Name of Organization �- The Public Organization �Spring� presents a project on working with the elderly. We need help very much, because we survive at personal expenses only, there isn�t financing.

The purpose of the project �is Creating a Family Elderly Home for the lonely, unable for self-service due to elderly age and illnesses.

Mission � Providing all day care including medical treatment, meals and dieting, visiting church services and the policlinics, communicating, etc. Providing conditions for the elderly to feel at home.

The project�s guide � Kolesnikova Zinaida Ivanovna, secondary pedagogical education, a Drawing teacher, a decorator artist, an educator of a Family Children�s Home from 1988 till 2004.

Partners and Participants - Parish Council of Assumption of Saint Virgin Church in Olonets

Problem description, it�s urgency � One can understand the necessity of founding different elderly homes � small, family-like, where the old could live the rest of their days and feel at home to some extent as well, which is very important when you are old and helpless to face the fear of death and loneliness. The existing boarding elderly homes network, when a home provides care for, as a rule, hundreds of the elderly, doesn�t allow to pay enough sincere interest to everyone. It�s especially hard for the elderly, strangers to each other, to be forced to live together. A Family Elderly Home can lessen the number of patients, sharing a room, up to one and up to five in the center.

Problem � Three patients (76, 85, 88 years old) and a disabled woman� live in the FEH �Spring� at present. They are seriously ill. A� 81-year-old senior citizen lives in� his apartment. He needs all day care, which we provide as far as possible. Due to the insufficient living conditions we can�t receive him in our Home. We�ve done much work for the year of our functioning: built a bath-house, stocked firewood, partly repaired the premises, granted on free of charge lease by Assumption of Saint Virgin Church in Olonets. There is much more to be done: we have no running water, no sewerage system, we need more stoves, we should make the premises comfortable and warm in winter, fix the car, which we have bought for our purposes. The old need a lot. We have no other vehicle to get to the policlinics or to the church. Our patients need our �Spring�, but it�s so difficult for us to survive.

Resources � the premises (for the FEH), a bath-house, a car VAS, a plot (500 square meters)

Expenses demanded � construction of a wooden pavement to the sauna for wheelchairs (2 cubic meters of edged board), 80 square meters of linoleum, 50 wooden fibre sheets, 30 wallpaper carpets, strips of carpets, night tables, mattresses, covers, bedding, desk lamps, expenses on volunteers (sawing up, chopping firewood), salaries for consulting physicians, volunteers, the project�s guide.

Results anticipated � Quantitative: provide care and attention for 5 patients, train 5 volunteers to care for the elderly, train two massage specialists to treat the elderly, involve 4 consulting physicians. Qualitative: provide care and attention for the elderly with the help of volunteers, overcome fear of death and loneliness, help the elderly to communicate, provide with medical care, carry out medical consultations with specialists (a dentist, a physician) once a week.

From the FEH �Spring� regulations �

Objectives � care, meals, medical care for the lonely elderly, charity help for the poor.

The FEH �Spring� provides with the following activities:

�                    meals for the patients considering diets

�                    24 hour stay in the center

�                    providing medical control, carrying out all the necessary medical treatment

�                    keeping a plot

�                    carrying out other activities to fulfill the objectives in accordance with the legislation and the regulations

Founders of the FEH �Spring� �

Means and property � the source of forming the property of the FEH in pecuniary or other forms;

�                    volunteer property donations and payments

�                    economical activity profit

�                    dividends from shares, bonds, other securities, deposits belonging to the FEH

�                    other legal receipt

In any state, in any times there has always been a certain percent of restless people among the rest ones living their simple lives. And the percent was always little: and nevertheless, the restless existed. They invented a primus and a nuclear reactor, discovered Australia and infinity of a human soul. They are both an inferiority complex and megalomania of the mankind, the ones who happened to change the world a little or a lot. The attitude towards them has always been different, especially to those who acted in a moral way. The people around are puzzled � why? Could it be that they do it to feel more important? �Individual sin doesn�t exist�-said great Dostoevsky and hundreds of suspicious and sparkling human eyes are always fixed on the one who is unexpectedly going to atone for our common sin.

