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RELEASE ON RECEIPT
December 10, 1998
Three Oberlin College Students and Professor to Volunteer at Russian Orphanage Winter Term
Media Contact: Marci Janas
OBERLIN, OHIO--Three Oberlin College students and an Oberlin professor will travel to Russia next month to spend the College's Winter Term volunteering at an orphanage.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian James Morgan, who has volunteered at the Tuzha Internat, or orphanage, nearly every year since 1993, will be accompanied by three Oberlin College seniors. The students are: Andrea Boehland, a neuroscience major from Duluth, Minn.; Amy Paris, an English major from Lynnfield, Mass.; and Wesley Steele, a Russian major from Greencastle, Ind. They will serve as teachers' aides and help to arrange activities for the children, but on a more profound level, as one of them says, they will be fostering "good relationships."
Tuzha is located in the Kirov Region, approximately 800 kilometers from Moscow. The Internat is more combined foster home and boarding school than actual orphanage, Morgan says. The nearly 120 children who live and go to school there, ranging in age from 7 to 18, are "not necessarily without parents." For a variety of reasons, he reports, the childrens' parents are unable to care for them. "Some are in jail, some are alcoholic, some are in hospital, some have been judged unfit," he says. All of these factors, he adds, are linked in one way or another to Russia's hobbled economy.
Last month, The New York Times reported that a study done by the Russian State Statistical Bureau, Goskomstat, indicates that more than 44 million of Russia's 148 million people, almost one in three, live below a poverty level defined as less than $32 a month. The Goskomstat data also revealed that 8.4 million Russians are without jobs.
Russia's children have been especially hard hit by these economic indicators. Two million Russian children lack families, and only about 650,000 of them live in orphanages. The rest "survive in cellars, attics, abandoned houses and in larger cities by seeking shelter from cold in sewer systems," says The Times.
Funding for the trip, which is being sponsored by the Oberlin College Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies [OCREECAS] in conjunction with the Winter Term Committee, has been made possible by OCREECAS. A recent $750,000 gift from the Clowes Foundation was designated specifically to endow OCREECAS. Edith Clowes, a 1973 graduate of Oberlin, and the Foundation connected to her family "were excited to open the Center with a focus on service and volunteer work," says Morgan. "This project dovetails with that goal rather nicely."
National and local interest in the trip is growing. A local dentist has donated extra children's toothbrushes. A church near Boston is helping to coordinate contributions of clothing and money, and Steele has contacted a drug distribution company in Indianapolis that, he says, "seems willing to help out, collecting samples from different pharmaceutical companies. They can do that for us, but they can't give us the medicine directly; they have to sign it over to a transportation company which then ships the medicine to Russia." He received one quote of $9,000 for transporting the medicine.
Clothing and medicine are, says Morgan, are the Internat's most pressing humanitarian needs right now.