The Big Family
After tearing around the country for two months, at the end of my stay in Ukraine this spring I settled for just over a fortnight at Big Family, a free shelter for disabled elderly people in Kharkiv.
I’d volunteered at Big Family before, at a particularly ‘interesting’ time – just when the Russians were making their incursion into the oblast in May 2024. They are still occupying some settlements in the north of the region but not near enough to Kharkiv city to attack it with artillery, which was the big fear then. They continue to batter the city with drones and guided bombs, as per my last post.
Big Family currently has just over forty residents, though that number fluctuates. The nature of the shelter is of course such that residents sometimes pass away; others are more fortunate and are able to go home with family once, for example, they have recovered enough from a stroke to no longer be bedridden. There are three shifts of extremely hardworking staff who work for 24-hours, one day on, two days off; a couple of equally heroic day cleaners; two nurses on alternating shifts. This is enough to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met; and the food is extremely good, providing you don’t mind it all be geared towards diners with no teeth.
Also, an American volunteer rehabilitation specialist, Christian, who has been living in since the early days of the full-scale invasion, plus a revolving cast of assistant volunteers, including me.
As Christian says, all the volunteers bring their own particular skills and interests to the job: everything from manicures to chopping firewood. I decided that this time around I was going to stick my nose into everyone’s business.
That doesn’t sound like a great contribution to the life of the shelter, but an ongoing problem for Christian and other foreigners who live in as volunteers, or in some case are residents of Kharkiv and help out long term, is of course language. Christian has learned some Ukrainian and Russian, but he’s not that confident. In any case, as he sees it, a smile, a laugh or holding someones’s hand is at times even more powerful than verbal communication, especially when the latter is limited by a language barrier.
Still, it’s good to use a person’s name, and most of the foreign contingent only volunteer for three weeks at a time, meaning it’s hard to learn and retain more than a few names, even if you ask repeatedly.
But there is now an English-language list of residents! One of the nurses gave me the Ukrainian list and we went around making sure I was associating the right names with the right people. Westerners approaching the question of first names may not realise that they are slightly different in Ukrainian and Russian, and the person they belong to may answer to or indeed use both versions.
For example, one room is inhabited by Tetiana and Tania. Those are the Ukrainian versions of their names – the Russian versions would be Tatyana and Tanya. Unsuspecting foreigners may further be unaware that Tania is actually the diminutive form of Tetiana, so sometimes the locals call Tania Tetiana, and Tetiana Tania.
Oh, and there are far fewer common given names in Ukrainian and Russian than there are in the West. So there are currently six women called Valia at Big Family. The three LiuDas are distinct from the two LiuBas… and none of those are actually given names, they’re all short forms but you can work out what the person’s given name because Liuda is always short for Liudmila, and Liuba is short for Liubov. And Shura is short for Oleksandr (Alexandr in Russian). OBVIOUSLY. Why do foreigners get so confused?
Well, hopefully we will be slightly less confused now there is a list. Christian says he will keep it up to date with new arrivals.
Addressing people respectfully is important, particularly when life (or Russia) has done its best to strip away their dignity. I also tell other foreign volunteers the importance of addressing elderly residents with the respectful ‘vy’ rather than the informal ‘ty’ (like ‘vous’ and ‘tu’ in French). The staff all use ‘ty’ because they’re on close personal terms, but those residents I’ve asked were firmly keen on volunteers using ‘vy’.
I tried to speak to everyone directly as well. Christian is happy to work with anyone who is willing, on whatever kind of physical therapy will benefit them: that might be helping someone re-learn to walk after a hip fracture, or strengthen an arm weakened by a stroke through exercises with elastic strips, or just massage. About a third of the patients are keen for help of one kind or another, a third don’t have issues that would benefit from help, and a third are detached from the process in one way or another. During my previous two weeks of volunteering I helped Christian connect with the residents more closely by interpreting for them and their visiting relatives; this time I did the same thing but I also tried to find out if anyone was keeping quiet out of shyness and help the quieter people connect with Christian if they wanted to.
In the event I didn’t discover anyone who was secretly longing for rehabilitation therapy … but Christian and I did prompt one old lady who had been at the centre for a month and barely even spoken to her roommates to suddenly open up. Quite a lot of crying later, she was, to put it in anonymously vague terms, able to access peer support in a way she hadn’t before.
My Russian is still far from perfect. I can now understand an increasing amount of Ukrainian, but it’s well behind my Russian. This is always a challenge. And at Big Family interlocutors are variously (very) hard of hearing, blind, confused, distressed by their circumstances, slurring badly because of post-stroke facial paralysis and/or speaking local dialects rather than ‘pure’ Russian or Ukrainian. Distressingly often I simply have to nod and smile. And sometimes that is still helpful, if part of the reason I can’t understand the person is because they are confused. But I will occasionally sidle up to a less confused resident and check in with them that their friend is not trying to tell me something important that I’m missing.
You might have noticed that one of the shelter residents looks remarkably sprightly. Svita is in her thirties and suffers from what is probably cerebral palsy, though she’s never been formally diagnosed.
Big Family is not always a jolly place. There are people with desperately sad stories, and being gawped at by a Westerner, even one who understands the words they’re speaking, isn’t going to fix that. You’re eighty-five, frail and destitute, your house was destroyed by a missile and your family are scattered or dead? There is no shining future.
But you can get a warm, clean bed, excellent (if squishy) food, and a sunny garden full of ducks, hens and dogs. Residents sleep two or three to a room, and for some that’s a comfort, as they lived half their lives in the Soviet Union where it was entirely normal. Facilities such as the bathrooms are gradually being upgraded to provide full disabled access. Though as with most causes in Ukraine, donations are dwindling. Through the War (of which Big Family is the most significant part) has a GoFundMe. Olha is doing her best to keep the plates spinning.
And if you ask me, Big Family is home to the finest babusias (old ladies) in Ukraine, bar none. Meet Tetiana: I can only dream of writing a blog post as eloquent as her expression here.
Tetiana ♥️
Tetiana and you, two lovely faces with stories behind those eyes!
I quite agree with the residents about their preference for "vy" rather than "ty". Over here, patients in hospitals are commonly called "tu" and their first names by any nurse, with whom they are not acquainted: especially the elderly and the emergency cases. It is a form of fake affection, masking the radical disrespect patients suffer from those who have power over them in the day-to-day management of their needs. Even then, I have only to get a glimpse of the world news to see much, much worse forms of disrespect being commonly practised...