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The world as seen through the eyes of small patients of pediatric oncology departments and their friends, hospital volunteers. Joint project by the Grant Life foundation and FotoLoft gallery.
The exhibition has been organized for the International Childhood Cancer Day, which is held on February 15 throughout the world.
“We are not like all of you. We are afraid of the sun. We do not wear sleeveless clothes, and there are no pink ribbons in our hair. We can laugh through tears and weep while laughing. We eat handfuls of various pills instead of ice-cream. Our best toys are syringes and drip chambers. We have already felt various kinds of pain. We know how much our life costs. We have learned to believe in God. And to wait for a miracle. We remember dozens of prayers now and repeat them each night. We don't want to die. We want to live on this Earth. Because we are just children with cancer.”
Tanya V.
“Every year about five thousand children in Russia are diagnosed with cancer,” says Chulpan Khamatova, co-founder of the Grant Life foundation. “These children not only have to live in hospital wards and endure painful treatment. During their disease, they often become outsiders, something that the world of healthy people doesn’t want to think about. But these children are still children. They also want to laugh and play, to study. They want to live. And they want to tell you about their life. This exhibition, the one we are inviting you to, is just our children's attempt to tell about their life. In a hospital. On this Earth.”
Almost all children reveal various talents in a hospital, including a talent for photographing, and the visitors of this exhibition will be able to see that this is true.
Photographs made by children constitute the first part of the exhibition. The second part shows the children's lives as seen through the eyes and lens of a volunteer, an adult who is near the children in this difficult time. In spite of their grave diagnoses and hospital environment, children still remain children: laughing, playing, and optimistic. This is how volunteers see them. This is how we must see them.
The authors of photographs shown within the We Live on This Earth exhibition are children supported by the Grant Life foundation, volunteers working with this foundation, as well as children and volunteers from Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Czech Republic.
About the foundation:
Grant Life foundation was created on November 26, 2006, by actresses Dina Korzun and Chulpan Khamatova. The mission of the foundation is to perform fundraising for treatment of children with oncological, oncohematological, and other grave diseases, as well as provide other kinds of help to gravely ill children and their families.
http://www.podari-zhizn.ru/
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