We help there: looking back on a successful summer

Now that the summer has come to an inevitable end, the 'We help there' Foundation can look back on a very successful summer. How proud we are of our participants! After months of preparation and raising money, they have experienced what our foundation is really about: doing something for someone else. We are students and our participants are students, but once in the former Yugoslavia we deal with all prejudices. Don't drink endless beer and cause nuisance, but blow bubbles and help feed. There it revolves around little Nikolaj in Stamnica who likes to suck on your hair, the old lady Rosa in Trogir who can't get enough of hair clips and so on. From my own experience I can say that the participants who have been to Stamnica, will suffer from their jaws for at least a few more days from the many singing of “parrot you are still alive”. Every year we see again with our participants that the journeys are confronting. Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia may be in Europe, but the conditions there cannot be compared to the Netherlands. In Stamnica children with all kinds of mental and intellectual disabilities are mixed up. From autism to Down's syndrome to even more serious syndromes. All children are mixed up and much worse: all children are treated exactly the same. This is not so much reluctance from the caretakers, but impotence. One sister takes care of about twenty children on average, who are often difficult to control. The children do not receive much more than basic care. Except for two weeks in the summer, then we help out and blow bubbles.