Pécs-Normandia Lions Club - En

„If somebody is dreaming alone, it is but a mere dream. If many are dreaming together, it is the beginning of a new reality”

– Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Foundation, mission

The idea having been formulated that an individual can give a helping hand to those in trouble, but it is only a community that can accomplish a genuine and great dream our Association was established in 1992.
We, too, were part of the civil organizations mushrooming at the beginning of the 90s. True enough we joined an organization, the LIONS movement, active already all the world over practically. After a couple of months of preparation, our Charter Night was celebrated on 24th April 1992, our founding club being Vallée d’Or LC in Normandia.
Tasks were set in our Charter as an aim to be realized. As the most important purpose it was laid down to support ill children in need of medical treatment; besides it was considered as an important duty to help the talented young people or those in need and supporting the Magyars beyond the frontier. One of our founding members having been faced with the circumstance that parents accompanying their sick daughter, already recovered from leukaemia, could not go off to sleep during the medical treatment, the first task has become of vital importance for us He/she told us his/her heart was ready to burst to see a mother from the countryside, in order to be able to be close to her sick child, going out to the park next to the hospital to sleep on a bench, suffering the molestation and the continued bawling of those revelling during the night or the eventual measures taken by the police. Having been acquainted with the circumstances of life upsetting as they were we decided to be the first in Hungary to provide lodging for parents of sick children free of charge.

From that time onward the history of our association has become inseparable from that of the parents’ lodging. 
Although at the very beginning as it was the case with every LIONS Club we were following individual charitable objects the new target came to be the charitable institution proper. The first stop on the bumpy road came about on 28th October 1994 when the first parents’ lodge was opened with two beds under No. 37 Street Rét in Hungary.  From this time onward the events followed every two years. Through the good offices of Mrs Árpád Göncz, Chairperson of anti-Cancer League, just as well as with the support of the Municipality of Pécs, a town of County Title, the parents’ lodge came to be enlarged into a place of 8 + 2 beds in 1996. The visit of President Árpád Göncz in 1998 arranged for the enlargement of the lodge to accommodate 18 persons, again with the support of the Municipality of Pécs, in 2010 this time on Street of the Martyrs.  This enlargement at the turn of the millennium has become a real milestone, because from this moment onward, on the one hand, fathers and other family members could join the sick children, thus bringing about the full unity of the family, and on the other hand, by dint of the new accommodation facilities parents could be lodged not only from the onco hematological department but also from all the departments of the Paediatrics and Maternity wards of the University Hospital at Pécs. By means of an international LIONS application and donations and after having added a new annexe under no. 9 Avenue of the Martyrs, already a LIONS House proper, the parents’ lodge has obtained its final form having 28 beds, 4 spare beds and 3 communal rooms. The LIONS House can accommodate besides relatives of all departments of the University Hospital at Pécs but it offers facilities in the afternoon, since 2010, to another children’s welfare activity of our Association in the Alternative Day-Care Center of the LIONS School where socially disadvantaged children or children struggling with motivation difficulties are prepared for school.

The Parents’ Lodge in everyday life
We organized an open day combined with a conference in the Parents’ Lodge in November 2014. Sylvia Tóth Mrs Németh, working as a mental health nurse at the Paediatrics, told how she saw the circumstances of a parent coming with an ill child from a distant small village. „Just imagine, she started, we shall wake up in Cambodia tomorrow morning. We do not know anybody, we do not know the town, we do not speak the language. Well, a parent may feel something similar when she gets into a hospital with the child.  Perhaps she was never before at Pécs, she does not know anybody, listening to the doctors and nurses it may sound to her as if they were talking a different language. The child crying in the bed, afraid of being left behind by his/her mother, imploring her: Mom, don’t go away, don’t leave me behind! and she does not know what to do. Then a voice is heard behind her – perhaps it is the matron – Mom! Here not far off, there is a free parents’ lodge. There you can spend the night. Here you have the key.  A few days later, already acquainted with the companions in misfortune, one of them tells her ‘ Julia, come, let’ s go home. We’ll be back in the morning.  ‘Home’ means the free parents’ lodge of the Pécs- Normandia LIONS Club.”