News
It was the 10th time that Maria’s Children went to Beslan. From year to year our friendship with beslani children and adults becomes even stronger – so much was done and experienced together!
There is a place, that we deeply love, on Bolshaya Dmitrovka street, not far from the studio – a vegetarian restaurant “Fresh”. It not only offers healthy and delicious food to its guests but also delivers its meals to our art center three times a week, and the children always welcome the tasty treats with unabashed joy. We express our huge gratitude to Irina Azarova and to all the caring and concerned restaurant staff! The children from the Family Care Assistance Center “Yunona” and orphanage graduates, enrolled in the PELICAN Foundation programmes, drew a picture-collage, gathered together and brought it to the restaurant with a great joy. Hope it gladdened our friends from “Fresh” as well!
On 13 of April volunteers from the “Sberbank Insurance” company visited orphanage graduates at the studio on Dmitrovka. First part of the evening was dedicated to collective preparation of cupcakes. The young people and the guests split in two teams and cooked many mini-cakes using berries as a decoration. After that we had a tea-party, during which the volunteers told the young people what does insurance exist for, what kinds of insurance could be useful for them, where and how one can obtain insurance. Thank you, our dear friends, for such an interesting and delicious evening!
On 26-31 March staff members of the Charitable Fund “Pelican” and five teachers of the Beslan School №1 travelled to Spain. The journey took place in the framework of the “Programme of professional development and psychological support of teachers of Beslan”. We express our gratitude to Sophie Nash for her warm welcome and Inessa Dorokhova for the organizational help.
On 14 of April a group of children from the Family Care Assistance Center “Yunona” went to an edutainment park “Kidzania”, opened in Moscow not so long ago.
Last week one of our good friends and donors gave us 50 tickets to Nick Vujicic’s performance as a gift. So on Thursday, 14thof April, several graduates (from the PELICAN Foundation) and high school students from the Family Care Assistance Center “Sputnik” and the boarding-school #31 for children with locomotor system disorders set out for the meeting with Nick.
On 15 April the biologist and scientist Ilya Kolmanovskiy held an interactive seminar at the studio on Dmitrovka. Children and graduates, staff members, volunteers and guests learnt about the fish called Dipterus that existed about 400 millions years ago in Devonian period. Dipterus belongs to a group of extinct species of lungfish (it used both gills and lungs while breathing).
On the 17th of April we celebrated Maria’s Children birthday. Many of our children hadn’t been born yet when Maria, Ilya, their friends and relatives founded this organization in 1997. Now we have the studio and, most importantly, we have each other – children, adults, mature children and their own children.
Now there is a huge overhaul of pipelines at the studio on Dmitrovka street, so all our graduates moved to the studio on Delegatskaya with all their art activities and studies. Yesterday several volunteers from Apple visited our young people with a pizza-baking master-class.
On 27 April we had a wonderful opportunity to pay a guest visit to the head office of “DIXY group of companies” in Ochakovo. We took part at a charity fair organized for the company staff members. As the company’s President Pedro Pereira da Silva stressed in his welcoming speech, the company exerts every effort to be socially responsible. The staff members were so inspired by the speech and sincere children’s art that they showed genuine interest and generosity, having bought a lot of our children’s handiwork. Thus, we raised 26100 Roubles, for which we are extremely grateful! It’s not the first year that DIXY supports our studio, transferring funds within its programme “Caring neighbors” for our daily art classes and developing activities for children-orphans. We express our sincere gratitude to the company’s administration, fair organizers, personally Elena Bondarenko and all the DIXY staff members for their support and warm welcome! Hopefully we will have more meetings and to continue our cooperation!
