Family Home Project: Chisinau, Moldova
AIUTO BIMBI Charity is working to achieve a great goal: to build a Family Home in Moldova, near Chisinau, to welcome orphan and needy children, small creatures abandoned to their fate.
Moldova is the poorest country in Eastern Europe, just a 2.5-hour flight from Rome or Milan, where the tragedy of street children is made even harder by harsh winters. Chisinau is only 20 kilometers from the war, a place where we should bring some of our love and presence.
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The Situation in Moldova
Children in Moldovan orphanages are on the brink of survival. According to the International Organization for Migration, migration affects a quarter of the working-age population of Moldova.
Thousands of children too young to live alone are raised by grandparents, who are often too old for this commitment. Thousands more children are placed in dilapidated orphanages, originally built to house orphans of World War II.
The "Internat", as childhood institutions are called, are often in poor condition, where minors live in traumatic conditions. At sixteen, many young people leave institutions without any support, ending up on the streets.
Our Commitment
We are a small, young humanitarian and non-profit Association, and our Mission is certainly not easy, because we lack economic means and subsistence, and we carry on with our modest strength, together with goodwill and dedication.
Our great goal is to raise awareness about street children and to collect help for the cause of these poor children. The road is long and winding, but we are tenacious and determined and will continue undaunted until we achieve our goal.
The Association also provides consulting and aid to other non-profit Associations and Organizations that pursue charitable, humanitarian and socially significant purposes.
The Orphans of Moldova – Chisinau, 20 km from the war
Angela Shabha is an exceptional woman, born in Palermo in 1954. An activist for many years, she travels the world to bear witness to the most shocking injustices. She has also been to Moldova, where she took hundreds of photographs of the tragic reality of street children.
A place where we should bring a little of our love and presence, where the most atrocious suspicion is that these children — and many others from other institutions — end up in the organ-trafficking trade. Nothing easier in Moldova, where the children of no-one live. Where children are locked up in orphanage-camps and forgotten there by their parents for years, forever. The directors of the Internat — as the children's institutions are called — have no qualms about selling their young residents to Turkish criminals. What does it matter if they then end up on the street forced into prostitution, or become victims of organ trafficking? No-one will come looking for them.
Moldova is the poorest country in Eastern Europe: over one hundred thousand children and adolescents are growing up without their parents, who have emigrated to the West in search of work that might secure their families a better future. The children of Moldova's state orphanages live on the very edge of survival.
According to the International Organization for Migration, this phenomenon affects one quarter of Moldova's working-age population. Thousands of children too young to live alone are raised by grandparents who are often themselves too old for the task. Thousands more are placed in dilapidated orphanages, originally built to house the orphans of the Second World War.
Inside some girls' orphanages there is even a gynaecological room, so that underage girls who become pregnant can give birth and put their babies up for adoption: they are not allowed to keep them, and often end up selling them to Turkish traffickers.
I realize this account is harsh, but it is the TRUTH. We must believe it and spread it, to raise awareness of the problem.
Film Screening
"Arrivederci"
Directed by Moldovan filmmaker Valeriu Jereghi
Original language with Italian subtitles
A docudrama telling the story of two children left alone in Moldova by their mother, forced to emigrate to Italy. A story that reflects the reality of many other Eastern European countries and moves emigrants and audiences alike.
Film awarded with the Grand Prix at the Eurasian Forum in Moscow in 2008, requested and screened by the European Parliament, which welcomed and greatly appreciated its high social content. The film's harsh realism is also a denunciation of the serious degradation of Moldovan rural society.
