Visit to a Children’s Home – Children’s Home and Aftercare Home of Pécs – May 2022

We visited the Pécs Children’s Home of Baranya County Child Protection Center, where we met extremely kind children, young adults and educators in the institution situated in the historical downtown of Pécs. The children warmly welcomed us and guided us through their home, groups and rooms, thus we were given insight to their everydays.

The building of the Children’s Home is of medieval origin. The building has served as a Turkish mosque, a Catholic chapel, a cooperage, and an educational institution for girls. The Children’s Home has been operating here since 1961, but the building has been rebuilt several times since. The advantage of the zigzagging of the building is that no two residential units are the same, so the monotony of uniformity is not perceptible. The individual residential units are relatively well separated, but at the same time the nature of the communal spaces is very familiar and cozy.

Within the framework of child protection specialist care, the Children’s Home provides care for children placed in temporary care or in foster care, as well as after-care care for young adults. The purpose of aftercare is to help the child or young adult to reintegrate into the family environment and to start an independent life. Beyond these, the most important goal of those who work here is to help children in their care to experience happiness and the joys of everyday life during their upbringing. We wanted to contribute to this with our donations, so we chose to give several fun and leisure gifts for children and lots of practical and useful gifts for the educators. Our donations included laptops, tablets, webcams, speakers, a printer and other office equipment, which will be of great help to educators and children, especially in education, but we also didn’t forget about the practical gifts, so we brought a high chair, stroller and vacuum cleaner alike. The home has a fairly large common yard where we brought a training table, treadmill, ping pong table, trampoline and garden sandpit.