‘Life Goes Between First Nettles, Dandelions And Last Apple In Abandoned Orchard’
- 13.09.2023, 10:56
How people survive in the regional centers of Belarus.
A resident of the Belarusian regional center wrote to the editorial office of the website Charter97.org:
“If Minsk is full of vacancies with different salaries (although this seems to me an illusion), then in our regional center, as in all the others, the story is about the same.
There are no jobs, the most desirable places in the administration (in our area they call it the “white house”) are only for devoted “yabatkas”, they even hire cleaners through friends.
And in our town, the most attractive jobs are at school, the salaries there are regular and decent — people earn 1,000 rubles, and maybe more. All other places — in the store, the hospital, the factory — it’s 500-600 rubles. My friend also has the same income. I met her recently with a huge bag, and she complained to me:
“I pay about 100 rubles for utilities, Internet and telephone. The maximum remaining is 500 rubles. I live alone in an apartment, without my own garden, so I am forced to gather.
Until the cherry plum is gone, I go to treat myself with it, and prepare some compotes and confiture from it for the winter. In winter I won’t have to buy sweets, over the summer I dried herbs so as not to buy tea, I dried dandelion roots for coffee, I’ll collect acorns and make myself a coffee drink.
There is still a rosehip ahead of me. Thank God there is a lot of it in the area, and it is very healthy. Well, there are enough apple trees in abandoned squares, so I’ll prepare them for the winter, dry, souse, and cook them. This is how my life goes between the first nettles and dandelions and the last apple in an abandoned orchard.”
My friend is a single woman, so she relies only on herself. But does she enjoy such a life? She says that her friends constantly tease her, that she leads a healthy lifestyle and moves continuously.
She would like to channel her activity in a different direction, to go to the sea at least once in her life, she saw the sea only in childhood. See the mountains, look at the Eiffel Tower. But fate turned out differently. Life brought her, a specialist with a higher education, to the regional center, where business is done through bribes and acquaintances. She found herself in emptiness — when one can move neither back nor forward.
Now, watching the events, she hopes that maybe God will allow her to see the victory over this darkness. To earn a decent salary for one’s work and lead an active lifestyle while traveling abroad. In the meantime, the woman is engaged in gathering in order to survive in this dark time.