Malotkavichy

Information on the village our children are from

Location and demographics

Malotkavichy is a village of just under two thousand people, rising to just under three thousand when including the other nearby villages which are connected to it. The people of these villages are strong, proud and good people. We thoroughly enjoy working with them, we fully believe they deserve this centre and the opportunities attached to it.

Malotkavichy is located in the south western region of the country, Brest Oblast. It is located just to the west of Pinsk, a medium sized city of around 110,000 residents. Malotkavichy lacks amenties and activities, for both children and adults a like. There is an amazing togetherness and community, what the community lacks is wealth and opportunity. This is what we believe we can begin to offer them and where we believe we can offered valued input in to their community.

Malotkavichy's location shown within Belarus and Brest Oblast.

School and community

The schools in the region are the central hubs of activity for the area, we believe the school for the most part does well. The subjects which are not educated well enough are more often than not due to a lack of available funding. The school of the children we support has an extremely dedicated and loving staff team of teachers and volunteers which support the children of the village. Music and dance are both very important school activities. Modern computers and tech items like video recording equipment or interactive blackboards and screens are not present and sports facilities are quite dated. The issues the school faces stem from a lack of finance, not from a lack of care or dedication.

We are actively seeking to offer our support to our school to increase the facilities available and help provide a greater standard of education to our children, to extend our impact beyond our summer activites each year, we will work hard towards lasting change. We feel honoured to know these wonderful people, which we see as equals and partners to our work, we often wish our own communities could have such a spirit of togetherness, what a world we would live in if we had the best of both worlds.

Residents of Malotkavichy and the surrounding villages live in either small housing, or apartment blocks. Often - but not always - we find the standard of accommodation is poor compared the standards we enjoy within the UK. The old soviet era apartment blocks consist of one or two room apartments with shared washing facilities. In these aged apartment blocks the washroom will be shared with every other apartment on the same floor, as many as eleven other apartments. Some apartments do not having running water and their residents collect to use in the kitchens in vats. Not every apartment or house is at such a standard, we have visited pleasant and clean living conitions also, it is the same as most other locations you can imagine - a mixture of lower and middle class.

The children we have hosted during our work are generally well-mannered and well-behaved. For the majority of our children, it is not a lack of community or care, but a lack of opportunity and experience that potentially stops their progress in life. We are thrilled to offer the children of Malotkavichy the experience of visiting the UK along with all the benefits it brings. They deserve even more than what we are able to offer, but at the very least our support shows them that someone out there cares for them and that the bridges built between our communities are worth maintaining.

Below are images of houses in Malotkavichy.