Crete for life

Home: Our Holiday Camp

We organized groups of closely aged children, that are free from any chronic or life-threatening illnesses, and do not need any specialized support  for  physical or mental conditions. We try to arrange groups so that the children already know each other (they come from the same school for example), so that they can feel immediately at home even in a foreign country.  

The group of ten children we will host this coming summer comes from the  school of Possadetz; they are between 7 and 12 years of age. Our plan is to invite them again, every summer, until they are 15 years old. Hosting older children presents very different needs, and we feel that at present we prefer to focus our forces on younger ones. In addition,  the Belarus government is less inclined to allow older children visas to visit foreign countries.

Children affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe have grown surrounded by social structures and the environment that have been changed and disturbed to a dramatic extent. In Crete, they will have the chance of experiencing and appreciating a natural environment that, so far, as been left relatively untouched.

Crete For Life recuperative camp 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, while learning to respect the natural world and each-other.

Supervisors and volunteers also organize weekly activities like, cooking, drawing, and Cretan dancing. Many activities will be open and will welcome the participation of  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.  

To guarantee the maximum benefit of the project, we  take the utmost care in inviting to Crete only children who have never been abroad, either through other charitable projects or with their own families, and we reserve the right to decline hospitality to children or to their mentors if we feel that they are not those most in need or are in any other way unsuited to what we are able to offer.  

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.