drunken daze, and the other guy sat opposite me. It seems that this guy had no money for the trip to the train station. He looked me in the eyes and then made the gesture for money by rubbing his thumb against his first finger. He was obviously asking if I had 10 rubles for his fare. In a fraction of a second I weighed it all up. I did have 10 rubles and could have given it to him, but realized that if I did I would most likely be out in the freezing cold all night. Without even being conscious of it I looked him straight in the eyes and shook my head slowly. It was not a ‘sorry I don’t have it’ look, it was a ‘No, I’m not giving it to you’ look. Within minutes the conductor grabbed him from the seat and flung him out of the bus onto the street.

In the moments after I felt profoundly guilty and ashamed at my instinctual response. The words of Julio Cortazar seem appropriate: “Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.”

The next 8 hours approx

After getting off the bus I decided the best option was to wait a while before going into the train station so as I could go in by myself without the other guy and hopefully do so undetected. I wandered around the streets aimlessly. What a bizarre thing to be doing. The truth is it was quite enlightening. Temporarily stripped of your identity in a strange place, dark and cold yet still refreshing in its novelty, you see other sides to yourself. It feels as if you have a great space in which to think and just to be. Constant movement combined with squeezing my muscles and then relaxing them kept me warm and the disgusting smelly jumper that I could barely stand to put on just hours ago now felt as familiar and cozy as any item I had ever worn in my life.

Wandering around grew tiresome and cold. I slipped into the train station at about 1am, unnoticed. Big waves of euphoria rushed up and down my stiff body as I hobbled around looking for a place to sit and hopefully sleep. Within 5 minutes I was sitting down and feeling privately ecstatic. Looking to my right I could see a completely smashed bum flayed all over one of the seats. That did not make me happy and would draw the security guards attention for sure. Which it did! So occupied with trying to get him out of there and his absolutely revolutionary refusal they didn’t even see me who was sitting as still and sober and as hopefully unnoticeable as humanly possible a few seats away.

Two hours or so in and I had managed to evade detection and fall in and out of sleep several times. Next thing I see the filmmaker Jake Mobbs coming through the doors of the lobby, not a happy camper, he is laden down with gear and visibly fuming. He sits down beside me and we talk like two spies meeting to exchange documents, not looking at each other and staring ahead in slightly hushed voices.

“What are you doing here?”

Kirov, like all other cities in this mad country has totally unpredictable hotel availability. It was a weekday in a place that hasn’t seen a tourist in 500 years and still every hotel room in the city was booked up. Jake was supposed to meet me at the hotel afterwards to take photos of the after part of the project and celebrate with some vodka. Jake got up and went to the tea area up the steps. I followed him several minutes later and he bought me a tea, we sat for less than 10 minutes, this time doing away with the clandestine business. I noticed that some train passengers in the

cafeteria seemed to be gawking at the unusual sight: cool foreigner and crippled ‘down and out’ speaking English and getting on just dandily.

Jake left and I returned to my seat in the main lobby. It was very comforting to be inside, all the walking on the sticks earlier had taken its toll and I was exhausted, falling in and out of sleep and doing a lot of sitting and then sleeping minutes at a time on the hard seat I am awoken from one of these dozes: a security guard who very gently tries to persuade me to leave, pointing towards the door and then apologetically gesturing with shrugged shoulders. I nod my head. He goes away. I go back to sleep.

My beauty sleep is interrupted again. This time by two Russian cops: They want me out of the station. Problem is I can’t understand the details of what they are saying. They are not very happy with this. They want my documents. I can make that much out. Everyone in Russia needs to carry their ‘documents’ with them all the time. Walking down any street in Russia you routinely see homeless people being harassed and taken away over these ‘documents’.

In my broken Russian I tell them that I am not Russian, I am Irish. The two cops respond with confused faces. They ask me how long I have been in Russia, I tell them 6 months. which is a lie. They ask me if I can speak English and I say in simple words “no, I speak Irish” – an ingenious idea. Then on the bench to my right, this young well dressed guy pipes up and say’s that he in fact can speak English. The meeker of the cops informs him that I’m Irish. And what does this guy say? “They speak English in Ireland”. When did minding your own business go out of fashion? So the police turn back to me and before I have a chance to say anything, the meeker of the cop’s says in his best English “50 / 50”. Presumably meaning that the half the country speaks Irish the other English. I nod my head in firm agreement and he was delighted with himself.

