If anything it was the opposite, people who perhaps didn't want to work were pressured into it. Now the local Red Cross, using Federation appeal funds, is trying to make a dent in both problems. It has contracted out a soup kitchen service to the Kyzyl Disability Society, which in turn employs 20 people to run the soup kitchen at the Donmasuk cafe. The name means 'warm water' in the Tuva language. Now the society feeds about 100 vulnerable people a day and employs 20, many of them disabled.
People have no money to buy the produce.
Still less the 'rampant capitalism' of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Kyzyl is littered with abandoned factories and a broken, rusting plant. Nowhere is the deadly spiral of economic decline, unemployment, Alcoholism, and destitution more evident than at Kyzyl's orphanage, for which Tuva republic branch chairwoman Irina Ondar is designing a support program under the Federation's winter appeal. His six brothers and sisters are all adults. He ran away from the orphanage recently but was found and brought back.