By Anna Kalmatskaya | Project Leader
Our dear friends!
We want to thank everyone for your support and we are glad to share with you first report on our project.
December went with us in hurry with the main goal to yearn our place at Global Giving. Having been working with internally displaced people for about a year we had strong feeling that the project on integration of refugees families surely deserves to live.
With that determination, we sent about 100 fundraising letters and e-mails to potential donors in Ukraine and abroad. We put advertisement and sent personal messages in Facebook, made about 50 phone calls. We applied to our friends in US, Canada, Japan, Europe. And we are surely grateful to everyone who supported us that time and made the miracle happen!
We started integration work with few families whom we already knew for some time. Those wonderful people who faced with the difficult challenge in their lives, definitely need individual pages for their stories.
One of them is Sergei and Lubov family that is raising four sons. Sergei and Lubov were successful businessmen in Donetsk, having big cottage house in Donetsk downtown with huge garden and big hopes for the future. After war has started they had to escape from their home by car which they finally had to sale in order to be able to feed their four children. Young parents came to Kyiv in September 2015, trying to rend some apartment and hardly could find one with dilapidated floors, peeled wallpaper, embossed window and cockroaches. For them, now it is a big challenge - to learn to live on $ 4 a day for the whole family. Their youngest 7-years old son still keeps shock and fearful memories about bombing and other reality of war they had to face. Along with our integration meetings and daily communication, we helped Sergei and Lubov with practical issues of finding job, resolving situation with school. We also made advertisement about their family particularly and found those who helped them to cover a part of their rent fee.
Another family that we have taken under our care was Anna from Lugansk region, who has a son with a disability Danil. Danil’s diagnosis is "Abnormal brain development, epilepsy, hydrocephalus, congenital one kidney." But Anna keeps hope that her son can become a full member of society and puts a lot of efforts into his treatment and training. Anna admits that the war forced her to leave her home, but at the same time made her find those who really helped her. "No one ever helped us so, as here, in Kyiv" – Anna says.
In order to help Anna to collect money for Danil’s treatment we organized Christmas charity bazaar in one of the shopping malls in Kyiv.
As a part of the monthly cultural events for internally displaced families, on December 20, we had big New Year party in Kiev Svyatoshinsky social-psychological rehabilitation center.
There were more than 70 children with their parents at the event. Children first took part in the exciting art-therapy workshops making ornaments for Christmas trees and beautiful Christmas cards for their parents. After that, children enjoyed theatre show and sweet gifts from the Federation.
On January 6, during school holidays we organized visit of 20 internally displaced children for the cartoon to one of biggest malls in Kyiv. While children watched a cartoon, we held tea meeting for mothers. Each woman could share her story, her troubles and hopes.
With your help, we will do our best to provide good and reviving program for internally displaced families!
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