They call Adelina Banakieva the woman with a cause for a reason. She always gives a helping hand to children in need – when they cannot go to school, because they have no shoes, or live in abandoned old vehicles in the streets. Adelina believes that these children and their problems should not be left to the state institutions only. She saw many times the apathy of some state officials who are interested in the number of these children and the budget allotted by the state only. Adelina cannot put up with corruption in the social sphere even for a moment and has not ceased looking for help or proclaiming the truth about the children raised at the institutions. The woman who stood against the vicious models believes that there is nothing wrong in asking for money when you have to help a child in need. In her words, the Bulgarian legislation does not encourage the business and the citizens to deal with charity.

Seven years ago Adelina learned quite accidentally about a family with three children which lived in huge poverty in Sofia. Since then she started to tour the Bulgarian institutions and the social cause became part of her destiny:

I remember an eleven year-old child collapsing next to me at a bus stop. Later, it turned out that this child was very hungry and his health problems were due to malnutrition. It was suffering from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). I started to look for its parents, because the child had to be hospitalized urgently. Later, I learned that it lived together with its four year-old brother and six year-old sister in an old abandoned car in Gorublyane residential district in Sofia. According to official information, these children were visiting school and kindergarten. Unfortunately, I was unable to persuade the officials from the local high school to send a signal to the social services and provide better living conditions to these children. This was a serious problem, because the schools in the small Bulgarian towns and villages would not allow even a single child to leave, because there is a deficit of pupils there. According to the school principal, the school many be closed, if the number of children is reduced. I explained that these children were living in the streets, their mother was suffering from a mental illness and their father was an alcoholic. Then I send a signal to the social services and asked friends and citizens to help me. It was very difficult to persuade the institutions that these children needed protection. It was even more difficult to accommodate such children at SOS Children’s Village which were financed by their headquarters in Austria at that time. In that case we are talking about the destiny of three children. This is how I started to fight for the rights if the children from dysfunctional families who were left at the institutions.

Unfortunately, things have not improved, Adelina went on to say. A Bulgarian family in Norway was recently deprived of parental rights. This single case caused a large-scale public debate in Bulgaria, whereas many bigger problems remained unnoticed, Adelina wonders.

Initially we welcomed the so-called deinstitutionalization of abandoned children. However, it turned out that it is not appropriate for Bulgaria at the moment. The Bulgarian society and the State Agency for Child Protection were totally unprepared for these changes. After the closure of the institutions, the children were sent mainly to poor Bulgarian regions and they became the livelihood for some of the families which provide the foster care. The children from the SOS Bulgaria in the village of Dren were also taken out of this wonderful place and were later sent with their foster mothers to live in concrete block of flats in Izgrev residential district in Pernik. Unfortunately, the people from SOS Bulgaria have already put up with this fact. However, I shall not stop asking why children have to be moved to a concrete building, if they already live in a place with wonderful conditions and special infrastructure? Now the former SOS village is empty and the people who were sent to live in Pernik are experiencing big difficulties. I do what I can- collect clothes and donate them to the children, but this is not enough at all. We definitely need more active citizens who can hold the institutions responsible.

English version: Kostadin Atanasov