Vital Emergency Fostering for Children in Ukraine

Dear friends,

Hopefully you are having a cozy Autumn. In this report we would like to share with you an impact story filled with love and warmth. It is a story of two boys whose lives were changed thanks to emergency fostering and your kind support.

The two smiley gentlemen you can see on the picture are Zhenia an Ihor*. They had a very difficult childhood, but once placed in a family of emergency foster carers received a chance for a better tomorrow. Most importantly, thanks to Emergency Fostering Services kids found new parents who concurred diseases and psychological trauma and created miracles with their love.

“Our son’s childhood was filled with limitations. – says mother of the boys, Natalia, referring to Ihor, the younger brother. – I can’t even imagine what was going on in his little had. It was not until half a year ago that he kissed me for the first time ever. It was not imaginable to lift him up or pat him on his hair. The child was under the effect of deep emotional damage”.

Ihor was also diagnosed several serious health issues, including deafness. As a consequence, at the age of two the child still could not speak. But Natalia was always there for him, ready to fight heroically for the health and wellbeing of her sons.  

“Now Ihor is seven. – Natalia continues. – He already mastered a big part of vocabulary, uses word phrases and has even memorized his first poem. Now he is a cheerful, happy kid. He would not leave my hands, kisses and hugs me all the time. He finally said “I love you, mom”. He has a hobby: he really likes to handicraft with scissors and glue. Zhenia, his elder brother, is very serious and responsible. At school he gets all the best grades, takes part in international contests and wins first prizes. Our sons are very cheerful, happy and well-behaved”.

Thanks to Natalia’s persistence and faith Ihor has been timely provided with medical treatment that helped him hear better. And thanks to your kind support Ihor was also provided with a course of therapy that helped to speed the process along and allowed the boy to start his first school year together with other 7-year-olds.

“Our whole family wants for our little one to recover from all the “special conditions” and have a life of a normal kid. We have already dealt with many complications, fought many difficulties to reach success. We are constantly moving forward for our son to have a chance for a full, happy life, filled with sounds,” - Natalia told us. And Ihor together with Zhenia prepared a little surprise gift (please, see the picture below).

Natalia and her sons have found each other with your help. Thanks to your support provided to this project the kids met their future mother and father in a warm atmosphere of emergency fosterers’ home instead of a “visitors room” of an institution where they would be stressed and scared. In this atmosphere they started to get to know each other, to get closer until they realized that they are a family.

To create more happy stories like this one, it is important that emergency fosterers are well-prepared to establish relations between a child and potential future parents without imposing them and, in case these relations prove positive, to further support them without intervening. This is one of the reasons why we put huge effort into training of emergency foster carers. As the process of introducing the Services progresses, more and more families are needed. With your help we will be able to train families of future emergency fosterers across Ukraine, in order to ensure that in all regions children temporarily left without parental care can benefit from this service.  

Please, do consider to further help this cause. And thank you for all you have already done to make such wonderful stories possible!

Warm regards,

Kateryna Snisarenko
Project Communications Officer

*The names of the beneficiaries are changed to protect their identities