What do we do at this moment?

We're still starting, trying to find the best and most professional way to make things work: making a businessplan, trying to find ways to get enough money together, looking for donations and making publicity to inform as many parents as possible.

One of the ways to collect money is offering english lessons to the local people. Volunteers are the teachers and the price of the lessons is very low so everybody can participate. All the money earned that way goes straight to the project.

And we have weekly reunions with parents and their children. To share emotions and experiences and let the children play and learn together.

What is it that we want to offer?

We want to help as much as possible to let the children devellop themselves well, and give them acceptance and opportunities to learn, work and live independently if they want to when they grow up.

Why? Because parents so far are ashamed of their children and they hardly have any knowledge about how to treat them or help them. There's not enough information, so a lot of them prefer to hide their child. Sometimes they are even kept as animals. It wouldn't be fair to convict the parents for doing that, because almost always it happens out of lack of knowledge, but we want to inform them, and teach them that there are better ways. So they can learn what exactly Down Syndrome is and how they can help their child.

We want to start little by little. The first step is what we are doing now: weekly reunions with parents and their children, to share emotions and experiences. We also give information and teach them easy exercises to help their child from the start.

Next step is trying to find a professional who can spend more time with parents and children and we would like to prepare the little ones as good as possible, so maybe some of them could participate at a "normal" school. And at the same time trying to be prepared to offer special education classes.

In Celendín-city we still need to make more publicity and we have to try to get in touch with the other parents who don't have enough courage to come so far. But we want to give information in the whole province. Maybe volunteers could visit small villages and inform doctors and psychologist. They could give basic information to the parents there, and tell the parents to come and visit us as well if possible.

In the future we hope to be able to offer more for older children as well. Maybe some day in Celendín you can find a café or a B&B by people with Down Syndrome...? We hope to make something like that come through!

Photos of some of the children you find here.

Design, fotos, tekst© Susan van der Wielen