Last Spring we assisted a Texas family who adopted a 15-year-old girl. All of her worldly possessions fit in her arms which included no more than 10 photos. Shade for Children will combine candid photos and professional portraits to create Yearbooks and prints for up to 100 orphans/children deprived of parental care in orphanages in the Transcarpathian Region of Western Ukraine. Composition of existing photos is already underway and with this funding, will be completed by the end next summer.
Someone said, "The memories that pictures represent don't change, even when the people in them do." Pictures represent memories and being an orphan or a "child deprived of parental care" means these children are often deprived even of their memories. They don't have pictures marking milestones or friendships. Their world of feeling castaway and forgotten is reinforced by the fact that there's little or no record of their existence. Our project will affect 1/3 of the orphans in our region.
Shade for Children volunteers have been visiting many of these children for years (well before we founded the organization earlier this year) and we have thousands of candid photos already. We will employ a professional photographer to make seasonal portraits (Winter, Christmas, Spring, Easter, Summer) through Summer 2020 before compiling and producing photobooks and framed prints for up to 100 children, plus 10 Compilation Albums for the Orphanage Administrators..
The 15 year old Ukrainian friend who was adopted earlier this year treasured the 8-10 photos she possessed even though a few of them were school pictures that looked like passport photos. Those pictures are some of the only links to her past. If a picture is worth a 1000 words then this project will provide many thousands of words worth of memories for about 100 children and teens. To be sure, we can't document all of their lives, but a Yearbook will give them a slice that will last a lifetime.
