It is hard to believe that we've now come to the end of our six-month Portage pilot project. It's been an interesting and occasionally bumpy journey but in the end things have gone really well and the children's progress has been fantastic. Each and every child has benefited from Portage intervention however I'd like to tell you about one child in particular who has made massive progress during the last six months.

Vallia has foetal alcohol syndrome and has grown from a quiet withdrawn isolated little girl to one who was giggling and laughing at me just a few days ago. She enjoys social contact now, has learned to walk and has learned a total of 78 new skills!

One of the unexpected bonuses of the project is that some of the children who were in the past considered un-adoptable have now been placed on the adoption register here. In fact one girl Nastyia made such good progress that she left the project early to join her new family in Spain. We were delighted for her and it seemed somehow appropriate that she left us on Valentine's Day!

Just after the pilot project ended another of our children, Angelina, was adopted by an American family. Angelina too had made remarkable progress but had never been considered for adoption previously due to her autism.

A third little girl, Sveta, is now also due to be adopted and will be going to Spain soon. Sveta has made wonderful progress, especially in the areas of socialisation, cognition and motor development. She now functions at the same level of development in those areas as other children in her age group.

Our team of Portage workers have worked so hard to make things a great success and are excited by new plans to expand the service to include more children with special needs and to train more Portage workers. At the end of April we will have a second Portage workshop to train more Portage staff. In addition to the baby home expansion project we are also beginning two new exciting ventures; one in the community and the other in Yerlatma orphanage for severely disabled children.

The Ryazan local community has taken great interest in our Portage project and has been asking us to set up a community project for quite some time now. We set up a Portage review group so that we could share the baby home children's progress with different organisations and authorities in the community. We will work together with students from the psychology and special needs department of the Ryazan state university to start a small pilot project for families who have special needs in Ryazan city. Families will be selected for the project together with local organisations who work with children with disabilities and their families. At the same time we will continue as a group to lobby local government for such services to be provided by the state.

In Yerlatma, a large village about 200 kilometres from Ryazan, we will start another 6 month Portage pilot project, training staff from the orphanage for severely disabled children to become Portage workers. We will start with 5 staff members and a supervisor and aim to assist 20 children.