We can help sick children! On 21 February the Taleon Club will host the first St Petersburg charity auction of elite drinks for the benefit of the patients of the city’s children’s hospice. Created in St Petersburg in 2003 on the initiative and with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church, the children’s hospice is Russia’s first, and as yet only palliative (“I cannot cure, but I will support”) service providing highly qualified medical and psychological help to incurably ill children. Here they learn that life can contain truly happy days capable of outshining dozens of unbearably nasty ones. “It’s a natural wish – to love those who are suffering,” says the chief doctor of the hospice, cancer specialist Alla Riazankina with conviction. “We come into homes where life, trampled on by misfortune, is sometimes hard to call life at all, in order to bring a tiny bit of joy and love into it. We know that we cannot fulfil our patients’ most cherished dream and cure them, but we believe a great deal can be done.” |