Family International Volunteer Services

Project Completed
Back to Europe

Family International Volunteer Services

300

Project Managers: Jim & Claire Brownwood

The Brownwood's have been involved with a Christian mission in Croatia since 1996, which procures and delivers aid to the local refugee camps, orphanages, hospitals, schools and centers for underprivileged and handicapped children. FIVS volunteers travel to the Germanic area of Europe to solicit supplies for distribution in their ministry, these supplies including clothing, school supplies, computer equipment and food. FIVS staff also teach partially handicapped youth and undertake various community development projects, in addition to receiving prosthetic limbs that are distributed in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina where land mines continue to take their destructive and debilitating toll. Wherever they go, the FIVS team also promotes the Christian message through songs, skits and puppet shows.

Brezovica-Zagreb, Croatia


Project Manager, with volunteers Misho and Joseph, constructing a playground.

Many of the city's buildings are still in this shape.

Heating system donated by the HOVAL company, Liechtenstein.

Beauty found in the ashes of war

To help you more fully appreciate the needs that exist here, you have to see the physical conditions that still exist from the war. And then imagine the psychological and spiritual scars.

Playground for children of war-torn city

We completed our project of building a playground for the Vukovar area. This city was one of the most devastated during the war and even though in the process of rebuilding, it will undoubtedly never be the same again.

Breza Orphanage

In coordination with a good friend, who used to work in the Croatian Governmental Social System, we at FIVS now head Project Breza, the first private orphanage in Croatia.

Excerpt from Family Care Foundation Newsletter Volume 3 -- No.4

Before Christmas, we arranged the donation of school materials to two needy schools, one of which is especially desperate for help, having recently received a number of Bosnian and Croatian refugees who were returned from the European countries to which they had fled.