Dear Mission Possible friends,
We are sending you information about one of our soup kitchens - the soup kitchen in Ihtiman - Bulgaria.

This year the Indian summer lasted unusually long. Even January was warm and while we all worry about the coming drought, the children from the soup kitchen in Ihtiman enjoy every sunray. Their joyful voices had welcomed us before we entered the churchyard. I was looking at their clean, shining faces and I could not believe that with all the dirt and poverty around them, these children looked different, changed, neat and polite. I saw these children a few years ago. Their clothes were torn and dirty, they were barefooted and they could not speak very well.
Their clothes are not better now, they were wearing old, but clean and sewed clothes. Their shoes were not good as well. Some of them were
wearing their summer sandals or some old shoes that were cut into some kind of slippers. But even though they looked neater.
We are living in the age of computer and video games and Internet but there, in the Gypsy ghetto, these things haven't arrived there yet.
But do not think that the children there are unhappy - their imagination creates incredible games. A carved into whipping-top piece of wood and a small whip are enough to make them forget everything.

They are out of breath and captured by the game, they spin their whipping-tops and forget about the world that changes through them.
I am a little afraid that there is only one fence that separates them from the other children - a lot dirtier and ruder children from the
neighbourhood who do not go to the soup kitchen. Their parents, who are Muslim, do not let them go to church. They are afraid that church can influence them.