If you are an attentive reader of our BalkanKids news-page on this website, you might already have realized that we are very proud of our Christmas Card charity campaign.

As a reminder for those, who have already read about our campaign and for all new visitors of our website: The Christmas Card charity campaign aims at collecting money through selling hand-made cards.

It started in 2008 and now, after the 8th round, we are happy to declare that we were able to collect 15.000 Leva!!!

How incredible, right? With this money, we want to help a hospital to furnish and color a room that will be needed as a physiotherapy room for kids with special needs.

Many people were involved, including the PTPI-Dolphins, former volunteers from Poland and Germany, and our current volunteers from Germany, Poland, and Spain. Most of these creative card-makers were not only making cards feverishly for the past two months, but also served as sympathetic card sellers.

I, as a German volunteer, was able to act as a card seller as well.

With only a basic Bulgarian vocabulary, however, this didn’t seem too easy at the beginning. I asked myself: How can I possibly sell cards when I only know how to say “here you are” and “they’re very beautiful, aren’t they”? Even the Bulgarian word for charity seemed too hard to pronounce.

But luckily, Bulgarian people are very friendly and understanding.

Simply smiling at them can sometimes be enough to make them buy a card. Often, they even gave us more money, because they knew it would be used for a good cause. And if they had questions, there were of course PTPI-Dolphins who could explain our aim. In fact, they were very hard-working card sellers, who spent their time after school and their weekends to sell as many cards as possible!

With an aim of 10.000 Leva, this year has definitely exceeded all of our expectations! We were able to multiply our investments by 40!!! Even multiplying it by 2 would have been a success.

Now, we’re looking forward to the next crazy Christmas Card season!