Actors of the Children’s Christian Theater visited Kalinovka Children’s Home for children with special needs on the December 27th with a Christmas show. The young actors made happy not only the facility’s patients but children from the neighboring villages and the personnel as well.

All the children got sweet presents and heaps of positive emotions especially because it is not often that creative teams visit remote villages of our region.

But the purpose of our visit was not only to please children but also to cheer up those people who work with special children every day. For this, upon the end of the show we arranged a modest “sweet table” and a tea-party for the facility personnel. Once again we informed the Home’s staff that to search for deficiencies in someone’s work was not our purpose. The main task for the volunteers and the facility staff is to daily improve the life of the disabled children left without parental care. From the foundation’s point of view we need to work in several directions simultaneously to achieve this: to improve medical care, hygienic conditions, to increase the number of aides and teachers (ideally – 1 aide for 5 children and the present situation is 1 aide for 9 – 15 children); to prescribe and above all to implement the rehabilitation program for each child; to ensure daily walks in the open air of those children that do not have any contraindications for this.

We addressed the Children’s home personnel with a request to write down on a piece of paper a list of things which in their opinion could improve the life of the orphans. The following was among the wishes of the aids and teachers:

• to buy literature, educational toys, ABC-books, beads;

• to give a larger number of diapers to ease to aides’ work;

• to replace benches by sofas;

• to install a water mixer in the bathroom;

• to assign one more aide to the residence 3;

• to treat aides humanly;

• to supply running water regularly without interruptions;

• to provide more information about the advanced methodologies in the upbringing of children with psycho-neurological disorders;

• to decrease a number of children per group.

All this requests we are communicating to the Children’s Home director, Nikolay Viktorovych, and we ourselves are trying to work at those problems which we are able to resolve. We also proposed to the facility personnel to arrange a special box similar to a mailbox for any employee to be able to anonymously make proposals in part of the improvement of the conditions of the special-needs children and the staff.

This tea party was our first attempt of unofficial communication among the personnel, volunteers, and the facility managers. Though many people from the Home’s staff were embarrassed by such an unusual event we are planning similar meeting in future anyway. After all, we will be able to change this world for the better only having combined our efforts and having considered the opinions of one another.

We are grateful to all the people who made it possible to organize the holiday in Kalynovka:

- Christians from one of Zaporozhye churches having made a donation to pay for a minivan and purchase of presents;

- Eugene – the Head of the Children’s Theater and Club called “Ukrainian Future” in the Zaporozhye region;

- benefactors of the Happy Child foundation responsible for small presents and the tea-party for the staff;

- Natalia Snegurova - Happy Child foundation coordinator;

- Nikolay Viktorovych Slavov - Kalinovka Children’s Home director – for the hearty welcome and the tasty dinner arranged for the group of children.

We are thankful to Svetlana and her friends from Zaporozhye for their help to the disabled children (purchase of diapers and children’s food for the sum of about 2000 UAH); to Fedor from Kiev (a parcel with diapers and toys for the children).

We’d like to remind you that everyone is able to make a donation for the Kalinovka orphans or to become a volunteer and help in the organization of children’s leisure!

Feel free to contact the foundation staff!