The Orphanage

Today we went to the city's orphanage for young children (under 7 years old). We organized an HIV/AIDS training for them. They have a baby whose mom was HIV+ and apparently there were some issues with the nurses and nannies being afraid to hold that child...
I was pleasantly surprised by the condition of the orphanage. They have a nice new building with cute little kid size bathrooms and nice bunk beds and cribs. They have a big "sports" room and a staff of 70 people for their 40 kids. The kids have classes with preschool teachers during the day.
About 30% or more of them are there because they are handicapped in some way and their families didn't want to take care of them. 40% of the kids are there because social services took them away from their family. (In that case, the Family Center is also working with the parents to try to get them healthier so they will be able to take care of their kids again). Another 25-30% are there because their parents just don't want them. They are usually healthy and will be adopted.
They have 6 mo. of medical "rehab" for all of the kids when they arrive. The Psychologist and doctor work with them to check and improve their mental and physical health. If they are handicapped then they will continue to be regularly watched over by the doctors.
Again, the science of looking at their programs vs. actually seeing the babies there are hard to formulate in my head. We saw one small class of the older children working with their teacher. Then we went to the nursery for the 12-18 mo. babies. There was one large crib in the center of the room with 5 or 6 babies crawling in it. There was one baby in a crib off to the side and there was one baby rolling around in a walker. Several of them had large red scabs or rashes on their heads and some were handicapped. But actually for the most part they appeared pretty healthy and happy. There were two nannies and a nurse on duty, which is great compared to a lot of the other orphange situations that I read about.
Then we went to see the smallest babies, under one year old. There were 4 of them in two big cribs and one having her bottle in the nanny's arms. Only one nanny was in the room with them. She said that 4 others of the babies are sick in the hospital.(That doesn't necessarily mean that it's something serious, just more convenient for them to receive care there).
The next room was a nice big classroom for the 8-10 kids between the ages of 18months and 5 years old. They were all coloring around a round table. They had only one teacher with them. It seemed to me that most of the 70 staff must include visiting instructors and med personnel since there were so few nannies and teachers.

The AIDS training we conducted there was the scariest yet. They were scared to death of getting infected. When we played the game of categorizing different activities into high, little, and no risk- they failed miserably. They were afraid of mosquitoes and tooth brushes. It was funny actually they thought that using someone's toothbrush and taking care of someone with HIV were more dangerous than oral sex!
We were not as prepared as we should have been for the level of fear and stigma that was there. Among students and other hospital personnel we hadn't encountered anything like it. Actually the worst part of the audience were those nurses and doctors present in the meeting. People kept deferring to them and they were more afraid and misinformed than anyone else.
My part of the lesson was a little comparison between their HIV situation here and ours in the US. I also talked on the history and overcoming of HIV discrimination/stigma in the US. Plus gave them some stats about the situation in Russia and Chapaevsk overall. I think that it went okay, but it would have been better if we had focused more on overcoming stigma... Tommorow we have a lesson in the orphanage for older children. We found a cool game about overcoming HIV stigma on the internet that we are planning to try for that group.