Crete for life

Home : Our Holiday Camp

Crete For Life’s recuperative camp, located by the seaside near the town of Ierapetra, on the south-east of Crete, provides  natural, safe and healing surroundings where our young hosts can enjoy being together, playing, swimming, going to excursions and participating in many open air activities.

The groups are composed of at least 10 children accompanied by two guardians, a translator and a minder. During the recuperative holiday, we make sure that the children enjoy the wonderful local produce, fish, olive oil, fresh fruit and vegetables, and benefit from the celebrated Mediterranean diet, to compensate for the poor and contaminated food that constitute their daily diet. 

Supervisors and volunteers organize weekly activities like, swimming lessons, art and crafts, organized games, English and Greek language lessons, singing and Cretan dancing. Many activities are open and welcome the participation of local children from the area.

At Crete For Life, we have experience with children, both personally and professionally. Among our members, there are teachers, pediatricians, and young professionals who have worked in holiday camps in Europe and North America. We also have members who have previously worked for non profit associations.

Since the early 1990s, many Belarus children have been on recuperative holidays abroad, and programs similar to ours are well known to parents and teachers. The children we are hosting come from extremely poor families: many are one-parent families, and several children have numerous siblings. Their parents are thrilled to know their children are given a chance to spend sometime in a healthy environment and are grateful for the help we offer them.  

Our vision is to offer recuperative holidays to disadvantaged children from different countries around the world and to mix children from different countries, races and religions. However, we are at the beginning of our project and we are taking one step at a time, while not forgetting our ultimate aim.