HAPHAZARD CHILDHOOD

Many people associate summer with a good holiday and they try to make the best of their time. However, the overwhelming majority of our citizens cannot afford to take a break even in summer. They are forced to keep working more and more in order to support themselves and their family.

Unfortunately, in the race for survival, adults who are busy dealing with their own problems often forget about children. And children look forward to summer holidays and dream of a good vacation. However, it does not always turn out like that.

During the school year, children spend most of their time at school, while in the evenings their parents look after them at home. During holidays, schoolchildren have lots of free time which their fathers and mothers are often unable to control because they are busy at work. For this reason, instead of going to the countryside outside the city and to the beach, children are forced to spend their long-awaited summer holidays in a dusty and polluted city.

A natural form of entertainment for most children and teenagers is television, which shows soap operas all day long. In the best case scenario, boys spend their time playing football, while girls sit on benches and discuss the contents of TV serials with their peers.

Several decades ago, there was no problem with children's leisure time in summer. There were many summer camps for the schoolchildren of Baku. But today everything has changed drastically and only memories remain of the children's recreation camps. What should children do during the summer holidays? What should parents do if they can't take leave? Who can solve this problem? Unfortunately, no-one can give a clear answer to these questions today, although it is high time to solve this problem.

Summer without alternatives…

The Ramazanovs family has two children - 11-year-old Samir and 9-year-old Togrul. The boys' parents, Sevda and Elcin Ramazanov, work in private companies. They say their salary is hardly enough for food, clothes and public utilities. They cannot save money for holidays. What is more, their companies do not provide paid leave, which is why their management warned them when they were first employed that, even if they decide to take leave, they should not hope to get paid for that. For this reason, neither Sevda nor Elcin have been on leave since they joined their companies.

Sevda's mother, Samir and Togrul's grandmother, died last year. Before her death, she spent all summer with her grandchildren. Now the boys' parents have no idea what to do and where to send their children on holiday. The children keep asking their parents to take them to the beach or to the countryside, but with one day off a week, their parents cannot offer them anything but to wait for Sunday and go to the nearest beach. As for the remaining six days of the week, Samir and Togrul spend them at home because their parents do not let them out in their absence, which is not difficult to understand.

Friends advised Sevda Ramazanova to send her sons to a children's summer camp. However, it seems that this idea is unlikely to happen. Ramazanova found out that such camps do exist in Azerbaijan, but there are very few of them and it is almost impossible to get there. The thing is that state-owned camps give preference to privileged categories of the population (refugees, displaced persons, martyrs' families and so on), while camps owned by various government agencies accept children of employees of the enterprises, ministries and departments that run the camps. Incidentally, a child from "outside" can also get into such a camp, but their parents must buy their place; this is very expensive for people who have nothing to do with this department - about 200 manats per month.

What are they to do and where should they send their children on holiday? Sevda remembers her own childhood with nostalgia, when her parents' companies could book a place for her. Her parents always took the opportunity to send their kids on holiday especially as most of it was paid for by the trade union. The money paid by her parents was only a token sum.

Moreover, a chance to go to a children's camp could be an incentive for good performance at school. The best pupils and winners of school Olympiads used to be sent to the so-called elite camps, such as Orlenok and Artek, of which every child dreamt.

Most of the camps that were located in Azerbaijan (incidentally, several summer camps were located in Baku itself, within its parks) have been closed down and more "necessary" facilities - wedding palaces or restaurants - have been built in their place. The ones that remain are in decline or are waiting to be knocked down. Things are better in camps run by government agencies such as the camp of the Interior Ministry and so on. However, only wealthy people can afford them nowadays. What about all the other children and teenagers who, according to the State Statistics Committee report of 1 January 2007, comprise 31 per cent of the country's population?

A drop in the ocean?

The Ministry of Youth and Sports told R+ that the state of affairs in this sphere is not so bad and that the state is carrying out certain work in this direction. The head of the department working with creative youth and organizing leisure time, Namiq Cafarov, said that summer camps still exist in our country and accept thousands of children and teenagers every year. For example, a daytime camp will be set up in Sumqayit this year and will accept more than 2,000 children from needy families. "We have to say that Sumqayit is not the only city where a summer camp will be set up. Such camps will be set up in several regions of Azerbaijan, for example, Saki, Nabran, Ismayilli and so on.

According to rough calculations, about 10,000 children will spend this summer season in the country's camps. Incidentally, there is also a sports camp in Nabran. Moreover, all camps set up by the Ministry of Youth and Sports are free of charge.

We would like to recall that the country's president has designated this year as a year of youth, which is why we pay special attention to this section of the country's citizens. The ministry plans to open a summer camp for leaders of youth organizations and students. A camp for gifted children was set up last year, and this year it is planned to set up a military-patriotic camp together with the Ministry of Defence. We have to say that we already have experience in opening such camps.

In the near future, we plan to set up a world class international camp in Azerbaijan - something like the children's camps that were famous all over the Soviet Union in the past," Cafarov pointed out.

According to our interviewee, the main event related to summer leisure this year will be the opening of an international camp from 5 July to 8 August in Britain. It is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the scout organization and will be attended by scouts from 200 countries of the world. All in all, about 40,000 people will attend this event and a delegation from Azerbaijan will be among them.

The scout movement in our country was founded in 1997 and is gradually gaining momentum, Cafarov said. At present, the scout organization has 1,200 members aged from 12 to 25 in our country.

We must say that some public organizations of Azerbaijan are not indifferent to the problem of children's leisure time and make their own contribution to the settlement of this problem. For example, the Russian community and some embassies working in Azerbaijan set up summer camps every year. However, there activities do not cater for a wide section of the population, but only for the children of people close to these organizations.

The Origami children's and youth public association is prominent on this list. It has opened a summer health camp for children with limited physical abilities in the village of Bulbula, with the support of the Suraxani district municipality.

Incidentally, everyone seems to have forgotten about this category of Azerbaijani citizens, though there are more than 52,000 disabled children who need special care in Azerbaijan, according to official statistical figures.

At present, this camp has accepted 67 children, including those suffering from infantile cerebral paralysis, oligophrenia, Down's syndrome, speech defects and so on. The children holidaying here are aged from 4 to 16. 

According to the chairman of the Origami association, Namiq Nacafov, all services in this camp are free and children spend their time there from 0900 to 1700. There are six tutors, a physical training teacher, a music teacher, a psychologist and two speech therapists working at the camp.

"Meals are served three times a day here. Pedagogical work is carried out with children who take lessons in painting, Origami and artistic moulding. They also have music lessons three times a week. Thanks to the work carried out in the camp, children with special needs become more sociable and socially-adapted to society.

"We would like the camp to function all summer in three shifts, but there is not enough money for that, which is why it will only work till 11 July. However, we would like to believe that there are kind people in the world who are ready to help disabled children - they are the most vulnerable stratum of the population," Nacafov said.

We keep uttering the well-worn phrases that children are our future and the basis of the state, but unfortunately, sometimes there is nothing behind the beautiful fasade of phrases. It is clear that our young state has enough problems requiring immediate attention, but there is not enough money for everything. We think that the organization of summer leisure time and recreation for the growing citizens of the country is far from being the last question on the agenda.

Children who are left to their own devices and who are not doing anything useful can reinforce the ranks of young criminals and become addicted to pernicious habits, which will lead to further growth in crime. The most annoying thing is that we could have avoided all this. For this reason, we have to recognise that the wellbeing not just of children, but of the state as a whole, depends on how well this summer leisure is organized.