Help Ukraine's refugees to make a new start

Dear friends!

Thanks to your sincere help, we could continue our project and went to its exciting spring stage!

It was marked with keeping daily integration work with families, few big events for our beneficiaries and intense spring school holidays with plenty of useful activities for children-refugees.

On March 12, with the support of the children's Trampoline complexes "Skypark", Women's Federation for World Peace together with All-Ukrainian organization of internally displaced people affairs held a Carnival for internally displaced children.

More than 150 children enjoyed entertainments, a huge variety of slides and trampolines, decorating pancakes and delicious cookies. Women masters performed interesting workshops of paper plastic, application on paper plates, flowers with candy necklaces and earrings with laces.

On March 22, 2016, together with Kyiv City Family Center, Women’s Federation held a meeting for families with many children. There were twenty families of Kyiv City, including seven internally displaced families. The meeting had an educational and festive character. After bright entertainment program the meeting participants shared their families traditions coming from great-grandparents, discussed challenges that large families face and have received general advice from the Family Center experts. Meanwhile children joined the master-class of making candies flowers. All families received presents and festive treatment.

A short week of spring school holidays in April went usefully for our children beneficiaries. Women's Federation organized a free cartoon session, dancing lessons, exciting master classes on painting with acrylic paints on canvas and clay crafting.

On May 24, we held charity concert for the benefit of three families who suffered from war conflict: internally displaced family with many children, a family that has lost a breadwinner at war and a family with disabled veteran of war at the East. The concert marked the beginning of long-term action to give targeted aid to these families.

To continue to acquaint you with our families-beneficiaries we would like to introduce Roman and Olga family from Donetsk region. They came under fire and escaped together with their two sons in September 2015. Being economists and used to have their own clothes shop in Donetsk region, they hardly could find their place in Kiev. Roman finally could find job as a taxi driver and Olga has to take care of baby. They say they already used to live without meet and fruits and buy only discount food. Nevertheless, they are happy, because after ten years of dreaming to have a daughter, they finally could get one nine months ago! Despite the difficulties they face Roman and Olga always try to help others. “This is probably the reason why God saved us under fire and finally gave us wonderful daughter!” – Olga says.

Thank you once again on behalf of all internally displaced families we were able to help by your sincere donations!

Links:

• Sky Park action
• Spring holidays for internally displaced children
• Charity concert

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!

Links:

• Christmas meetings with internally displaced families
• Charity bazaar for three beneficiaries including refugee boy
• New Year event for internally displaced children