My job at Hope Home

Help feed the kids; do extra activities, music, creative sessions with them; make arts and crafts like handmade Christmas cards for fundraising; help with the mammas’ jewellery making project and their sales; receive groups of visitors and show them around in Hope Home, and help Dora, the association’s director with all sorts of admin activity… my to-do-list is long and diverse!

The main motivation for this volunteering project for me was to jump off the consumption-oriented tread wheel, and just help. Where it’s truly needed. After a lot of discussions with friends and colleagues in the past months, I see most people have their questions regarding the way things work and how fair/unfair this might be on a global level. I personally had an overdose of the money-making, numbers-based, crazy-paced life, and needed a break with a drastic change. I wanted to give a try to balance out the inequities on my personal level… And the best way to that seemed to find a project where I could make a difference. The volunteer activity in Hope Home fulfills and exceeds all of tha! First of all thanks to the smiles we receive in exchange to our work here. :)

The specificity of this orphanage is that it gives home to 30 kids and youngsters living with a wide range of disabilities, including autism, AD/HD, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and all sorts of physical disabilities. Most of the Hope Home kids live in a wheelchair. The age range goes from birth to young adults. Right now our smallest kid is 1,5 year old, and eldest resident is about 35 (ages are not always very precise, as the birth and family conditions are sometimes not known). The backbone of the staff is the team of 7 house moms living with the kids day and night, working 24-hours a day, 6 days a week. They feed them, bath them, wash their clothes, put them to bed, wake them up, move them around in the wheelchairs and keep their environment clean…. They are part of the everyday superheroes for the continuous effort they make!

My mission as a volunteer is to colour the picture of Hope Home’s life. So doing the fun part, mainly! On one side of course I help the mammas, as well as the teacher and therapists in their tasks; but the main goal of a volunteer here is to do extra activities with the kids to give more stimulation.

Here are a few pictures of our activities in the past weeks.

Moise enjoying a ride on the special swing:

Some viola music and sing-along on the terrace:

Gary and Christian on the play rug outside:

Homework time – every night with Alannda and Ismael, who go to special school:

Baby Marvense happy with the soft toys:

Cintia enjoying her meal:

Alta, proud of her fingerprint christmas painting:

The Cinderella part of my job: selecting and distributing the breads and help organising the boutique for the jewellery-making project:

And the result of our christmas card manufacture earlier this week, all hand-made for the painting part by the kids. They simply love this activity! Already impatient, they ask every day when Santa arrives this year! :)