Friends of the Belarusian Children's Hospice

It’s been a long while since I wrote anything in my blog because I have been so busy but I wanted to tell you a bit about what is happening at The Hospice now and how BCH is influencing the provision of palliative care services way beyond the city of Minsk.

The government has promised to give a piece of land to BCH on which we can build a new, purpose-built hospice.  The first piece that was looked at turned out to be unsuitable for a children’s hospice because there was a factory next door.  The second location to be considered has a high pressure gas pipeline running beneath it.  Now a third piece of land is being studied by the engineers and we are all keeping our fingers crossed that it will pass muster.

We have managed to maintain, if not increase a little, the amount of money we have raised this year but inflation still continues to rise rapidly so our spending power is reduced.  Everyone is having to tighten their belts at the moment but we have our fingers crossed for better days ahead and continue to look for economies.

It is always nice to come home. I spent three weeks in the USA on a volunteer management programme run by the State Department.  It was extremely interesting and useful because volunteering in the USA is very well developed and takes many different forms.  How nice it would be to put everything I saw into action back in Belarus!

Only two days after I flew to America, there was a terrible explosion in the Minsk underground that killed 15 people and injured more than 100.  At the same time, the country descended into the grip of a terrible economic crisis: literally within the space of 2 months the Belarusian rouble had devalued by 200% against the US dollar and still continues to fall.  In the first four months of the year, the average level of inflation in the country was 10.9% and on staple products such as potatoes, buckwheat, tomatoes and so on prices rose by more than 50%.