YTNF :: SVITUkraine

Local activity in Ukraine in the framework of “Human rights education in practice!” project, which is realized by OWA Poland in cooperation with YTNF and SCI partners, with support of Batory Foundation and Soros foundations, was developed by the participants of the training courses Aleksandra Seliverstova, Maria Servetnik and Alina Gogodze, and is called “Look around yourself”.

The first phase of this project started already in the end of November, immediately after participants came back from the training in Poland. There is no precise date of its start because the main task of the first phase was contacting as many people as possible and informing them about our future trip to the children orphanage, asking also for their participation and possible contribution to the overall amount of presents we were supposed to take to the orphanage. Today the project continues to run and probably it will be finished not earlier than in May 2009.

In December Aleksandra (from Kiev) collected money and presents for children in her community and also from other volunteers’ acquaintances. People who were willing to donate were just random people, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances etc. Overall cost of the presents and money collected was about 1000euro (the cost of used goods is not counted here), it included fruits, candies, biscuits, juices, diapers, new and used clothes, new and used toys, hygienic products, books etc.

The visit of 2 orphanages happened on the 13th December. About 10 people together with Sasha, and also including our photograph, from Kiev went there.

There were much more children than we expected and also the condition of the road to the orphanage was quite time consuming because of snowy weather (those two orphanages are situated about 200km from Kiev, in the city of Pryluki). In the end it was just not possible to spend enough time with children, whom we needed to conduct our drawing exhibition, but we were glad to make them smile and laugh while receiving their presents and our attention.

Mostly contemporaneously SVIT had a meeting in Kharkov of its members, where other participants of the training, Alina and Maria shared their experience of participation in HR training in Poznan with other volunteers. We mentioned also about Phase 2 of the training and discussed main ideas of the exhibition. After that Maria and Alina started to collect more materials for the exhibition in Donetsk and Kharkov region. During this phase we received some help from EVS volunteers who were working in Artemovsk, as well as SVIT local group in Artemovsk. One of the volunteers was working in the special boarding school for children with mental disabilities. We decided to make drawing competition on children's rights right there. Preliminary volunteers prepared presentation on HR topic and went to school. Activists of SVIT with them also and helped with the explanation of the presentation’s concept. They asked children to make drawings on HR topic before and after presentation.

This competition took place in different classes. Later we conducted similar competition in the usual school where other EVS volunteer was working. In the end we received about 60 drawings and approximately half of them were and used (exhibited) in our current exhibition.
In the end of January we had another meeting of SVIT members where we discussed our future activities concerning the organization of the exhibition. On this meeting we chose pictures and drawings needed for exhibition. They were collected from the 2 orphanages, visited by Aleksandra and other people, special boarding school in Artemovsk and pictures of one 5-years old beggar, given to us by one professional photograph from Kiev. Totally we have printed 33 pictures. To the material for exhibition we also added some statistical data on children’s problems in Ukraine, and some articles from the International Convention on Children’s Human Rights. The exhibition also contains white wall for comments and feedback of the visitors.

The first exhibition was opened in the central library of Artemovsk on the 26th of February. After that it “travelled” to Novoazovsk – the host is local partner of SVIT, Community foundation of Novoazovsk; Lugansk – the host is Pedagogical University of Lugansk, and will also visit Kharkov and Kiev.

Prepared by Aleksandra Seliverstova