History of the school
Freedom of religion during the transition period continued to exist in the form of gratuitous assistance to neighbors, spiritual consolation, which is absent from representatives of traditional medicine.
To provide medical institutions with personnel knowledgeable in the historical and cultural traditions of Orthodoxy, by order of the Moscow Government in 1992 on the basis of the First City Clinical Hospital named after. N.I. Pirogov, for the first time in Russia, an Orthodox medical secondary school was created.
The work of the educational institution was subordinated to the Moscow Department of Health, and graduating nurses are trained according to state educational standards for secondary professional training of medical specialists.
The quality of education received by graduates allows them to provide medical care in shelters, nursing homes, and hospices with a spiritual understanding of the depth of emotional experiences of patients and the provision of all possible assistance and compassion.
In addition to nursing care in inpatient departments of hospitals, graduates provide patronage services at their place of residence to persons with disabilities and lonely elderly people deprived of the help of family and friends.
And what is so special about you?
To find the answer to the question of what is so remarkable about the St. Demetrius School of Sisters of Mercy, we talked to several people.
In our school, indeed, there is something that you will not find in other institutions. What exactly - read in our material. Those wishing to enter the school must go through three selection stages. The first of them is an interview with the confessor and the director of the school. After this, the applicant must work several hours in the hospital. The tasks are elementary - wash the floors, take out the trash, but in this way it is revealed whether the future student will be able to work with sick people, whether he is capable of compassion. The practice at the hospital is followed by the last stage - entrance exams. Everyone who wants to enter the school takes an oral exam in biology. In addition, those who have completed nine grades of school write a dictation. Applicants who have completed eleven classes take the presentation. In addition to the usual documents required for admission, you will need a recommendation from a confessor. An interview is not scary at all. Bring 2 photos and a pen. The confessor and the school director will meet with you. You will need to tell us about yourself and why you decided to come to us. In short, tell it like it is.
Natalya Yurievna KULAVINA, deputy director for practice, second-year supervisor at the school, explained to us why the supervisor should know everything about the student:
— We have this order: once you take a course, you must complete it. This is very convenient - you know all the children, they know you. I'm like a class teacher at school. I deal with their problems, if they have any questions, I solve them, I help if they have difficulties. Every day something new. There is an uninteresting part of the work, and there is an interesting one. Uninteresting - monitoring attendance, appearance, reminding students of the responsibilities of students, etc. And the interesting thing is when you communicate with them, when you help with something. They come, tell us something, ask for advice. And they have different problems - from family to studies. For example, the problem of misunderstanding at home. It happens that non-church parents want their children to study at a church school. But at the same time, they themselves understand little about this. Therefore, they do not distinguish between a school and a temple. A mother recently called me, making a lot of noise that her child was disappearing from morning to evening: “What kind of school is this? When should she do her homework?!” But it turned out that they meant that the girl studied until half past four, then she stayed for service in the temple. Of course, no one forced her on her own initiative. Parents often don't understand this. Some parents don't understand how much workload their children have. They simply don’t see how their children live here, how they live here. Parents think it’s like school here. Therefore, I have to talk to them, explain how hard it is for their children. Some students, especially in the second year - it is the hardest - even have to be excused from obedience if the load is too great for them. I have a girl in my second year whose mother is very seriously ill. And the girl takes care of her. She still has a brother, but no dad. We freed her from all the obediences we have at school, even the most obligatory ones. Her obedience is to look after her mother. That is, we must know a lot about students in order to correctly distribute the load and behave correctly with them. You have to be a psychologist, since many things manifest themselves in behavior. Why did the student suddenly become absent-minded? It turns out that something is wrong at his home.
“Tell me, do obediences probably not happen in secular schools?”
- - Can not be. Obedience is simply some good deed that needs to be done. And subsequently students get used to doing good deeds. Then it becomes a necessity for them. At the beginning they may not understand this, and this is how we introduce them to it. Then they themselves understand how necessary it is, how joyful it is, and they themselves volunteer. And the practice, which also exists in secular schools, is a mandatory state program that needs to be mastered. Now, for example, the second year is helping a mother with many children. She had a fourth child. She had a hard time giving birth. And, besides this, she also moved to a new apartment. She does not have time to go out with her elders, who are four, three and two years old. Once a day, two people from the second year come to see her. There are 56 people on the course. It turns out that one student undergoes obedience with this mother of many children, well if once every two months. That is, there are, in principle, not many obediences. And on their own initiative, they themselves help - they go to hospitals. Obedience in the hospital, it seems to me, is the most important. *** Students of the school undergo internships at the First City Hospital, at the hospital of St. Alexy at the Patriarchate, Children's Hospital No. 9 named after. Speransky, City Clinical Hospital No. 7, Research Institute of Emergency Medicine named after. Sklifosovsky and other hospitals in the city.
