A summer of friendship and fun, in Belarus and Britain • Home, sweet home • We need your support!

Foster care programme • Humanitarian aid deliveries • Gomel Children's Hospice

Calendars and Christmas cards • London 10km Road Race • In memory

We need your support!

Stas in Manchester

The foster mother for the house at Rogachev will be funded by the state, and there will be an allowance for each of the children. But we will need to find the salaries for the support workers and there will be other expenses involved if we are to give the children the quality of care we would like them to receive.

We are looking for people/companies/churches who would like to sponsor one of the children. When we know that we have secure funding for this house, then we can begin to think about creating more. Some of the children form Zhuravichi may soon be moving to a Boarding School for children with cerebral palsy where they will get a much better education and quality of life. This is fantastic news! And we are now employing the former head of the Rehabilitation Centre in Gomel as a ‘Zhuravichi Liaison Officer’, whose role is to organise training and work experience for the staff, and to find possibilities to move children - back to their own families, on to foster parents, or to more appropriate orphanages.

But there will be children who do not fit into any of these possibilities and who desperately need a more stimulating environment than Zhuravichi. We would dearly love to enable Ira (on the front) to develop her potential and to find some happiness after fourteen bleak years which have failed to dim her spirit.

So, ..... we need £100 a month for each of the five children to cover salaries, taxes and other expenses. That’s just £6,000 a year in total, not such a great amount when you think of the difference it will make to the children’s lives.

Could you persuade friends at work or in your church to make out a £5 a month Standing Order? 20 of these will cover all the costs of looking after one child.

If we raise more than we need then the surplus can be put towards buying a good quality second hand minibus, which can be shared between our house and the Rogachev Association. Please complete the form on the back of the newsletter if you can help.

Stas is crazy about water, so he was over the moon when he was taken to play in the fountains in the centre of Manchester. He does not speak, has poor eyesight, and needs help with walking. But Stas is an inquisitive boy who gets a great deal of fun out of life, and he is learning fast, staying with Chris Learoyd and her family in Teifi Valley and attending nursery school.