An 80-year-old siege woman gets behind the wheel of a van every day to help the disabled in St. Petersburg

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Dobrota charitable foundation has been operating in St. Petersburg for 10 years already. The only participant in this fund is Galina Ivanovna Yakovleva. A woman drives a white van, loads them with food and groceries herself, delivering them from suppliers to disabled people on the outskirts of the city. And she does all this work regularly, despite the fact that Galina Ivanovna herself is 80 years old and that she herself is disabled.

Galina Ivanovna doesn't take money - she says it's inconvenient. But he does not refuse products and essential goods: he finds suppliers on his own, picks up all the goods herself, loads them into his van and takes them to the addresses herself. In total, Galina Ivanovna has about five hundred "wards" - this is how she calls those people whom she is trying to help.

Galina Ivanovna admits that she does not refuse any help: sometimes she is given expired food or used clothes, but the pensioner prefers to go through all the goods on her own and decide whether they will be useful or not. Often the expiration of products is purely nominal - they are still quite fit for food, but they can no longer be sold on the counter. And other products are given to Yakovleva completely fresh.

So, the journalists of one of the Russian channels witnessed how Galina Ivanovna was given not five, not ten, but half a ton of frozen meat. Someone gives toilet paper, someone apples from their garden, and someone - tickets to the theater.

To make the work more productive, Galina Ivanovna once acquired a van, on which she delivers all the goods to the addressees. “I have a rest at the roll, I get pleasure,” Yakovleva admits. "The car is my health, and charity is my life."

Galina Ivanovna brings aid to nursing homes and social homes in St. Petersburg. And he takes the products themselves in stores and wholesale warehouses. “They are so used to me, they know that I don’t speculate, I’m not a businessman, I just give everything,” Galina Ivanovna says about suppliers.

Galina Yakovlevna admits that it is charity that allows her not to stick out and be so energetic - after all, in fact, she herself has enough health problems. Galina Ivanovna is a blockade woman, during the bombing she was still a child, then she was severely concussed and for several years Galina became numb. Now the years are also affecting - the pensioner admits that it is difficult for her to walk, her legs hurt a lot. But, fortunately, Galina Ivanovna has a long driving experience (as much as 57 years!) - she worked for many years as a trolleybus driver, so now her van is helping out perfectly.

“Even if some kind of trouble happens at home, I sit down - and it calms me down”? - says the pensioner. And Galina Ivanovna finds few reasons to be upset. She tries to help everyone around her, donates gifts to people whom she sees for the first and last time, and believes that this helps to make the world kinder. Perhaps it is, because otherwise people would not share with Galina Ivanovna. She believes that, of course, there are bad people in the world, but there are still more good people.

In our article "Useless treasure" you can learn the story of a billion Soviet rubles that did not make anyone richer.