The proposed publication is an ethnographic study presented in the form of a documentary novel. It is based on field recordings made in an orphanage for children with developmental disabilities and a psychoneurological boarding school for adults, where the wards of the orphanage are sent upon reaching adulthood. Several years of work as a volunteer for a charitable organization allowed the author to collect extensive material and demonstrate how various aspects of “normality” and “deviation” manifest themselves in the interaction between the wards of institutions and those who deal with them. The book reveals the institutional logic behind the practices of the staff of the boarding schools and volunteers of the charitable organization. The reader is presented not only with the trajectories of the wards, but also with the inner story of a volunteer who goes through the path from accepting the volunteer ideology to its estrangement. The scientific apparatus is mainly put in the footnotes, and is also collected in the afterword. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers of fiction and non-fiction, but above all to those interested in anthropological and qualitative sociological research of contemporary Russian society, anthropological aspects of social work and disability issues.