Child Sponsorship Report 2008, from Kotayk, Armenia

Child sponsorship update from the SOS Children's Village Kotayk, Armenia from Summer 2008.

The bright sun outside urges us to finish all our main jobs before the summer holidays and keeping our promise to you we are writing about your sponsored SOS Children's Village Kotayk in Armenia, as it has become a kind tradition to be in contact with you this period of the year. And every time when we sit down to share with you about the recent events and developments in our Village, we know how much you have been looking forward to getting this news. With pleasure we send you information on recent events and developments in the village Kotayk as well as our warmest greetings and great feelings for your help during this time.

You may already know that SOS Children’s Village Kotayk is 18 years old since its inception and it enjoys great popularity in our country. It is our continuous endeavour here to create an atmosphere very near to a normal family for the lonely child who has been a victim of severe and unfortunate circumstances. One very detailed article was published in National newspapers about the SOS. The article covered one full page and 1/3 of another page. Another popular TV channel twice highlighted the work of SOS, first inviting the National Director for a detailed Questions & Answers about the activities of the SOS Children’s Village, and for the second time inviting for a podium.

The year was full of events, celebrations, visits and many other entertainments organised in the village, as it mostly coincided with New Year, Christmas, Day of Army, Women’s Day, the Day of Maternity and Beauty, the Victory together with many birthdays which were all celebrated in very joyful atmosphere giving a lot of energy and enthusiasm for children. And correspondingly many excursions have been organized connected with the above mentioned events. As you may know Armenian Christmas is on 06 January and this is one of the beloved events for the children of our Village. It is the day when many, many people visit the Village, perform concerts for the children and together with the Santa give presents to all the children.

Additionally the period was a good start for the second part of the academic year. In this aspect a lot of our children were very progressive and showed significant results in their studies. Various hobby groups of the village remain active and go on functioning productively with the attendance of most of the village children; almost all of them express their interests and abilities in the above mentioned groups and various exhibition-competition activities take place in the Village regularly. The comparatively newly opened Young Journalists’ hobby group was surprisingly well admitted, and in the result in April an orientation visit had been organised to the printing house where they witnessed interesting processes of printing. It was really exciting! Children of this group with the help of their hobby group leader have established and regularly publish newspaper called “Hrashamanuk” which means “wonder kid”. Children publish their poems, fairy-tales, and stories about village activities in it as well as interviews with SOS staff. In March there was a regular exhibition of needlework hobby group and some of the village children had really nice works and got memorable presents from the jury. By the way, it has been a long time since SOS children painted batic pictures, which are, surely, the visiting-card of our Village. Unlike paintings of the first generation, which used to hang on SOS nursery school walls, the new ones are decorating their home walls.

Children's out of school activities

One of our girls named Ani has been attending dancing school for already a few years where she has been learning both Armenian and Latino dances. She has quite serious achievements in it and most probably will get soon a qualification verified by the certificate. Her dancing group has even got an invitation to visit Bulgaria with concerts which is not decided finally. Besides, she shows good progress at school and, in general, she is very much interested in studying and is actively involved in activities both at school and SOS-Village. Moreover, she attends almost all the hobby groups in the Village and is very good at painting, embroidery, sewing as well as role playing. One of her batik paintings the SOS village have recently presented to the best friend of the SOS children famous Armenian singer Christine Pepelian who visited to the SOS-Children’s Village on the occasion of her birthday.

We have told you many times about sport activities in the Village, and we are proud to inform you that our SOS football team is a serious one and is known as one of the best junior football teams in Armenia. There are 10-11 boys in this team. They are trained 5-6 days weekly for 2-3 hours by their coach. The SOS-team has had many matches within last years and it mainly ended up the winner. Recently there has taken place a competition in the capital city of Yerevan between the junior football teams representing all the orphanages of Armenia, which was initiated by the joint cooperation of the Brazilian and Argentinean Embassies in Armenia. Unfortunately our team didn’t take the first prize; instead it played a very good game full of nice goals. All the participants got presents form the above-mentioned embassies. It is worth mentioning that some of the boys have a good potential for becoming professional football players by the words of experts, however, they have to make it their big wish and dream to reach this goal.

The health issue of the SOS children has been under the constant control of the organisation. Some of the children needed psychological assistance and the association has provided that, and thanks to them many children who had psychological problems now are fully relaxed from the emotional instability. So the year was smooth and quiet without any significant events and occasions, and to our great happiness only joyful facts were by the SOS Children Armenia. It is worth mentioning that we make every effort to create conditions for psychological rehabilitation and social integration of the children into the village life at present and into the society in the future. Whenever facing difficulties, SOS-mothers ask for additional support by professional psychologists. It is a matter of common understanding that children get their positive energy in the families as family is the heart of society, and in this sense, the role of the SOS mothers is of high importance. The implementation of case discussions that started in the beginning of January has become a very welcoming support towards the work of the SOS mothers. All this becomes possible because of the sincere and affectionate care given by the mother and surely your valuable sponsorship. Your support is not only financial but helps the child in a unique way too.

