BACCUP
Belarussian Aid for Children Cardiff Undergraduate Programme is a student-run charity based at the Medical school, Cardiff UniversityIn 1999 five medical students from The University of Wales College of Medicine, as it was then called, were invited to Novinki Children's Home outside Minsk; one of 35 orphanages in Belarus. The 200 young people aged 5-25 living there all have disabilities ranging from autism to schizophrenia and Down's syndrome to severe cerebral palsy.
Many of the children are victims of an impoverished society. Their families often live in Minsk but are too poor to afford childcare or be able to stay home and look after them.
In Novinki, the children were regarded as objects to feed, change and deal with rather than children that deserved care and stimulation. The fifty high dependency children were being looked after by two carers working 24 hour shifts.
The next year 60 students travelled out to in groups of 12 to work in the Orphanage washing the children, feeding them properly and changing them from their urine soaked clothes.
In the last 5 years over 200 medical, nursing, dental, physiotherapy radiography and occupational therapy students have travelled to Belarus to work with the children.
Thanks to many, many kind donations, BACCUP along with other charities working in Novinki have helped to achieve some amazing changes within the orphanage:
·Carers are friendlier and extra carers have been employed by BACCUP.
·Unit 4 is now a 'medical' ward enabling greater government funding for care.
·New playgrounds with better, safer facilities.
·A stick is no longer used to punish the children.
·Food is served in bigger, healthier and more nutritious portions.
·The children have enough clothes and shoes which fit better.
·There are more nurses to care for the high dependency children.
·Novinki Children's Home is going to be named as the 'Gold Standard' for the other orphanages in Belarus to help raise the standards for the whole country.
A new caring ethos has been developed in Novinki enabling the children to develop as the carers to feel more valued and sympathetic. The students have been involved in a challenging and rewarding project. We feel that every student who has been to Novinki has had such an amazing experience that we have taken the idea to other medical schools. Last year Birmingham medics set up a kids project in Zambia and other students to get involved.
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Some of the Novinki Kids!
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