At Cedar, we know that often the most valuable and meaningful things require the most effort. Our road to providing aquatic rehabilitation for some of the people with disabilities in our centers has been long and challenging, but that has not stopped us at all.
There are very few specialists in this field in Bulgaria, and none in Kazanlak, where we wanted to implement it. This meant only one thing – we had to train our own rehabilitators to work with our children and youth. In addition, we had to find a suitable location, secure long-term partners to support the initiative and attract motivated people willing to get involved. And we succeeded!
We are grateful to Daniela Sadikova – a practitioner with extensive experience in working with people with disabilities in aquatic environments, who immediately embraced our idea. With her help, we organized a free training, which included specialists from the region. They had the opportunity to get acquainted with various theoretical and practical guidelines, as well as to practice what they learned directly with the children and young people from our family homes.
In the beginning we included most of the children and young people in the activities, but with time we found that not everyone is benefiting from water rehabilitation. We did an individual assessment and decided to work long term with five of them where the therapy had the strongest positive effect and contributed to their overall physical and emotional wellbeing.
Today, half a year later, two of the trained rehabilitators are now part of our team and have weekly sessions with them. They also recently participated in additional training in Sofia, during which they upgraded their knowledge and learned new methods to be even more effective in their work.
And every Thursday our children and youth look forward to the activities in the pool. Water therapy has a positive effect on their physical and emotional state – they are much more relaxed, active and sociable. The rehabilitators say that over time their coordination improves, their movements become freer and the tension in their muscles significantly reduces.
But none of this would have been possible without the support of our partners at Multisport and their clients who joined their charitable campaign. Thanks to their help, we were able to turn our dream into reality. And the best part? The company is supporting Cedar again this year. On March 21, every workout with a MultiSport card will generate a donation of one lev for our cause. Join the initiative!
