Past CHEF Projects

For the past two years The Fund has been assisting the Lotus Children’s Centre, based in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. Details of the programmes under the Lotus Centre that CHEF has been assisting with are listed below.

The Lotus Children’s Centre is a Mongolian Charitable Association that works in a network with the local community, the hospital system and the police to give shelter, relief, health care and education to children who have been orphaned, abandoned or who are run-aways from violent or abusive family situations.

The main priority of the Lotus Centre is to reunite children with families where possible

This may involve keeping in contact with families to monitor conditions to see whether the situation that led to a child being abandoned or running away may have changed.

Ill or alcoholic parents may recover. Economic conditions that led to the abandonment of a baby or child or to a child running may improve.

When children cannot be reunited with family, the Lotus Children’s Centre undertakes to care for the child, including all personal care (clothing, food) health and medical care, primary, scondary and tertiary education, trade training and technical education. All of this occurs in small ‘family’ groups of children under the care of individual house-mothers.

  

The Lotus Centre receives children from many differing backgrounds and with various degrees of trauma in their history. The absence of governmental machinary to deal with these problems leads to the close relationship between various government departments and The Lotus Children’s Centre.


 

The Centre cares for a number of children with special needs. Six children with Down’s Syndrome and one severely epileptic child who had received no previous medical treatment. Each has various degrees of social and personal incapacity partially caused by their condition and partially caused by the long years of neglect. One is a young, bright girl with cerebral palsy who is currently doing very well at school.

Some of the children are street kids brought by the police, some are from the public hospitals which also call the Centre to take charge of abandoned babies. In the early days of the Centre’s existence particularly, babies abandoned in the streets were also an unfortunately common occurrence, and if found before freezing to death the police or hospital would call upon the Centre to take the child.

Apart from these official pathways, the Centre is also found by members of the community who find that they cannot, for one reason or another, continue to, or temporarily, care for a child or children. This may occur after the death of a spouse, loss of employment, ill-health or some other reason. The Centre investigates each claim and they may temporarily take in a child, or if the situation is not alleviated, the child may become semi-permanent or remain within their care permanently if no extended family is found to care for the child.

The aim of the Lotus Children’s Centre is to enable each child in it’s care to lead a useful, fulfilled life and take their place within the context of Mongolian culture and society. The Centre does not allow or participate in the foreign adoption of any of the children in it’s care.

In addition to the Lotus Children’s Centre’s basic work with children in need, the Centre also strives to help the children forge productive and viable futures.

Programmes have already been begun in the form of The Lotus Café, which gives training to some of the young adults in hospitality skills, waitering, restaurant management, accounting etc. The Special Needs Programme has ranged from commercial cooking to crafts-making for the children with special needs who are resident at the Lotus Centre.

 

 

 

Assisted Project 2007-2008: Hutul Youth Centre

The Lotus Centre has undertaken a new project in response to administrative requests in the northern Mongolian town of Hutul, The Lotus Centre is reaching out to a wider demographic of young adults and youth in need within the community by establishing a Youth Centre .

The establishment of this Centre hopes to alleviate the causal problem of aimlessness which has lead to a crisis of alcoholism pervading the country, beginning with young adults, and in some cases even children. In the WHO global Status Report on Alcohol 2004 it was observed that alcohol abuse could be Mongolia’s biggest stumbling block to economic and social progress, with women especially falling victim to a daily round of vodka-fuelled violence and 69% of school-age youth report drinking alcohol . The establishment of the Youth Centre hopes to offer an alternative to the young people of this mining town by offering after-school activities, classes, a library and an alcohol-free café. Commencement of the Centre is projected for 2009.

Assisted Project 2006: Life Skills For Disadvantaged Children

A programme for special needs children living in, and supported by The Lotus Children’s Centre. The funding supplied purchased a ger (traditional Mongolian tent) as a class-room for the programme and supplies for the programme for 2007.

 

Assisted Project 2004-5

The first project assisted by the Children’s Health and Education Fund was in India. In 2004, a progressive women’s organisation called Narii Abhyudaya (“Women’s Development Association”) applied for assistance to begin a Community School for Street Children in Greater Noida on the outskirts of New Delhi.

The funding was for the training of teachers and materials for the School which has now been successfully operating for over six years.