A student-led organization will be hosting a gala dinner to benefit a day-care-style medical clinic for mentally and physically disabled children in Armenia’s Aragatsotn province.
AstkhikHakobyan, amyhakopyan@yahoo.com
LOS ANGELES, March 4 – The Armenian American Students for Health (AASH) announced Wednesday that it will be hosting a gala dinner on Thursday, March 26th, 2015, at Lux Banquet Hall in Hollywood. Tickets cost $55 and according to AASH’s Treasurer, SonaSourenian, “one-hundred percent of the proceeds will go towards sponsoring the over 50 children in Armenak and Anna Tadevossian’s Medical Center in Kosh, Armenia.”
The clinic is home to an innovative program that acts both as an educational day-care center as well as a personalized medical therapy center for physically and mentally disabled children. The benefits of the clinic include time away from home, the opportunity for socialization, and personalized care from physical therapists, speech therapists, psychiatrists, and other specialists.
Since the village medical center cannot afford to cover the daycare’s expenses completely, parents must pay $100 per month for each child. “Many children are in need of this specialized attention, but most can only afford to attend the center twice or three times a week,” explained Ernest Gyolchyan, AASH Project Manager.
“We feel that we owe it to those children and to that clinic to try to make up the portion that the parents can’t afford, so that the kids can get better sooner,” said AASH Public Relations Manager, PetrosKeoseyan.
Although the AASH mainly focus on raising funds to provide scholarships to American students to travel to Armenia for medical internships, they have decided to thank the clinic their past participants have interned in by providing their participants these sponsorships. AASH prides itself on having a Mexican-American, IndelisaMuro, as one of their first medical internship participants of 2014 in both Yerevan and the medical center in Kosh, Armenia.
Donationscan be accepted through AASH’s Eventzilla account which can be found on their official Facebook event page.
