Photojournalist and Documentary Photographer / Resident of Ukraine since 2014 / speaking Ukrainian and documenting the war in Ukraine for The Wall Street Journal
Biography:
Christopher Occhicone is a documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Kyiv, Ukraine for the last 14 plus years. He covers general and breaking news, as well as the war in Ukraine. For more than four years, he has been working on an...
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Focus:Photographer, Photojournalist, Journalist, Health, Environment, History, Documentary, News, Domestic, Foreign, Portraiture, Humanitarian, Human Rights, Artist
Skills:Digital Printing, Photo Assisting, Color Correction, Film Scanning, Photo Editing, Black & White Printing, Color Printing, Print Making, Curating, Copywriting, Exhibition Design, Photojournalism, Film Photography
Oksana's intake photo hangs above her bed. When she entered the internat she was able to sit up and engage with people, at least with a smile. Many children are poorly diagnosed and a lifetime of medical records consists of several pages of brief notations. Instead of receiving medical treatment, physical therapy, and mental and emotional stimulation, they are condemned to remain in bed for the majority of the remainder of their lives.
After several years of remaining in bed in her internat, Oksana is underweight and vacant. Like many of the young people in her institution, she is left undressed and neglected.
A couple visits their bedridden child. The majority of the children in the system are not true orphans and have some living relatives. There is no support system for families with disabled children. Doctors encourage parents to send their children to internats and "try again." Disability Rights International reports that this is part of a kickback scheme where doctors receive a fee for referring children to local internats.
The view from the window in an internat in central Ukraine is idyllic. However, the children who live in the room spend their lives in bed, often restrained in homemade straight jackets. An inherent part of the Soviet ideology which created the internat system was that there were no handicapped people in their society. The Soviet man was considered be superior to their western rivals and the existence of handicapped individuals ran counter to this belief. Thus, internats were typically located on the edges of remote villages; out of sight and out of the consciousness of the general public.
Many bedridden children are restrained for the majority of their lives. At this internat, even ambulatory children were not permitted to go outside until 2014. Many of the bedridden children will not go outside again for the remainder of their lives.
Workers say that the children are restrained in order to keep them from harming themselves or others. However, there are poorly supervised and many children escape their restraints and manage to injury themselves. Much of the self-harming behavior is preventable. One common technique employed in the west is to have staff member hold the children for several hours a day.
Roman is restrained and unable to compete with the other children for a rare treat of cake which was brought by a volunteer. After the volunteer delivered the cake, a staff member shovels it into the eager mouths of the children instead of serving it individually.
Many bedridden children are unable to chew or swallow. In western institutions, this is routinely treated by speech pathologists who specialize in treating disabled children. However, many of the 100,000 children in the Ukrainian internat system receive no therapy of any kind. Instead, they are fed twice daily by a nurse who snakes a rubber tube down their throat and injects the meal into their stomachs. Many children who are adopted out of the system learn to chew and swallow within a year of adoption. In the interim period, they have a feeding tube installed in their stomach, thus reducing the trauma of having the feeding tube repeatedly inserted and allowing the child to receive consistent nutrition throughout their day.
Bedridden children are fed a meal consisting of blended buckwheat and vegetables. If a feeding tube is needed, the mixture is heavily diluted with water. Many of the children are severely undernourished and children in the system routinely die of slow starvation.
A nurse shows a volunteer Vasily's teeth. they are so rotten that eating a painful ordeal and he is severely malnourished. Vasily, 19, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a baby and has spent his entire life in the internat system. Without a proper evaluation, he was left in bed with minimum human interaction. It is likely that he may have had a normal mental capacity. Years of neglect leave this question a mystery.
15 year old Dima thrashes constantly in his restraints. Staff members find it difficult to feed him and have been observed giving up after only several spoonfuls of food. Dima died several months after the photo was taken.
Vasily, seen here at 20 years old, found it painful to eat and was severely malnourished. He died shortly after this photo was taken. Like all children living in the internat system, there is no investigation into the cause of his death given.
A boy is left retrained and sitting in a bucket for at least two hours. During this time, no staff member checked on him. This is a common practice, particularly when the internat director is not at the facility.
During the warmer months, the ambulatory children are brought outside. Instead of bringing them back inside to use the toilet, staff members leave them sitting in pots and buckets.
A staff member disposed of a bucket of waste from the children's potties. Staff see their role as being limited to serving meals, changing the children's clothes, bringing them to the toilet at the prescribed time, and cleaning. Offering any human interaction is viewed as outside the scope of their duties. Paid only 200 dollars a month, most refuse to do anything outside of their job description.
Bedridden children often suffer from bedsores. Infection of sores is a commonly reported cause of death in internats. It is completely avoidable with proper care.
A nanny comforts a child who was not allowed to go outside. While the vast majority of staff members see their duties as being limited to cleaning, dressing, and feeding the children, a minority of the staff have a loving attitude towards the children in their care.
Staff often handle the children while wearing gloves. Bedridden children will almost never experience the warmth of human touch. Many of the children exhibit self harming behavior. A commonly accepted preventive measure is to hold children for several hours a day.
The majority of staff member see their duties as limited to cleaning and dressing the children as per their schedules. They do little else besides the minimal requirements of their job descriptions.
The residents only have each other to offer comfort. The lack of supervision creates opportunities for more advanced children to take sexual advantage of others.
Misha looks for opportunities to work. While it is not required, many higher-functioning residents of the internats seek out work. There are no activities for the residents so work helps pass the time. More importantly, it gives them a sense of responsibility and pride in their ability to care for themselves and their friends.
Roman, on his first night in the internat, is heavily sedated after attempting to wander outside the compound. The nanny on duty was unable to change him for bed. Oleh, one of the higher functioning residents, steps in and dresses Roman. It is common for higher functioning residents to become standout caregivers.
Roman is upset at not being able to eat a piece of cake earlier. He was unable to get any because of his makeshift straight jacket. Many of the children have high anxiety and stress about their ability to secure food. Lower functioning children are at the whim of indifferent nannies and higher functioning children have to compete with each other.
Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe. Therefore, it is not surprising that every room in this internat has a new television, despite the fact that most of the children are nonverbal and funding for the children's food and medication is less than one dollar a day.
An unmarked grave of a child who died in the internat. There are no investigations when children pass and directors are not required to report a cause of death.
All of the ambulatory children in this institution are boys. Even though Oksana is ambulatory, she is confined to the section of the internat for bedridden children for her safety. The whimsical nature of the system and the neglect the children suffer is a mystery to most of the public. Several directors, hoping to shed light on the situation, permitted photography inside their institutions on the condition that photographs of the outside of the facilities were not published.