That�s why, when morality, being an abstract notion, turns into a certain every day deed, it always becomes extremely painful. And, maybe, it�s due not only to the notorious human indifference, but also to their quite excusable caution.

The caution doesn�t fade year after year. In 1989 Zinaida Ivanovna Kolesnikova, a painter from a town of Olonets, which is not far from the Ladoga shore in Karelia, adopted eight kids, having her own five children and founded the Family Children�s Home (FCH). The people around were greatly surprised. And she herself, after all, thought sometimes: what had made her take a decisive step, when her love for children started to mean more than a wish of any normal person not to attract idle attention?

The woman managed to make her noble dream come true thanks to her endless labour and superhuman persistence.

In spite of the fact, that all the adopted children were vastly psychically and physically retarded

(for example, a six-year-old child could not talk) � soon they could not be differed from the happy children of their age, who were surrounded by care of their own parents.

The sluggishness of the local authorities was eventually broken. The FCH was provided with two extra apartments. Zinaida Ivanovna and her husband Victor Grigorjevich, a priest, were given� fixed pays as educators. The time passed, the children grew up, separated: some study, some work, many have their families. In 2004 the last child came of age and the FCH was closed.

It seemed to be the time for Zinaida Ivanovna to return to ordinary life. That�s the way how a human being is arranged, that one is no more able to do the work in which many others are involved, having tasted once the passion for unusual and noble, the passion for ONE�S mission. A restless soul asks for a new mission.

It�s simply to find it - as we know, there are loads of the homeless asking for support and deprived of common possibility to survive. But to fulfill it befittingly�

A new project of Zinaida Ivanovna presented a foundation of a small� home for the elderly � also family-like. The undertaking has been really unprecedented in Russia so far. Actually, there is one or two comfortable private elderly homes in Moscow. The elderly are provided with home care and their wealthy relatives pay a lot for it. It�s clear that the idea can�t be fulfilled in a small and poor Olonets. �Paid charity� could hardly be the right way for Zinaida Ivanovna.

No, she decided to organize a small center with an individual approach, having a pay scheme borrowed from state homes, when a center gets 75 percent of the pensions. Here the elderly could feel at home, which is very important at such an age, when they helplessly face the fear of death and isolation. In other words, not to survive but to live.

Of course, a huge existing boarding houses network in our country doesn�t allow to pay real attention and even elementary care to everyone. Moreover, it�s especially unbearable for the elder to be forced to live among many �strangers�. A family-like elderly home allows to cut down the number of patients sharing rooms up to one or two and up to eight in the whole center.

And again Zinaida Ivanovna found herself in the center of great attention, which was unfriendly on some occasions. On the one hand, many made a modest contribution, giving house utensils� and second-hand furniture. On the other hand, only some of the friends and family members welcomed the idea - she had unquestionably no time for any other things. When she was busy with her Children�s Home, some told at that time, �Is it possible to have one�s own and adopted kids together? Can one treat everyone equally?�

When she had to care for her elderly disabled mother, a new plan matured. Having decided it was equally difficult for her to take care of one or two helpless elderly at the same time, she spent a year taking care of another female bed-patient and lived at her place.

However, such a scheme- to receive the needy or live at their places- could not allow to care for minimum several old people at least. Here the first important problem appeared- it hasn�t been solved up to now- the problem of premises.

Family-like �Spring� occupies a half of a big wooden house, which belongs to the parish of Assumption of Saint Virgin Church on the edge of Olonets. A lonely elderly married couple, who needs care, occupies luckily the rest half. After Zinaida Ivanovna Kolesnikova moved in November 2003 they became the first patients of �Spring�.

