Kharkiv Kindergarten

Our partners at UAid Direct, out of London, put us in touch with a kindergarten in Kharkiv that serves about 100 children there, and also another 100 kids in Izium. They didn’t have much to give the kids for Christmas, so we delivered enough candy bars to keep these kids on a sugar high for a week! 
The school was heavily damaged by a few direct artillery strikes in the opening weeks of the war. Since then, they’ve had all the windows replaced (almost every one was blown out by the force of the blasts), and are gradually renovating the interior as time and money allow. The director of the school, Roman, gave us a tour of the building, showing us the renovations, the bomb shelter in the basement (a sad reality in every school in Ukraine). They’ve done a great job of converting a small pool into a play area filled with hundreds of plastic balls, so the kids can associate the shelter with fun.