Uncategorized

On Saturday, December 24th, Christmas was celebrated at Fountain of Life!

In the morning patients in the hospice were visited by volunteers and gifts were given to them.

There also was a festive lunch at the day center. A small choir sang some Christmas carols, which was enthusiastically received by the crowd. Also there was a lunch with special food. At the end, also a bag with useful items and even some shoes where given to each visitor.

Fountain of Life would like to thank the donors, who kindly provided the gifts and shoes!

Also this winter we received so many clothes from you for the homeless. Next to that someone anonymously donated us potatoes from his own field. OBF “Help the children – SKD” kindly donated medicine and hair shampoo. We would also like to express our gratitude to Mubarak-Ezhe for the kindly donated products: Flour, butter, sugar, potatoes, noodles, apples, detergents, etc.

On this Saturday the Hospice, run by Fountain of Life, was officially opened by representatives from the Kyrgyz government and other organizations. The first deputy minister of the ministry of Health and social development, Aliza Soltonbekova, handed over an official expression of recognition to Margaret Gordon, the present director of Fountain of Life. Later on she was asked to cut the ribbon with the other representatives.

And what is an official opening without good Plov! During this very good lunch, there was the opportunity to get to know each other better and Gerlinde and Riek, the Dutch nurses were able to answer questions.

One of the speakers was Dinara Alyaeva, the president of the children’s Hospice in Bishkek. A privilege to meet with her and hear her story about the children’s Hospice.

Later on, a famous Kyrgyz Instagram vlogger, Assol Moldokmatova, came for a tour through the Hospice. She also handed over to Margaret beautiful flowers and a medal to acknowledge her work. 

We are looking back on a beautiful opening of the Hospice, well organized by Azamat and Uulkan and the whole team!

The news channel ALA Too 24 made a news report on YouTube of the opening, please click here

This Friday we did a food distribution by a bike, kindly donated to our center.

Although we cannot provide all of our usual services at full scale, due to COVID, we can still do most or our work on a smaller scale or by spreading the activities over the day.

This men got a haircut today. Although for privacy reasons his face is blurred, you can still see the huge difference between before and after.

We also encounter many situations which are hard to see.

On the firs pictures you see a man who did not take of his clothes for more than one month and his clothes literally at some points glued to his body.

The last picture is someone of our staff visiting a seriously ill woman in her ward.

Although life for the homeless is very tough in Bishkek and does not always end well, there are also great stories. This young man was a homeless, but got his life in order and is now a taxi driver!

One time per year the community in the city here helps cleaning up the neighborhood. As Fountain of Life, we thought it is good to cooperate in this. Therefore the staff decided to join forces with our homeless clients to clean up a park in the neighborhood. Next to cleaning, of course, there should also be a good meal to regain strength to clean up more 🙂

At the end of the winter we wanted to give a short update. We are working as usual, although we prevent having too many people in the center at the same time due to COVID prevention. In this post we want protray an often not mentioned group of homeless people: women. Although the majority of homeless people are men, we also receive many women in our centre. Often they have a long problematic past. Some are not able to take care of their families any more due to, for example, excessive drinking. We also often assist in getting X-rays done, if there are reasons to assume that this person has for example Tubercolosis (TBC). Unfortunately, also this winter this was the case sometimes.

Below some pictures of women that visit us. For privacy reasons we blur out the faces on the images: