Protecting Children Protecting Nature

Visits to UK this Spring

As part of our commitment to build capacity and provide professional training for our partners, we are bringing two groups of people from Kitezh and Orion to the UK in March and in May 2012.

March: Foster mothers Sasha Simukova and Katya Shumeiko will visit the Mulberry Bush School for 3 days intensive training experience in their therapeutic methods with severely disadvantaged children. Then they will spend a week at the Findhorn Foundation immersed in the experience of living in community, followed by a day of Art Therapy Training with our Art Therapy consultant, Beverley A’Court. We need to raise £2,000 for this training. If you would like to support them, please make a donation here.

May: The International Holistic Centres Gathering at Findhorn 12 – 19 May. An annual gathering of communities and holistic centres – this year it will be hosted by the Findhorn Foundation as part of the celebrations for its 50th anniversary. Three key people from Kitezh and Orion will attend, including the Founder Dmitry Morozov, to take advantage of the opportunity to meet with peers from centres from many different countries, to share and learn from each other. Read more about it here. The cost of this visit is £5,000. To contribute please make a donation here.

A new arrival at Orion

Daryona
Daryona aged 5 years (she will be 6 in April) has recently arrived at Orion from Moscow. She came to Orion in September 2011 from Moscow. Her former foster parents took her from a hospital (a department where babies are abandoned by their mothers stay) when she was 8 months old. Her former foster parents have 2 blood children and Daryona was their only foster child. The parents couldn't cope and decided to leave Daryona at Orion. Right at that time Orion were searching for a girl of her age.
She has joined Arina and Lyosha Duvanov and their foster family with Lera, (photo) Anton and Dania. She is very bright and open and has no problems communicating with people. She can read and likes helping her foster mother Arina at home. She calls Arina & Lyosha, mama and papa, and doesn't remember her former parents lately. At the moment she is attending the kindergarten but later this year she will start the primary school.

If you would like to support Daryona or any of the other children in Kitezh & Orion please go to our
Sponsor a Child page

One day last spring, a little boy arrived in Kitezh with his sister. Danila was almost 5 years old. We didn’t know his exact birthday then, it’s not unusual for the documentation to be incomplete. He was very small and very afraid, like a lost lamb. He didn’t understand why he was here. He asked his sister, who was seven, ‘When are we going home?’ What could she say? She too was struggling with the trauma of being taken away from her parents; but she saw that it was better not to have to be in a house of violence. The children had not been beaten, but for a child, exposure to overwhelming violence can be as traumatising being the victim … to see night after night, the bleeding wounds of the parents.

He was afraid of men, all men. His foster father, a truly gentle man, just sat in the same room as him. Then at the same table as him, with his young and attentive foster mother. Then he began to play games, firstly on the computer - safe, remote, fascinating.

This month we celebrated his 6th birthday. Everybody loves him; he’s such a happy little boy, like any ordinary six-year-old. There is nothing on the surface to show all the months of patiently comforting him, reassuring him, setting the boundaries, encouraging him to come “home” at the end of the day, to eat and to eat with ‘the family’; the nightmares, the crying and two-year-old the tantrums. His mother, who is not yet 25, loves him and cuddles him as if he were her own child.

I see this here every day; people who have dedicated their lives to the care of children.
Andrew Aikman

More Stories about the children of Kitezh-Orion

Innovative Education at Kitezh Experimental School October 2011  Read More >

Andrew Aikman writes about how the children help each other in the therapeutic process  Read More >

Read about the success of two of our Kitezh graduates Vasily & Valya  Read More >

Alina's story... Read More >

Dasha & Danil new arrivals in 2011  Read More >

Masha & Misha have four boys - Sasha's story  Read More >