 “We live only when it is living for the sake of others”, a famous Russian author said. These words became the core motto for the House of Hope National Fund.
 Ten years ago Galina Kuleshova saw a boy lying on the steps of the pedestrian subway right in the center of Kherson. The boy was dead. The shocking thing was not only the death of the boy itself, but the reaction of those around: NO ONE paid any attention to it! Hundreds of people were hurrying to get their things done, and there was only one who stopped. That stop set hundreds of people on move for the sake of thousands of children all over Ukraine.
The Bible says that in the beginning there was the Word. It is the Word that regenerated people and the people born anew began passing the Word to those around them.
 Galina and her team chose a very special way for passing the Word: they simply fed the homeless and neglected children right there in the streets. Dozens of children gathered in specific places to get milk and bread. How little… Yet how much! — This simple food saved lives of many of the children. That was how all get started.
And then there were Bible lessons right in the streets of the city. It was not easy. They taught in any weather: when it was -15°C (about +5°F) and when it was +35°C (about +95°F). There was no air-conditioning, not even money for public transportation. The most important, however, was the STOP for the sake of the MOVEMENT! Someone stopped just to get on the move with a new team and with renewed strength.
 Several years passed. Galina Kuleshova and her team came into pastor Andrey Revtov’s office and there they met the first person to have the same perspective. Beginning with 2002 the team made of 4 people worked with the children in the streets, visited orphanages and shelters. At that time we were helping several hundreds of children.
In 2004 Andrey Revtov decided to start House of Hope National Fund. The Fund started its ministry  in Kherson: it purchased a facility for the children. It is a daycare shelter for the children that can take up to 100 people a day. The children could have two or three meals a day there and take a shower. Social workers help the children with their papers (as many do not have any documents), and there are teachers to help them with studying. It all started back in 2003 with 4 people only.
The work increased each year, and sometimes even each month. More and more children would come to the center for help and would find it there. So we decided we could go beyond simply feeding them at the center and finding them in the streets, cellars and sewage systems. We decided to begin working with poor families so that we could prevent the children from getting into the street life. These families lack money even for the simplest foods — not mentioning payments for the flats where they live. The places where they live can hardly be called homes… And there are 591 families like that in a comparatively small city. There are over 2000 children in these families. The children that need constant help and care since their parents cannot really influence their lives… In other words we started working with over 2000 children a month. Of course, they did not come at once and every day — but still… 
Still can one help the children by simply feeding them? Surely no! They need  care and some level of education. That was exactly why we started computer and English classes. Every day up to 50 children come to these classes and thanks to the skills they acquire there they can get a job in future. And there are first results in this field already.
Yet it was not enough… What can be done about the children that start  prostituting at the age of 4 or 5? What can be done about the children that take drugs from a very young age? How can they be taken away from the street? How can we help them fill their time? And we have found a way! We opened a gym. This is a place for the children to exercise as well as to realize their potential, get healthier and achieve certain heights in life through sports. And there are some results here already.
Our children have grown without parents or in extremely poor families. They saw nothing in life and were not likely to see anything if it were not for the help of House of Hope Fund. However these children are talented and very creative! So we decided to open a drama studio. And our children — that were neglected and abandoned yesterday — today give their performances in Kherson, Poltava (Central Ukraine), Nikolaev (Southern Ukraine) and other cities, gathering halls of over 1,000 destitute children like they used to be. Our children prove by their lives that each child has a future. It takes only a strong desire to open it.
However we cannot help all the children through our children’s center. So we send them into the state run orphanages throughout our region. And then we have a team that visits the orphanages daily and helps the children develop physically in sports, intellectually in studying, trains them in high morale, spiritual matters and many other things. The orphanages added another 1,500 children a month to the pool of our ministry. After we started helping the orphanages the total number of children we help exceeded 5,000 in Kherson region only (a region is similar to a state in the USA).
Each summer we take over 100 children into the summer camps. Last year we were able to help over 300 children from different parts of Ukraine. And we are doing it for over 6 years now. The camps help us understand our children, their needs and goals. And what is even more important is that hundreds of children changed their lives, motives and aspirations as the result of these camps.
Then we decided to go further. We started our branches in Poltava (Southern Ukraine), Zaporozhie and Dnepropetrovsk (Central Ukraine). At the moment there are over 30 staff workers in the House of Hope Fund, working in different regions of Ukraine. We help over 7,000 children in 4 different regions (a region is similar to a US state). |