It was necessary to prepare the rest of the house for the other elder people. Here she faced a serious problem. The house is over 120 years old and it�s hardly adopted to live in. There is low heat insulation and wet here. There are only two stoves in the back of the house. The half of the premises, which �Spring� has, has been a cattle-shed before. One had to take away the rubbish- there was a heap of it � to lay the floors, partition the rooms, fix the stoves. One had to build anew the bath-house outside. No modern conveniences were available. There wasn�t even a well on the plot � the water for the house needs could be taken only from the Olonka River, flowing at the distance of 50 metres from the wicket-gate. One has to go to an ice-hole in winter and often Zinaida Ivanovna has to take an axe and hack the ice just to get the longed-for water and wash the clothes or to take her patients to the bath-house, which she has built.

During the first hardest months the aged woman had to do it all almost alone or to hire assistants for her money. Disinterested help was limited up to presenting simple household articles. Gabriela Marvedy, a citizen of Germany, who lives in Moscow and is a wife of the Shell Company worker, granted the only more or less considerable donation.

In summer 2004 Zinaida Ivanovna received another elderly woman and an elderly married couple in autumn. In the first place �Spring� receives seriously ill people. However, the living conditions don�t meet the demands of an institution for the elderly and ill, and it hampers the further development of Kolesnikova�s undertaking. Five old people have found a shelter here, their dreary waiting for death to come turned into living full of someone�s care.

One should say, nevertheless, Zinaida Ivanovna found volunteers during the year. The woman showed another side of her charity talent � to think that her assistants were far from being socially satisfactory. Weakness for alcohol, mental diseases, taking their inert course, and invalidity don�t allow them to adopt to a normal life � however, these physically healthy workers get the lodging and a plate of soup, but also, which is the most important, the feel of necessity, which was lost long ago, their necessary taking part in an important and big deed. After all, the best way to restore self-confidence and self-respect for such people is to help the weaker ones.

Thus, surprisingly for many, the Family-like Home �Spring� has proved its viability by 2005. Notwithstanding, though many problems were solved- as it usually happens in such undertakings, one decided problem was changed by two undecided. It was finally clear that the church premises need much to go through capital repairs � so much that it�s easier to build a new one. However, of course, there isn�t enough money both for repairs and purchasing a house or a flat. It�s impossible to rent a four-room flat minimum due to the absence of permanent state or private financing. The very 75 percent, which the old contribute to the �Spring� fund, can hardly cover the expenses on food and medicine.

Another problem, which has been mentioned, is the lack of permanent and even minimal financing. The smallest repair, the purchase of a new fridge and a washing machine, little salaries for assistants are both dreams and absolute necessity.

Only one thing is for sure � the persistent woman is going to continue her work in any conditions: with a guardian council or without it, with permanent financing or without it, with the premises which meet the needs of a Family Elderly Home or without them. Aren�t we going to find ourselves in such a world sooner or later? And though her passion for the undertaking can irritate the justest people, though they will say it would have been better to give those two flats to the town people than to fulfill strange ideas � all of it fades compared to the greatness and beauty of the idea which is being fulfilled in a Karelian town. After all, a deep-rooted atheist will agree to the justice of Jesus�s words: �Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends�.

Mother superior Zinaida's Spring

Zinaida Ivanovna Kolesnikova has already been used to the people who come and ask for help. The talks about a kind-hearted mother superior who was ready to give all she had spread quickly. One can say that the townspeople witnessed how one of the first Family Children�s Homes in Karelia was organized by mother superior Zinaida and parson Victor, a priest of Assumption Church. �Trud� told about the surprising family some years ago. They adopted nine kids, being parents for their own 4 children. They educated and set the children up in the world. The kids grew up and separated. At present Zinaida Ivanovna takes care of the elderly. It�s all her over. She helps her neighbor, the one, who needs her support.

The story began with Mihail Petrovich of 88 years old. It was him who knocked at the door of mother superior and begged not to leave him alone. The neighbors left and he and his wife were alone. They were about 90 and had many illnesses. They could not survive on their own.

