The “House of the Deaf-Blind” near Moscow adapted children from boarding schools to ordinary life

by time news

People have almost no hearing and vision, but they study and work. Thus, the “House of the Deaf and Blind” in the village of Puchkovo near Moscow has made the impossible possible: its guests do not stand with outstretched hands and do not live in boarding schools. They settle in mini-communes in escort houses and make life around them better.

Cheesecakes with raisins

At the elevator on the 13th floor there is a window with a lambrequin and a winter garden with lush greenery at the elevator.

– The neighbors came up with, – one of the six hostesses of the escort house, 23-year-old Anastasia Kungurtseva, points to the garden, – and we rent an apartment from our volunteer and take care of the garden.

Nastya calls to the house. At the stove in the kitchen, where cheesecakes with raisins are puffing in a pan, the girls are waiting for us – Valeria Vereneva, Tatyana Boyko, Margarita, Lena and Svetlana. “May I have no names?” – embarrassedly ask three of them. Nastya Kungurtseva from Perm, Sveta from Samara, and two more are graduates of the Sergiev Posad Orphanage for the Deaf and Blind. Rita has a “difficult” family, and she lived with her grandmother in Kolomna, near Moscow, until she found out about the “curiosity” – the house for accompanying the deaf-blind. “This is a place where we have everything, just like you,” Rita shares.

Girls have hearing and vision impairments. Psychologists call this form of disability “an astronaut in a spacesuit”: we do not hear him, he does not hear us, the “cosmonaut” has a clear mind and reason, but he sees as if through a cloudy glass.

– I graduated from an agricultural college in Perm, then a university and became a landscape designer, until my eyesight fell, – says Nastya. – Now I’m going to study psychology in order to teach domestic rehabilitation in deaf-blind homes.

The girl has the skills of a hostess and competent speech. “Oh, while I was talking, the syrniki burned,” Nastya holds her assistant Leroux by the hand. She silently jokes in sign language: “We’ll eat it ourselves.” By the lips I guess the “translation” of their finger communication and I take the cheesecake: “Well, no, mine.” I chew, and Lera and Nastya laugh happily. At first glance, it’s impossible to understand that they have two hearing aids for each and “tunnel” vision: this is when it is lost by 50-70 percent and does not give clarity and visibility. I don’t understand how they cook cheesecakes at the same time. Lera artlessly “finishes off”: “And I work in a cafe.”

– By whom? – breaks out involuntarily.

The girls laugh again. “Calm them down,” Lera asks Nastya in sign language, “I pack fish and breed nearby, if there is no one.” “For a very competitive salary,” adds Nastya, “plus a pension. You can live.”

Sveta irons clothes in the laundry room, Lena makes cheese at the cheese factory, Rita draws and sews. Up to 24,000 people subscribe to her and her colleagues’ aprons, candles, ceramics and gift wrapping on the website of the House of the Deaf-Blind. And three years ago, Rita could not do anything. In classes with a psychologist, she, 19-year-old, said: “I am children.” Now, barely audible, but firmly repeats: “I’m an adult.”

The implant pressed with pain in the ears and did not give hearing, it turned out – it was not tuned

Tanya Boyko came to the escort house with a dream to remove the implant. He pressed with pain in his ears and did not give hearing, it turned out – he was not in the mood. Yesterday, for the first time, Tanya heard Lena laughing and how the door creaked. “I thought it was a new noise in my head,” she is embarrassed, “and this is music.” Now she wants, like girls, to work. Also, like Lera, to study at an Orthodox gymnasium and prepare for the exam: Lera goes to college. She wants to be… a photographer.

Artel in a spacesuit

Out of confusion, I change the subject:

– And who do you have on the “Swedish” stairs? – She occupied part of the hallway.

– We dry clothes on it, – Nastya Kungurtseva laughs, – we got it from the owner. Better ask, how do employers tolerate us?

And then the girls simply “attacked” the sign language interpreter Nastya with a request to voice their versions of life among the sighted and hearing. They find work through the “House of the Deaf and Blind”, and at first they “train” in it – some in the kitchen, some in the courses of cutting and sewing, ceramics, some in a computer class or in a massage center. These are steps from the “suit” into the space of people. Favorite steps-toys are classes with blind coaches with university diplomas – Nikolai Khludov and Evgenia Lagunina. With the help of an adapted Braille console for a computer, Nikolay teaches how to surf the Internet and use a smartphone, often built into the ear. Girls are girls: turn on the video call and use gestures to say “incessantly.” “Zhenya will teach anyone how to handle a computer like with a toy,” Lera jokes, “and when we tell employers that you’re on the wrong side of things, they’re surprised.”