College students can put a patient on his feet just by carefully handling him. Third-year curator and deputy director for academic affairs Elena Ivanovna KAMALOVA talks about this
: — Some time ago, after classes, we began to care for patients in the trauma and other departments of the First City Hospital. Often, if an elderly, sedentary person arrives, he will develop a bedsore. Grandmothers with a hip fracture, for example. We were asked to help care for such patients. But the fact is that it is necessary to monitor how the bedsore behaves in order to treat it correctly. Therefore, the person who comes to grandma cannot appear only once a week. He must see the wound the day before and the next day to understand what is happening to the wound. And then you can adjust, treatment, care. Therefore, last year we came up with the idea of creating a brigade to combat bedsores. And they introduced a system of elders - those who monitor the behavior of bedsores. We have many such elders now. We found patients with pressure ulcers throughout the hospital - in internal medicine, in trauma, in neurology. Last year there weren’t very many of us, and it was very difficult. Sometimes the rounds took up to four hours, that is, after classes we sometimes came home only at nine o’clock. The girls like this kind of work with patients, since we went to see these patients every day, we knew them very well. And if you take care of a sick person every day, he gradually enters your soul, you begin to think about how best to treat him, what to do with him? That’s why we have a lot of people in our brigade this year. There are up to eighty people at general meetings. These are the second and third courses. They themselves come and sign up for our schedule of visits to patients.
- Aren’t the girls scared? Immediately confronted with a dying patient with huge wounds...
- No, they get used to it. In the first year, they still don’t know how to do anything, so they just go to help - turn grandma, give something, bring medicine, etc. And in the second year, since they are learning the basics of nursing and care, they can turn themselves, feed. In addition, patients not only need to be cared for, they need to be communicated with. The task of the first course lies even more in communication, because communication has a very good effect on patients. At first, patients lie down and do not react to anything - to anything at all. And some time after our visits, they begin to smile, become interested in the world around them, then they begin to sit down, some even stand up, etc. That’s why the girls like that there is such a huge return on their work. Many already from the first year begin to work in the hospital - First Gradskaya, in the hospital of St. Alexy of the Moscow Patriarchate. Our students formally get jobs as nurses, although after the third year they can work as full-fledged nurses - giving injections and putting in IVs. But until they graduate from college, they cannot officially be hired as nurses.
— Do boys also take care of the sick?
- Yes, and we have boys. They care for male patients. For example, here we were invited to look after two disabled boys. *** If you are not very church-going, don’t be alarmed. You will also be received with joy and love. Many of our students went to church here with us. And now they even organize liturgies once a year - they sing themselves, bake the prosphora themselves.
Svetlana SHATALOVA, a teacher of church singing, talks about how the tradition of student liturgies appeared at the St. Demetrius School:
— About 8 years ago, a group of students asked to be allowed to hold a church service and to assign a regent for this. They sang very successfully, and this tradition stuck. Now every year the first or second year, if desired, even the third and fourth year, must all prepare for the celebration of the liturgy. We have been preparing this service for a year. On average, it turns out to hold such liturgies no more than twice a year. Students even bake their own prosphora for this liturgy. They bake in the prosphora of the St. Demetrius Church, asking one of our professional prosphora makers to come and help them with this. And now such a tradition has begun to take shape - on the day of graduation, the 4th year sings the liturgy, and after the service, the students give the Father Superior a vestment they have prepared with their own hands in memory of themselves. They specifically ask the sacristans which vestments are best to make and what color. There is always someone on the course who knows how to sew. Or students find someone who can help them. Somehow they manage to make vestments even during state exams. I don't know how they find time. Many of these vestments have already become so familiar in the temple that no one even thinks that the students made them themselves.
Come, they are waiting for you!
“Not a job or profession, but the meaning of life and service”
On May 28, 1991, on the day of the patronal feast of the Church of the Holy Blessed Tsarevich Demetrius at the First City Hospital, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II blessed the creation of the St. Demetrius Sisterhood - a community of sisters of mercy. The sisters of mercy took on the responsibilities of caring for seriously ill people in the First City Hospital and at home, and later in Infectious Diseases Hospital No. 2. Then the St. Spiridonian almshouse was opened, where lonely seriously ill people were placed. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Mercy service launched other projects, the number of which grew to 26, many of which employ sisters of mercy. The Sisterhood of St. Demetrius still gladly accepts new sisters into its ranks.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the sisterhood, two sisters of mercy shared stories of their life journey. These young girls consciously made their choice - to help their neighbors.
