Over the last week we have been doing an intensive review of our transition homes, which Oasis has been running in Kyrgyzstan for two and a half years. It has been amazing to hear about what has been achieved... all the young people have continued with their education and some have done really well; two are preparing for university (unheard of for young people from the Reform School which is a bit like Borstall); we have helped some of the young people to receive official documents such as passports and birth certificates which they had not had previously and which are vital in order to get a job; all but one have done internships and had work experience; we have helped some of them to find and contact family members; and all have been kept safe from involvement in serious crime and from being trafficked. This last point is not to be underestimated; for girls from orphanages in particular, there is a high possibility that they may end up working in the sex industry and indeed all the girls in our transitional home know of friends from the institutions where they grew up who have ended up as commercial sex workers.
But alongside all the achievements there are things that have not gone so well; transitional care homes are expensive to run, the costs are on-going, and we have never been able to fund the work as we would like to; for the staff who are with the young people each day the work is also intense and we have not been able to find enough people willing to take on this work for the long term that is needed to build relationships; and helping the young people to move to a point of genuine independence has not happened as well as we would have liked.
The next exciting step is to look to the future - how do we take all these lessons from what has been achieved and what has not gone so well, and improve our work with young people to help them to make a successful transition from a life dependant on the institutions where they have been brought up, to life on their own? There are no easy answers...