Scots Photographer on Street Children in Odessa
By Annie Brown
www.dailyrecord.co.uk, July 10, 2010
As morning breaks in the townhouse in Marshal Zhukov Street, curtains are pulled open, mothers make breakfast and coax their children to wrap up for school.
Below the flats, a parallel life stirs, in an underground world, through a ventilation vent less than 2ft by 2ft.
In the searing images taken by Scots photographer David Gillanders there is a glimpse into this hidden place, where the street children of Ukraine live in feral desolation, beneath the contempt of society.
For almost eight years, he has visited the street children of Odessa, cataloguing their struggle and immersing himself in their wretched world.
He said: "I wanted to understand what happens to the children as well as photograph them.
"And the only way I can do that is by going back to see them and spending time with them."
There are an estimated 4000 homeless children in Odessa, an elegant, grand city which sits on the Black Sea.
By returning over the years and often photographing the same children, there is a painful continuity to his work.
Each time he went back, another few children had died, others had regressed, ravaged by malnutrition, drugs and despair.
A stark example was a boy called Vova.
Vova had lived on the streets with his homeless parents until, one day, when he was six, he woke up on the beach with his mother lying dead against his shoulder.
In David's shot of Vova from 2006, when he was nine, the little boy had been playing in the fountain of the Odessa theatre and he almost bursts out of the photograph with excitement.
Then, he was living with other boys, sheltering at night under market stalls.
When David, 39, returned to Odessa this year, Vova was among those he found living under the townhouse but he didn't recognise him at first.
He had been transformed from the mischievous rag-tag kid to a morose teenager, so brain damaged by drugs that he struggled to say his own name.
Vova is in the advanced stages of TB and like the majority of street children has HIV.
In the pictures taken in March this year, Vova the child has been lost behind dead eyes.
In March, he had recognised David but had said nothing.
David said: "I think he was ashamed of how bad he looked.
"It was horrible to see him like that. I got the impression that he just wanted to die."
To access the children, David had to squeeze through the tiny vent, which was excruciatingly small for his adult frame.
He said: "It filled me with horror going in there. As I started to ease myself in, I realised how tight it was on my chest and it dawned on me that even if I got in, I might not get out."
As he wriggled through, his head touched a pipe a couple of feet in - and he dropped in to the thick darkness. Using a cigarette lighter, he could see there was an underground labyrinth of compartments, separated from each other by the foundations and water pipes of the apartment block.
Underfoot was a squelching mixture of mud, debris and faeces.
A few yards in was the dismal glow of a light bulb and under it six youngsters sat, dishevelled and listless.
A pungent smell of unwashed children and human waste travelled to the pit of David's stomach. In the corner was the decaying corpse of a dead dog. The children keep dogs and cats for companionship and warmth and, when they die, they leave them where they lie.
David said: "If I close my eyes, I can still get a sense of that smell."
The oldest of the kids, Vadim, 19, and his girlfriend Sveta, 16, took charge.
All of them inject an adrenalinpacked nasal decongestant they grind and mix with water.
The hit lasts barely a minute before they plummet into a dark, stupefying low.
They inject 25 or 30 times a day. The children are covered in abscesses and they cry with frustration when they can't find a vein for their syringe needles.
The drug causes brain aneurisms and attacks the central nervous system, slowing their speech and contorting their young limbs.
When they can't walk, they can't contribute to the group and they are abandoned to die. The kids had to push one dead child through the vent so his body could be picked up from the pavement. Street children can't afford the luxury of sentimentality.
Yet Sveta tried her best to be maternal, sweeping and tidying, knowing it was a wasted effort.
In one photograph, she lies back, her head against another child wrapped in a blanket.
She is reading a magazine found in a bin. She escapes into its glossy pages of relationship advice, celebrity gossip and adverts.
Her fingernails are black with dirt but she does her best to brush the lice from her hair as she washes in the water from a leaking pipe.
She and Vadim are a couple prone to explosive rsts and moments of great s and it is clear they are each other's only comfort.
David spent two nights staying in the basement and he never felt threatened.
When he lost an expensive piece o camera equipment, he assumed it would be quickly sold for drugs. But the next day, Sveta returned it to him, having retrieved it from the floor.
Thieving is the only way they can earn enough for their drugs, alcohol and food, so they break into cars and sell pieces of scrap metal they scavenge from bins.
A food staple is cheap bread, smothered in mayonnaise and, on the odd occasion, a little meat.
By now, the children will already have moved from this basement because transience is a necessity in a country where no one wants them.
The kids choose to stay in dank basements and stinking sewers because they can stay hidden there.
Their underground world also provides much-needed warmth in a country where the temperature can plummet to -20C in winter.
Outside, the police beat them and steal from them, and workmen will board up the ventilation ducts, regardless of whether or not children are sleeping inside.
In 2002, when David first met the children, he had been on a project charting the movement of heroin through Russia and had travelled to Odessa because it is a major drug port.
He was introduced to the children through The Way Home, one of the few charities which helps them.
Near the famous Potemkin steps, a tourist hotspot, about 25 children were living in a derelict shed while, just a few yards away, foreigners sipped beer in cafes on the elegant tree-lined boulevards. David said: "I couldn't fathom it - that in such an open and affluent place, there was this life going on underground .
"It was the most horrifying, pitiful existence I had ever witnessed in my life."
Over the years, he has photographed the children many times - and the pictures are the only "footprint" that remains of them.
David became so emotionally embroiled, he found himself returning sometimes two or three times a year, until he realised that he would have to pull back.
His return this year was the first in more than three years.
He said: "It got to the stage where I was starting to get really bitter about it. I was angry and I had to stay away for a while."
A photograph of one street child, Yana, won UNICEF Photograph of the Year. It captured the 13-year-old only five days before she froze to death in the snow.
In his heart, David hoped his images would bring about change but the world has closed its eyes to the plight of the street children .
He added: "It is tragic, absolutely tragic. When I first started to take pictures of children living like that, I knew that I wasn't going to change the world.
"But I did think something would happen - that it would improve. It didn't."
