Did you ever experience real darkness? When the difference between opened and closed eyes is just your feeling of staring into every dimension of black?

Today, ten volunteers from all over Europe and eight Bulgarians got the chance to put themselves into the shoes of blind people. How does it feel to have one sense less?

Equipped with a guiding stick for the orientation, one by one entered the dark room. From the minute you are losing the ability to see, you can basically feel how all of your other senses become stronger and take over control. Hearing the steps of the people around you, feeling the warm breeze of the  air conditioner and especially start using your hands and fingers to recognize people and things. You will see how amazingly fast our bodies try to adjust to the change.

This one step into the unknown, away from our comfort zone, felt more like a step into another dimension.  A dimension where our ordinary tasks, like sitting down on a table, making group work and having a nice tea party with some cake, needed to be seen from another perspective. Conversation and trust became the key words of every reflecting dialogue. Even if the strange new situation sometimes makes you feel lonely, helpless, scared, thoughtful, restricted or in some points powerful and inspired, for sure it builds a bond between the participants, because everyone needed each other.

Experiencing such a new and unknown world sets a lot of emotions free and illustrates the importance of trust. If you will make the step into the darkness you will start appreciating what you have and maybe the world will be a bit brighter than before. 

Canvas, paintbrushes and paints. Sounds like the perfect art party for children. Each child could use all their creativity to create a personal masterpiece. It is not a small piece of art that can get lost in a drawer or easily put away in a closet. Amazing feeling is seeing the look on the kids face when they turn the blank canvas into a colorful world of their imagination. We never know, maybe we just found the next little Picasso! It was a great way to create a wonderful piece of art and more importantly many memories.

Not everyone knows a lot about Bulgaria or our city, Varna. For me it was the same, before I came here to work as volunteer for Balkan kids. So I would like to give you a small impression about the city:

When I arrived in Varna I didn’t have any expectations and I was a bit shocked by the huge and ugly buildings out of Bulgarias communist history, which determine Varnas appearance. Furthermore you cannot imagine how old and especially crumbling the streets, cars, busses and houses looked to me.

But that’s why I learned to better take a closer look and don’t judge to fast, because this city has a huge potential.  In summer the center and the seaside  are the places to be, it might be a bit touristy but you can discover a lot of cute, delicious and very cheap places to eat and drink if you leave the main street for some minutes.

If you open your eyes, you will see a lot of fascinating and beautiful architecture in every imaginable colour.  Me personally, I adore the coast and the sea, every time I’m  going there, I’m amazed about the nature. And if you want to drink something at the seaside you can still be sure that it will be half of the price in comparison do drinks  in Germany, Spain and most of the other European countries.

Summer is for sure the most vivid and lively time. Varna is full of people, music, sun, laughter and spirit. You will fall in love with this certain summer magic the first time you’ll see and feel it and of course one cannot stop loving a city just because the weather changes. So even if everything seems to be less colourful, maybe even grey, even if people faces change in winter, there is still this little sparkle glowing. Varnas sparkle, that promises another summer.

So everyone can just lean back in one of all these cosy coffee shops, drink a cappuccino and enjoy the calmer time.

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!

Sun, sweat, and lots of fun! BalkanKids really know how to kick the ball! In Varna's beautiful autumn weather we had a great football match with colorfully mixed teams. Kids from a foster home, PTPI Dolphins, international volunteers of BalkanKids and many more joined to enjoy the game. Result: 2:2 - at the end, everyone was a winner!

"Experience is the only source of knowledge" Albert Einstein.

Yesterday we invited to a nice event that we will organize every month from now on. The aim is to give the opportunity to share something you are passionate about. If its about a hobby, a country, travelling, cultures, sports, education, art or any kind of interesting projects, everyone appreciates to get to know something new. All in all its about having a good time,learn more and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere. 

So Yesterday we got to know more about Australians nature, the african country Togo, Whine tourism and the romanian capital Bucharest!

It was a powerful, interesting and creative evening and we are looking forward to the next time!

Thanks to everyone who came and see you soon,

your Balkan Kids Foundation girls.