A Tourist Club for Children, Klubok, has been working in Zaporozhzhye under the aegis of the Happy Child Charitable Foundation for several years already. On April 10, the founders of the Club, Anton Bondarenko and Albert Pavlov, met with mass media

- Our main goal and mission is organizing trips for children. Last year we organized 31 tourist events involving 669 children, told director of the Happy Child CF Albert Pavlov. – Our Foundation owns the necessary equipment: backpacks, tents, and sleeping bags, that is why we were able to conquer Hoverla. But it would be good if we could purchase some more equipment.

These days children from Zaporozhzhye orphanages came back from a trip to various places of our country. The Klubok travelers were able to see the invaded Crimea and Western Ukraine. The founders of the Club demonstrated the video from their last trip.

The Klubok Tourist Club is supported with the donations of common people. In 2013, the following events were organized:

11 tours to the Crimea and the Carpathian mountains for 223 children;

3 tent camps for 63 children;

9 weekend trips to Kyiv and other cities for 173 children;

4 visits to circus for 149 children;

4 tours for 62 children.

- We plan our events in advance, but due to the recent developments in our country sometimes we have to postpone the trips. At the end of March, we took the risk to go to the Carpathian mountains. We went to Bukovel. For most children it was their first skiing tour. For many of them it was their dream coming true, told Anton Bondarenko. Last Saturday we went to Crimea. We crossed the border, visited Sevastopol, where our tour guide gave us a wonderful tour. In future, we are planning a hiking tour with the children from Prishib village. Such tours make children healthier and happier.

Besides, Albert Pavlov brought the attention of mass media to the key issues in the development of children’s recreation activities:

- Children’s recreation is usually perceived as the improvement of children’s health in children’s camps, and such trips as we organize are not funded by state, though children are greatly interested in them. The sanitation requirements concerning children’s tourism are too high: you almost have to have a water closet in the tent. It would be great if the state organized some kind of calls for proposals for such organizations as ours. So I have to ask for support. We need even simplest foods for hiking tours or tourist equipment.

Most often, the participants of our programs are children from host families and dysfunctional families and also from orphanages, but we sometimes also accept children from ordinary families. For orphans our trips are free of change, children from large families pay some token amount, e.g. their trip to Kyiv cost them UAH 50 (approximately 5 US dollars).

Everyone can make a donation to support the tourist program for orphans and children from low-income families.