Tragicomedy in Moscow--Aid That Isn’t

It was, to say the least, a delicate problem.

It’s not that Dr. Yuri Pavlov is ungrateful for the humanitarian aid his facility is receiving, nor does he want to be accused of looking a gift horse in the mouth.

But what, after all, is a Moscow children’s hospital supposed to do with 150,000 condoms from Japan?

“In all different colors,” Pavlov added. “Condoms in every color of the rainbow! We kept trying to figure out a way to get rid of them. First, we called around to other hospitals to see if someone would trade us for some bandages, but no one would.

“Finally I just gave them to my staff.”

The episode is just one tragicomic example of aid gone awry in the former Soviet Union. For amid the mounting tons of donated food and medicine pouring into the Commonwealth of Independent States, a small but nonetheless frustrating--and ultimately costly--percentage is turning out to be unneeded, unwanted or simply unusable.

It is a problem officials are reluctant to discuss for fear of appearing unappreciative or just plain picky. But a random survey of hospitals, schools, nursing homes and relief workers in Moscow alone suggests that millions of dollars worth of humanitarian aid may be useless or going to waste.

Among the problems are medications and foodstuffs with expiration dates long past, or gifts that come with inadequate labels, or without instructions in Russian or any other language understandable to those administering the medicines or cooking the foods.

“Just last Monday, we received medicines from Germany that had expired in 1989,” said Dr. Alla Burlakova, a pediatrician at the Minsk Children’s Hospital in Kiev, where many children suffering from the secondary effects of Chernobyl radiation are being treated.

“The same thing happened with a shipment from Germany last autumn,” she said, adding that the hospital has become more diligent about looking for expiration dates on donated goods. “It’s a shame.”

Sometimes, cultural differences render foreign donations useless or, more frequently, merely puzzling.

The Salvation Army, which is overseeing the distribution of U.S. aid in Moscow from the current Operation Provide Hope campaign, found itself providing shoe polish to bewildered refugees and dental floss to toothless pensioners.

“They couldn’t figure out the solid deodorant, and they looked at the shoe polish for a long time,” said Salvation Army Capt. Kathleen Ljungholm after visiting the refugee camp.

“They had never seen eyedrops before,” she added.

The Salvation Army likes to offer toiletries as gifts along with the soup it serves, she said, adding that a delivery of mouthwash is expected soon.

On the other hand, Russian recipients took to some of the other American products with zeal.

“Things like pudding are very rare here,” Ljungholm said. “And they loved it, just loved it.”

When she went to a soup kitchen to teach Russian cooks how to prepare dehydrated military rations--leftovers from the Persian Gulf War--the reaction was pure disbelief.

“When I showed them the meat and put it in water and it started to grow, their eyes about popped out,” Ljungholm said.

Still to come are cans of chili con carne, lasagna and fish sticks.

There have been sporadic reports of spoiled food turning up in aid shipments, due either to expired dates or damage in transit. Some of the Russians who reported the problem were not offered replacement goods and, in some cases, had to fill out long forms requesting official permission to throw the stuff away.

“We got 685 cans of meat with expired dates on the cans from the European Community aid,” said Elina Ustinova, principal of Elementary School No. 46 in Moscow. “We distributed it to the children without looking, and some of the parents came back to us and mentioned that the dates were expired. But they said they tried it anyway and it was fine.”

At a home for elderly women, one director reported 450 cans of spoiled vegetables and marinated fruits from Poland and 12 dozen chocolate bars that had been gnawed on by mice.

More common than spoiled goods, however, is donated food going to waste because the recipients simply find it unpalatable.

Children’s hospitals gave negative reviews to canned beef from China and to the oval-shaped Dutch equivalent of Spam, which looks and smells alarmingly like dog food.

“Sometimes you want to say ‘thanks but no thanks’ and reject it, like the canned beef from China, which is pretty awful,” said Viktor Markin, a deputy director of the First City Children’s Clinical Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the former Soviet Union.

“But once you say no, you’ll get cut off altogether,” Markin said. “We tried the Chinese meat, but the sick children just wouldn’t eat it.”

