Health, hope and happiness • Gomel baby home transformed • Growing support for hospice care
Congratulations to Natasha and Lilia • Special needs team visit to Belarus • Rodni House
The Mayflower Centre • Symbol Communication Training • Senior medical team visit Britain
Fund raising successes • Belarussian holiday for Zhuravichi children

The Mayflower Centre

family needing respite care

One of the main purposes of the Special Needs visit was to determine how our plans for setting up a Respite Care Centre should progress. We consulted everyone concerned - officials and families - and appointed Natalia, an experienced psychologist at the Diagnostic Centre to begin visiting families with profoundly disabled children to see who would most benefit from regular respite care.
During the next few months we will create a centre where children with autism, severe learning difficulty or profound physical disability will be able to stay for two or three nights, every couple of months, giving their parents a desperately needed break We will also provide some day care activities for slightly less disabled children and training opportunties for parents.
The Social Protection Department have offered us a large part of a kindergarten and their full support for the project. Following visits to respite homes in the UK, David Walker has drawn up a plan for the centre and the renovation of the building will be funded and organised by Barney McElholm of our Solihull group. In April Barney came to Gomel to survey the buildng with his Project Manager Ian Jamieson, Work is already underway and we hope to have the Centre ready for opening by early December.