Two Village Orphanages

Thursday 8^th March 2012

The next day was Saturday and Martin and I plus a friend Danielle went to visit two orphanages in villages just outside Tbilisi with our favourite Nebraskan.  Originally in that area, there was a large house with 42 children living there.  They didn’t have much to do with the outside world as they went to school there as well.  The government now has a policy of integrating children into the local community and moving away from the large institution style houses. 

Not all of the children are orphans, sometimes the parents cannot afford to or unable for one reason or another to look after the children.  The government put out tenders to run smaller houses and the Divine Child Foundation which is a US charity was successful in bidding for 2 houses. 

They wanted to take all the children but could only take 20 and their priority when choosing children was to keep siblings together.  One boy, now 9, was found in the streets of Tbilisi when he was aged about 3 years old.  Naturally he did not have any official documentation and the new orphanage had to fight long and hard to get him placed as red tape being what it is in Georgia, the authorities were reluctant to release him.  The homes are beautiful and the standard far exceeds the usual village house. 

The houses are run on a Polish model where there are 5 house mothers who work in shifts and each house mother has responsibility for 2 children in particular, making sure they are working at school and kept clean and tidy.  We didn’t know what to expect and took sweets and some nail varnishes for the girls.  We did feel a bit awkward, like watching monkeys at the zoo and as we couldn’t really speak very much  (we tried and someone translated for us) we felt a bit redundant.  It would be a good idea if there were some games we could have played that didn’t require speaking like Jenga or 4 in a row but there wasn’t.  Something to think about for next time.