By Didi Ananda Devapriya

I am very happy to share with you an exciting news from AMURTEL
Romania and to request your help. Just recently we finally received
the funding approval for our grant request to Cooperating Netherlands
Foundation of 30,000 euro in order to start an after-school program,
designed to benefit 20 of the children most in need in the village of
Panatau.

The project will provide both a free hot meal, as well as homework support and
extra-curricular activities. The startup, renovation and first year of
operating costs, except for the cost of food will be covered by the
grant.  The food costs for the hot lunch program will be the
responsibility of AMURTEL. After the first year, according to the
contract signed between AMURTEL, the mayor of Panatau and the
Foundation, the mayor will take on responsibility for all of the basic
running costs, except for the food costs which continue to be covered
by AMURTEL. AMURTEL will remain responsible for providing the staff,
programming and coordination of the project throughout its duration.
The town of Panatau has also provided a building owned by the commune
free of rent.  It is in bad condition at the moment and so the
majority of the grant is just to restructure it and bring it up to a
proper standard.

We are so happy that we will be able to provide this service as we
feel it will help to satisfy an urgent need for social services for
children in the area! From interviews conducted with future
beneficiaries, we discovered that many of these children are living in
extreme poverty. In several cases, the only money that the family has
to live on is the 6 euros received from the state as a monthly welfare
allowance for children.  This buys hardly more food than you could
purchase with the same amount in the rest of Europe.  In these cases,
the children are oftenly living on a steady diet of only polenta-
perhaps with a thin soup or occasionally meat from farm animals.  In
some of the cases, the families are homeless as their homes were
destroyed in floods and not rebuilt. Some are from single parent
families.  There is a desperate lack of social services in the rural
communities of Romania. We are very pleased that this project will be
stimulating the local government to shoulder part of the
responsibility, and if this model of partnership is successful, we
hope to do be able to continue with future collaborations to provide
more needed services within the community.

As AMURTEL has taken on a commitment to provide the food costs, I
would like to invite all of you to support this project. We will need
to raise approximately 7,000 euros every year to cover this expense.
It is now quite easy to make smaller donations (under 300 euro) to
AMURTEL, online with your credit card.  On our AMURTEL Romania
website, there is a link for making donations, and at the bottom of
the page there is a button which takes you to "Paypal". You do not
have to have a paypal account to make a donation, as you can use any
of the major credit cards to make a donation. Soon we are planning a
face-lift of the whole site, and it will be possible even to make a
monthly subscription - for example to donate 30 euros every month, and
have it automatically deducted from your credit card.

Larger donations can be sent by bank transfer, and I can provide the
bank information upon request, or you can find it on our webpage. I
hope and trust that with your support we will be successful in being
able to provide warm, nutritious, vegetarian food to these children.

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Didi Ananda Devapriya is a nun and works full time with AMURTEL in Romania.

She manages a children's home in the village of Panatau amongst other projects.