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The Day of Hope.
With the assistance of Moscow Government and hundreds of volunteers, “The Day of Hope” program takes place monthly in 27 Moscow orphanages. The goal of this program is to establish relationships between children and HOPE volunteers so that after graduation, the orphans will have friends who are also mentors, advisors, and helpers. In this program volunteers congratulate children who have birthdays, play sports and table games with the children, make wall newspapers, put on plays, and communicate. Each meeting has a specific topic: friendship, gratitude, respect, finances and bad habits and their consequences. There are 2,700 orphans and 1,000 HOPE volunteers participate in this program.
Recently HOPE worldwide – Moscow organized the seminar for all the volunteers who participate in the programs. The purpose was to educate the volunteers about different social and psychological aspects that orphaned children have to be able to know how to deal with certain problems when children struggle with their character, vision for future, bad habits, memories from the past, etc. We shared also about the specific of how to work with the orphanage administration, discussed different administrative issues when somebody wants to take child home or to adopt.
Every volunteer received the brochure and booklets with the information of how to make the program better that will help all of us to take care even better about children.
Also, this seminar helped the volunteers to receive the information about all other programs that HOPE worldwide in Russia organizes besides the volunteers based programs.
Very often children share their dreams and hopes with the volunteers and they can be extremely open about their lives. Many children in orphanage have experienced much tragedy in life. Some children have witnessed how one parent killed another. Among children who live in institutions there are many orphans whose both parents died. But some children have parents who are still alive but they in prison, other refused or socially unable to take care of their own children.
One orphan named Sasha was about to be adopted by one good family, but at the last minute his mother decided to take him back home. The Court decided to give her a chance. After few months Sasha was put back to the orphanage because his mother started to drink again. Once she even locked Sasha at home in his room for three days without food and drink as a punishment. One day she left home and disappeared. The police still can not find her and no one knows what’s happened with her. The Court decided that Sasha should live in the orphanage because he has no other relatives and the couple who wanted to adopt him before has already started the adoption process to adopt another child. Sasha shared with us that he wanted to commit a suicide many times since that happen, but something has stopped him. He says: “Probably I realized how much all of you guys from HOPE love me and I did not want to disappoint you by making this stupid decision to quit. Being around with you for years helped me to find strength to live, fight and not give up”.
Again, on behalf of HOPE worldwide - Eurasia we want to say “THANK YOU” to all of you who provided the support for orphans. We believe that only working together we can really make a good change in orphaned children lives and help them to be successful in future.
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