The Belarus Appeal
We have “adopted a specialist school for children with sight problems ranging from squint and being partially sighted to totally blind. In supporting this school the Trust has spent in excess of £45,000 equipping a special Lions Centre of Excellence for Child Eye Disorders and the school now takes referrals from all over the Gomel Region. Over the years we have watched the quality of life for children improve and including one young lady, totally blind, who on our last visit insisted on dancing for us with her friends. There is other work needed at this school which we like to do including renewing the kitchen, in which the equipment must be 50 years old.
There are other orphanages and schools with similar problems which are coming to light on a regular basis. In Belarus, the residents of these orphanages are not necessarily children who have no parents, but quite often children whose parents are unable to care for them, or incapable of caring for them, due to illness, desperation, depression or social deprivation. In some cases the children are also social drop-outs themselves caused by the conditions in which they have to exist.
We recently supported a project called “Computer is my friend” by the volunteers running it, to help integrate disadvantaged young people into society through training them with special programmes on three new computers supplied on our humanitarian aid lorry. We would like to support the same group by converting and old building into a day centre for them but the total cost of that due to its condition would be in the order of £90,000. This figure is far beyond our means without the help of our supporters and those donating generously to our work.
There are many such projects involving the sick, the disabled, those less fortunate than ourselves, which we would wish to support but cannot.
We wish to support many projects currently being proposed to us by our hard working friends most of whom share a common purpose by being members of Gomel Lions Club, but without donations to our funds we are unable to do that. Please be generous in your donations to our work.
