Visist to Sarkani

Sven and Glad Ljungholm reporting from a visit to Sarkani:

The Latvian headline read; Latvian pedestrian with twice lethal alcohol level killed by car while he lay in a drunken stupor on the roadside. My mind immediately raced to Sakarny.

Sakarny is the site of former Soviet military barracks abandoned in 1991 when the Russians recalled all troops subsequent to Latvia’s independence. The Latvian government adapted the barracks for use, copying a Russian model where all possible social ills are hidden from view. During Soviet times in Russia the sight impaired, deaf, and physically challenged persons were all relegated to infirmaries and institutions hidden far from cities and towns. It was the government’s clumsy attempt at hiding a less than perfect Soviet citizen, often claiming to a doubting ‘west’ that there is no missing chapter dealing with their disability history.

Some visitors to our blog may recall that during the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow, a Western journalist inquired whether the Soviet Union would participate in the first Paralympic games, scheduled to take place in Great Britain later that year. The reply from a Soviet representative was swift, firm, and puzzling: "There are no invalids in the USSR!" (Fefelov 1986).1 This apparatchik's denial of the very existence of citizens with disabilities encapsulated the politics of exclusion and social distancing that characterized disability policy under state socialism. Historically throughout the former Soviet bloc, persons with physical and mental disabilities have been stigmatized, hidden from the public, and thus made seemingly invisible (Dunn and Dunn 1989).

In Sakarny Latvian alcoholic families are hidden away from public view and their dependence distanced from the reality of Latvian society. Some thirty families many with children are housed in unheated flats with only the basic necessary pieces of furniture. There is no running water or plumbing of any kind. A tractor brings logs from the nearby forest to be used to heat the very crude make-shift furnaces. Many of the adults can’t be bothered to make the effort to collect the logs and heat their flats so the children suffer while their parents remain in a drunken stupor.

There are no shops in the settlement of six barracks, and the only items for consumption sold is bootleg liquor sold by traffickers. The children, some as young as 6 and 7, become unwitting enablers in the attempts to protect their parents as best as possible. This includes carrying them in from sub zero temperatures, cooking, and feeding them and cleaning the messes their parents make. They shield their parents’ addictions from their friends by never inviting them to visit. Such behaviors are referred to as codependence.

Sakarny has been an area of particular interest to the FSAOF since we first learned of the children’s plight. This included the need for warm winter clothing and financial support to provide school lunches. Both challenges were met and we were anxious to visit first hand to see what had transpired.

We arrived in Sakarny in our Toyota van following the Corps leaders in their Ford station wagon on a sunny Sunday, with the temperature hovering at -10. From a distance we could see the children playing in the snow. Even in the sub zero temperature it was a more desirable place to be than in the flats watching their parents in various degrees of drunkenness. However, they were comfortably dressed and warm thanks to the kindness of a great many people not least, those in Exeter who responded to the articles in the Express and Echo.

When the children spied the familiar SA station wagon they all came running waving and shouting their hellos. The Captain and his wife are more than pastors to them, they are their surrogate parents. Some of the children have been moved to nearby Skangali, a SA children’s home where they reside Monday – Friday under a special judicial ruling allowing the SA to make legal arrangements directly with the parents as to the care of the children. The Sakarny children who live with the orphans during week are jokingly referred to as missionaries as they constantly talk about Jesus, with the 23 orphans housed there. The childrens home operates a pre school programme three times a week from 9-1 where the children are provided two meals and a warm shower. One of the young girls was presented with soap and shampoo as she emtered the shower- on exiting the shower some minutes later it was noticed that neither the soap or the shampoo had been used; she had no idea what they were to be used for!

The children, who knew nothing of Glad and me hugged us warmly as if we were their family, no doubt due our uniforms with which they would be familiar. The oldest girl had all the children line up in a row as if they were siblings and named each of them for us. We then asked if we could take their photo and they promptly took their places. Then, out came ‘Babushka’ (grandmother), the mother of one of the alcoholics and who assists in caring for all of the children when they join in the Army activities arranged for them in the two rooms allocated by the local government for our use. (The SA will soon be provided additional space and it is our intent to take a work team to Sakarny in the summer of 2010 to renovate some of the flats in which the families live along with designated SA facilities.

When it came time to leave one of the boys threw himself on the ground in front of our car and the others joined in and there was soon a pile of children letting us know they didn’t want us to leave. The joy on their faces was infectious and their spirits exuded love and affection, the result of constant contact with their Christian ‘parents’. One of the young girls asked if she could pray with us before we left and, of course, we said ‘yes’. Her prayer was not (from what I understood from my limited knowledge of the Russian language) one asking for a better life, heat and comfort, regular meals … She thanked God for these visitors who had come and for all those others who had assisted in providing warm clothing and who had guaranteed that there would be a lunch served every day in school … and then she closed with a lengthy petition that God would grant Glad and Sven travelling mercies; roads clear of snow, a warm bed and smooth seas!

The army's presence and Christ's imprint on their young lives were unmistakable !

Dr. Sven Ljungholm
Former
Exeter Temple Corps, UK