Margarete von der Borch: 

These children really need us

Western (and, for that matter, Russian) philanthropy often takes on grotesque forms: wealthy, well-dressed people handing out money (often someone else’s) to poor and ragged people. The story of Margarete von der Borch is different. Neither the antiquity of her family name nor financial security has hindered her in the positive work she has been doing for the last five years.

Born in 1966 in Essen, West Germany.

Studied at Sherborne School for Girls, Great Britain; graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1997.

President of the organization Perspectives (Perspektiven e.V.) since 1992.

I wanted to become a juvenile court judge. I enrolled in law school, but within a year I figured out that it wasn’t for me. Then I realized that Russian is such a beautiful language that it was worth studying and I began to study Slavonic philology. I enrolled at the university in 1987 and graduated only recently: I was a perpetual student. In Germany that’s almost normal, by the way. My acquaintanceship with Russia began in 1987 with a trip to Moscow. After that I wanted to go back, and I decided to go to Moscow again—as the office manager for the Society for the Support of Germans Abroad. I had to travel a lot all over the Soviet Union, something I enjoyed very much. In 1991 I came to Petersburg with friends, and before the trip I’d read in a newspaper that there was a shelter for homeless children here, the Blue Crow. We decided that we absolutely had to look up these people and after meeting them, we felt we had to help the shelter. That’s why in 1992 we founded Perspectives. Since then I’ve begun to get more and more involved in the organization’s work.

Your first impressions of Russia are connected with Moscow. Why did you choose Petersburg?

In Petersburg I started to involve myself in social work. Besides that, I found Petersburg more congenial: I feel freer here. I liked Moscow very much also while I lived there, but I already knew then that if I got the chance to choose, I definitely would choose Petersburg.

What does Perspectives do?

Perspectives is a German non-governmental organization. Our goal is to support people and organizations that work with neglected children and handicapped children, that is, children who have very few chances in life, for whom it is much more difficult to develop than for others. We have a partner non-governmental organization in Petersburg, the Innovations Center. We don’t want simply to hand over money, chocolate, clothing to children, but what’s most important is that good people, educators, work with them. So our philosophy is that we have to find people who want to work with children, people who are kindred spirits and in much need of support. We give money to these people in order to help them carry out their projects and meet with educators or social workers from abroad. It turns out that social workers in Germany, England, and Russia have a lot of problems in common. We therefore think it’s important to arrange for Russian social workers and educators to go abroad and to invite people to come here.

Why on a small scale? Is that the result of a lack of money or of a scaled-down approach?

Money wouldn’t be a hindrance, but that’s not what we’re really after. It seems to me that massive projects always lose a great deal in quality. The human contact is very important, although that’s an idealistic statement.

How did you go about looking for Russian partners? In the early ’90s people must have regarded you simply as foreigners, as a means to make money.

That’s how it was. I think that we foreigners should accept part of the blame. We came with the best intentions, we very much wanted to help, to give money. And of course several employees at the shelter and the children themselves very soon realized what sorts of acts they had to put on in order to make a bit more money. In 1993 we were forced to admit to ourselves, although it was painful, that this was no longer the thing we had started. We gradually distanced ourselves from those people. And in 1994 the Blue Crow closed altogether (I think because the downtown area was "cleaned up" for the Goodwill Games).

It turns out that, like the British colonizers, you corrupted the Indians.

I see how terribly naive and sentimental we were when we came. It was painful to admit that we had acted foolishly. But with us it was never a question of discontinuing our work. So we started to look for other partners, we gathered information. We started to look around more for ourselves, to see who was doing what. When the Blue Crow closed, there were ten children left, and with them some of the teachers. In tents, with nothing to their name. We found out about this. We thought that anyone who would stay with the children in those conditions doesn’t want money, but wants to work with these children. With the money that was left from the Blue Crow, we rented an apartment for them. That was the beginning of the Bereg [Shore] Center.

Does Perspectives exist on donations from Germany?

Yes. Part of our philosophy is that the German staff members work for free, but the Russian staff have to be paid, because I don’t think that there are people here who can work for free.

Doesn’t it seem to you that by virtue of this philosophy the Russian employees in a certain sense begin to live, if not better, then in any case not less well than their foreign colleagues?

I, for example, was very lucky—I got money from my grandfather, so I can live in peace for the present. This isn’t some sort of romanticism: it’s simply impossible to pay German wages with our financing. We don’t want to spend half of our budget on salaries.

Are there a lot of idealists in Germany?

Surprisingly many. Many people come to us without our asking. In general my experience shows that the richest people are the stingiest. Their first question is whether we’ll give them a receipt for the internal revenue service showing that they made a donation. The richest people want this piece of paper right away and often give one hundred, a hundred and fifty marks, but for them that’s pocket change, while people who have much less give more money and don’t ask for this document.

How hard is it to raise money in Germany?

It isn’t easy. The situation is becoming more difficult: there’s less and less money going into social programs. In Germany we’re approaching the American system in that there will be more private foundations financing the social programs that now are funded by the government. But there isn’t enough money. That’s why sometimes people ask us why we aren’t doing this in Germany. They point out that there are problems at home and quite a lot of them. We tell them that we work in Russia not because we think that there aren’t any problems in Germany, but that we like it very much in Russia. Yes, usually private sponsors give us money: I tell them about what we’re doing and persuade them to support our project. Of course, in carrying out the project here I am very much dependent on the Russian partners, who decide how much to pay people, how much to give to whom. Often it’s hard for me deal with German sponsors who have a poor understanding of what’s going on in Russia and want sensational stories: the dirtier and hungrier the children are, the better. We’re doing professional work and have to think through what we’re doing very carefully, whether we can support one project or another. In general, before I start something up it’s important for me to decide how long we can keep it going.