All this diplomacy aside they still want me out of the station and presumably an answer to what an invalided Irish man is doing living homeless in their country. The main cop starts radioing to someone, asking my name and date of birth. I give them the details, the main cop then demands “Stay here, do you understand, STAY HERE”…I say “Da, da” (Yes, Yes) They head to their office to check me out, as soon as they were out of sight I grabbed the metal rods and frantically bolted through the train station and out the doors straight onto the first bus I saw. It was around the 7.30am.

The Last 8 hours

So after avoiding the cops I spent the last money I had from begging the night before: going round and round in buses until I got thrown off each one. Anything to stay out of the cold!

Sitting on one of the busses, it was some point after rush hour and people were getting on in small amounts, so the bus was about half full. One girl sat down beside me and then within moments got up and moved away. This would happen again and again. The smell must have been bad; I had been fermenting in the clothes all morning on these warm bus rides. I had become accustomed to it, the citizens had not. At points like these you realize that a homeless person occupies an entirely different class than the rest of society – a literally ‘untouchable’ class.

It must have been about 11.45 or 12 that I got off a bus that was right by the place I started the experiment the day before: the big shopping center with the clock and temperature. It was colder now, - 6c with wind which brought the temperature down a few more degrees and I could feel it.

I hobbled on the sticks down the street a bit to beg so as I could eat something, I was hungry and hadn’t had anything in 18 hours and even then that was just two chocolate bar’s. I decided to beg again so as I could eat a meal.

There was one man with workers tools in a belt around his waist. He walked briskly down the street with his friend talking animatedly. He passed an underweight stooped over hunchback type guy leaning on a flimsy metal stick, head bowed with a hat in hand asking for help.

About 12 feet ahead of me he suddenly stopped and walked back….put 60 rubles in my hat saying something along the lines of ‘its really bad today, really cold” and walked quickly away as if to escape the cold wind. I nearly cried. I think that was the first time in my life I felt love for a stranger. How could he ever know he would feature in an essay written over a year later in the middle class suburbs of a foreign country?

“Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”

– Scott Adams

Every cell in my body was silently saying ‘thank you so much man…I’m gonna buy a sandwich and a coke and have a feast’…

With the money I got from the workman I went with the excitement of a child straight across the road to the “Denar” a stand up kebab diner…I get in and hobble down the 3 steps, it’s a small type of place and there is a few people there. I go to the counter and try and ask for what I see in the sign above me. The girl is sniggering at me, eventually after her asking me if I want this or that, I just agree to the last thing she says and ask for a cold coke.  

Just as I’m relishing the kebab and about to eat it, who comes in the door? Two “bandits”. Back in 2001 in Perm, you used to see a lot of these type of characters, now not so much. Late 30’s but looked about 60, drunk at 12’ o clock in the day. Anyway the leader of the two seems to know the guy who is eating beside me and from what I can tell starts asking him about money. The guy swallows his kebab down and quickly exits out the door.

So now the main guy turns to me, the smell of drink of his breath could kill a small child. He’s a big dirty dude with thick, yellowed fingers. His buddy behind him has tattoos all over his hands and fingers, a punched in nose and scars on his face. The main guy gets real close, stares into me with eyes that are actually vibrating in his head and says “give me money for beer”…I feel like the school bully of my past has re-incarnated and tracked me down.

’aw, no’ I think to myself…’I’m not giving this guy anything’. However my vulnerability is immediately apparent. In a pathetic and powerless way I try and stand my ground: ‘I don’t have any money…I’m without home’.  This was about principal, not the few coins in my pocket.

He just keeps staring at me waiting for the money. Then I start to weigh things up, there is no reasoning with this animal whose eyes now seem to also be spinning rapidly in small circles. I take out a few coins, put them on the counter and say ‘that’s all’. He begins counting them and I very nervously take a bite out of my sandwich trying to play it cool…he turns back around to me and says “that’s not enough”…I take out more coins

and put them on the counter. I feel embarrassed for myself and humiliated then he grabs my kebab and takes a bite out of it and passes it behind him to the other guy who takes a massive bite out of it, its then passed back to me…the feast I had been looking forward to had officially ended.

