The holiday season is not only a time of celebration with family and friends, but also a time to help the needy, especially the children. While celebrating, we can't forget about those who are not as fortunate, about those who do not have family, friends, home, and a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving or nicely wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree on Christmas Morning. Each year we try to provide charitable relief to one particular orphanage from the foreign countries we work with. This project is called “Christmas Wish of an Orphanage.” This year we chose to help an orphanage from Kazakhstan that has about 260 children of pre-school age. We asked the orphanage administration what the orphanage's “Christmas wish” would be. First of all, they were thankful. They told us that the government helped the orphanage with some repair needs, and they are not in urgent need of any repairs, food or clothing. However, what they need is games. Not toys, they have plenty of toys (donated by charitable organizations and adoptive families), but games that would help the children to learn and grow, to explore different jobs, to learn colors, numbers, shapes, objects, animals, musical instruments and so on. Colorful, musical, make-believe, easy-to-‘digest' games would be highly appreciated. If a child needed to learn shapes, for example, a caretaker would cut shapes out of cardboard to show them to the children. If orphanage personnel wished to teach the children numbers, they use sticks or some flashcards, made by the caretakers themselves.

The children do not have simple musical toys instruments to learn how to play music. Any educational games that help the children to develop learning and explorative skills would be received by the orphanage with great appreciation. Do not forget that in this orphanage the children do not know English, so they do not need games with lengthy English instructions or with many English words. Please donate a game or two to the orphanage. For details in how to do it - do not hesitate to contact Ark Mission. We also asked the orphanage personnel, the people who work in this orphanage, what their wish would be; their answer was ‘a computer'. This is a big orphanage and there is a lot of administrative work that could be done on the computer, but because it is an orphanage, the regional officials give funds for the children, but do not provide much for the orphanage adults who dedicate their life, year after year after year, receiving very small salaries, to these children. We talked to several orphanage representatives and they said that they use one old-fashioned, extremely bad and heavy typewriter, and it kills a lot of time. If they make a mistake while typing a letter, they have to start all over. All information is stored on paper and the papers are in folders and the folders are everywhere. The big orphanage with 260 children does not have even one computer. Can you imagine how hard it is to keep track of all the information on each child; their progress reports, their medical, social, and background information, as well as the orphanage inventory, bookkeeping, and word processing needs without a computer? Those who wish to help please contact us (kids@adoptionark.com ) for information.

We hope that we can help this orphanage's Christmas wish become a reality. We will post your names in our after-Christmas follow up of this project if you wish, and will provide you with a complete report on how much money was collected. We also hope to have photos of the orphanage receiving their Christmas gift. For those who wish to receive a receipt for their donation for tax purposes, one will be provided to you. We hope that with the help of our kind and generous supporters we will be able to collect the games and the money for a computer. If you have a computer in good-condition that you would like to donate, we will gladly accept those as well. We hope to write an article featuring pictures of your donations, shortly after the up-coming New Year! The children and orphanage staff will be very grateful, and we will pass their appreciation on to you. Please help make this orphanage a lucky one, and may God bless you.