Members of Faringdon Rotary have been supported by Faringdon Rotakids and members of the new Global New Generation Rotary e-club to establish a new partnership with Kharkiv City Rotary. Having been brought together through a few different connections, Kharkiv City Rotary shared some project ideas with Faringdon Rotary including a ‘Children of Heroes’ project to support young people whose parents have been killed or injured in the war.
While we wait for these ideas to be developed and an opportunity to discuss how our club can help in the medium and longer term, we decided to follow the Friendship Box scheme promoted across Rotary in Britain and Ireland.
Our Rotakids joined in enthusiastically and had lots of fun packing the boxes. We had considered taking the Rotakids to the shops but decided that might be a little too chaotic. So instead I bought a wide selection of pens, pencils, books, toys and stickers, and then we had two Rotakids meetings of selecting the gifts for each box, making up 20 boxes and writing short messages to include in each box. Ievgeniia Kopytsia is from Kharkiv, currently based in Oxford and a member of the new Global New Generation club. The children were keen to write messages in Ukrainian so Ievgeniia helped with these. It was great to see how keen the Rotakids were to send gifts to children who they know are living in such a difficult situation.
Once packed up, Ievgeniia worked with the Kharkiv Rotarians to arrange the delivery. And then very quickly we received a fantastic short video to show us that the boxes had arrived safely and been distributed. But not only that, we saw that the Ukrainian children had made Motanka dolls for our Rotakids children!
Ievgeniia presented the Motanka dolls to our Rotakids a few weeks later. The children really appreciated the gifts and have been able to pass on the stories of the magic of Motanka dolls to other club members who missed that evening meeting.
Our club has supported youth education projects in different countries for many years and this is a great opportunity for us to continue with this focus and work with Rotarians in Kharkiv to support young people, whose lives are clearly affected by the Russian invasion. As Ievgeniia has explained, the children who have left Kharkiv for other regions and countries could be at quite an advantage when they return to their home city after the war, having been in safer environments and learning other languages. There is therefore huge scope for us to offer support for the children and young people who have stayed in Kharkiv city and Kharkiv region. We look forward to developing our partnership with Kharkiv City Rotarians.
Karen Eveleigh, club president