By Nino Chubabria, Julia Ashmore | Project Leaders
It is just 4 weeks to Christmas which our children and teenagers from Tbilisi are really excited about! You can help them celebrate the holidays and their achievements of this year like one big family. Global Giving UK will support them too – they will match each new regular monthly donation set up in December up to the value of £100 – the matching funding to be received after the 4th monthly donation has gone through.
Regular monthly gifts mean a lot to us, help us plan ahead and know with some certainty the funds we have – and that makes a great difference to Mkurnali. If you can set up a regular monthly donation through Global Giving this month, we can take advantage of their matching offer!
And now to our news:
Last September we fulfilled one of our long-anticipated ideas – to bring Nino Chubabria – Director of Mkurnali charity to the UK. This is the only charity in Tbilisi which supports homeless teens and young adults and those who have had trouble with the law. One of the fundamental problems is that once these youngsters turn 16, they are on their own, even if they have previously been in a shelter or orphanage. The result is that they end up on the street or in prison.
With this in mind, our programme for Nino included visits to the UK’s foremost charities and organisations which work with street children and young people. These meetings brought up a whole new range of ideas: how to teach basic literacy for troubled teens and street children; how to provide training for personnel; what street children forums can do for promoting and helping such organisations as Mkurnali and many more. Not least, discussions referred how to preserve the unique work ethic created by the charity over the years.
Nino says “The information I gathered will be very helpful. This visit was a great experience and each of the organisations that I visited has shown me a fresh perspective of my work and inspired me with new ideas”.
It was a new experience for Mkurnali residents to run the shelter on their own while Nino was away but they learned a great deal from it, and did a great job, as Nino tells us.
“In September I had to leave the Organization for 10 days, which was sort of a test for Jemal. He had to take care of the shelter (with the help of the other young people). I want to proudly announce that the boys handled everything in a great way in our social enterprise (a cartridge filling business) as well as for Mkurnali. They also renovated and tidied up the outside of the house including the yard. The boys painted the outside walls and balcony railing. They did it with the money they raised themselves through their employment. Another nice gesture was that they mended the washing machine that I couldn't repair because all of the repairmen that I called said that the machine couldn't be fixed by them, so I had to take all of the laundry and wash it in my own house. The boys found a repairman that could fix the washing machine and also raised money for that themselves.
Through the help of our supporters, Mkurnali's toilets, balcony floors, kitchen and storeroom got renovated.
Two months ago we received new beneficiaries: A woman who is a victim of domestic violence and her two daughters (because of the rising numbers of cases in domestic violence, the organizations who work in this field do not have any more resources to deal with these growing numbers). The children are 16 and 2 years old. The 16 year old fell behind with her school syllabus; she was missing school most of the time because of her family situation and we are working on helping her catch up with her school programme.
Also this girl has some behavioural problems and we are working on her behaviour as well, with the help of our friends who are psychologists.
Last week it was the Georgian National Youth Championship in kickboxing where our Jemal was a referee.
I want to proudly emphasize that in this month there were no brand new criminal cases that were caused by street children.” Thank you for all your support in 2015!
By Nino Chubabria, Julia Ashmore | Project Leader
By Julia Ashmore, Nino Tchubabria | Project Leader
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