Ambulances
At least once a day I see an ambulance rambling through the narrow alleyways around the seventeen fourteen-storey apartment buildings on my 1.5 square kilometer block. They drive at about 15 miles per hour, looking around corners and trying to read the signs on the corners of the buildings which indicate their address. (There is only a sign on one of the many corners of a building, no matter what its size or orientation.) They all have lights, but I've never seen an ambulence with the lights on, under any circumstances. My two mental images of ambulences are of them stopped and looking at a map or parked while one of the drivers walks around asking for directions from a local. When they pick someone up, they take their time driving them to a hospital - I've never seen an ambulence driving faster than traffic. If youre having a heart attack, you might as well struggle onto a trolley bus, or just die.Which is pretty much the attitude around here in general. There is no handicap access anywhere. I lived here for two months before I as much as saw a single wheelchair bound person. In the past week I've seen three, all of them have been on Metro station platforms. I have no idea how they got there, since the only way down is via a 1000 foot escalator followed by steep stairways decending to either side of a platform. Its as if they live down there, or else simply appeared there spontaneously.
I saw a fellow today with no legs, wearing army fatigues and rolling around on a 4-wheel cart, using thick hand brushes to propel himself across the floor of the subway car. He was clearly a Chechen War vet. [This was not because of the army vest - nearly all lower-class men between the ages of 18 and 50 wear army fatigues on a regular basis, since universal conscription [some university students - and the rich of course - do not have serve their 2 years] still exists and nearly all of those men have served in the army in one capacity or another. The fatigues, then, amount to free warm clothes, an invaluable good since the army essentially does not pay conscripts for their service.] You could tell because of the attitude of the older male passengers, putting a few kopeks in his vest pocket as he passed. He didn't ask for anything, but would look up at those who gave him something and say a kind word. His eyes were hollow. There was nothing left of him.
I guess the handicapped are just expected to die. I wonder sometimes if there is some big soviet handicapped city somewhere that the buildings are all one floor instead of 14 and there are ramps to the entrances. [To clarify, there are 'ramps' on some stairways, which are actually metal runners for wheels to fit in that are built at the edges of many subway ramps. Of course, they are usually only on one of several staircases that one must traverse to enter any location, and amount therefore to dead ends. This is besides the fact that they are often at 45 degree angles, without inturruption or hand rails. They end up being used by mothers with baby carriages, though only to stop my heart from beating as I watch them struggle as the carriage gets caught on a rusty bolt, tipping it forward while the kid dangles over the safety bar and inches from imminent doom.] Its a daily occurance to see people who should be in wheelchairs limping around with canes in the floods of people on a crosswalk or in a subway. They must simply struggle along with those canes until the day when they can't possibly go on, they fall an break their hip; leaving them with no choice but to spend the rest of their life in their apartment until they die.
Unless, of course, they die right there, while the ambulence tries to figure out which alley will take them to House #12, Building 7A.
posted by Майлз Г. Смит @ 3:52 PM
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