Social work training

I'm a Social Policy student from the University of Turku. Here I'm taking a random selection of courses from politics, sociology and social policy and social work. The university offered me an opportunity to do a training period in social work, and for some reason they thought it would be a good idea to start with that. I'm not so sure since my current level of Russian is pretty useless but that's what I've been doing for the past few days. The training takes places in a local shelter for homeless people and will go on for at least two weeks. The shelter is an interesting place, to say the least. There are about 800 homeless people in Petrozavodsk. The shelter facilitates 30–40 people. Honestly I was surprised to find out there was such a shelter at all here, I sort of expected that the concept of social work doesn't exist in Russia. I'm happy I was wrong.

Since I can't do anything on my own with my level of Russian, I'm together with this lovely girl Tanya, who's writing her thesis about homeless people. Today I spent four hours reading the files of homeless people in Russian. Yes, very boring but I made some interesting observations.

First of all, very thorough paper work, all stored in a cabinet and in brown cardboard folders. Secondly, some interesting "psychological evaluations". I haven't studied psychology but somehow I feel that a colour test isn't a valid way to evaluate people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCscher_color_test). This test was on all the files. Also, there were some other interesting tests, including dozens of questions like "as a child, were you scared of dogs?", "do you ever get tears in your eyes when watching a tragic movie?" or "when standing next to an open window, do you ever feel like jumping?". Evaluations and different kinds of statements from doctors, psychologists, social workers, lots of reports concerning health and other certificates. What I sort of missed was the actual measures to improve the situation of these people. Of course, my Russian is poor and I've only seen a tiny fraction of what they do at the centre but still I can't help but wonder. Phrases like "social rehabilitation and psychological correction" were used a lot, though. To me, "psychological correction" sounds somewhat scary!

Oh, guess how the workers at the shelter were dressed? Low cut tops and high heel boots. What surpised me, is how they treated the people coming to the shelter. With kindness.

I have so much to learn.