Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

A snowy Sunday evening was the perfect time to sit and catch up with Svetlana Franzevna, whom I felt like I hadn’t seen in months. At the end of October, I had started my internship with ROOF—the Russian Orphan Opportunity Fund. It seemed that since then, she and I had only exchanged brief hellos and good-byes as I left her apartment early every morning and came home late every night.

I very much love Svetlana Franzevna. She has hosted American students in Moscow for years, dispensing advice on which Russian fairy tales to read and how often one should hang from the pull-up bar in the hallway of her apartment (“It is very good for your back,” she insists). 

A newspaper article about ROOF had been published that week, and I was eager to show it to my host. She constantly scolded me for working such long hours at my internship, and I was still having trouble explaining in Russian exactly how important my work had become to me.

Russia’s more than 700,000 orphans (according to the Russian Ministry of Education) have two things in common: dark futures and the stamp, "orphan," printed clearly in their passports. The average orphan has already fallen two years behind in his schooling by the age of 12, and the situation only worsens as he gets older. ROOF’s teachers work with students to further their academic progress and to help them enter universities, find jobs, and settle into apartments and lives on their own.

With two cups of tea and a plate of cookies in front of us, Svetlana Franzevna positioned her reading glasses on her nose. “All right, if you want me to read it,” she said, smiling.

“Under ROOF’s roof,” she read. “Your firm, right? We are an organization… set up in Moscow to give orphans a chance… children come to us who don’t even know how to read… No, you see, already I don’t believe the article.”

I looked up from my tea in disbelief. “Wha-what do you mean, you don’t believe it?” I stammered.

She sighed and looked at me. “Taylor, how can a 20-year-old not know how to read?”

Svetlana Franzevna, like most Russian people, was well practiced in the art of reading a newspaper article and picking out what parts of the text might be true, and what was most likely propaganda. My dear host had also lived most of her life in a Soviet world where, whatever it lacked, everyone learned how to read—by law.

How could I explain to her that this was not the time to be reading between the lines? That these kids, who I laugh and work with every day, live in orphanages and are virtually denied all opportunities for a good education?

“But, but it is true,” was all I managed to say. “You have to believe me. This is where I go, these are the kids I see every day.”

She gave me that warm, sad smile—the “foreign-student smile” she uses when I am trying and trying and just cannot communicate in Russian. “It’s true, there’s a very sad situation for Russian orphans today,” she admitted. “But with the way the government is run, it isn’t going to change soon. And the economy—the people of this country are simply too poor.” She got up from the kitchen table and began to water the plants on the windowsill. She sighed, “And sometimes, things like this are too hard to change.”

I smiled bitterly into the remaining tea in my cup. All that she had just said had truth. Though there are no official statistics, over one third of Russians are believed to live below the poverty line, unable to support themselves, much less someone else’s child.

But there is one more group to blame, I thought. What of those Russian people who retreat to their apartments to forget the world outside? Much like Svetlana and I were doing now, Russians often gather with friends in kitchens, relax with a cup of tea, and set about discussing the problems of the world. Yet for all their fondness of chatter, there remains much in this country that people don’t speak about. Some subjects are better left abandoned to the cold and darkness of the streets.

“Do you want another cup of tea?” Svetlana Franzevna asked me.

I stood up. “No thanks. I, uh, actually I’m going to run outside to buy a pack of gum.” I slipped the article back into my notebook before I left.

As I walked out into the snow, I looked at the bright windows in the buildings around me. I knew there was tea and friendship behind them all. I knew how pleasant it was to take refuge in the rooms behind those windows.

But there were times, like tonight, when I welcomed the cold. It was a physical reminder of the harsh realities that too many people in this country still face, and that too many others are trying to forget.