FARMINGTON – An international foundation, Diema’s Dream, has been created to help improve the lives of some disabled Russian orphans.

Although the orphans are physically miles away, local supporters are selling hand-painted Christmas ornaments, bells, Santas and toys to assist the foundation.

The ornaments are purchased in Moscow and are available from November through mid-January at Sugarwood Gallery on Broadway as a fundraiser to help provide food, clothing and staff to care for 160-disabled orphans, said Jared Platt and Dan Gazette of Farmington.

Physically and mentally disabled children are housed in the orphanage, where 20 orphans a year used to die from malnutrition and the orphan to staff ratio was 30 to 1, they said. The foundation has worked to change that ratio to 8 to 1, Gazette said.

The local “bazaar,” as Platt calls the part of the gallery where the ornaments are sold, includes a corner table full of some traditional Russian ornaments and toys.

“We have a following with people looking for certain ornaments and coming back year after year,” Platt said.

Members and supporters of the foundation, the pair enlisted the support of friends, including Dan and Janice Maxham, owners of Sugarwood Gallery, who oversee the sales once the display is set up.

While working in Washington, D.C., years ago, Gazette and Platt became friendly with the family of Gazette’s supervisor. One of her sisters, Mary Dudley, moved to Russia with her oil-executive husband and started volunteering in a local orphanage, Gazette said.

There she met and befriended a young orphan named Diema, who at age 3 was “paralyzed from the waist down. He was in an oversized wooden playpen with not one toy and was still being bottle fed,” Dudley writes on the foundation’s Web site.

“At age 5 he was transferred from the baby home to an institution of over 600 children and disabled adults where conditions were unthinkable. He was in a room of 30 disabled children with only one worker caring for them. The children were often tied to their bed,” she wrote.

She started the foundation, whose goal has grown to include the creation of a village of group homes for disabled orphans over age 18, Gazette said. The foundation also works to educate and train people and families to work with special need children and adults.

Gazette and Platt became involved in 2000 when they visited Dudley and her sister, Debra Cockrell, in London and attended one of the foundation’s fundraising auctions.

“We learned more about Mary’s work, thought about it and went to Russia the following year,” Gazette said. “It was a humbling experience. We toured the orphanage and saw the children were in better shape than in earlier photos. They were loving, warm and full of joy. One boy just wanted to show me his space … the bed he sleeps on. I’d never had an experience like that in my life.”

Similar bazaars are held in other states to help support the work of the foundation, he said.