The primary purpose of this visit was to find a house in Rogachev suitable for purchase as a home for four or five young children from Zhuravichi, but I spent two days in Minsk before travelling to Gomel and Rogachev.
I met Alla Konoplova, Head of Special Needs Education for Belarus and she brought two teachers working with autistic children to meet me. It appeared that they had far greater understanding of autism than is common in Belarus and they were very keen to come to the UK to learn more. I spoke with Alla about her planned visit to Britain and we hope that she will be able to come in late September, with either the Minister for Social Protection or one of her deputies, plus a senior member of the Health Ministry. She was very keen to learn more about assessment methods in Britain, as one of the major problems for children with Special Needs in Belarus has been that they are diagnosed at a very early age and may never be reassessed. This has meant that children who were perhaps late developing because of lack of support at home have been condemned to live in inappropriate institutions and receive a low level of education and very little opportunity in life.
We also spoke about the Rehabilitation Centre at Selmarsh – our ‘Cloud Nine’ project. Alla said that the Education Department should have the money before the end of August to reroof the building (not sure whether she meant the whole building) and she was obviously hoping that we would commence work again on the strength of this. I explained that the Management of CCP(UK) had decided that we could not invest more funds and energy into the project until we knew the Education Department’s time table for completion of their part of the Centre. She seemed surprised that we were worried about this so I gave her the example of Uvaravichi School which had stood as a half finished shell for ten years before being completed. She was not aware of the school but said that this would not happen now; the delay had been because of the problems in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union. I was glad to hear that she is optimistic that the Centre will be finished in the near future, but thought about Kaptsevichi, the home for mentally disabled adults in the South West of Gomel Region, where the half finished new building has been untouched for at least two years. I did not mention this and said that I hoped we would be able to begin work again soon. In the meantime we were planning either to create a small home or a unit attached to a Special School such as Vasilievichi School for Blind and Partially Sighted Children or School No. 5 in Gomel for children with learning difficulty. She was not sure if Vasilievichi was ready for such a unit but thought it would be great to do this at No 5. She told me about a forthcoming conference in Gomel on Fostering and Special Needs education and showed me the statistics about how many children are now being integrated into mainstream schools.
At the Humanitarian Affairs office I met the Chief of the Department, Mr. Kalidar to discuss with him the problems we had encountered on our recent aid delivery. I told him that the aid on the small truck had not been cleared two weeks or more after the manifest had been received by the department. At the conference in London in March he had promised that in the near future aid would be cleared within two or three days. He told me that he hopes this will be the case when the next Presidential Decree, No 11, is passed some time in August. This will mean that manifests do not have to go to the President for clearance but can be give final clearance by Mr. Kalidar. This will be a great help as we currently have to load the trucks at least three weeks before the convoy leaves to be sure of being allowed to deliver the aid ourselves.
The other problem had been that Gomel Customs insisted that our truck had to be accompanied on its deliveries by one of their officers, and they were not allowed to deliver over the weekend. Kalidar tried to insist that it must have been the fault of our partners who had not warned customs that we wanted to deliver at the weekend. But I told him we always make weekend deliveries and the Education Fund had in any case discussed this with Customs in advance. He promised that we would not have this problem in future and said that we should write to him before the next delivery so that he could speak to the Head of Gomel Customs and ensure everything would run smoothly.
I thanked Mr. Kalidar for the great efficiency with which the Customs Border posts now usher trucks through, and at Evgeny Ukraintsev’s suggestion I told him a little about our new plan to buy a house in Rogachev. He said that it was essential to meet with the head of the Executive Committee to discuss this, and if we needed any help from his department we only had to let him know.

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