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Residents take over backyard of St Lazarus shelter to build schooner from ashes of political upheaval for global voyage
Where a communist-era tractor factory once stood in south Warsaw, around the back of the St Lazarus homeless shelter, the steel hull of an unlikely vessel is slowly rising from the ground.
As high as a two-storey house and 17 metres (55ft) long, the boat is incongruous amid the messy detritus of socialism and the half-built capitalism that is gradually taking its place. It looks like an ark built in anticipation of some biblical flood being visited on this unfashionable corner of the Polish capital.
The real story is scarcely less surprising. It is a two-masted, ocean-going schooner, being built to exacting specifications by a team of homeless workers, who plan to sail it around the world in 2013.
It is a grandiosely defiant gesture in the face of dislocation and poverty that is fitting for a country where Soviet communism was brought to its knees by some particularly stubborn shipyard workers.
One of the homeless men working on the boat, Slawomir Michalski, worked in the Gdansk shipyard in the turbulent 1970s and 80s, just as the Solidarity union movement was being born. Lech Walesa was a workmate.
"I knew him very well, not as a personal friend but to say hello to every morning. I was a welder there and he was an electrician working about 100m from my position," Michalski recalled.
While Walesa fought his way from the Lenin shipyards to the presidential palace, Michalski lost his way. He left Gdansk to be with a woman and found work elsewhere in the country, but ultimately he lost the woman and the job. After drifting for some time, he ended up at St Lazarus two years ago, aged 51.
"Building this showed that, though we may not have our own homes for now, we are still capable of big things," he said,
A rise in homelessness is part of the price Poland has had to pay for its whiplash transition from a command economy to a free market. No one has a firm handle on the numbers – even official estimates range from 20,000 to 500,000, depending on which state agency provides the data and what definitions they use. Whatever the statistics, the 120 beds at the Catholic-run St Lazarus home are always full, and it constantly has to turn people away.
The idea of building the yacht came from Father Boguslaw Paleczny, an inspirational monk and travelling musician who built the St Lazarus home with the proceeds from concert tours and CD sales to the Polish diaspora around the world.
While recovering from tuberculosis in 2006, he was leafing through a sailing manual and decided that sailing was an ideal way of restoring the sense of self worth that many St Lazarus residents (he always resisted calling it a homeless shelter) had lost.
When it appeared it would be too costly to buy a boat, he decided it could be hand-built in the St Lazarus backyard and persuaded Polish manufacturers to donate almost all the materials.
However, he died of a heart attack two years ago, leaving the mission's administrator, Adriana Porowska, to keep the outlandish scheme alive. "For me, the yacht is already fulfilling its role. It's already sailing," Porowska said. "This is about getting a sense of dignity back and, from the point of view of society, if people can see these homeless people are capable of something like this, then they can't be 'degenerates', after all."
The daily work on the boat is overseen by Waldemar Rzeznicki, a sea captain who was persuaded by Paleczny to work half-time on the project.
"This is about sheer determination and hard work," Rzeznicki said. "The men are down in that hull for eight hours at a stretch and come out as black as miners. And they are doing it very professionally."
Rzeznicki will captain the boat and the crew will be volunteers from the 45 homeless men who have worked on its construction.
Michalski now has an offer of a boatbuilding job in Belgium, but says he will be back when the time comes to set sail.
He said. "If I hear it is finished and ready to go, then why not? It would be a beautiful adventure."