“A Child’s Smile”. UNICEF and Amway opened more than 20 playrooms and sensor rooms in Russian cities
Under the project “A Child’s Smile” implemented jointly by Amway and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), more than 20 playrooms and sensor rooms were opened and appropriately fitted in various regions of Russia. This was announced today, 14 May, at the press conference in Moscow by UNICEF and Amway officials. The press conference was also attended by UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Oksana Fedorova. The three year project “A Child’s Smile” started a year ago and will finish in 2010. Within the project, playrooms and sensor rooms are to be arranged at locations where children are most vulnerable and particularly need assistance. These are places such as children’s hospitals, rehabilitation centers, family and children social support centers and shelters. “Social partnership between UNICEF and Amway is of vital importance today, when ever more children need assistance”, said UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Oksana Fedorova. “When one person helps another he or she in the first place improves the quality of his or her own life. Helping each other is the true definition of happiness and the benefits from providing that help are returned threefold”.
Often children have to stay in medical, social or rehabilitation facilities for a prolonged period of time. Any child, irrespective of his or her state of health and life situation, needs to play, relax and develop. In playrooms children will be able to find exercises to their liking, see cartoons or release their accumulated energy. Bright slides, play houses, teeter-totters, pools and toy construction sets will help children, at least for a while, forget about their diseases and their stay in medical or social facilities. Sensor rooms arranged in children’s homes, shelters and rehabilitation centers create an atmosphere of full safety, comfort, mystique, which in the best possible way contributes to establishing calm relations of trust between a child and a professional specialist. Sensor rooms help relieve emotional and muscle tension, incite a child’s mental activity, develop their imagination and creativity and correct psychoemotional state. In 2008, playrooms and sensor rooms were opened in children’s hospitals, children’s homes and rehabilitation centers in Biysk, Barnaul, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Chelyabinsk, Petrozavodsk, Irkutsk, Samara, Toliyatti, Nizhny Novgorod and Lomonosov (Leningrad region). About 60 such rooms are to be opened by 2010 under the joint UNICEF/ Amway project. “In the context of the current global economic crisis children and families with children become ever more vulnerable”, said Kemlin Furley, UNICEF Deputy Representative for the Russian Federation. “We greatly appreciate that even in this difficult situation Amway and our other corporate partners do not reduce their charity expenditures and we can together help children and make them smile”.
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