Angelica, sister of mercy from the Patronage Service:
Angelica – I am an economist by training. After college, I immediately went to work at an art school as a secretary and at the same time worked as a contract manager. The director was pleased with me, but I got married and moved to Moscow. I liked working with numbers, I would still happily go into the public procurement system, start printing orders, collecting and collating data for annual reports, but I suddenly realized that I was not ready to devote my whole life to this work. It seemed to me as if I was drowning in an endless stream of numbers, and there was no benefit for myself or those around me.
My older sister was the first in our family to join the church, and I followed her, but not immediately, but 5 years after her death. Before my sister’s death, God for me was generally someone distant, someone who watches us from above and does not interfere in our lives. I was looking for answers to the questions: where was God when my sister died? Where is she now? And I was also worried about how to get rid of hatred for the person whom I considered to be the culprit of her illness and death... I found answers to all my questions surprisingly quickly, I found them in Orthodoxy. It turned out that everything is simple: God has always been and will be there.
When I came to the Church, I began to feel the need to fulfill in action the Lord’s commandments about loving one’s neighbor. And I began to look for an opportunity for this.
It so happened that I have been surrounded by good people since childhood. My dad and mom didn’t teach me that I needed to help those in need, they just showed it by example. My husband is a kind and open person who also never refuses to help anyone. This is probably why my family happily accepted my desire to become a sister of mercy and did not dissuade me.
The path to sisterhood began for me with the Palliative Care Center on Savelovskaya. In one day, I then managed to see the full scope of the junior nurse’s work: from feeding to the death of the patient.
I remember a beautiful young woman, I feed her, and she keeps worrying that I should eat too, and after every spoonful she eats she says to me: “What about you?” I remember a man who spoke passionately about his travels and showed me his paintings. I was not at all frightened by the sight of a body changed by illness, soiled underwear, curses and even swearing at me, screams of pain, strong smells - after all, I understood that I had come to seriously ill people who really needed my help. That day I learned the main thing: it is very important for a sick person to know that I am not embarrassed by his weakness, that I do not hold a grudge against him for his rude words, that I am always ready to help him with all my being. I came there as a volunteer and wanted to stay as a core employee, but at that time there were no available vacancies for a junior nurse. Then I was very upset, but did not give up.
She continued to search and - by God's Providence - found a position as a junior nurse in the sisterhood of Tsarevich Dimitri. It was here that the sisters showed me by their example what true service means, and discovered the depth of sincere love, tenderness and friendliness for their charges.
And when things are difficult, the awareness of God’s closeness gives strength
Now I understand that a real sister of mercy is a person who is filled with a very strong desire to help people, who is able to love another person as the image of God and be able to distinguish where a person speaks and where the illness speaks for him, and not be offended by the patient.
For me, of course, this is no longer a job, not a profession, but the meaning of life, service. Even when it’s not easy for me, the awareness of God’s closeness at the moment of helping people gives me strength to move on.
My rhythm of life has now completely changed, as if I had moved from an eternally raging sea to a quiet lagoon. In the first place now is not numbers and pieces of paper, but a person - my ward, with his life story, joys and worries.
Maria, sister of mercy of the St. Spyridonievsky almshouse:
Maria in the almshouse with her ward - Actually, I haven’t become a sister of mercy yet, but I’m just learning to be one. At the moment I am in the process of studying at the St. Demetrius School, but I believe that in order to become a real sister, you need experience and a lot of work on yourself. This is a very difficult, but interesting path.
If an unbeliever asked me to explain what a sister of mercy is, I would advise him to read a book about Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. I think this is a great example and explanation of what is involved in this concept.
It was precisely these life examples that helped me take the path of sisterhood.
By profession I am a fashion designer. I must say that for some time I was able to help people in this area, but at one point I suddenly realized that this was not my thing.
One day I came just to see what this almshouse was like. I remember as now, this day in a cozy home environment, in the circle of sisters and old people. And unexpectedly for myself, I realized that I also had a desire to help and participate in the lives of these people, and over time, my interests began to grow, and so gradually I came to enter the St. Demetrius School.
The family reacted very well to my choice and understood that this was a form of helping people.
My work teaches, first of all, compassion, patience, humility and, of course, love for one’s neighbor and respect. Of course, this brings us closer to God and faith.
New people, acquaintances, new interesting events, knowledge appeared in my life. I also really want to believe that I have grown in some ways.
A lot of miracles happen here. For example, in an almshouse there was a man who could not pronounce a single word clearly; no one understood him. But after a while, through diligence, self-improvement and true faith, he again learned to read, speak and even sing songs. And I see this often.
I do not call on all those who suddenly want to become a sister of mercy to accept Orthodoxy. But I would recommend first sitting down and trying to explain to yourself what mercy is. This word - what does it mean? And I think then the question of faith will disappear by itself.
