Human rights calendar

A couple of months ago, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Ukraine team, together with the Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for Human Rights, came up with a great idea - to create an annual photo calendar on human rights, where each month of this calendar is dedicated to some specific right - for example, protection of personal data, the right to access to public information, protection of rights of refugees, children, national minorities and the equality of the rights of men and women.

Lviv Independence Day

This will be a post of love for the city of the lion. Of all the cities, it was Lviv that conquered me on this holiday. When it was still “not fashionable” to wear embroidered shirt on weekdays, they did not pay attention to it here. On Independence Day, Lviv becomes especially magnificent and elegant.

My first visit to the 4th profile boarding school

I visited many boarding schools and hospitals for the mentally ill, during this time I saw a large number of wards - in different conditions, mostly oppressive and inhuman. But there are times when you leave the boarding school shocked not at all by the conditions of people's stay (on the contrary, the institution is extremely neat and clean), but by their deprivation. What is even sadder is when they are children.

Why do these people live?

After the publication of the last post about how the wards live in the psycho-neurological boarding homes, I was asked a lot of questions in private messages. These are some of them: “Why are they like this?”, “Are they stupid?”, “Can they think and talk?”, “Why don’t their parents take them?”, “Do they know where they are?”, “They can be cured or will they remain so for the rest of their lives?”, “Why do they live?”. These questions are a consequence of the policy of total closeness of the boarding and psychiatric system from the life of society. In developed countries, they have long ago understood that the best solution for such people is to include them in the life of society as much as possible, so the sight of a person with a physical or mental disability on the streets of European countries has not surprised anyone for a long time, this is treated as a common occurrence. We have a tradition of hiding "not like that" away from the eyes of people - unfortunately, it turned out to be surprisingly tenacious.