Diary
I
must begin by apologising that this diary is late coming but after one and a
half glasses of Geo’s home-made wine last night there was no way I was ever
going to do my diary till the next day!
We
have now left Cefa – though hope to visit them again on the way to the border
on Friday morning to return my borrowed Romanian mobile to
It
took us most of the morning at Cefa to pack yesterday and fit it in the car –
Beni was amazed that we had so much luggage and that it could fit in the car.
It is much better now as we had a work-mate and electric drill (or similar) for
Geo so there is a lot more space in the boot now! [As a female I cannot for the
life of me understand why Phil insisted on bringing the workmate himself in the
car instead of putting it in the trailer as it took a lot of space in the car!]
Yesterday
afternoon we went with Speranta Familiei (name means hope for the family) and
Raul told us about their projects. Due to financial reasons they have had to
cut back on what they were doing and have handed their work at Cheriu to
another foundation. They now focus on 3 projects and they arranged visits
distributing shoeboxes to show us all their projects. We made 4 visits all in
the town area.
They have Naomi Project which works with single parents; originally they
ran this by having an apartment with 4 rooms for mothers and children but now
they work with the single parent (male or female) in their own home and find
this works better. They will pay rent or/and provide whatever is needed most gradually moving
towards self sufficiency. Our first visit was to a mother on this scheme – she
lives with a large family of brothers and sisters. Raul has plans to help them
tidy the place by painting it in the summer. We gave shoeboxes to all the
children and adults including a retarded toothless young man who got very
excited. In view of his mental age we gave him a box for 6-11 year olds. In the
box was a bottle of bubbles which he immediately went to drink – we were just able
to stop him in time! But I was horrified that we had sent bubbles (our
guidelines say no liquids) and there was nothing on the bottle to show it was not
for drinking, so I feel it was an understandable mistake for a non-English
speaking recipient. So I must try harder to make sure the checkers remove all
bubbles in future.
Our next visit related to the
school support programme. To enable children to receive education Speranta
Familiei will help the families sometimes with bus fares or transport costs to
go to school, education materials, school bags, food, etc. We visited one
family where the oldest boy tries to earn money as a mechanic while his sister
keeps the house immaculate as well as attending school – when the parents died
a number of trusts helped the children but all have stopped that help now
except for Speranta Familiei who continue to visit each month and monitor what
goes on.
The next project we visited was related to their fostering programme. We
visited a family who had fostered an 8 year old girl since the age of 4 months.
They are a loving family and have treated her as their own throughout. They
always said if they had a 3 roomed apartment (meaning having rooms that can be
used as bedrooms) then they would adopt her. As they do not earn much money
(the father is a carpenter or similar and the mother has just qualified as a
nurse) this seemed an impossible dream, but amazingly a family member wished to
down-size and swapped their 2 roomed apartment for his 3 roomed one with only a
small cash adjustment. The mother explained that as Hannah in the Bible had
promised God she would give him baby Samuel to serve him, so they had promised
God if they could have a 3 roomed apartment they would adopt the child. And so
it has happened.
After
that we contacted Gyonghy again to say we had her Christmas shoebox and ask if
we could meet her somewhere to give it to her. We spent a very very happy
couple of hours with her as she invited us to her new home to meet the others
there. She is now with Agape Trust who have a programme reaching out to
vulnerable young people affected by the state orphanage system or poor family
background. They have a group of girls living in a lovely large house near the
MacDrive, on one floor the houseparents live and the girls have the lower
floor. They offer a life skills programme and also very positively encourage
further education, as well as employment.
We
were impressed with what we saw and with meeting the houseparents. They spoke
of the difficulties unskilled young people face in finding work and told us how
Gyonghy had got a job at the shoe factory for a trial 5 days. She was kept on
for a further 5 days but then sent away without any pay. Agape Trust (who are
funded from
After
that we came home to Geo’s for a lovely meal.