This article was written by Kireon Pim on a visit to see the work of Hope For Latvia. It was featured in the Eastern Daily Press and it is with their kind permission that we publish it.

Picture yourself climbing a staircase with a rotten wooden banister that is damp and sticky to the touch, trudging up flight after flight of stone steps until you turn into a shadowy corridor. Paint is flaking from the walls, exposed wiring dangles from a fuse box, and when you flick the light on a yellow pall emanates from a bare bulb. In the dull glow you can see that half-a-dozen doors lead off this hallway. 

Step across the threshold into one of these tiny, one-windowed rooms and you find a family huddled inside. Then you are hit by an inescapable smell: filth hanging in the air that coats your nostrils and throat with every breath you take, the combined odour of engrained dirt, stale air, damp, body odour and decay. You are in a dismal Soviet-era concrete block of flats in Latvia. Now zoom out and imagine the whole apartment block: it has row upon row of small windows, some with panes, some without. Each window represents a family. 

Take a step further back and you see that this is only one of dozens of similar buildings, typically squalid and soul less remnants of the decades spent at the western fringe of the USSR. Look on a map and you'll see it is not so far from the UK - about three hours' flight, beyond Scandinavia on the Baltic coast - and its proximity makes it all the more shocking to witness the severe poverty in which people are living; or rather existing, because much of what I saw on a trip to Riga, the capital city, last month could hardly be described as living. When I visited in mid December it was unusually warm, with the temperature a few degrees above zero Celsius. Winter will often see Riga sink to -20C (-4F) or lower, which is devastating in apartments with smashed windows and no central heating. The city is usually covered by snow at this time of year. Instead when I visited there was a cold humidity in the air, an all-pervasive dampness that seeps into your skin and bones. In midwinter the days never quite escape the night: from about 10am to 2pm there is a grey twilight and then the darknes creeps back again. But amid all this gloom there is a remarkable ray of light: the children. Their energy, resourcefulness and positive attitude is something to behold.

It gives you a warm glow inside even in the bleakest Latvian weather. You cannot help but be impressed by their determination to escape the poverty trap and make their lives a success. Many of the children are trilingual: Russian is their first language, then Latvian, and their English ranges from basic to fluent. Ethnic Russians form around 30pc of the population of Latvia, a legacy of the many years of Soviet occupation, and they make up most of the poorest section of the society. "In the past we have invested into the adults of the families but we hit a brick wall with some people," says Derek Blois. "We have found that by investing in the children and young people you get a better response." Alcoholism forms a large part of the problem with the older generation and when you see the conditions people live in, it is not hard to see why so many seek solace in the bottle. "Vodka is cheaper than bottled water," he explains, "and when you sit with a mum and three kids in those rooms and it's -20C, and there's no heat and it's damp and there's no food, and she can get hold of a bottle of vodka for 20p, you can understand why she does it. Obviously this isn’t the answer but she gets out of her head for a half a day and you can understand why." It is sad but true to say that many of these children's parents seem to be beyond turning around: their lives are too far down a very bleak road. But their children are at a crossroads, on the cusp of adulthood. There is hope here. To see them out in the evening at a restaurant (Hope for Latvia pays for them to have a meal out when they visit Riga) they look pretty much like any kids; a little pale and malnourished, perhaps, but well turned out, with pride in their appearance. And then you see them the next day and notice that they're wearing the same clothes... and then you go back to their homes, to see where they come from, and see their true situation.

Seventeen-year-old Jenya Kuznecova lives in "social housing", which perhaps sounds grander than it is, as if it would be hygienic and sanitary at least. Hope for Latvia has supported her throughout her childhood and teenage years. We travelled to her home in Bolderaja, in a grim apartment block like the one mentioned earlier, in a dead-end estate beside a factory that incessantly pumps dark grey smoke into the cold sky.

We walked up the half-dozen dark flights of steps, down the unlit corridor and knocked on a door. Jenya's grandmother answers, a little babushka in a headscarf, chattering away in Russian. Jenya is out at the moment but will be back soon, she says, so we pile into the tiny flat, sitting on the beds and chairs, and her grandmother jabbers away cheerily and gesticulates. Hope for Latvia's new social worker Inete  translates for us, converting half a minute of rapid Russian into half a dozen words of English. "She says she is proud of Jenya... She says she works hard at school." Although it is a tiny space to live in, unlike many others this flat is clean and smells fresh. With £300 from Hope for Latvia, Jenya has redecorated the room. There is clean lino on the floor, floral wallpaper, a desk in the corner where Jenya does her homework. Her bed is in the far corner, her grandmother's bed in the middle, and there is another single mattress where her mother sleeps when she's around and not drinking. Her uncle often also stays there. As with so many of these families, the father is nowhere to be seen. For Jenya, as with many of the other boys and girls over the years, Derek and his colleagues have become father figures instead. 

We travelled to another flat in Bolderaja, this time within a decaying wooden house rather than a concrete high-rise.The lights are off, gloom and staleness hang in the air. The father works sometimes, as a mechanic, but when he works he drinks. He is working at the moment but not being paid. Derek comments dryly that he hasn't seen him looking so healthy in a long time. Wherever we went the story was much the same: the parents sitting at home day by day, the dank flat lit only by the flickering blue glow of the television. As for the toilets, in the worst cases they are in an outside shed, often a hole in a plank of wood over a cesspit. The smell of excrement and urine hits you from metres away. I will say nothing more about their cleanliness other than that you need to watch where you put your feet. Six families will share a toilet and washing facilities in a typical apartment block. The kitchen and bathroom facilities are also often shared between a number of families, each having its own light switch and light bulb so that electricity bills may be paid separately. It is common to see three lightbulbs hanging from a kitchen ceiling with three co responding switches. Flick on the light - a rare luxury - and more is revealed: you see the grease and dirt on the walls, the soot-blackened ceiling above the flue, the ragged curtains hitched aside to reveal grimy windows. But in several of the flats we visited it was that smell that made the strongest impression. Step across the threshold and you gag. The problem with words and pictures is that they cannot convey the smell of poverty: it is a visceral stench that gets you in the gut, in a place within you that lies beyond words and makes you feel instinctively that no one should have to live like this. It is ironic that people exist in these conditions only a stone's throw from where hordes of British holidaymakers gather every weekend to drink cheap beer. Since a budget airline introduced cheap flights to Riga, it has become a favourite destination for stag parties, and the beautiful architecture of Riga's historic city centre is also a strong draw for tourists. Leave the old town and head for the nearby suburbs and it is a very different story. 

When Latvia joined the EU and Nato 18 months ago along with its neighbours Lithuania and Estonia, this had the effect of making people think the country must have a similar standard of living to Britain. Derek says: "One of the perceptions in England is that because this country is now in the EU, people think there's all this money splashing around, so they think 'what's the problem?'" The problem is that EU membership has brought wild inflation to an economically weak country. The price of property has gone up by 45pc in the last 12 months. There is in fact plenty of money in Latvia but it appears that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer. Since gaining its independence it has been seeking inward investment and most of its industries have been privatised. Much of the money coming in is Russian. There are Porsche showrooms, a noticeably high number of Bentley cars on the streets, and Armani shops... but most people are earning around £200 a month.

With all this has come a shocking rise in the cost of living, while wages have stayed the same. This has sent the standard of living in an already impoverished country into freefall. About 30,000 people are looking for places to live but prices are growing: housing prices are almost on a par with what we would pay in Britain, meaning that many families have no chance of buying a home.