The Elpida Guest House of the Association of Friends of Children with cancer opened its doors in September 1999 to provide warmth and hospitality, free of charge, to families from outside the capital.  The first of its kind on a national scale, it was created to soothe, provide a home and give hope to children who suffer from neoplasmatic diseases and their parents.  It offers hospitality to families with children from 0 to 18 years of age who need to stay in the Athens area for as long as their treatment in the oncology clinics of the “Aghia Sophia” and “Aglaia Kyriakou” children’s hospitals lasts.

For these families the “Elpida Guest House” is their “home away from home” in Athens.  The place where they derive the strength to face the worry and stress over the progress of the child’s health, which is usually accompanied by a long stay in hospital, many months of outpatient treatment and huge costs.  The treatment the children undergo lasts from 1 month to 1 year with the result that the children find themselves far from the environments familiar to them for a long period of time and need special psychological support.

But the parents also need support; they need to hang on to their hope, in order to help their children.  The fact alone that in this environment children and parents who face the same problem live together as a family gives them a feeling of succor and solidarity. Its operation met a great social need since for several months the parents had to live in hospital corridors or pay enormous sums of money for hotels, most of which did not provide the proper living conditions which were indispensable for the recovery stage of the children.  They were drained financially or even had to stay with relatives.

The Guest House sees to it that the children and their parents do not lose their contact with the social whole.  That they have support.  That they believe that nothing ends with a diagnosis, that cancer can be beaten and that “Elpida” is at their side throughout the difficult road ahead.

With their beautiful and soft colors the five floors of the Guest House create a warm and calm atmosphere seeking to cover and relieve to a great extent the feeling of insecurity felt by the families as soon as their child’s complex health problem presents itself.

On the 1st floor there is a lounge where the families can receive visits from relatives and friends as well as a place for events. On the other 4 floors there are 30 rooms with twin beds, each with its own bath, heating, air-conditioning, television and telephone. On each floor there is also a dining-room and kitchen, a particularly important place since it gives the family the possibility of independent living as well as the opportunity to form relationships with other families and their children in the guest House. Special facilities have also been created for washing machines, dryers and ironing boards on each floor.

In the basement of the building there are two rooms suitable equipped for use as playgrounds and a school both for free and organized activities with a puppet theater, video, book corner and lending library, spaces for drawing, games and computers.

During the period of the initial stay in hospital, the family is advised of the existence of the Guest House. An initial visit to the Guest House will relieve the stress of the lengthy stay and will provide psychological support. Interested parties submit an application to Social Services which is evaluated by the Guest House Committee.

The basic criterion for hospitality is the socioeconomic state of the interested party.  In the event no room is available, there is a waiting list.  The length of the stay is stipulated in a note from the doctors and is renewed chiefly by written certification from the Director of the department and the Committee.

The documents required for admission are:

• Application for admission (to be filled in at the Guest House)
• Note from the directors of the Oncology and Hematology departments.
• Corroboration from a hospital or other public agency that the interested party escorting the child does not suffer from an infectious disease.
• Authorization by the parents or legal guardian ratified at a Police Station, when it is necessary for an adult relative to stay with the child instead of the parents.
• Corroboration by the Aliens Department of legal residence in the event the interested party is a foreigner.
• A certificate of indigence when required.

Financial support:  Beyond hospitality and at the recommendation of the social worker and evaluation by the Guest House Committee, the following financial allowances are provided:

• Monthly financial support, for a period of approximately 6 months, to families facing financial difficulties.
• Financial support in the form of a lump sum to families facing some extra expense (paramedical exams, etc.).
• Financial support to enable families to travel to their homes.
• Financial support covering rent for a small period of time to families who have great need to remain in Athens for other – personal – reasons.

From August 1999, when the Guest House opened its doors and welcomed its first family, to the present day, 650 families from all over Greece and from abroad (5.2%) have benefited from its hospitality.

Most of the children are boys (52.2%).  Half of them are up to 6 years of age, while 31.4% are children aged 7-12.  During the time the families are guests, in 43.5% of the cases it is the mother who stays while in 48.9% it is both parents – at least for the initial stage of adjustment.  The father then returns to his home town and job as well as to his other children.  There are cases where a child is accompanied only by his father (4.2%).

The average length of time the families stay in the Guest House is 12.9 months.  71.5% of the families stay for up to a year while 9.5% stay for over a year and up to 31 months.

Families come from all over Greece, with a significant number from the Peloponnese (23.5%), Thessaly (15.1%) and foreign countries (5.2%) while families from Cyprus account for 1.4% of guests.

A child’s right to participate in everyday life, in life itself, and the need to provide occupational and psychological support both for the child and its family, are our most important activities, in the effort that is being made to ensure the quality of life of the sick child and its family.

Through a series of programs that are already in progress we support the children and try to reactivate them, to make them regain their lost interest in life.

These activities are:

• back to school
• I celebrate and have fun
• I visit and learn
• creative activities
• financial support
• cooperation with other agencies
• psychological support groups

Back to school:  The “back to school” program has been in operation from September 2000 to the present, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, and is being implemented in the form of home schooling with 2 educators (nursery or primary school teachers as required) and with a program that is totally in line with the special needs of these children.

