It is worth fighting for everything and everybody

Mrs. Sibylle Meier-Klodt President of the International Women’s Club of Sofia

Mrs. Meier-Klodt, you have been President of the IWC for the last year, tell us more about it.
My intention was to move the club to a more professional work and I think we have achieved this. And we can see it because it pays back. We are gaining more funds because people realise that we are acting more professionaly, people acknowledge us more and have more trust in us and they spend more money – it is as simple as that.

The women who work for the club are highly motivated. I’m very impressed because here they do it voluntarily. Sometimes we are a bit complaining that not too many members want to get involved. It’s a shame that they haven’t discovered that this is both-way acting: if you give something you get a lot of things back. But I think more and more realise it. And it makes you happy in a way.

We all work for free – we even bring money with us to pay our expenses like the fuel, the telephone bills. I think we are unique in that way because no other club or no other foundation in the country at the moment provides support to minorities where the whole of the raised funds goes through – we have no expenses to keep for a salary etc. It goes 100% through.

Would you present to the readership of Bulgarian Diplomatic Review the major IWC activities?
One third of the work of the club is providing the network and organising cultural events. And two-thirds of the other work of the club I’m doing is organising fund-rising events. Actually the aim of the club is to be a non-political club but as we all know the minute you have your own opinion you’re a political person. We try to lobby for minorities like the children in the homes, the disabled children, the elderly and other not so fortunate minorities. We provide emergency support for them if they contact us but we also try now to work more conceptional. We try to work for changes with the children because you may know that Bulgaria is on a black list related to children’s rights and a new legislation is to be implemented. We see that many things are still wrong or not in place and we get the impression that kids are starving in children’s homes. Last year we started doing a directors’ forum, a Director’s Conference, and we are now doing it for the second year in close cooperation with the Child Protection Agency. We are also getting closer to the responsible persons in the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and the Agency for Social Support who are responsible for the different types of children’s homes. The new legislation envisages a different approach and more rights for the children but unfortunately this has not happened, yet. It is very difficult because the structure needs to change but there is actually no money to do it and the financing of the children’s homes is quite bad. And we try to push and to help, and to lobby for this minority.

The other IWC activity is the big Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign – this is another thing where we are involved and this again is I’m afraid somehow political because we try to push the Ministry of Health to change the situation to give the chance to the women to have a free scan or free monitoring. And the women are actually insured – the social insurance pays for this. But first, they don’t know and second – still if you go into a hospital they charge you even if you are socially insured and we know many cases where the woman had to go for operation and she even had to pay the nurses to change the bandages even if they are insured. And I think this is not a normal situation. It is horrible: it comes down now to the point that you either have the money or you die.

We are aware of all these things and we are trying to lobby to make it better. Of course, we cannot tell the Minister what to do but we can rise our voices. Because as foreign women we are here for a short while and we can provide our expertise but it is your own women who have to fight for their own rights. We can make them a little bit more nasty in a way. And I’m quite a bit depressed since I’m here in Bulgaria and I cannot understand why if people are in a bad situation they don’t go together to fight against this bad situation.

And how about the big upcoming events?
On June 15-16, we will host the Directors’ Conference here in Sofia, where we gather all the directors from the children’s homes countrywide. We are doing it with the support of ELIEFF Center for Education and Culture to the American University in Bulgaria. They provide for free the centre for the conference.

So in June the directors of the children’s homes will get training in the implementation of the new Child Protection Law. This will be done through cooperation between the Child Protection Agency and us, and there will be a professional training provided by two NGOs, acknowledged in this field of training. The directors of the homes have to evaluate and to assess each child and develop a plan for this child – how do you bring up this child, how do you make sure that this child has a history. Because so far you see that the children have no history and especially the disabled ones – they do not even have a picture of themselves. And imagine if you would not have your own identity… And it is still embarrassing what’s going on how the children look like and how low the investment in these children is – they get not enough to live but they get just enough to survive.

But do you think that the directors will manage to do all this?
I think they also have problems but after 10 years of changes they still have to change their mentality. Some of them have understood the message and have tried to make the homes cosier but others, especially in the disabled homes, believe it is not necessary because the kids do not feel it and don’t understand. It’s a matter of attitude.

We are also starting in Petrovo the so-called Baba Project. It was actually developed for normal children in homes with the intention to socialise the children with elderly people – they have a elderly women, a grandmother, who comes every day and takes care a couple of children, so they can have somebody close to them. This is a project developed by Milosardie, which is an adoption agency and the idea is to help the children socialise and prepare them for adoption. We think this is a great idea and we now are supported by Milosardie to implement this Baba Programme under a different point of view – working with disabled children. Because we want these children even those with the heaviest problems to have something like human nature close to them. We invited 14 babas for the interview from the region. We will select five out of these fourteen and then they will be trained by qualified psychologists. And finding the babas was also quite difficult because these homes are mainly far away in rural areas and you don’t find qualified people. For example it took us 3 months to find and employ two physiotherapists for this home. Because the children were just left to lie in their beds and a disabled child is usually a very sociable person. And you cannot blame the women who work there – they don’t know better as they are never qualified for the job. And it is really tough. And if we go there for one day it takes me half a week to recover, and many times I cry. And this is just an example – we cannot be everywhere but it is where we’re concentrating now.