My mother is the best one on Earth! – this is how the little Pancho is greeting our team. Pancho is a happy child who is growing up surrounded by the love of his mother and sister.
One day some colleagues from the CPD called us to tell us the story of a pregnant young woman who is looking for “a good place” to leave her unborn child after giving birth to it.
The team of Hope and homes for children – Bulgaria met the mother-to-be and a long-term case work started with her for days on. After a few days, Yulia returned home with her two children. In this difficult time – a mother with two children, without her own home and no stable income, she felt our team as an ally. We went through illnesses together, looking for accommodation, together we experienced the baby’s first tooth poke, his first steps and words arranged in a sentence. The kindergarten became a playground and his older sister is his authority as a source of knowledge after coming home from kindergarten. Yulia has two jobs so she has very little time which she spends with her two children.
When the coronavirus pandemic was announced, she realized that the restaurants where she worked would be closed for a week. When the week was over she understood that she would have to be fired because the restaurants would remain closed for months. It was difficult to recover from such a shock – she has lost her job, left without a stable income and without any clear idea when all this would end.
Hope and homes for children – Bulgaria suggested that CEZ could include Yulia and her family in the “Together we can do everything” initiative and CEZ agreed to.
Many families are deciding to abandon their children in this kind of situations. They sacrifice their own happiness and their children’s one so that they cannot be dependent on hunger. Poverty becomes a reason children to be abandoned in Bulgaria so that children can have food and clothes, but this is a trauma that haunts them and very often changes their destiny.
Through the “Together we can do everything” initiative Julia will feel more secure and Pancho will continue to be a happy child, and the family will buy firewood for the winter with the money they have saved on the electricity bills.
We continue to be looking for benefactors who can lend a helping hand to another family, to another child, to another Bulgarian to grow up surrounded by parental love.
