"When your interpreter is weeping, you know you're being told a sad story"
I interviewed a caregiver
at an orphanage in Omsk, a run-down Detroit of a city in Siberia. (Dostoevsky was sent
there as a punishment for revolutionary activity, which tells you something about the
place.) The caregiver had brought a little boy named Kirill (pronounced Key-REAL)
because she wanted me to know his story.
Kirill was asleep on my lap, as limp as a ribbon of seaweed.
The Soviet Union collapsed a few weeks after my visit. While I was there, the once
inescapable apparatus of the Soviet State was going up in smoke. It left breathtaking new
freedoms, but also rising poverty, lawlessness, decay, and alcoholism. There was
widespread fear that the coming winter would bring a famine and starve millions.
The orphanage was ill-lit and dirty. Clearly, it had never been a pleasant or child-friendly
place. But as the State and the Communist Party crumbled, the structures that supported
places like orphanages dissolved, too. The workers were struggling to feed and care for the
swelling population of children without parents—many of them handicapped or otherwise
in need of special care.
Like Kirill. His mother was an “incorrigible alcoholic,” one of those staggering drunks you
saw everywhere in Soviet cities. She'd left him on a park bench one icy day a couple of
years before, when he was too small to follow her. Now Kirill was six years old—the age of
my own son at the time—though he looked more like he was four. He was thin, with
translucent skin and wispy blond hair that seemed permanently charged with static. He
moved slowly, like someone underwater.
I've been to understaffed orphanages around the world. The children in these places
seldom see men. They're afraid, yet they hunger for attention. Kirill did what kids in those
places usually do: At first he cowered behind the caregiver, flinching when he heard my
voice. After a few minutes he worked his way closer until he was leaning against me,
almost like a cat. Suddenly, he went limp. He'd gone to sleep standing there. I lifted him
onto my lap to keep him from falling.
He's weak—not healthy, the caregiver said through the intepreter. He falls asleep like
that. He gets nosebleeds. He can't yet speak. We don't have a doctor to examine him.
I put my hand on his forehead. It was clammy and hot, the way my kids feel when they're
sick. That feeling triggers a reflex in a parent: Do something. All I could do was hear, and
then tell, his story.
When you conduct an interview through a translator, you get the information in flat,
factual packets. Facial expressions and other emotional cues happen before you know
what they're about. The caregiver's voice became more quiet. She shook her head and
looked at the floor. Kirill shows signs of brain damage. From his mother's drinking.
Possibly made worse by malnutrition.
She hid her face in her hands: None of the children eat well. All we can give them is
borscht. No protein. There are so many of them, and only food we can beg from
neighbors.
When they found Kirill in the park, he was hypothermic, his lips blue, ice in his hair. He
has not recovered from that. He is never well. The children call him Snowman.
That's when my interpreter started weeping. Then sobbing. She couldn't catch her breath
and kept trying to apologize to me and to the caregiver. Kirill slept, breathing lightly.

(Jeff Brooks. The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand)