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| SERGEI GUNEYEV FOR TIME |
| proof of life:
Kostin helps the homeless in Odessa regain their identities and dignity |
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Posted Sunday, April 20, 2003; 14.23 BST
Sergei Kostin is a geologist, but amid the ruins of the post-Soviet economy in the early 1990s, there was no way he could find work in his field. So he started mining for humans who'd been buried alive. There are perhaps 25,000 homeless people in Kostin's hometown of Odessa (pop. 1 million), including some 5,000 street kids under the age of 16. Some are mentally ill, others have been cast adrift by drink or drugs or divorce. All of them have an advocate in Kostin, 44, a fireplug of a man whose Vandyke beard and fervor suggest a Russian revolutionary — one from back before the whole thing went sour.
In Ukraine, losing your address means losing your identity. The homeless have no right to vote, collect pensions, or qualify for whatever meager help the state can offer. In 1996 Kostin founded his organization, the Way Home, as a bridge for this growing brigade of official nonpersons. In the years since, he has had to grapple with a slew of attendant problems: soaring abuse of home-made opiates and ephedrine, child prostitution, and one of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemics in the world.
The Way Home has become an all-purpose provider for Odessa's destitute: registering more than 6,000 of them as a first step toward getting their identities back; providing food, clothes, eyeglasses, dental and doctor's appointments, train tickets and more, thanks to grants from the British, Dutch and U.S. governments. "We try to fill the holes; in our country there are many," says Kostin. He runs a carpentry workshop and a homeless newspaper, and passes out some 400 syringes a day to head off the spread of AIDS.
Odessa's criminals have a mixed reaction. "The dealers like what we're doing to fight AIDS, since the disease is wiping out their client base," says Kostin. But the Way Home's efforts to get children off the streets has angered some of the predatory pimps who enlist them in prostitution, either at home or in networks abroad. "They came around and suggested that bad things could happen to us if we didn't back off," says Kostin. "But then they went away." They could see they were dealing with a rock.
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