Nursery Home of Estery, Imereti Region, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / NKTA 2007

I’ve been to so many boarding schools in Armenia that it’s not surprising their equivalents in Georgia are pretty much identical in terms of conditions with the wallpaper coming off crumbling walls in rooms connected by dark and poorly ventilated corridors. However, the one main difference was that in Georgia many of these soviet era institutions are emptying whereas in Armenia they are not.

At the confusingly named “Nursery Home of Estery” on the outskirts of Kutaisi, for example, there were only 18 children from approximately 90 originally enrolled and attending. This is because of the continuing policy of deinstutionalization in the Republic of Georgia and the provision of family-based alternative forms of care for vulnerable and abandoned children.

Georgia has over 4,500 children currently living in orphanages, and the vast majority of them (86%) are not in fact orphans but have been abandoned by their families who have been hit hard by poverty and other social problems. These families have no form of assistance or safety net and for those living on the edge, the institutions are the only available option.

Institutional care, however, can seriously hinder a child’s development, as they don’t receive the proper care and attention they need to flourish.

Others had been reintegrated back into their biological families or placed with foster parents. After visiting the institution I also accompanied two of the Ministry of Education and Science’s social workers to see such cases. Such visits are regular and also assess the psychological condition of children as well as the physical, but more on that later.

Until then, one other observation. Whereas children in state-run boarding schools in Armenia are rarely if ever fed meat, in Estery they were as part of a much more balanced diet which also included fruit. Of course, having significantly less children enrolled in such institutions mean less budgetary constraints, but anyway.

The main and most important difference, however, is that that there are over twice as many children placed in insitutions because of poverty in Armenia than in Georgia.

Nursery Home of Estery, Imereti Region, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / NKTA 2007