It takes a village to raise a child

I hope you will interested to know, therefore, that the Embassy teamhad a fantastic day this week at the Zālīte boarding school in the Bauskaregion yesterday. The school has about 85 children who live there during theweek. Many come from difficult and often painful backgrounds and arestrangers to the family love and protection, which the rest of us canfortunately take for granted. My colleagues had the brilliant idea ofvisiting the school to help redecorate a library and dormitory, chopsome wood and play with the children. We cooked lunch for them. We thenhelped them put on makeup for a concert performance thatafternoon.We had such a lot of fun. The children performed beautifully, theEmbassy joined in the concert by putting on a dance display to theresonant thumping sounds of Village People's "YMCA", we gave out lotsof presents and received some lovely paintings from the children for usto hang on the embassy walls.I was touched by the energy and enthusiasm that my friends andcolleagues at the Embassy put into this. It required a lot of hard workand preparation to make the day memorable for the school. The benefitsfor us were huge too. I think we all took something away from theexperience of giving one day of our time to bring a little sunshineinto the lives of those children (my special thanks go to Aigars and Vlad who spent the best part of the week working there).But the tribute I want to pay in this blog is to the headmistress Ināra Novicka and staff of Zalite school who devote not just one day but every day oftheir lives to that most precious and important duty: looking after thechildren of this world. We should be proud of them.