The goal is for them to recoup lost knowledge but mainly to preserve their contact with the teacher-educator.  This relationship will give the child the confidence that it has a future and this will help it regain its self-respect and self-assurance.  As of 2004, teachers assigned by the Ministry of Education (literature, mathematics) give booster courses, while volunteer teachers undertake other lessons as well as foreign language instruction.  Already the first children who have stayed at the Guest House are today students (about 20 children) in Schools of Education, Art, Psychology, etc.)

I celebrate and I have fun:  Life must go on as usual.  Children must experience this adventure as a “life break” to be spent as pleasantly as possible.  The major established holidays such as Christmas, Carnival, as well as name days and birthdays are celebrated in a special way, by inviting stars the children see on television and would like to have with them.  So far a great number of stars, singers, actors, athletes have answered the children’s call with particular love and sensitivity and visited us and celebrated with us.

Artists, journalists, television personalities, athletes, etc. form a special category of people who responding to the requests of the children themselves spend many hours of their valuable time in the Guest House with them.  They are the friends of the children of the Guest House.  But other friends as well – people from the neighborhood who live by the families on a day to day basis and are close to them on their children’s name days and birthdays, offering them, over and above their love, various kinds of entertainment and basic essentials that make the life of the children better.  But their contribution during the difficult moments the children live through is also important since with the same love they offer the them blood, platelets, facilitate their transportation, etc.

I visit and learn:  Children and their parents have the opportunity to get to know new things through the alternative forms of information and entertainment that Athens offers.
Excursions are organized to places of particular educational, recreational and religious interest, such as archaeological sites, museums, etc.

Trips:  Within the framework of the programs created by the Guest House to provide creative activities and psychosocial support to children and parents, trips lasting several days are organized to various parts of Greece.

The aim of the program is to give the family the opportunity to be united once again, to spend some carefree time together, to feel that they too are living a normal life and to gain courage on seeing that children who were hospitalized earlier are well and getting on with their life.  At the same time we also provide an opportunity to siblings who for such a long period of time have been neglected because emphasis is given to the sick child, to join in.

The idea for the excursions began with the Messinia Prefecture Union of Hoteliers.  It was later reinforced by families who stayed at the Guest House and so excursions to Cephalonia, Crete, Kyparissia, Corfu, Mytilene and Bari in Italy were organized.

The expenses for these excursions were covered by sponsorships from municipalities, prefectures, Unions of Hoteliers and Restaurateurs etc. usually as the result of initiatives by the parents of the regions who had received hospitality in the Guest House.

Creative activities:  A team of volunteers (in collaboration with the Greek Red Cross) implement creative activities programs adapted to the interests of the children, mornings and afternoons, offering specialized knowledge as well as hours of carefree fun and entertainment.  More specifically, the volunteers are active in dance, music, computer education, constructions, painting, theater games, puppet theater, English lessons and art therapy.  In this way they make up for the lost hours of fun and games and bolster the children’s basic skills.  The parents participate in handicrafts, pottery, batik and other groups discovering new talents and cultivating new interests.

Psychological support

A very important part of the activities of the Guest House which aims at quality of life is providing psychosocial to the children and the other members of each family staying at the ELPIDA Guest House.  The family is backed by:

• support given to the individuals who escort the child staying in the Guest House (e.g. parents, grandparents, etc.),
• support for the children staying in the Guest House so that they may experience the illness and the treatment in a realistic and graspable manner, according to age and level of development,
• creation of a safe and defined framework where communication is encouraged through externalized and energized thoughts and emotions by parents and children.
• advice on issues such as relationships between family members, handling the change in the child’s everyday life (home, school, friends), relationships between the family members staying in the Guest House and those “left behind” (husband, siblings),
• encouraging the child and its escort to lead an active and social life within the framework of the Guest House (volunteer programs),
• creating relationships and bonding with other families staying in the Guest House,
• preparing the child and its escorts for the return home and its assimilation in the school environment.

Psychological support covers the following areas:

• Frequent contact and interviews with almost all the families and discussions on the problems they face.
• Individual support to families facing significant problems (with their partner, with the rest of the family, with their other children, etc.)
• Group support with meetings for discussion and venting with the Guest House’s social worker and a volunteer psychologist in an effort to defuse and resolve their impasses.
• Adolescent group.  The Social Services department is particularly sensitive and pays special attention to teenagers who constitute a de facto difficult group.  Through organized outings (very often with the presence of some popular artist or athlete) to the movies, amusement parks, parks, etc. teenagers are given the opportunity to have fun and retain the characteristics of their age, of which they have been so largely and abruptly deprived.
• Visits to medical centers and hospitals where the children undergo treatment to maintain contact and psychological support.

Catering to the particularly developed religious sentiment of the families is also an important sector.  For this reason there is always a member of the clergy available for discussion or to hold religious ceremonies (extreme unction, benedictions, invocations).