Comfort Dolls from Our Community

When some great calamity - a flood, a mammoth storm a forest fire - has taken away a family's home, their possessions, their livelihood, their very way of life, the emotional shock can be appalling. If this devastates adults, consider how it affects small children. They don't understand the sudden nightmare that engulfs them. Everything familiar is gone and they have nothing left to cling to except mother. Some may not even have her.

To a very young child, what is not familiar is likely to be scary. Is it any wonder then that under such conditions, children grab onto almost anything with a vestige of familiarity. A doll may be the most urgent personal need for a child whose world has crashed. Sociologists, psychologists and -ologists of many other kinds have published countless studies of why children need dolls.

Comfort Dolls from Our Community

After the tsunami struck the Asian coast in December of 2004, several members of the of the Dollmakers Internet Community wanted to send handmade dolls to comfort the children. Making appropriate dolls, gathering them, finding agencies to send them to that would get the dolls distributed to children who needed them WHEN they needed them most...these obstacles prevented the dollmakers getting any dolls to Asia.

But there will always be another major disaster, so the dollmakers established Comfort Dolls from Our Community to be ready for the next one. Through a flurry of emails around the USA and around the world, a plan emerged. One member, Margreta Albright, volunteered to serve as Fearless Leader and as both collection and contact points. Greta now has contacts with several disaster relief charities. She set up and hosts a web site which provides information, explains the project's intent, and chronicles its progress.

The site lists examples of successful Comfort Doll placements - to disadvantaged children in Fiji, to a hospital for children facing scary surgery, to victims of a wildfire. Dolls were also sent to Louisiana children following Hurricane Ike. The dollmakers discovered that war and natural disasters are not the only terrors small children sometimes have to face. Life-threatening illness, surgery, amputation - even the stay in the hospital can be traumatic. Therapists, doctors and nurses have learned to use dolls to ease these fearsome situations.

Comfort Dolls from Our Community has not yet achieved legal non-profit status so donations are not tax-deductible. But if you have some scraps of fabric and would like to put them to good use, you could whip up a Comfort Doll or two. The write-off value of such a contribution wouldn't be much anyway, but the good you could do is priceless.

The author is a member of both the Dollmakers' Internet Community and the Comfort Dolls founding committee, as well as designer of one of the Comfort Doll patterns.
www.comfortdolls.org/