Visit to Dzegvi Homeless Shelter

Last Thursday, my friend Susie and I visited a homeless shelter called Dzegvi outside of Mtskheta, about a half hour away from Tbilisi. The shelter was established in 1995 as a home for street children, but has since housed homeless adults, mentally disabled individuals, elderly people whose families cannot take care of them, and internally displaced persons (IDPs are former inhabitants of the two disputed territories within the geographic borders of Georgia who have left their homes for safety reasons). In addition, some of the original inhabitants have chosen to stay at Dzegvi and establish families.

This has become a permanent community, but it is not self-sufficient. Some members of the community work at outside jobs to earn pocket money. School-age children go to school in Mtskheta, but there is no nearby facility for the preschoolers who live at Dzegvi. The disabled members of the community stay on the property full time, with no rehabilitation facilities available to them. According to the caretakers, people who come to Dzegvi stay until they die—it is their permanent home. Full-time caretakers at Dzegvi are Nana and Mother Mariam; a young man who came to Dzegvi at age 14 has taken over maintenance and handyman duties (Romani).

Romani and Nana

Because Dzegvi is not self-sufficient, the community members are dependent on others for everything. The Georgian Orthodox Church supplies food and pays for utilities. Various foreign embassies and other foreign entities provide grant money for major renovations. Individuals and organizations make various kinds of donations that benefit Dzegvi. Despite these generous contributions, the living conditions in Dzegvi are what we would call extremely basic. 

For the entire community of 75 people, including 22 children, they have a kitchen equipped with only two small sinks and five burners. They prepare hot meals for everyone in this tiny kitchen every day. They also have two small washing machines, one small broken washing machine, and no dryers.

Our visit was prompted by my work with a group called American Friends of Georgia (AFG). AFG supports a wide variety of charitable causes from housing homeless

children and single mothers to funding medical care for children with cancer to initiating hospice care in Georgia to preserving Georgian culture heritage and architecture. The Dzegvi shelter is one of AFG’s many projects. We were accompanied by Ana Koripadze, who works for AFG, and Koba Maisuradze, our driver for the day.

From what I understand, the Dzegvi facility is a former psychiatric hospital that was abandoned when the Soviets left Georgia. The main building has been refurbished and now has updated rooms, a working water supply, and a safe heating system.  There is a building on the hill that we didn’t visit. I believe it houses mentally and physically disabled residents. The object of our visit was a third building that is in complete disrepair and in need of complete renovation.

This third building is currently in a condition that would render it “condemned” in the U.S., but it is inhabited by about 10 people who have nowhere else to go. The state of this building is deplorable—the wooden floors are not just buckled, they rise up in waves maybe 1 foot high. The windows and doors are gone, some of the walls are gone, and banisters on the stairways are gone.

There’s no electricity except what they’ve rigged up by running it from other buildings through dangerous old wiring. A new water supply system has been installed, thanks to previous grant funds, but the piping system to use it will not be installed until the building is renovated. There is trash and rubble everywhere, inside and outside of the building. A pit toilet/latrine is being dug right outside the building, but it is not in use yet.

We met one family living in the building. It was a grandmother and her two grandchildren—a boy of about 3 and a girl of about a year old. This family of three lives in what used to be a single patient room. The windows are covered, although I don’t know if they have glass or plastic. The room is stuffed to the brim with a table, a sleeping space and a TV. There was a round electric coil heater on the floor within easy reach of the children; I couldn’t help thinking about how easy it would be for the children to burn themselves on it or knock it over and start a fire. The children appeared to be reasonably healthy and well fed, but the space they shared was smaller than a lot of bathrooms in the U.S.

The goal for the building is to make it a clean, safe living space for the 10 people who are currently living there plus 10 more. In addition, Nana and Mother Mariam would like to have a public space that can be used by school-age children to do their homework, by preschoolers to have daily activities, by adults for training sessions, and by the mentally and physically handicapped for rehabilitation sessions. There is currently nothing for the small children on the property to do during the day, so an indoor activity area would be especially valuable for their development—both mental and physical.

According to Nana, Dzegvi currently has a $100,000 grant from the Japanese Embassy plus an additional $50,000 (source unknown to me). They are planning to use both of these sources for renovations to the building we observed. Nana and Mother Mariam estimate that they need an additional $30,000-$35,000 to undertake the reconstruction project, which would cover the cost of replacing the roof.

My contribution to the current project is to help AFG find a source of funding for the remaining amount Dzegvi needs for the roof. The local director of AFG (there’s one director in the U.S. and one here in Georgia) asked me to visit the site and write a photostory about the needs of the community members, especially the ones living in the crumbling building. This photostory will be used to present the case to potential funders in efforts to raise the money needed to complete the project.