Christine Witcutt Centre and Home Visiting Service, Sarajevo, Bosnia

The Christine Witcutt Memorial Fund was registered as a charity in 2002 and since that time has worked to provide help and support to children with special needs in Sarajevo. The initial focus of the Fund was the Christine Witcutt Centre, a day care centre for children with special needs.

In 2007 funding for the centre was secured from local government sources and since then the Fund has concentrated on building up a vital home visiting services for families with mentally and physically handicapped children. In Bosnia many children are still in institutional care. Such homes are slowly improving but are still heartbreakingly poor, overcrowded and understaffed. For parents trying to care for a disabled child at home life can be difficult in the extreme.

CMaD initially  provided financial support to the Christine Witcutt Centre,  and more recently the Christine Witcutt Home Visiting Service. Michael Owen, linkman for Bosnia and Herzegovina, recently visited the Centre and told CMaD that the Centre was :

“very impressive and inspirational. Would that such facilities were made available everywhere for those whose lives are made more challenging by mental handicaps.” In addition Michael wrote that “it seems to me that it is important to continue to support the Home Visiting Service, encouraging not only a capacity to cope with people in the home but also to give them some status in their communities.”

The home visiting service provides counselling, physiotherapy and other assistance (including medical and dental care) to children with disabilities and their families who cannot attend the centre and is entirely dependent on donations and fund-raising.  Twenty families are visited regularly and each child has a program individually adapted to them. Periodically the children are able to visit the centre to participate in therapies needing specialist equipment, while giving them the opportunity to leave their homes for a few hours.

The aim is to increase the number of children benefitting to 25 during 2010. More information about the Fund and its history can be found on the charity’s website: http://www.cwcentre.org/

To some extent the home visiting service is a lifeline in a context where there seems to be very little state help for families who are greatly in need. To be able to help these families in a small way is important and something that CMaD hopes to be able to continue to do into the future.