Orphanage Initiative Romania (OIR)

Name of the activity: Orphanage Initiative Romania (OIR)

Country/NMO: Romania (FASMR)

Program: Ethics & Human Rights in Health

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Third Party Activities. Supporting an individual or a group to tackle an issue, either in the form of fundraising (collecting money) or operative work (help with administrative tasks of other organizations or communities).

General description:

Orphanage Initiative Romania is project that aims to empower institutionalized children to take an active role in improving their hygiene, medical and nutritional knowledge as well as their mental health. An important part of this activity is also to promote children and human rights.

This is a continuous project that contains a variety of non-formal activities held by medical students or experts in a specific domain, such human rights and ethics. These activities are adapted for children in order for them to understand and gain some basic knowledges about hygiene, healthy lifestyle, emergency care procedures, mental health and human rights.

Mini-workshops, presentations, interactive activities, mini trips to visit cultural places or just wonder in nature are some of the activities that we frequently organize in order to fulfill our mission. Nevertheless, we always remember to bring with us something sweets, presents and a lots of smiles.

Focus area:

Orphan children rights and medical education

Problem statement:

There are almost 57.500 children in the orphanages in Romania and the misfortunate situation is that not all of them benefit from the care and education they need. The system provides all the basic necessities (food, a place to sleep, caregivers etc.) but the level of education and empathy is usually from moderate to low.

Target groups:

Children, People with disabilities

Beneficiaries:

Children, People with disabilities, Caregivers, Teachers

Objectives and indicators of success:

Our goal is to empower institutionalized children to take an active role in improving their hygiene, medical and nutritional knowledge as well as their mental health.

1.Organize twice a month meetings with children from orphanages in which we teach them medical knowledge and verify it through interactive games.

2. Organize 3 annual gift-donation campaigns (Christmas, Easter and International Children’s Day) based on what the children need.

3. Organize two children’s health screening campaigns in the orphanages in order to get information about the children’s health issues, make an improvement where needed and lobby to the local or national authorities.

Medical students are going twice a month in the orphanages and play with children, they teach them in a non-formal manner through different activities and test their knowledge by setting up situations where they can apply what they have learned. These activities are being done 2 to 4 times during the school year and, when it is possible, during the summer as well.

Methodology:

Our target population are 1000 children from orphanages placed all over Romania (aged 4 to 18 years old), the care providers and, also, the medical students that can benefit from this activities by improving their ability to communicate and adapt in every situation.

Mini-workshops (Bandages, Basic Life Support and others), presentations (Viral Infections, Keep Your Hands Clean, Eat Healthy, etc) , interactive activities, mini trips to visit cultural places or just wonder in nature are some of the activities that we frequently organize in order to fulfill our mission. Nevertheless, we always remember to bring with us something sweets, presents and a lots of smiles.

Twice a year, we conduct screening campaigns on children’s health issues- as chosen by each LC.

Plans for evaluation:

The project coordinator sets the necessities of the children at the beginning of each activity with the help from director of the foster house and the children themselves.

Before each workshop, we evaluate the knowledge of children upon one specific subject and compare it with their knowledge on our next meeting.

Before each gift-donating campaign we make a list with the necessities and children’s wishes.

We chose our screening campaigns focusing on what is important on health at the specific moment.

While the activities are unfolding, volunteers constantly ask kids for feedback and the project

coordinator keeps in touch with the director of the orphanage. When the year is over, in order to have a specific evaluation of what we have achieved we kindly ask the institution to provide us a written feedback that we usually require to be done by the psychologist of the institution.