Saturday 14 June 2008

Barbara and team

Every year Barbara Rose, a professor at Roberts Wesleyan College in New York State brings a team of students to Arad to get involved in the work of several charities. Barbara (pictured with Calman making a friendship bracelet) is an amazing woman and along with her friend, Anita does a wonderful job of leading her teams. We have some lovely friends in the States from various trips and consider their annual visit to be one of the year's highlights. If any of you past Roberts team members read this please get in touch ... we have had over two years of problems with email and had a computer crash, losing information and so have lost touch with some people.

We were privileged to have Barbara and team with us for a day and they did a whole host of activities with our street children and young people. Several designed their own t-shirts ... they loved it!

Some of the young people struggle with even the most basic of activities which we take for granted, but the team members were always ready to help. In some cases I think the team member did all the work with the young person 'supervising' the process!

Others, like Cipri pictured here managed to do most of the designing and drawing themselves and were so proud of their achievement. For young people who have either never attended school or managed one or two classes even colouring in difficult. Most of the street children and young people cannot read and write, some can do the absolute basics but with effort. For us and for the majority of our volunteers it seems incredible for children not to have been through school. It is hard for 'normal' people to understand what a handicap it is to go through life with no education.

Irina had a good time too ... as well as t-shirts to design the team had brought a couple of aprons ... Irina's design consisted of writing things about Kenneth and myself - she wrote "Ken - President of Vis de Copil, Kati - my colleague, sister and crazy". Honestly, you just can't get the staff!

1 comment:

Rose said...

Brilliant love your blog Kathy and of course all the work you do.