Yelena Steblina who is a foster mother of a 12-years-old boy Oleg moved from Zaporizhzhya to Sinelnikovo (Dnipro oblast’) last year. “We’ve bought a nice house, but several reparations should be done there”, - she says. “There are old wooden windows and a time-worn heater system in this house. What’s more, we had to break out the old furnace because it made us suffocate. We also reconstructed the walls. So we changed a window in the room last May. Then I was offered to take under wings 4 kids (2 boys and 2 girls) who were siblings. Needless to say that I’ve agreed.

We finished rapidly the repairs in girls’ room and in the big boys’ room. They are walkthrough rooms. The repairmen puttied the walls and fixed the heater system.

On the 24th of June I took the children from the orphanage. They were always ill there. When we came to our house, they ran a fever. 3 days later my mother and I also ran a fever. My mother caught pneumonia. Children have been ill since summer, their immunity isn’t good enough. They sometimes even have to skip the classes at school and at the kindergarten.

We need to make repairs in the house. Of course we clean it, and we live here without any problems, but there aren’t any radiators in boys’ room, and the windows there are really bad. Everything was ready, there were only the radiators to install… but when the winter came, we understood that windows can’t keep the warmth, and all the money that we had we spent on children’s education at school and on the medicaments to cure them. So we didn’t have the possibility to install the radiators. There was no question of the windows. We’ve seen wood-destroying fungus that had appeared because of a cold weather. Unfortunately it makes worse health of the children. And we don’t have any place to relocate them.

What’s more we haven’t got the subsidy.

We appeal for support everybody who is able to help this family with money to buy and install 2 radiators and 2 windows. They need 380 USD for living without fear in a warm house this winter.