CHERNOBYL CHILDREN'S PROJECT (UK)

Support Children With Disabilities

When we first started to work in Belarus in 1995, children with disabilities were almost completely hidden from public view. In many cases disabled babies were abandoned at birth, and doctors told mothers to forget about their child, who would probably die anyway.

In Gomel Region many of these children ended up at Zhuravichi Children’s Home, which was so well hidden in the countryside that hardly anybody knew it existed. After the Chernobyl accident there was an 80% rise in the number of children in this region born with disabilities, so even more children entered the home.

However, today it is much less common for families to give up their children and attitudes to disability are changing quite rapidly. We have brought many teachers, directors of schools and orphanages and senior representatives of local and national government to the UK on educational visits which have helped to bring about these changes.

We support Zhuravichi with educational visits, humanitarian aid, a holiday for many of the children every summer and by sponsoring some extra carers.

We created Family Home 2000 for four young adults, three of whom had grown up at Zhuravichi and had never had the chance of an education.

Two years later we set up a home for five young children in Rogachev, who came either from Zhuravichi or directly from the Home for Abandoned Babies in Gomel. The children at Rodni Kut have a foster papa and a team of ‘aunties’ who share their care.

In 2004 we helped to move several children from Zhuravichi to Rechitsa Boarding School, where they have a better education and more opportunities to develop.

We created access into Special School No 5 so that children in wheelchairs would have the chance to attend school instead of being taught at home. In 2004 we opened the Mayflower Centre, the first overnight respite care centre in Belarus, which supports some 60 families with disabled children.

We are currently helping a new school in Gomel to begin the process of integrating physically disabled children. A very experienced teacher in this field from a school in Manchester visited Gomel in October to give training and advice. We are providing a minibus for the school so children with physical disabilities are able to attend from September 2010.