The girls are delicately silent: they do not always take them to work.

– Employers are afraid to hire a person with a disability, – admits the executive director of the “House of the Deaf-Blind” Elvira Parfenova, – but we are lucky, we find those who take risks that give a good employee.

We are going to an online store where Kolya Kolzukov works as a picker under an official contract. He is a resident of the “House”, but five minutes before the new resident of the second escort house, which is about to open. The guy has a separate “office”-warehouse-hardware. Not so long ago, he did not understand what money is and how to count it, how to live on his own and go to work, but now he is imprisoned for self-expression and is dissatisfied: he has an urgent online order, and guests ask to show the registration procedure, which takes time.

– He is like that, – later the owner of the online store Alexander Piven will say, – everything is on the shelves. True, this is my third worker from the “House”. Not everyone pulls, but the thing is this: if it doesn’t work, you need to switch the person to something else. I myself am a disabled person of the second group, so such hard workers do not scare me. The main thing here is without extremes – not to get angry, not to spread rot and not to be sloppy.

House of the deaf. Computer literacy teacher Evgenia Lagunina will teach anyone how to handle a computer like a toy. Photo: Arkady Kolybalov

He pushed around without a job until he opened his own business. He took up “the tug insolently”: by chance I read a phrase from Blessed Augustine, from which a chill went down the back: “To be angry is like taking poison and waiting for another to die from it.” Understood: about him. I started to erase bad memories by working alone, but I realized that the team can do more. But in it he, the employer, was angry, as they were angry with him.

– You can’t call me meek, but people like him, – Piven nods at Kolya Kolzukov, he lays out fabrics in the distance, – they humbled me. Next to them, you quickly realize that there are no perfect people, everyone has vices, just someone is their slave, and someone does not give up. We or people like Kolya feel them. Light comes from them.

Guides and stalkers

Kolya has a housewarming party soon. From the training “suit” of the “House of the Deaf-Blind” he moves to “live in freedom” – to a new escort home with 15 young men and women. Kolya goes to the cottage to collect furniture and clean the yard. When he climbed to the third floor, the needles around and the view of the sky caught on. He understood: it came true.

– This is an ordinary miracle, made by himself, – shares the founder of the “House of the Deaf-Blind”, rector of the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Puchkovo Lev Arshakyan. – It’s a miracle how in spite of everything a protest to “living out” in neuropsychiatric boarding schools takes root in a person. I don’t know how that very miracle “turns on” when a person finds the will and strength to swim against the current. For the first time I saw this miracle on the Jordan River, where a blind pilgrim received her sight. She did not see the way we did, but she saw the light and no longer wanted to live as before.

While still in the Holy Land, Arshakyan met Sergei Sirotkin, a participant in the “Zagorsk experiment” of the 70s, one of four students without hearing or vision, who graduated with honors from Moscow State University and became a candidate of philosophical sciences and one of the founders of the “House of the Deaf-Blind”. His work is continued by his widow Nadezhda Golovan, a deaf-blind actress, and priest Lev Arshakyan.

– I know one thing, they, – Father Leo points towards the computer class where the classes are going, – are closer to God than we are. Otherwise, how to explain that our Nebi without hearing and sight, I call him Nikola of Dagestan, fell from the rocks, but he did not have a scratch? He lived as if he were out of town: alone in a house in a mountain village in winter he melted snow to drink tea, but still we …

Nebi did not find time to meet with us. After work, he is a massage therapist, to whom the queue, went to the library. “Read,” Father Leo says, seeing our numbness, quietly closing his eyes. “He once said that books helped him not to confuse happiness with joy. He says: “Joy comes and goes, and happiness is found peace. It keeps us from comparing ourselves with others, because comparison leads to envy and jealousy.”

That’s how Nebi became our guide between happiness and jealousy. And after all, try to go through the inevitability of sparking spiritually deaf people with deaf people. Passed and spent – a guide, lost – a stalker.

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