Life Skills Training Aids Teenage Orphans
 These
older Ukrainian orphans learn basic life skills through OBI’s
orphan training centers. |
Ukraine – The teenage years are a challenging time regardless of where a young person lives in the world. Teenage orphans in Ukraine, though, face even greater obstacles than the average adolescent. Each year, more than 2,000 young people ages 15 through 18 are released from orphanages with little or no basic life skills.
Having grown up under the reins of institutional living, these teenagers leave the orphanage not knowing how to cook, shop, manage money or time, or how to simply survive in the outside world. As a result, an estimated 70 percent of older orphan girls turn to prostitution and 60 percent of boys to crime after they leave the orphanages.
Fifteen-year-old Sveta looks to her future with great uncertainty as to how she’ll manage life alone.
“I wish there was someone to support me,” she said. “Someone to hold my hand and be there for me.”
But a new program from Operation Blessing is helping to break that destructive cycle and give orphans like Sveta a chance to have a successful future. Through Operation Blessing’s new Orphan Training Center, older children in orphanages are taught basic life skills prior to departing the place where they have called home their entire lives.
Two years before orphans leave, they enter volunteer-led classes on identity, mental and sexual health, homemaking, relationships, legal rights, and a variety of other growth and development topics. By equipping these young people for independent living, Operation Blessing is supplying knowledge and skills that will last a lifetime and increase their opportunity for success.
Operation Blessing leads projects like this one that help children in need
around the world. Learn more about
OBI’s work with young people. You can also make an online
contribution and help Operation
Blessing continue this life-changing work. |
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