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Brigham Young University
Project Overview:
In partnership with One Heart Bulgaria—a nonprofit organization that helps orphans in Bulgaria—Phi Kappa Phi volunteers supplied more than 500 children in 8 orphanages with a high-quality collection of books (between 60 and 80 books per orphanage), complete with hand-picked titles appropriate for varying interests and abilities.
Volunteers, orphanage staff, and interns from One Heart Bulgaria will use these new books to help cultivate a love of reading in these children.
Community Partner:
One Heart Bulgaria is a non-profit humanitarian organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for Bulgarian orphans. They provide supplemental food, hygiene items, and access to medicines and medical care, along with programs designed to provide the emotional support, guidance, and love that these children need in order to truly thrive.
Impacted Population:
The project impacted children between the ages of 3 and 20 living in eight orphanages scattered across Bulgaria. Some of these children have no living parents or family, others were abandoned for financial or social reasons, and others were taken from abusive or harmful parents. Regardless of how they got there, these children’s world is now defined by life in Bulgarian orphanages.
Of all the orphanages this project aided, only two already had functioning libraries, and those libraries were very out of date and in need of refreshing. All eight now have current and useful editions of picture books, chapter books, childrens' encyclopedia, workbooks, textbooks, Bulgarian classics, and world classics. The project also provided a printer for the library of the orphanage in Slaveikov, where the orphans write and produce a monthly newspaper about events and activities in the orphanage.
Story:
Before we made it far into the orphanage in Pazardjik, Bulgaria, little Illiana ran up and grabbed Sheri’s hand. Illiana has a mild cleft palate, a severe speech impediment, and a very strong grip. She and Sheri sat down on a bench and read one of the new books, Iliana humming, smiling, and pointing as Sheri explained the pictures and answered her grunted questions. Although the orphanage couldn’t afford the speech therapy or additional surgeries needed for Illiana to be able to speak, I was impressed by Iliana—even without using any words, her sincere smile as she and Sheri read together expressed her feelings quite effectively.
Later, the director called a few of the children to come see their new books. The children gathered around the table and started picking up book after book—sometimes flipping through two books at a time in a desire to look at them all. Eventually, we started putting the books into bags so we could move them to the soon-to-be library. I put some books inside a bag and held it open for the boy next to me, who looked up at me quizzically. His eyes went from me, to the books in the bag, to the books he was hugging close to his body, and back to me. He had spent the whole time picking the books that interested him, the books he most wanted to read. When his eyes got back to me a light seemed to go on, and he said, “so . . . are these books all for us?” I told him that they were all for them, and the smile he gave me was more reward than I ever expected. His smile, and mine, lasted as we carried the books to the library.
The librarian of Bulgaria’s biggest orphanage explained to us, as we drove with her to the bookstore in town, that many of her books were too old and outdated to be very useful (or appealing) to the children. When we got back to the orphanage with our bags of books, a teenaged orphan named Itzo ran over to help us take them inside the orphanage. I was startled when he all but shouted—he had seen the cooking textbooks we bought and was excited to finally have books to go along with his cooking class. Itzo proudly held two of the books and smiled.
Throughout our two weeks in Bulgaria, we saw many beautiful things. We saw sunflower fields and flowing rivers. We saw the majestic Black Sea and the stunning Rodopi mountains. Most beautiful of all, though, had to be the smiles. The smiles of the orphanage directors in the little Bulgarian bookstores. The smiles of the children as they picked out books they wanted to read first.
