2025-03-31
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go to theguardian.com longread Holidays in Hell Summer Camp with Russia's Forgotten Children by Howard Amos Read by Harry Lloyd in The summer of 2007 I joined a group of 30 Russian and English students to work on a month long summer camp at a state orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children in the Pskof region south of St.
Petersburg.
We lived in a house nearby or in tents pitched in the garden.
Every day we walked up to the orphanage to put on developmental activities,
sporting events, solve puzzles, play games, stage shows and go on camping trips.
I volunteered at the orphanage in the village of Beske Oustier for almost a decade,
but it was the first visit that made the biggest impression I had seen Nothing like it.
My closest reference point was probably workhouses or orphanages from a Charles Dickens novel.
I vividly remember the smells, cooked food, unwashed bodies, chlorine and urine,
and how the children crowded you, grabbing hands and clothes,
pinching, pulling hair, jostling and asking questions.
Dressed in an odd collection of what seemed to be adult cast offs,
the kids spent most of their waking hours in rooms furnished with just a few scuffed tables and chairs,
a bookcase and television.
At night and for long periods during the day,
cast iron metal grills across corridors were locked,