Problems are solved when people are active
According to the Movement for Freedom (the MFF) Hantsavichy town activists, the coverage of the local problems in media and personal meetings of citizens with officials are the efficient steps in solving painful problems.
The MFF Hantsavichy activists analyzed the town dwellers’ appeals to The Hantsavichy Times newspaper as well as their own work in this January and February.
They discovered that most problems included in the appeals of the local residents are rarely understood or solved at the level of the local district officials. For example, having discovered unfinished work, the residents of the cooperative apartment house at the Kastrychnitskaya street 68 have many times appealed to the construction company and to the District Executive Committee officials. However, the responsible persons didn’t perform any sufficient actions to correct the defects. After this, the residents arranged the meeting inviting, among others, an employee of the independent The Hantsavichy Times newspaper. The decision was made at the meeting to write the appeal and to demand the local authorities to take urgent measures in order to correct the deficiencies.
The residents declared in the ultimatum form that if the situation doesn’t mend they would have to appeal to the State Monitoring Committee, and initiate the audit of the entire construction project with the expenses charged by judicial means.
Literally several days after the meeting was held and the claims were sent, the commission consisting of the PMK-7 construction company contractors, the District Executive Committee, and the design engineers inspected the house and promised to replace flooring and ceiling in several apartments, as well as to level the walls and to correct other deficiencies. The commission promised to eliminate the defects of the roof in springtime. However, the work began only after the article named Cooperative apartment house made with defects was published in The Hantsavichy Times on January 15.
Hantsavichy district practices show that many problems are solved when the citizens are active and when The Hantsavichy Times publishes quality articles. The important factor is when journalists do not only inform of the problem itself after citizens appeal to them but also try and find out the causes of these problems, the ways to solve them, and the opinion of the responsible officials.
Sometimes, the officials have to take some measures as early as at the stage of discovery of a certain problem, so that no information appears in the press of their inactivity. For example, the article named When there’s no water, the frost is to blame was published in The Hantsavichy Times issue of January 29. The residents of the 18-apartment house raised the problem of the absence of water in their house (the water appeared to have frozen). People had to go for water for a 300 meters distance to the water column for four days. Everyone can imagine this is rather hard to live in such conditions when you can’t have a wash, cook some food or go to the WC. At first, the utility service didn’t react to the numerous phone calls and appeals of the residents. After the journalists joined this situation, a work team began working in this house the next day and finally managed to heat the frozen water pipeline.
By their joint efforts, the Hantsavichy town dwellers and The Hantsavichy Times succeeded to force a partial resolution of the problem of low temperature in the district hospital which alarmed many residents. Phone calls to the newspaper hot line, analysis of the causes of the cold temperature in the wards, and the publication entitled Frost therapy used in the hospital on February 5 forced the management of this health care institution to take measures which led to better heating in the hospital.
Attendance quality improved in the outpatient clinic due to the activity of the citizens who complained about long queues in the outpatient clinic which prevented people from getting to doctors for several days or from completing the medical examination. After the article named Queues cannot cure patients appeared in The Hantsavichy Times on February 19, attendance schedule of some doctor’s rooms was revised which lifted the tension and reduced the queues.
However, we should note that all this happens provided people are active and open, and aren’t indifferent to civil problems.
Likewise, some appeals of the residents to the heads of the state services and agencies proved to be the efficient measures. Many people visited Valiantsin Abramchuk, the Brest province State Monitoring Committee (SMC) head. They worried not only about personal problems but also about the civil ones. One of such problems was the environmental issue when people complained about the elimination of the alley of the age-old oaks and other trees in the town. This was done even at the day when the SMC official was receiving the visitors. As before, neither the District Executive Committee nor the environmental services of the town didn’t react to the town residents’ appeals, and refused to present the permission on sawing of the trees. So, people even showed the photos of the barbarian elimination of the trees to the province official. Then, he promised to solve this problem.
The situation concerning the sawing of the trees was also reflected in The Hantsavichy Times article of February 19 named Savage environment protection. It will be known before long whether the District Executive Committee had the permission and whether the forest service paid money for destroying the good trees.
Today, active work is being done to solve two important problems discovered in Hantsavichy and in Razdzialavichy village. The first problem concerns the presumable future termination of the agreements and the disconnection of more than a hundred private houses from the central heating system in August 1, 2010. Hantsavichy dwellers have already appealed to the SMC concerning this issue, however, received no answer as yet.
The other problem concerns the disconnection of the electric power and water supply for the dwellers of the Razdzialavichy village agricultural quarter that run small household farms. Likewise, this would influence over a hundred households that would have to stop breeding cows and pigs which virtually means they would be left without food and the means of subsistence, since there are almost no vacant job positions in Razdzialavichy which is one of the most distant villages from the district centre. Apart from picking blackberries and cranberries, small household farms are the only means of subsistence for many rural dwellers. However, the conditions created by the local authorities for villagers do not comply with the ones declared by the higher authorities. Instead of promoting the development of villages, the authorities “throttle” the villagers. Is it right to have to carry several buckets of water from 150-200 meters distance two or three times each day, sometimes to the forth floor? This explains why there are only less than two hundred cows in such large village as Razdzialavichy which previously had some five hundred cows. Nevertheless, the villagers don’t want to give up, and try to find justice. Signatures are already being collected. We’ll see soon if this yields any results.
Many problems have accumulated and continue to accumulate with many of them not being solved by anyone. The causes for this are not only the inactivity of the officials but also the indifference of the citizens. Nonetheless, there are some positive changes. It should be noted that people became more active after the opinion poll was performed and the problems of the Hantsavichy district residents were discovered, and especially after the efficient examples appeared of some positive changes due to the initiatives of individual citizens.
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