Zinaida Ivanovna decided to organize another Family Home, but for the elderly. She was snubbed by the local authorities and informed that the region had a home for the elderly. Ill, feeble aged people would not go for the world to the so-called �poorhouse�, which had central heating and a warm lavatory. They want to live in a family, to know that they are helped by friends, that somebody in this world needs them.

�The very Mihail Petrovich with his wife Anna Fyodorovna presented the church a half of their big house in the village Tatchelitsa near Olonets. It was the place where mother superior Zinaida organized a shelter for the aged lonely. When Ivan Frolovich, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, asked her assistance in caring for his ill wife Mother superior agreed without a moment�s thought. And then she took Natalia Ivanovna to her Family Home, where the last days of the ill woman were filled with sympathy and care.

Also Elizaveta Grigorjevna of seventy-six lives here. She suffers from the Parkinson�s disease. Her husband died, her sun left the village and visits his mother sometimes. Elizaveta Grigorjevna sang in a church choir and so she knew mother superior. She felt a sudden bout of the illness when she was going to stretch out clothes on the line. She had been lying outside for several hours until she was found by the neighbors, and the woman understood: she wouldn�t survive on her own when forced to use a wheelchair. That�s how she found herself in the Family Home.

Mother superior Zinaida has assistants. One of them, Tatiana, lives here as well, looks after a small chapel near the house and helps with the housework. Zinaida Ivanovna is responsible for all of it: fetch firewood and water, till the kitchen-garden, cook dinner, do the washing, just have a heart-to-heart talk. They have talks on the ground floor of the house in a spacious kitchen at tea- time. There are only three living-rooms on the first floor. So, it�s impossible to receive more lodgers, though there is a quite enough number of the people willing to live here.

This spring mother superior Zinaida has registered her Family Home. It�s called �Spring�. As Kolesnikova confesses herself she would have never spent her time on the problems with documentation and visits to officials. There are many businessmen who would like to help. The problem is that they are ready to have business with an officially registered organization. And now �Spring� is the first and the only Family Home for the elderly in Karelia and, maybe, in Russia.

Lonely hearts' spring

Parents and children

She is a mother for her fourteen children, the parishioners of Saint Virgin�s Church call her mother superior, the new patients, who appeared a year and a half ago, call her Zinaida Ivanovna with respect or Zinochka.

Zinaida Ivanovna Kolesnikova is known as an organizer of the first Olonets Family Children�s Home in Karelia. In the early 80s she adopted nine children from children�s homes being a mother for her own four kids.

Her children have grown up and separated. Some of them are in the army, others are lucky to have families. A six-year-old daughter lives with Zinaida Ivanovna at present. But mother superior Zinaida has never been idle. She says she has always enjoyed children and the old. That�s why she has been cherishing an idea to organize a home both for lonely kids and elderly fellow regioners for a long time.

Once an old man at the age of eighty knocked at the door of her flat in Olonets. He told his neighbors had left and begged not to leave him alone.

First of all Zinaida Ivanovna asked the local authorities to found a home for lonely elderly people who need care in Olonets. But the officials alluded to the fact that there had been founded an elderly home in Vidlitsa and the local aged men and women are visited by social workers. They refused to help.

First, mother superior Zinaida supported the old and visited their places. She even moved to the ones who was seriously ill. Unfortunately, she couldn�t help everyone in Olonets�

There where someone is waiting for you

Everybody knows an old� big Russian house with a small chapel in the village Tatchelitsa not far from Olonets where Zinaida Ivanovna lives. We found the way quickly.

We were met by a lean elder with a picturesque white beard, dressed in working clothes, covered with shavings from head to foot. It turned out Mihail Petrovich was the very old man who had begged not to leave him alone.

It was tea-time for some guests from Petrozavodsk and the children who had come for a stay. The kitchen was large and situated on the ground floor of a comfortable house made of logs. Almost every member of the new family was sitting at the table.

