What I Do

I'm figuring there are at least a few people out there who are wondering exactly what it is that I'm doing here. I am currently employed as an intern at Friends House Moscow or Дом Друзей if you are linguistically inclined. FHM is a non-profit organization that acts as a conduit for British and American Friends to donate money to Quaker-value based initiatives and programs in Russia. FHM basically acts as a way for Friends internationally to donate money to Russian programs in an effective and reliable manner.
FHM helps coordinate and support projects in a number of areas including Alternative to Violence Programs, work with orphanages, creating school conflict mediation programs, and conscientious objection to Russia's mandatory conscription, among other things. We are currently support AVP and school conflict management programs in Moscow, Kazan, and Odessa (Ukraine). Work in Odessa includes work done in prisons for youth offenders. As you can see FHM is very active in a lot of areas, which often stretches the full time staff, Сергей (Sergei) and Наташа (Natasha), rather thin. My hope as an intern is to relieve some of the pressure from them and increase the efficiency of the office.

One of my major tasks so far has been translating. It is often difficult to have Russian speaking staff and English speaking donors and board members. Board members live as close as in Moscow to as far away as California. The Executive Board of FHM is made of of Friends in Britain and America who meet once a year. All other contact is through newsletters, reports, and emails. Having a Russian speaking American (thats me believe it or not) allows for easier reporting from Moscow to our board and donors. The better idea the donors have of what we are doing, theoretically, the more donations we receive. This is a rather shameless plug, but the only thing holding FHM from supporting additional worthwhile projects is a lack of funding. So I have spent time so far translating reports, translating articles to send to interested parties, and organizing the FHM library (Think one library, two languages, and the Dewey decimal system).

In theory as I get more settled here and get into the flow of work I will get to do more hands on work with project coordination and completion. There are AVP workshops help in our office space almost weekly, so eventually I will hopefully be working in those as well as other projects. While this job isn't exactly stacking up the bills in my bank account, as you can see this is very rewarding work. It hard to feel bad about yourself when you are working to bring money to orphanages.

(Pictures Which Can Be Clicked On and Enlarged are, from top: the view from my bedroom at 11 last night, my bedroom, the offince, and my desk/workspace at the office)



More Info on FHM Can Be Found At the Following Links
Friends House Moscow
Friends House Moscow (Britain)

-Крейг