Marat’s answer

What is a life worth? How do we put a value on it? Are lives like cars or homes? Does it depend on their condition? If they’re well-kept, good looking, do we value that life more than another? 

 

In the north of Kazakhstan, where a lethal blend of industrial dislocation, unemployment, depression, cheap alcohol and narcotics, have ravaged thousands and thousands of lives, this question is being answered, daily. 

 

Marat’s answer is his story. Marat grew up in a town not far from Karaganda. Karaganda is home to the massive Karaganda Steel Works. It is also not far from the gulag in which Solzhenitsyn chose to set his novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 

 

Marat was raised by his mother. As a young man, bored and unemployed, he quickly fell into bad company. He and his friends were hooligans, petty thieves and the like, and eventually he was locked up for it. In prison, narcotics were easily accessible, so he started using. Drug addiction starts with curiosity, then 6 months of euphoria, then the sickness comes, and then you understand you cannot stop, you’re an addict, and then the pain and the pain will only go with more drugs, and you are trapped, he tells us. 

 

When Marat got out of prison he decided he’d quit using. So he stopped. For 2 days. But the withdrawal was so severe he went back to using. With no work, he turned to thievery, anything to get money to meet his addiction. His mother made him try medical treatments for his addiction but none worked. Depression set in. He decided he would end his life. So he went into a toilet, secured a rope to the ceiling, put a noose around his and jumped. The rope broke. He hit his head as he fell and lost consciousness. When he regained consciousness he saw clearly, finally, that he needed his life to change. His mother told him to go to a rehab that everyone knew of. It was on a farm outside of the town. They took addicts, alcoholics, homeless people and former prisoners - those that society has already declared are worthless.

The atmosphere there was completely different, Marat tells us. There Marat found a new family. They accepted him completely. They counselled him and helped him find the healing he could not find alone. In 2 weeks the addiction was gone. After 6 months of rehabilitation, addicts begin to find a hunger for life again, Marat says. Their eyes are open to possibilities and hope. Marat met his wife at the rehab. They now have 4 children. Marat is now director of a Pavlodar branch of the rehab, rescuing others as he was rescued. 

 

For potatoes, it is harvest time in northern Kazakhstan. The days are cooling and already shortening. The steppe is a mellowed sunburnt grey. The other 30 or so men at the rehab harvest, as we talk. The rehab has been operating for 13 years. At New Year, families including 80 children of those who have been through the programme gather: 80 children of former alcoholics, drug addicts, the homeless, prisoners. A whole new generation of lives from a generation whose lives had been regarded as worthless. 

 

Not a bad definition of redemption. 

 

This year has been a breakthrough year at the rehab. It started with a forty foot container. After 8 months of waiting, the metal works near the rehab agreed to send their truck to pick up a container’s worth of donated goods from our Shymkent warehouse. Beds, clothes, furniture, computers, TV’s, the container goes on! The quality of the goods was really great, Marat tells us. A day or so later much needed financial assistance came their way from another source.