Along with the activities to assist families, the funds raised by the Emergency Coordination of the Focolare Movement for the Ukrainian emergency support the creation of a multifunctional center where children can grow up safe from the dangers and traumas of war.
September brings with it the beginning of school and for us it becomes an opportunity to focus on training and education. Fundamental elements for the development of communities in Italy and elsewhere.
There is something that goes beyond the physiotherapy and the treatments, even if essential, that the protagonists of the AMU projects receive: it is the possibility to look to the future with optimism. This was the case for Elias thanks to the project Seeds of Hope in Syria.
Until a few months ago they never believed it was possible to lose everything in a few days, abandon home, work, friends, and start over at sixty. But they, Olena and Olha, two sisters who lived in Mariupol in Ukraine, today live the time of waiting at Caritas-Spes. Goodbye, but with the desire to return.
Amhed, in Syria, holds his thirteen-year-old boy’s last report card in his hands. This year, at school, he was the best in his class and it is a great satisfaction for him because he achieved this goal after a long educational journey at the after-school program supported by AMU in Homs with the program Seeds of Hope.
Olha had given birth to her baby girl just three weeks before the war broke out, in a small village on the border with Crimea. Two months after the Russian occupation, she arrived at the Caritas-Spes center in western Ukraine.
The children of the Seeds of Hope Project after-school programs in Syria have achieved excellent academic results despite the difficulties around them.
The activities of Caritas-Spes in Ukraine supported by the fundraising of the MdF Emergency Committee were concentrated in the centers of Yablonitsa and Bryukhovychi-Lviv.
There are many adolescents hosted at the Caritas Spes center for internally displaced persons in the Carpathians. They are young people who want life and a future.
Mrs. Victoria is now safe in a Caritas-Spes shelter in western Ukraine, but her only plans for the future are to return.
It seemed impossible to find a corner of peace in Ukraine, yet Olena and many displaced people like her were welcomed in a Caritas-Spes center located in the Carpathian Mountains. Here “the human soul heals”.
Farah’s mother talks about the little girl’s newfound serenity in Syria, after starting a language rehabilitation program, thanks to the Seeds of Hope program.
