“Hello, we are calling from the theater, we want to invite your children to the performance on June 1!»
“Our company would like to organize a master class for your children on June 1»…
“Can I give your children things by June 1?»
June 1, September 1, and the New Year are “sacred” times of the year, when children from orphanages are massively remembered. They are massively shown on TV, they are massively brought something, they are massively arranged for holidays, master classes, competitions…
We in the fund “Change One Life”, of course, are used to such calls – with a bunch of ideas to do something good for the children of orphanages. Only I personally, when I listen to these proposals of volunteers, almost all of them refuse and send them to other funds. First, because we do not have children in the fund, we only have thousands of their videoankets. And secondly (and this is my personal one), because I simply do not believe in such help with holidays and gifts. I don’t believe it anymore.
“Katya, it’s good that they remember about children, you should be happy, people are doing a good thing,” my friends and colleagues constantly tell me this.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing. But I can’t be happy about it either.
Because I am happy when there is a result from any help – no matter if it is the most sincere or for the sake of “plus to karma”.
Yes, yes, yes, a huge number of texts have been written about conscious volunteering, a systematic approach to charity and effective assistance. And they write them (like me, let’s say, this column) mostly at the same “sacred” time when people remember about orphanages. But if people still call and call (at least, to us in the fund) and ask to help them take things to the orphanage, then you need to write more, and more, and more.
I write only from personal experience.
“What did you bring me today?” – all the time the boy Sasha from the orphanage asked me, to which I, there was a case, regularly went as a volunteer. This boy became attached to me on those trips, knew me, and was happy when I came. But every time I said that I had come by myself, without toys, and to communicate with him, he was very upset at first. And only then, the more trips I made to that orphanage, the more important it became for Sasha that I just came. It finally became more important to him than the “stop-first” car that the “stop-first” volunteer brought him.
It is clear that not everyone has the opportunity or desire to go to an orphanage. It is easier, of course, to send things there. Which makes a lot of sense.
“Just as you like, so do it!” – a teacher of a group of children from an orphanage told me in a hopeless, “colorless” voice, even from despair, telling me how for 11 children from her group, the budget money was only enough for 7 shorts – and this is for the whole summer.
In another orphanage, I looked at the mattresses stretched to the floor on the beds in the bedrooms and kept thinking about whether the children’s backs hurt after sleeping or not. And somewhere else, the children’s homes showed me their closets, which were closed with bent nails, because there were no locks there for years.
I know what this is all about. Many orphanages really still lack basic things. But here it is important to know what exactly. For example, volunteer organizations that oversee specific institutions can help you. This is the first one.
But there is a second point, and it is, in my opinion, not just even more important, but incomparable in scale with the first. Let’s try to help children in orphanages more globally. Not with toys. Not in shorts. Not with balloons. No matter how much the children really need all this!
Opportunities to help orphanages-rivers-sea-ocean: from reposting our videoankets to finding a babysitter for a specific baby who was brought to the hospital for treatment alone from the child’s home for three months.
Just believe me when you-here you are personally-do something for a child that will help him, say, learn English, or go to college, or find a long-awaited family… That’s when you help SUCH a project with your own hands, ideas or finances, the realization of this help will overwhelm any feelings that you can experience when you see a smile on the child’s face from a toy presented to him. And to speak about the benefits of the case is already somehow ridiculous…
But just do not give children in orphanages one-time gifts. And please don’t forget about them for a year. Let’s not brighten up the children’s homes only moments of their (of course, not the most joyful) lives, let’s change these very lives! For example, the lives of these kids
The article is published on the portal snob.ru