SARAY ORPHANAGE
The Saray orphanage in the North of Baku is where the charity began. It is home to about 175 children, most of whom are orphans and have some form of disability. The following extract, written by Sacha at the time, sums up the mixture if emotions that we all felt:
'None of us have experience of dealing with children like these and images of children bundled up in cloths, often actually tied into them, are a shock at first. We saw some of the children being bathed and were again shocked to see an emaciated child being carried by an arm and a leg to the bath, a large red bucket.
Many of the children stay in their beds all day and we were told that those who have difficulty eating do not have time wasted on them and so continue to go downhill. We were also told how in the winter one lady saw a dead child being taken out each week'
THE CHILDREN OF SARAY
The orphanage in Azerbaijan was undoubtedly one of the most shocking experiences that we had. The first overwhelming sensation was the noise – a truer representation of bedlam would be hard to create. The second was the smell. Unwashed bodies that had permeated into the building itself created an unforgettable moment in time
On our first visit we saw children carried by an arm and leg to rudimentary baths, for which read a bucket of water. We saw children tied to radiators, others rocking back and forth and others being able to move only by rolling down corridors'
The pictures below are some of the children we found when we first arrived at Saray. The children were often left alone for much of the day, sometimes tied up, either to themselves or to pipes and radiators. The elder children looked after the younger ones creating a strange, isolated community, cut off from much of the rest of the world
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One of our first impressions was that there was a real resignation amongst the children and it was strange to hear none of them crying - it is as if they realised that nothing would come of it
THE INFRASTRUCTURE
The infrastructure we found was lacking in so many levels.
BAKU OILFIELDS
'As we neared Baku, we smelt it long before we saw it. The smell of sulphur and crude oil hangs in the air and the edge of the Caspian sea is full of tankers and lit up oil rigs.
The children’s conditions seem to stem from the fact that this area was the Soviet Union's petro-chemical centre where health and safety has obviously never been an issue. Baku was raw and presented us with the harsh reality of an untamed and decaying industry'
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