Please stop for a second and think about your typical morning. You wake up (ok, this may take some time if you are not a morning person), brush your teeth, take a shower and get dressed. This is quite standard, right? Unfortunately this is not so easy for many disabled children.
More and more families in Russia adopt children with special needs. The support of their new families is vital for them to survive. However very often these families do not have enough funds to pay for the required medical treatment and so these children lack basic self-support skills such as feeding, washing, getting dressed and walking independently.
We partnered with Charitable Organisation “Volunteers Help Orphans” in Russia. This charity works with adopted children with musculoskeletal disorders including such severe diagnoses as cerebral palsy, spina bifida and arthrogryposis. Before adoption orphans did not have an opportunity to receive enough attention and required medical care. As a result of the inadequate care, children lost motor skills which now need to be recovered before they can start working on gaining new skills. For these children rehabilitation is important not only to improve their physical health but also to have a proper social life in the future.
Our support
Help Impact provided funds to pay for rehabilitation courses of adopted children. The rehabilitation courses of some of the children will contribute to the improvement of self-support skills so that children can cover their basic needs including feeding, dressing and doing personal hygiene without external help. Other children will start learning to walk between classrooms in school, to use staircases where there are no access ramps, and to use public transport without support of their parents.
Impact of this project
- Improving skills – the rehabilitation courses are designed to help children to gain more motor skills and improve those skills developed during previous treatments.
- Socialisation – improved skills will allow children to become more independent and so to have more opportunities to interact with others and have a social life.
- Potential for more adoptions of children with special needs – we see this project as collaboration between charities and parents of adopted children. The availability of projects supporting families with disabled children makes potential parents more confident that they will be able to meet the child’s needs and so increases the likelihood of potential adoptions.
Please read the story of Alyona who received a rehabilitation course funded by Help Impact.
Help Impact 