Counselling for 300 children in Romania

All of us as children fear that we would lose one of our parents or, even worse maybe both. However, one can never be prepared enough for the effect of such an overwhelming impact the death of a parent can have on a child.

When Alina first came in to our offices with her mum, she was devastated – she had lost her dad 3 months ago and could not recover from the tragedy. Her school performance weakened ever since and the teacher reported that most times she just stares through the window in the empty space during classes. Her mother brought her in to our programme for the first time 3 weeks ago, being desperate about how to help her child heal and go through the grief process. Currently, our therapist is working with Alina to open up, process her feelings and eventually accept the loss of her parent in order to return to her normal life.

Alex is a child that has been abandoned when he was two and ever since he has been moving around in different foster homes. He is now 15 and extremely intelligent – he is performing very well in school, however he joined our programme with behavioural issues. A life of pain, emotional distress and lack of a feeling of belonging makes him behave like he is always in defensive, argumentative, gets nervous easily and constantly struggles to fit within the society. With help from our therapist, we aim to set Alex on the right track, appeal to his brilliant intelligence, teach him to love oneself and see that he is worthy of a bright future.

These are just two of the most recent cases that our counselling programme is addressing – these are the type of children that we are helping – the ones in high emotional distress that otherwise would be left with hard to handle traumas in life.

We cannot do this alone and we are thankful for your help in making this happen!

As an organisation, we are thriving to help as many children as possible – by including group counselling as part of our project! Between 1 -19 November 2017 we have been part of a series of group counselling sessions for over 120 orphans in the area with the theme – Where there is love, violence does not exist!

At the same time, we have tested 202 children from schools in the area to identify children that need help healing the most.

On the 14^th of November, we will travel to a school in a rural area near Gura Humorului where our team of counsellors will talk to over 100 children about the dangers of social media/online communications.

We are constantly developing ways of ensuring that every orphan and disadvantaged child realises their full potential and overcomes the emotional distress that sometimes makes them part of a vicious cycle of unhappiness, misery and eventually bad habits.

But we cannot do this alone – your support is helping us shape the lives of every child part of our counselling programme!