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Needed and happy to be

 Alevtina Babyna became Hesed client in 1998 when the recrudescence of polyarthritis in lower limbs put her on crutches. The pain was insufferable, so was the feeling of helplessness and irrelevance against her long previous life full of physical endurance. Accepting extraneous help in completing everyday household tasks and petty gardening jobs was oppressive though it was not to last, lack of funding to pay for visiting aid and care. It may look fair that Nazi victims are entitled to that kind of attention in priority but still, what Heseds are to do of those who had managed to flee Nazi reprisals, or had been fighting in combat units, or were nursing injured soldiers in hospitals?

Self–sustained by nature, she simply had to have something to do with herself to feel fully alive and needed. She could have thought of anything but chose the community. Members are mostly elder people, Hesed clients with lots of similar or specific problems. They need help, they need the community, they need each other, though they often don't know it. However, at Hesed–Rahamim they do; that is why their mobile element “Hesed–on–Whee ls” keeps touring Minsk region from Mir to Logoisk to Ossipovitchi to Nesvizh, delivering food sets and newspapers, and gifts–in–kind together with the certitude that somebody cares.

Usually, that kind of changes do not happen all of a sudden, unexpectedly; it takes time to realize that giving may be as gratifying as receiving. In 2004 she offered her house as a foothold of community life: weekly Sabbath assemblies, Passover and Tu B'shevat Seder bring together 30 and more members. Volunteers, Hesed clients, visitors from Minsk and abroad mill around all week long at Alevtina's, and make her busy… and happy.

Alevtina Babyna lives in Ossipovitchi all alone; her children have their own families, they left Belarus a long time ago. When they come to visit her mother they look to make her life easier. Now she has in–house sanitaries, and handrailing all over the living space. In a broad manner, 67 is not that old: health permitting, it may become the age of plenitude, of reviviscence. If this “a priori” statement does not seem to fit Alevtina's case, her authoritative look of belonging to where she lives tells a lot about exceptions.

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