In addition, he said, the hospital received outdated German powdered milk from a church and outdated medications from various countries.

“A lot of medication comes with expired dates,” Markin asserted. “And a lot comes without instructions, and we can’t use it because we don’t know what it is. If anyone asked us, we’d give them a list of what we need, but nobody’s communicating with us.

“We take what we get.”

Children’s Hospital No. 3 reported a recent delivery of penicillin that was more than a year out of date.

“We’ve got too much of one kind of medicine and we are not able to use it all, and that means that even when tablets are OK, they become useless because of the time that we keep them here,” said deputy director Yuri Zaikin.

“On the other hand, we don’t have necessary items like vitamins and antibiotics,” he added. “On the whole, we are grateful and are trying to use what we’ve got.”

Medications pose a particular problem when they come with inadequate labeling or instructions.

First City Children’s ended up with half a ton of white tablets from America--500,000 pills packed loose in plastic bags with no instructions or labels. The chief doctor complains about the space they take up in storage but makes no effort to solve the mystery, saying he does not want to create a fuss.

At the No. 7 Children’s Hospital, director Yuri Pavlov brings out samples of donated medication that his 1,100-bed hospital cannot use. The display includes Robitussin Cough Expectorant from America that arrived, according to Pavlov, in December. The medicine bears a May, 1991, expiration date.

More frustrating are the bottles of Japanese pills with no description in any other language. Another Japanese medication called “Creosote” offers only a cryptic English label suggesting that it can treat everything from food poisoning to dental cavities. But the tablets do not include further instructions for doctors.

“We have no comparable medicine here,” Pavlov said. “Russians use creosote for cleaning boats.”

“All this probably cost about $250,000, and we’re not using it,” Pavlov lamented.

He said a special committee at the Health Ministry was contacted, as was the Japanese Embassy, but no useful answers were found.

The Japanese Embassy, in turn, was puzzled by the mere appearance of any Japanese medication in Moscow, since its government is sending aid only to the Russian Far East and Central Asia, not to Moscow.

“Maybe it’s from private donors,” suggested embassy spokesman Akio Kawato.

Only medications that have been tested in Russia or approved for use here are supposed to be in distribution, according to the Health Ministry, but exceptions obviously are slipping through, especially in relatively small shipments of private aid that go directly to a specific facility.

“All embassies have lists with the medicines that we need urgently,” said Deputy Health Minister Alexei Moskvichov. He insisted that the government has “practically gotten rid of” shipments of unusable aid.

Moskvichov offered no current statistics but said 7% to 9% of aid received in the first half of 1991 proved to be useless.

During this winter’s international relief effort, he said, one hospital received a large amount of U.S. medication used to treat a relatively rare condition involving excess iron in the body, although iron deficiency is a far greater concern here.

“It’s not used very often, and there’s enough of this medicine to last many hospitals for five or six years,” Moskvichov said. “Unfortunately, all this medicine expires in six months.”

At the Russian Humanitarian Aid Commission, which is charged with organizing aid shipments, deputy chairman Alexander Zhitnikov expressed some frustration over the situation.

“There may be some very good pharmaceuticals that have not been tested here or used here before,” he said. “So some good pharmaceuticals will arrive, but physicians will not be allowed to use them. . . . “

The most notorious case of unwanted aid was probably the shipment of beef from Britain, which Moscow refused because of concerns about “mad cow disease.” The problem was resolved by shipping the beef north to a region without livestock, since the beef was considered fit for human consumption but the byproducts posed a possible danger if used for animal feed.

Sometimes, Zhitnikov said, donors are simply too generous.

“What we really are trying to get are very simple things like beef or butter,” he said. “It’s a problem when you send something expensive.”

He recalled that a German woman had wanted to buy down-filled parkas for an orphanage but that Russian officials had to discourage her.

“Here such a parka would cost 6,000 rubles,” he said. The average salary is 960 rubles per month. Donating such a valuable item would only tempt thieves and speculators, he said, and children unaware of the value might trade it too quickly for a few hundred rubles.

Told of the Japanese condoms sent to a children’s hospital, the aid official, like the doctor who received them, was at a loss.

“That’s just crazy,” he said.