Rita Plotnikova and Medea Mitrophanova
Alexandra Smirnova was 62 when the first war in the Chechen Republic broke out. The family had to leave Groznyi in 1993. With one of her daughters, Lena, and granddaughter, Inna, they settled down in Beslan, North Ossetia. In 1998, a terrible message arrived about the death of her eldest daughter. Alexandra then became mother for the two orphaned girls, her grandchildren, Alla and Tatyana. From then on, the new family of five lived in a small, two-room apartment in the centre of Beslan.
Lena worked as a tailor at the local factory. Striving to make ends meet, Alexandra helped her daughter sew dressing gowns which she then sold at the local market. Alla and Inna, the two cousins of a similar age, went to the same school and soon became close friends.
Today the Smirnov’s life is different. Two years after the tragedy in Beslan when 338 people including 172 children were killed, the whole town was in mourning. Alexandras’s two granddaughters, Alla aged 11 and Inna aged 12, perished in the fighting that followed the school siege. The family feels empty and devastated. The girls’ photos are posted on every wall of the small apartment. Lena often goes to the church and to the cemetery.
She recalls that it took a long time to find the girls' bodies in the mortuary among dozens of others. Nobody helped, she says. They were shown a heap of burnt unrecognizable bodies.
"We identified Inna by her slippers,” Lena recalls. “I knew that it was her, but I continued to search in a desperate belief that she was alive”. The girls were buried together in a single grave at the cemetery not far from Beslan. Lena, like many other women in Beslan, visits it daily.
Lena knows that other people have experienced the same and she understands that everyone has his or her own way to overcome the trauma. Some organize public committees, others defend their case in court, participate in demonstrations, but she knows that the majority sit at home, do not go out and do not ask for anything.
But life must return to normal. Every week a visiting nurse from the Red Cross rehabilitation centre comes to see the Smirnovs, supports them and doesn’t let the two women stay alone. Following the screening of 578 affected families, 227 were selected as the ones in need of permanent care and psychosocial support at home. Lena and Alexandra are among them. The list of beneficiaries changes as some people start to cope on their own.
“We try to help everyone who needs help,” says visiting nurse Ludmila Kargieva. "It is very important to make sure people are not dependent on our help. We invite them to participate in social events organized by the Red Cross, to involve them in our work. If in 2005, our main aim was to find an individual approach to everyone, now we are trying to involve people in community activities.”
The Russian Red Cross rehabilitation centre in central Beslan helps with this. Besides regular classes at the centre (English, folk dance, sports, fitness, computer club, digital photo studio) the Red Cross organizes special events such as a competition of drawings which started with a local contest under the theme ‘My native town’ and grew into an international travelling exhibition entitled ‘The world through the eyes of children’. An exhibition of paintings, donated to Beslan by Ivanovo’s Art Gallery, was used to promote communication between schools in the city. Other events include a youth festival, gardening in the city’s green spaces, repairing park benches.
These ways of social involvement have a visible psychological effect as they help people to revive after the tragedy and find the strength, both in themselves and in the community, to start a new life.