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                    The Village of Possadetz

The children that we host in Crete are from Possadetz, a small village situated about 80 km. west of  Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in an area officially recognized as contaminated by the Chernobyl catastrophe. Until 1939 this region was the border between Poland and Russia. The area is organized as collective farm: the land is owned by the state, and laborers are paid salaries according to the work and season, that vary from $ 50 to as little as $ 5 per month.

Forty-five children aged between 7 and 16 years old attend the small school in Possadetz. The children get two meals a day at the school, breakfast and lunch, usually their only meals of the day. Together with their food, they are given some vitamins supplements. The school staff, some of whom have their own children at the school, is aware that the food children receive at the school is not enough in quantity, of very low nutritional value and usually contaminated, but unable to do anything about this. The children's diet is also supplemented by local produce, such as mushrooms and forest fruits even though the high levels of contamination means their consumption is officially prohibited.

The majority of the children comes from extremely poor families: many are one-parent families, and several children have numerous siblings. We have visited the homes of several children from the school. All were in very poor condition even by Belarus standards.

Many homes where one or both parents are heavy drinkers were particularly miserable; often even very young children have to carry a heavy share of responsibilities in their family life, working, cleaning, looking after younger siblings, etc.

According to the director of the school Mrs. Galina Vladirovdna, only four children out of the 45 are considered healthy according to Belarus children's health monitoring parameters. Their most frequent illnesses are related to problems of the hearth, thyroid and lungs. 

The school occupies a 45 years old building in need of urgent repairs and there is little hope to get public funds for it. Moreover, for all the children and teaching staff there are only two small outside W.C., without any type of discharge or septic tank. These very primitive toilets consist of very shallow holes in the open ground where the refuse build up as it has nowhere to go, enclosed by a wooded cabin.

                          Orphanage N.8, Minsk

Before the Chernobyl’s catastrophe there was one orphanage in the whole of Belarus. Now there are fourteen, only in the capital Minsk, and over one hundred and thirty throughout the country. Many children are abandoned because their parents cannot cope with the strain of bringing them up or because of physical and mental illness; many more are taken from families that cannot offer them an adequate environment to grow up.

Lubamira Dimitrivna Bondareva is the social assistant in charge of Orphanage n. 8 in Minsk, which hosts over one hundred children between 11 and 18 years of age. The majority of the older children have no hope of ever being adopted or fostered and will have never known family life. The youngest ones will benefit enormously from a regular break in Crete: it will give them a tremendous boosts in confidence.

The state pays the equivalent of €1.15 per day per child. This amount, which includes everything, from food to education, also includes the children’s yearly wardrobe. Every year, each child is entitled to 1 pair of trousers, 1 pair of shoes, 10 pairs of socks and 4 shirts. Whether the yearly pair of shoes, which given the speed of growth of children is inadequate in any case, is suitable for summer or winter, these children’s feet are going to suffer for half of the year. For this reason we have been buying children’s shoes for this orphanage for the past two years.  

The orphanage is in an impersonal large building, with few communal areas and few sources of mental and physical stimulation. The children would be helped by gifts of computers, videos and DVD, books, music CDs and games as well as sport shoes and winter clothes.