Gail foundation donates recreational facilities to Mahaica Children’s Home playground
Georgetown GINA, June 9, 2016
Children of the Mahaica Children’s Home now have a place to play and lead active, healthy lifestyles, following the commissioning of a recreational space at the facility’s compound at Mahaica, East Coast Demerara.
The playground has a seesaw, swings and slides donated by the Gail Foundation Incorporated, a non-profit charitable organisation from the US headed by Attorney at Law, Gail Seeram.
The Mahaica Children’s Home facility is home to young girls and single mothers who are displaced due to abandonment, abuse or neglect. It was established in 1982, and was reconstructed in 2013, through a partnership with the Government of Guyana and Digicel.
Minister of Social Protection, Volda Lawrence during her feature address, at the handing over ceremony, praised the Gail Foundation for the timely donation and all work they have been doing to ensure that the children have a place to play.
She noted that persons must not only just see the facilities as just swings and seesaws, but that they must think about the comfort it will bring to many children who are experiencing neglect or other forms of abuse.
“When organizations like the Gail Foundation come along and recognized that there is a need, many times we believe that needs are food and clothes, housing which are important aspects to life and living, but many times we miss the little things and that is the soothing to the mind and the emotion, the therapeutic remedy for the trauma that some of these children would have endured…so what we see here today, don’t let us value it by money, but what it will do for the children who pass through the home,” Minister Lawrence explained.
Meanwhile, Head of the Foundation, Gail Seeram, who is of Guyanese descent, said that her foundation started when she visited Guyana in 2010 and saw an orphanage in Berbice which did not have a place for the children to play.
Seeram said that all children in Guyana should have access to such facilities, and should be given the gift of play, which is very important to their individual development.
The Minister, Director of the Child Care Protection Agency, Ann Greene and the Osman family received plaques for their dedication to protection of children from Seeram.