A sixty-year-old woman noticed us and a pleasant smile lit up her face. Elizaveta Grigorjevna was sitting in a wheelchair. She suffers from Parkinson�s disease.

Some time ago she had a family. Her husband died long ago. The only son left the village. Now he visits his mother only in summer. She has been singing in a church choir for many years. There she met Zinaida Ivanovna who began to take care of the elderly woman as soon as the latter was overcome by illnesses.

After she had been lying on the wet ground near her house for two hours she moved to mother superior Zinaida. She could never stretch out the clothes she had just washed. Her feet refused to move. Having found a helpless woman some kind people called Zinaida Ivanovna.

Tatiana is a woman who has not reached the retirement age yet. She worked as a lay-sister for one of the churches of the Olonets region. She has to go to Petrozavodsk for treatment every other day due to her serious illness of late.

- I am alone in a flat without modern conveniences. My son has grown up and left. It was very difficult to cope with the housework, my illness and loneliness. I asked mother superior Zinaida for novice. At present I look after a small chapel near the house and help with the housework. It�s very important when somebody is waiting for you.

Smart and brisk Lena lives in her house across the river and helps mother superior Zinaida. When she feels fine she comes to nurse the old. She gets the medicine, does the housework, she says she likes the elderly and it�s not a burden to be helpful.

Having had tea with lemon and the rolls fresh baked in a Russian stove we climbed a steep and narrow staircase. Peaceful and merry songs could be heard. They were about good and evil, performed by celibate priest Roman. The melody was coming from an old tape-recorder. We passed two light bedrooms occupied by the woman and went through a hall and a new doorway. Then we found ourselves in the part of the house which belonged to Mihail Petrovich and his wife Anna Fyodorovna. They are almost ninety. It was the couple that presented the church with the second part of the house and it became a shelter for the helpless old.

- It� very good that Zinochka has settled here, - tells Anna Fyodorovna � We are quite old and lonely. We don�t want to go to the poorhouse. Zinaida Ivanovna cooks for us, does the washing, gets firewood. My feet are seriously ill. It�s due to my work at timber felling and to the damned war.

One more lonely and elderly married couple didn�t want to be in a poorhouse. Ivan Frolovich, a Great Patriotic War participant, asked Zinaida Ivanovna for assistance in caring for his ill wife. Mother superior agreed. Soon Natalia Ivanovna couldn�t struggle with her illness and was taken to Tatchelitsa. Here she died surrounded by care and love.

There are always kind people to find

The Family Home �Spring� has got its official status this March.

-         I�d have never done it, - tells Zinaida Ivanovna, but life made me do it. We couldn�t do without financial support, we needed money for everything. I addressed to many organizations and they were ready to help if we had an official status. While I waited for the promised help Elizaveta Ivanovna was deprived of a social worker, - she continues � But there are always kind people to find. Foreigners helped a little. Some Olonets inhabitants heard of �Spring� and brought us everything they could. Anna Fyodorovna and Mihail Petrovichh gave us a fridge. A group of parishioners has collected one thousand of roubles lately. We spent it on bedside carpets. The parson never refuses to help when we ask him about it. Having heard of such a good deed a Finnish businessman let us take waste for firewood from his power saw bench. Moreover, we all brought many things here.

Remembering the beginning of the story Zinaida Ivanovna told that when she moved into the wooden house without any modern conveniences she broke two ribs because she had to carry water and work in the kitchen-garden all the time.

-         I�ve spent all my life in an apartment with modern conveniences, - she tells, - so, I�ve had a lot of problems for a year and a half.

There is a warm and cosy atmosphere in this modest Family Home thanks to the efforts of Zinaida Ivanovna and her assistants. Elderly people still ask the kind-hearted mother to help them. But she can�t take everyone under her wing. There are only three living-rooms in the big house. They have neither running water nor a sewerage system so far. But mother superior Zinaida is always ready to give a hand. She says she will shelter more lonely hearts as soon as an appropriate sum of money is available.