Developing young lives and the community

Here we must tell you some details about the Youth Facilities as a substructure of SOS Children and in general life in Youth Facilities has been very active during these months, and their Individual Development Plans are mostly vividly coming into life. The bright examples are stated below which made the of our youth very hopeful and our youngsters smoothly build up their internal culture and a such they demonstrate excellent example of a well organised community as a whole. Andrey and Paylak from the Youth Facility I have graduated their High Schools recently, Andrey-the State Academy of Arts and Paylak-the State Teaching Institute and are getting ready to take their mandatory military service. Some of our youngsters study at secondary or vocational schools, while the others are at higher educational institutions. Luckily, our youngsters having acquired enough life and professional skills can make achievements in real life. As we have stated in our previous reports, a young lady named Nelly is enjoying great successes in the Circus art. She is already receiving serious roles in the circus performances, and thus sees her future in that filed.

The year was very fruitful for the implementation of other SOS projects aiming to strengthen families and prevent the abandonment of children. The forthcoming of the Family Strengthening Programme in Yerevan, the programme of Support to the Quality Development of Public Schools in Kotayk and Nor Gyugh villages, greatly increased the public awareness on the organisation. The start of the Family Strengthening Programme in Yerevan became a kick-off for the process of awareness building in Yerevan as well. The SOS Armenia was thrilled to cooperate with the City Hall, which was really a great pride for SOS Armenia. In the result after a year of its operation the Family Strengthening programme was awarded by a letter of commendation by the beneficiaries themselves and an official one by the City Hall. Another fact that surely must be highlighted in our report the establishment of the second Children’s Village in Idjevan, one of the wonderful and green places in Armenia. We greatly hope that soon it will become a safe shelter for a lot of children in need of normal family atmosphere. Thus the year was very important and significant in this aspect too.

The period for the initiative of SOS Armenia to support the development of public schools of the adjacent to Children’s Village Kotayk villages of Nor Gyugh and Kotayk was marked by the opening ceremony of a training and resource centre in Kotayk school where mostly our SOS children study. New child centered methodologies have been well practiced by the trained teachers. It can be proudly stated that the school has so far managed to be awarded grants from the Catholic Church, as they have written projects proposal together with children for music centre and theatrical curtains for the hall. Another donation by an Armenian from Iran was conducted; desks for 11 classrooms have been presented to the school. Toilets outside the school have been reconstructed by the godfather of a SOS child another Armenian from Italy. They called it just a miracle.

June 01 is the International Day of Protection of Children and we are very much pleased to see the number of people and organisations offering special programmes to our children.

An education and a future

The work of the SOS Nursery School as an inseparable part of the Children’s Village, was fully integrated into the village life. Moreover, almost all the events of the village were organised in the premises of the Nursery School. Needless to speak about the close cooperation of the kindergarten staff and those SOS mothers whose children attend the nursery school. It remained to be the only pre-school age child care service provider in the vicinity of the four neighbouring communities in the result of the close cooperation. The “Ararat Climbing Hold” German company has built and set up a child-friendly ‘’climbing wall’’ in the Nursery School, which the children enjoyed very much and it was the first one in Armenia.

Here also a very notable event related to the physical capacity of the village; after 14 years, the village was fully gazified which promotes to obvious savings for the CV. Another important and long pending event was the set-up of Internet connection in the CV. It was of great help for the village as today it is difficult to imagine life without this kind of connection.

So this year the SOS Children's Village Kotayk has been a safe and comfortable home for 79 children in need who found warm families and loving mothers here with the help and thanks to your precious support. Since the beginning of the year only one child has been admitted in the village, and thus the total number of children is 252 children in SOS-Armenia together with Youth Facilities and Semi-Independent Living.

Last but not least, as usual for this period organisation of summer holidays for our dear children and youngsters is under way about which you will be reported on their holiday experience in detail in our-end-of-year report. Finally, we want to express our gratefulness personally to you and to all our sponsors, friends and donors who provide us with continuous support and devotional care. We highly appreciate your charity and wish to help our SOS children to have a better future tomorrow. In our days such kind of support is most noble and praiseworthy.

On behalf of our SOS children, SOS mothers and the staff, I want to express my gratefulness to your sincere support and devotion to our children. It's true that without your generosity and thoughtfulness it would be impossible to make these events come true and to make our children's life happier and brighter. We keep praying for all of you and may you be happy and healthy throughout your life. We feel happy to be friends with you and also feel proud that the long distance is not an obstacle for our friendship, and we sincerely look forward to enlarging the circle of friends. We do hope that our feelings are mutual.

Wishing you good luck, all the best and memorable summer vacations,

Yours sincerely,

Hovhannes Kostanyan,



Village director