To what extent do you have to make use of the myth of the ongoing Russian nightmare in order to raise money?

That myth still works, although I try not to use it. But I confess that when I see that people want to hear it, I try to phrase what I say so that they can understand it that way. I’ve already given up attempting to educate people. Unfortunately, you have to play this game. You have to decide whether you want money or to teach people something. For example, we avoid inviting journalists from German television, although we’ve had such opportunities.

Are unfortunate children more or less alike in Germany and in Russia?

The difference is that in Germany there are many more places they can turn to. There’s much more money allocated to the social sphere. But the problems in general are very similar. The scale is somewhat smaller. In Germany almost all children have passed through the social welfare system and the fact that they’re on the street shows that this system doesn’t always work. In Germany there are more places where they can go.

Tell us about your partners in Pavlovsk.

In Pavlovsk there’s a state children’s home. We came across it quite by chance—we were told about it by a German volunteer who had taken a child there. He felt very sorry for the children. They lie in bed twenty-four hours a day because there aren’t enough staff to work with them. Since then we’ve been supporting the home and we have good relations with the head doctor. They allowed us to come and play with the children. They welcomed us, and our project slowly grew out of this. We understood that these children really need us. There’s one person on duty there for twenty-four hours, looking after fifteen children who are severely handicapped. These are children with infantile cerebral palsy and various diseases on top of that. They wind up there because it’s thought that they’re not going to develop: the system provides only bed and board. They get bathed—but they’re not supposed to play, for example. We started to work with them gradually: we dressed the children, played with them, did special gymnastics. Now several people from our organization work with them regularly. Many people wondered why we were bothering ourselves with kids who’ll never walk. We think that there are no children with whom it isn’t worthwhile to work, and such severely handicapped ones are in even greater need of help. We thought about hiring Russians. But it was feared that there would be a conflict over wages because naturally we pay more than they do in children’s homes. That’s why we decided on foreigners. In some sense it’s easier with foreigners because they’re strangers, they’re outsiders in this context. The idea of voluntary service is very important to Perspectives. In Germany, girls can do a year of volunteer work in the social sphere after finishing school, and for the boys there’s alternative service.

What do the staff at the children’s home make of this?

They have different attitudes. It seems to me that in the beginning many of them thought that we Germans were crazy: "Those kids are idiots, they’ll never walk. If you want to work with children, then do it with the ones that are worth it." They thought that we were some sort of naive, romantic tourists who would vanish one day. Of course when we kept on working it became more difficult for them to handle the children, because they had come to life, they would no longer lie in bed all the time. They started to ask for things. We think all the time about how we can make the staff’s job easier. Now things have settled down at the children’s home and they’re confident that we’ll continue to work there.

Have you managed to change anything?

I think that things are changing somehow, very slowly. They had the same attitude in Germany and Holland, in all countries, thirty years ago: the handicapped have to be kept somewhere and it’s no use doing anything with them. But that’s changed. And I think that there have been some changes at the home. One of our goals is for the children to become as independent as possible, so that they can feed themselves, dress themselves, go to the toilet, bathe themselves: that makes the staff’s work easier. For example, there’s a girl who used to just sit in bed all the time with her eyes closed, swaying back and forth. She could walk but she didn’t want to. She didn’t eat on her own—she only drank from a bottle, although she was five years old. Now she walks, she sits at the table and eats with a spoon; she’s become much more active. She doesn’t talk and I don’t know whether she ever will. Of course these children aren’t going to become scholars, but they are children, they can do some things independently. Their speech and coordination have improved. They’ve regained an interest in life.

Many Germans come here to take part in certain actions—Aktion Suehnezeichen Friedensdienste [Action Atonement Peace Services], for example—or from motives stemming from the war and history. To what extent does this apply to you?

I wasn’t thinking about that when I started to work. I was rather impressed and grateful that people in Petersburg never reacted negatively toward me. No one ever said to me, "What do you want here? Leave us in peace."

Tell us about your family. I’ve heard that it’s an old family.

Something midway between a baron and a count. There are very many such families in Germany. My ancestors came to Germany from Holland about five hundred years ago. I have an older brother and an older sister who has five children. My brother’s wife is Chinese and they have one son. They all live in the countryside in Westphalia, in an old house that’s always in need of repairs. They’re all very supportive of my work. Mama’s also actively involved in Perspectives. She looks for money, writes thank-you letters. My mother’s always been involved in charity work through the church. I admit that sometimes I make use of this when I’m raising funds.

Do you have to supervise Russian employees? Fire people?

I don’t sense any special difficulties—as a woman, for example. Sometimes there are problems with Russian officials. I was terribly naive when I started and thought that you could talk about everything: I didn’t think of myself as an employer or take into account that other people depend on this money. I didn’t pay enough attention to cultural differences: for example, in Germany it’s more acceptable to criticize each other, while here that’s considered improper. Now I’m taken more seriously because I’ve already been here several years. I’ve learned a thing or two and want to keep learning. And yes, I’ve had to fire someone. The man had to go. I surprised myself, and then I had a shot of vodka.