The Salard Community
A Smiles Foundation Project
In Romania
In June 2007, Dr Claudia Micula
– The Smiles Foundation’s doctor to the
Family Care Project – was
visiting a sponsored family in the city of Oradea when approached by a
desperate lady asking for help. The lady’s sister – married with 12
children – had just experienced the horror of a house fire that
destroyed the house and claimed the life of their 5 year old
daughter. The family were now divided, with
ones and twos staying in various homes
with friends and the parents with some of the children sleeping on a
mattress in the field beside their burnt out house.
This lady knew of only The Smiles Foundation that could possibly help.
Dr Claudia called the Chief Executive soon after lunch. By 5pm the same
day, Kevin Hoy (CEO) with Director of Smiles Romania, Maria Cimpoca met
Dr Claudia and Jenica Ostafi (Social Assistant to the Family Care
Project) and with the sister of the bereaved family – went to a town
called Salard to see how we could help.
Within minutes of arrival, word spread to the Mayor’s
office and his
representative for Roma and the poor of Salard was sent to meet us.
We met the family and with the mayor’s
representative, we heard the entire tragic story of the family’s loss.
The mayor was able to offer a small piece of land where a new house
could be built, but they couldn’t build the house. The Smiles Foundation
said perhaps we could, so we went to see the piece of land.
We were shocked at what we found.
A small Community of 19 families living in extremely poor conditions and
whilst it was reasonable to say the family who’s house had burnt down
were worse off – it was a case of ‘Only Just!’
Some of the housing in this community was as
bad as our Chief Executive had seen in 17 years of visiting and working
in Romania.
The Mayor’s representative saw our surprise and asked if there was any
way we could help more families. These situations face the Smiles Team
daily but our CEO felt in this case We Should, We Could and We Would do
something!
The Smiles Foundation firstly committed to building a new house for the
family that had first brought us to this community.
Within
6 weeks of seeing the need, Smiles had built a new home for the family
who can now begin to rebuild their lives after the tragedy of the house
fire and loss of their child.
At a cost of £2,670 / $5,340 Smiles set to with providing materials and
financing labour costs to build this small but effective home.
How well it looks and how delighted and thankful are the family who have
been re-housed. Thank you to those who have supported the building
costs. Now we hope to get sponsors for the family to ensure we can
continue supporting them back to total independence.
Then we started gathering the information on each family and their
specific needs. Some for basic help with Food, others with Medical needs
and several required help with their poorly built homes.
All we saw that day was reminiscent of the
early days of the Foundation’s Family Care Project in 2001, when
families had these basic needs which today, 6 years later, has the
Foundation assisting over 1,300 people every month.
Now we are faced with a further 19 families
(85 adults and children)
needing help each month and sponsors are
needed through our Family Care project urgently to meet the need.
If you can help, please sponsor a family now or contribute what you can
each month towards the Medical or Housing support we are now offering
the Salard Community.
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