Emmaus Club

Dancu & Ciora, Moldova
100+
£Ongoing

Emmaus Club – A wonderful development program for children with special educational needs in Dancu.

Besides many problems the families will face in Dancu, there are many parents who often baffled by the problems presented by a child with learning disabilities. Often this “invisible disability” does not become obvious until a child reaches school age. Even then, difficulties may be subtle and hard to recognise.

Originally children were ‘sent away’ when they couldn’t keep up with their peers but thanks to the Emmaus Club they receive extra lessons in order to keep up. The project is now welcomed by the local school and our teachers work with them to help particular children. This now also involves children who come from very chaotic and sometimes violent families as well as children that have been left with grandparents while their parents work abroad.. All the children we help come from poor families.

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 LATEST UPDATE – November 2023

By the grace of God and with the priceless help of you, our reliable, faithful partners, we want to tell you with much joy that we successfully finished the 13th year of the educational programme ‘Emaus club’. This club is dedicated to helping children in disadvantaged families who need more support to master the school curriculum .  It runs in both the school setting and the community centre ‘New Hope’.

Through your generosity we have had a very good year in the Emaus club and have managed to carry out all the activties that we proposed at the beginning of the year. In the Dancu school 136 hours of activity have taken place during the academic year 2022-2023 spent at school with 26 children in total. We also managed to have 35 Saturdays (70 hours of activity) with 30 children at the New Hope Community Centre teaching Maths, Romanian and English.

Within this project the children received help with their homework and also participated in group activities aimed at strengthening their confidence, self control and co-operation.  The children also received 2 hot meals on the Saturday when the activities were held at the community centre.

During this year, the students completed a lot of homework, demonstrated their skill in solving complex maths problems, read together and learnt to do good deeds: to help an adult, to litter pick, to compromise, to hug and to make new friends.  They also ate well, participated in a range of educational games, played football and took full advantage of the breaks and the free time that they had.

Our biggest desire  is that these children will come to love school and to benefit from the support that is dedicated to their needs within the project so that they want to do better and make progress at school.  Their evaluation is based on both the progress they made within the project and on the basis of the qualifications they obtained at school.

We have travelled a long road but it never seemed difficult to us, as we always had a reliable partner ‘Link to Hope’ by our side, together with whom we rewrite the life stories of these wonderful children.

Our greatest joy is to see these children happy and encouraged by their dear teachers who share joy and offer them all the love and help they need. Unfortunately these children have many difficulties and too many worries for their age. The fact is that these children come from large families and from families with big problems, with severe poverty.  Just think for a moment how difficult it can be for a parent to ensure good living conditions for their children to live in and to offer them all the necessary things for them to grow well and develop physically.  Also imagine how a child might live and receive a good education when they live in a small, disadvantaged house that is often without warmth in the winter , without bread on the table and their parents are indifferent to the living conditions of the children. These are the shortcomings which are faced by many children in such families and lead to a total indifference that brings them much sadness and marks them for life.

It is for this reason that we are very happy that together with your help we are able to give them the support that they need throughout the school year and we are sure that they will not stop here but will continue with their studies as long as possible.

Now, we want to invite you on a journey in time, to look back at some of the good parts of the activities carried out in our programme during the academic year 2022- 2023.  During this year they received help with their homework, they played, they sang, they participated in many creative activities and they learnt to smile.  They learnt empathy, kindness, sincerity, how to share, how to forgive and how to grow up beautifully.

All of these magical experiences lived in the Emaus family have created a lot of memories which can never be erased!  At the end of the year I congratulated all the students with all my heart and awarded them a diploma for participating in the club because they have learnt well throughout the year and we can’t wait for them to come again in autumn when we will discover wonderful things together again.  But until that time I wished them a wonderful summer, full of fun and beautiful activities.

It is wonderful to do good works together!  We have hearts full of gratitude for all the beautiful and dedicated people within our project, for all the effort you and your partners put into this project to sustain the extraordinary good educational project, for all the joy which we see on the faces of these wonderful children.  Praise the Lord for all these wonderful gifts.

We are honored and grateful to be part of such a great team and we thank our partners for the support they give us every day!

We thank you partners with all our hearts for the support and faith you have given us in the 13 years of work.  Together we bring joy into the hearts of children in difficult family situations who are at great risk of abandoning school.  We thank you for the support and good collaboration and we assure you that all that we do we do with all our love and all our hearts for the children.

    

Teachers from the primary classes

The 1st – 4th classes are the classes which we teachers have led and guided the children in the Emaus club program sponsored by Link to Hope.  The Emaus club is in its 13th year of running and without reservation we can say that through participating in this program, the children have shown real progress in overcoming their conditions and broadening their horizon’s.

The diverse activities that are undertaken every day make the children happy and help them to learn new things through play, attention  and movement.  This attitude has motivated the students to return the next day with the same joy of being at school and also in the Emaus club.

Apart from the activities that were undertaken daily, the hot meals that they received every Saturday were also an important part of the club and the children waited eagerly for the food, curious to find out what food they were about to receive.

Our daily activities varied from the usual resolving and explaining of homework, to a ball game on the sports field when the weather allowed, cutting, sticking and colouring, interactive games or the much loved immortal stories of childhood.  We can not forget to mention our outing to the park, where we played together  and not only that but we also had a time when we all cleaned up, collected the rubbish and took it to the correct place.

We conclude by thanking you on behalf of ourselves, the teachers directly involved in this work, the parents and especially the children for all the effort made everyday by all those who work for this programme to exist and work so well for the children who really need our help.  We thank you very much.

With much love, The teachers, Ina Sonic, Ludmila Mardare, Ludmila Lungu,  Inga Iacob, Ina Balcan, Lilia Gulica, Daniela Colteniuc,,

 

A child from the Emaus Club:

Dear Link to Hope,

“We want to thank you for all that you do for us.  Due to this programme I have learnt new and very interesting things, to be more polite, to listen more and to be more confident.  Before we were not sure of ourselves but now we are more confident and curious to learn new things. .  We will really miss the program and our dear teachers during the summer.  Thank you again for everything, in the programme we do many beautiful and interesting things.  We love you so much!”

Emmaus Club Community Centre Group