Tbilisi Diary

Iris Neva accompanies a newly-single mother to a kindergarten for handicapped children

On another rainy day in Tbilisi, meeting up with Lena is like dispersing the clouds and making the sun shine just for today. Even when Lena is in the throes of divorce, her smile beams unbroken.

Together we go to pick up her son from kindergarten. Chachia has got used to me and as soon as he sees me, runs towards me and falls into my arms. "Iris, what's your name?" he keeps asking me rhetorically—repeating the few words he's mastered in his mother tongue. I know the phenomenon from my own brother who is similarly mentally handicapped and always keeps saying the same things, sometimes to comical effect. For example when Chachia calls me to catch up when I'm lagging behind for some reason, he does so with the words “idi detka!”— "come on baby!"

Before I 'come on,' I'm actually here to chat with the staff a bit. I find out that this is one of only a handful of kindergartens of its kind in Tbilisi. Since there are only about nine kids enrolled here, this obviously means that the majority of handicapped children spend their days entirely at home.

The state does not even award a symbolical sum of money to parents of such children, so at this institution each child's family is invited to pay as much as is possible at all for them, generally between GEL 70–90 per month. In practice this covers only food, so the employees work on what can be considered a voluntary basis (they receive GEL 20 per month as a salary).

Foreigners don’t visit this place every day, and the kids soon group around me, curiously eyeing my every movement. A little blond girl with Down syndrome has taken to hanging on my arm no matter where I'm going. I smile back at her and strike her hair and maybe I should have been a bit more circumspect when asking “Does she speak?” because the answer comes back harshly: "I also know French,” she snaps.

The lady who is showing me around is a speech therapist. There is also an orthopedist, but most specialists have left. "Up until two years ago UNICEF ran this kindergarten, and everyone here is much nostalgic for those times,” she tells me. UNICEF stayed for five or six years, provided excellent equipment and even brought some of their own personnel who could share their European training with the local workers. The food, too, was good; they even had money for sour cream in the kids’ soup, I am told.

But after UNICEF's contract finished, they took their equipment with them and because the salaries that could be paid out dropped enormously, most of the local workers left.

At that moment it was actually Lena who jumped at the task of trying to get some funds raised. She looked up foreign companies on the internet. In order for it not to look like spam she had to write to every single firm separately.

"How many did you try, like, twenty?" I ask. "No, a lot more," she clicks her tongue. "Like, sixty, seventy, a hundred?"—"Nooo,” she shakes her head, "more than 150 for sure!" One single company, an insurance firm from Vienna, answered and subsequently sent money.

But when the cash finally arrived, most went into the pockets of the staff at the kindergarten, rather than benefiting the kids in any way. "Who exactly did this?" I ask, incredulously. "Everyone there, like the lady you just spoke to… Yes, they take what is meant for the kids—but how are these people themselves supposed to survive?" Lena adds, understandingly. "You know, if they don't do this work, no one else is going to do it."

As someone who has worked for the British disability organization Scope—whose president is awarded a salary that has nothing to envy of that of a manager of a commercial establishment—I opine that, anyway, in some cases, what is called corruption here, in the West is simply integrated into the system in a way that is not visible to the eye at first sight. As I inform Lena about my resigned outlook on the world, Chachia suddenly demands all her attention, tugging at her sleeve: "Are we going to see mamiko [Dad]?"—"No, we go to Sveta's house,” the mother has to dash the boy's hopes.

When I first got to know this kid, he could never get enough from Sveta, his grandma, but now, of course, as Lena moved out of her husband’s house, things have sadly changed for him. "Ya khochu mamiko!” he cries.