Ruslan and Vitya

Friends, I have an important request for you. Before voicing it, it is necessary to explain what I have been doing lately, ”says Dmitry Markov.

(Total 7 photos)

Source: JJournal/dcim

1. In general, these are Ruslan and Vitya. Father and son, respectively.

For the first time I met them in the area of the central market of Pskov: Ruslan, like a Paralympian, was accelerating in his wheelchair, and a boy smeared in chocolate was sitting on his lap. It looked pretty juicy: I decided to find this tandem and take a picture. I found out the home address, and soon climbed into their old house, skirting the vicious yard dog along the neighbor's fence.

2. As expected, the family turned out to be unusual: the father is a physical invalid, the son is a mental invalid, a correctional worker. Mom was once in this family, but then swam away. Usually, in such cases, dads swim away, but ours is not far from sailing away with all our desire. Ruslan sat down on his butt after an injury many years ago, and then, already in a wheelchair, he lost some of his fingers in the cold. The house they lived in burned down, and now the father and son (as well as Ruslana's sister and her daughters) are renting half a house in a private sector on the outskirts of the city.

The house is emergency: without heating, sewerage, water supply and gas, but inexpensive.

3. A couple of times a week, Ruslan and Vitya go around the city markets, where kind people help with food and money. On the route, every dog knows them: taxi drivers repair the stroller, saleswomen in tents feed the child with chocolate, and formidable aunts selling pork in the market weigh the meat.

Everyone loves and respects Ruslan: for the fact that he loves his son and does not drink. The latter I checked especially carefully: I defiantly sipped cognac three times in front of Ruslan. Or five. He always refused.

4. I started to ride around the city with my family and take pictures. At the same time, I watched how the space around the wheelchair was changing.

You see, it’s one thing to have a speculative idea that it’s difficult for wheelchair users in the city, it’s another thing to lift a specific stroller with a specific peasant in a specific pit. At this moment, there are no indifferent people nearby: there are those who help, and those who condemn: “Where did he go with the child?”, “Probably drunk…”, etc. I saw a pretty girl in a Mazda, who, bulging her eyes, demanded that the carriage go around her trough through the bushes. But I also saw a guy in a suit (office suit, not sport suit) lifting a pissing man off the ground with his own hands. And yes, disabled people, it turns out, sometimes walk by themselves, not having the physical ability to go somewhere else. In general, I learned a lot of new things.

Watching these social transformations, I foresaw that this could not continue for long. A bright picture will sooner or later attract the attention of specialized services. I began to invent a social route, after passing which Ruslan, if he does not solve a number of obvious problems radically, then at least with an interference fit will fit into the basic social norms.

Ruslan was all hands in favor, and even admitted that for several months guardianship has been hunting him. I nodded understandingly, but kept silent that the day before I met with the head of the department to find out at what stage the proceedings on Ruslan's case were. The head assured that there were no grounds for restricting rights (and even more so for deprivation), although there are many dissatisfied with his driving on the highway with a child in the city. I decided that we have time to bring the situation into line.

Less than a day later, the guy was dragged from home to a shelter with a police squad.

5. In the morning Ruslan and I went to custody to rescue the child.

On the porch of the territorial administration (there were no people willing to raise Ruslan to the office) there was an unpleasant conversation about the violation of the child's rights to education: they say that the other day Viktor Ruslanovich turned seven years old, and he still does not go to school. Formally, there was no crime in this: the boy's birthday is in October, and at the beginning of the school year he was only six. But even beyond that, I had a trump card: you *** in the brains of the Pskov CSO, I asked for a social worker who would help the family pass the school medical examination.

The beginning of a long journey has been laid - as if I were hinting to sympathetic women - and by the next academic year everything will be in order.

6. Specialists made a sour face and, in general, not without reason: it would not be easy for Ruslan even with a social worker to creak in the dark across the city for a ticket to the reception, and then creak in the cold with a child in his bosom. A compromise option was to leave Vitya in the shelter until he was sent to school (in this case, the guy's examination is taken over by the workers of the shelter by proxy).

After thinking, Ruslan accepted this option. I accepted it as Victory Day - with tears in my eyes.

For three weeks, dad went to the shelter every day when he had the opportunity. The only impossibility was a broken stroller, which Ruslan welded in local garages with sympathetic men. A couple of times he was not allowed into the educator's shelter, and I had to raise the director. Once Ruslan was offered to wait two hours in the pouring rain (then I had to insert my grinders between the doors and politely ask the teacher if she hadn’t fucked for an hour?).

And today is an important day. Today there will be a PMPK, where the guy will be assigned to a correctional facility. I foresee that immediately after this, the Big State Machine for Fucking the Brain will turn on and begin to persuade the father to send his son to a boarding school for a five-day period. Meanwhile, there is some good news. The department for accounting and distribution of living space promised to consider an application for the provision of housing in a mobile fund as soon as possible. To put it in human language, the family will be given temporary housing, like victims of a fire. The question rests only on the delivery of the child to school. Theoretically, Ruslan will be able to do it himself, merrily somersaulting on city curbs. Why not: in the end, they somehow reached the market all this time.

7. And now, in fact, a request - Ruslan needs to buy a normal stroller. The current one is broken and keeps breaking. I was crazy about picking up Ruslan in the pits and dragging him across the railway crossing. Now is an important period with commissions and guardianship, it is necessary that dad arrive on time, like a bayonet, and not fall apart in the middle of the way. The price of the issue, according to the victim, 14 thousand. Well, or 15, it still depends on what is on sale in Pskov. We need money for a wheelchair and nothing more. No financial support: it is important that the family is socialized within the framework of public services and local services, and not hooked on a charity needle.

UPD. While I was sleeping, twenty flew in. It's enough. Thank you. No more. Hang up.