The cruel war keeps going. People are still dying in Ukraine. People are still suffering in Ukraine. Any help means the world to them. New needs keep surfacing. Here’s some news.

Igor Mazurenko in Cherkasy:

We continue a very important programme, the Rotary Club in Cherkasy, that we started together with some foreign friends and partners from USA and Germany. The goal is to help schools in Cherkasy by providing additional teaching materials and equipment for students, mine safety and protection workshops and shaping both the education process and mental health protection methods for children during bombing of school shelters, including sports rehabilitation.

It’s very important to channel the excitement, nervousness and anxiety of children in shelters in the right direction which can be done through a set of physical and breathing exercises. These are provided to the PE teachers and guardians of the students. We use physical activity for this, including armwrestling.

Our Cherkasy Rotary Club started providing certified armwrestling tables for children from a domestic manufacturer to use as a sports rehab tool and the first class for children was taught professionally by the World Champion and PAL president Igor Mazurenko.

The competitions were interesting and sparked enthusiasm among students, especially girls, who did not want to be subdued by boys, and this sort of friendly rivarly took the children’s attention of sirens and other issues of the reality of war.

While communicating with children we noticed with pain that when an alarm goes off, the children who moved from areas near frontlines were the first who gather their belongings the fastest, almost “professionally”.

It’s a traumatic experience, to have to run to a shelter.

We would once again like to thank all donors (American rotarians from the USA, District 7910, Rotary Club of Framingham, Rotary Club of Westborough, Rotary Club of Newton and Rotary Club of Marlborough, MA and helpers from our sorority club RC Steinfurt, D1870, Westphalia in Germany, for helping us financially in preparing the new edition of schoolbooks, completed just before September 1^st. These books for children are still used in a few schools in the Cherkasy area. On top of that, institutions offering inclusive education in Kiev started cooperating with the Kyiv-Sophia Rotary Club – more in the future!

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