Accepting the situation albeit with violent fantasies of revenge I know getting away from these characters is an immediate priority …so as the guy is finishing his counting effort I offer him some coke, he accepts my offer and as I grab my metal sticks and am about to shuffle past, he takes a gulp and hands the coke to his partner behind him who also takes a swallow. And then in one of the most amusing things I have ever witnessed they both look at each other and nod their heads in surprised satisfaction, as if they had never tasted coke with a sandwich before in their entire lives.

I left the café and was back on the street relieved to be away from these characters. I almost finished this first day and night on the streets of Russia. The last hours would be made up of uneventful wandering in the cold and finally collecting my gear and changing. En route to my clothes I passed a babushka (old lady) selling fish, I dropped the remaining roubles I had on her little table and hobbled by.

The crutches were still there in the snow where I had hidden them. I just dropped to my ass sitting in the snow outside of the block of flats and started to reassemble the crutches … my bizarre actions caught the attention of a guy who was standing a few meters away by his doorway smoking. When I got up off the ground and started moving towards the big bins to get the smelly clothes off me, he stared intently as I pulled off my coat, then jumper, and then my shirt and threw them in the bin. Then using the flick knife started to cut the tracksuit bottoms off myself. Revealing a clean pair of black tracksuit bottoms underneath, throwing the old pants into the bin I saw my bag was gone. I crutched away in just a t-shit and the tracksuit. God only knows what the spectator must have thought. I made my way back to the hotel, which was about 2 minutes from the bins. The clock read 3.45pm I had completed the task.

Conclusion

“Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking

we can get on with creating the future”.

-James Bertrand

I got back to the hotel on an incredible high, I had ‘survived’ and was perfectly fine yet had gained some small knowledge and perspective that is impossible to get any other way. I tried to walk for a day in the shoes of the homeless Russians.

Six months later, on the other side of the world I would find myself homeless for real. The period would not be 24 hours but four and a half months living out of a car, on strangers couches, sleeping on the streets a few times and within a homeless shelter (Coachella Valley Rescue Mission) for a brief period. All these experiences combined completely altered my way of thinking.

I have refrained from listing the lessons I learnt over the course of the 24 hours and leave it to the reader to imagine what they might be. The approach I have taken with this essay may seem to some as frivolous, irresponsible or too light hearted for such a ‘serious’ issue. I disagree. We need new ways of looking at old problems. From a different angle it appears that ‘The’ main problem is not homelessness or hunger, or HIV or poverty. The singular problem is human consciousness: Where we are ALL at as individuals, as societies and then as a species, whether we are homeless or not, living in underground tunnels or penthouse apartments. Community and society are reflections of the minds of each member that make them up. The world is the way it is because we accept it. Society is exactly the way it is because we accept it. We blame the whole but never inspect the parts that make up the whole. Every person has the ability to decide the way in which they will live their lives and when we decide to live our lives based on principals of love and compassion and peace there will be change across the board. Until then things will follow the same course: we will despair at all the pain and corruption in the world at the same rate that we ourselves create it.

Thanks

I want to thank the incredible artist Laura Milkins www.lauramilkins.com for producing the artwork for this essay. Jake Mobbs for his support and relentless work in making a documentary about the Love’s Bridge children, teenagers and young adults www.arussianfairytale.com Jake is hoping to finish the film by March 2010 and is seeking financial support, if you can help him please do. To Russia With Love www.torussiawithlove.ie for sponsoring my trip to Russia in late 2007 / early 2008, a trip where for so many reasons my previous ideas about how to help homeless and at risk youth changed.

A big thanks to all the Love’s Bridge crew who work tirelessly and thanklessly on the ground day in day out on the outskirts of Siberia, the western edge. This essay has been written to promote our organisation. Finally the greatest thanks goes to all those who support our work. Thank you!

-Kostya and me outside the Pushkina centre February 2008