Dear friends,
Dramatic events are unleashed against children. Promise of the future, they are increasingly prey to deadly attacks. It's not enough to kill or injure them - 20 children die every day in conflicts (source Unicef) - the survivors must also be kept out of school, destroying the knowledge of future generations and extinguishing all hope of building future peace.
Sheltered by a family in a village on Lebanon's Bekaa plain, Jad remains prostrate in his room. He hasn't spoken a word since his house was bombed, and he fled with his two older sisters in the night, leaving his parents under the rubble and his brother in hospital. Mission Enfance, via its social center, offers her psychological support and makes up for the lack of food in the host families with food vouchers (rice, oil, meat...) and heating for a month. Our social center opens its doors to children who have dropped out of school, to provide them with educational support.
In the streets of Lebanon, in half of the public schools, 600,000 displaced children are today deprived of an education.
Angelina, a little girl displaced from northern Burkina Faso by terrorist attacks, smiles broadly at the borehole and walls of her school, which are now standing thanks to the work of the Mission Enfance team. After a year of wandering in the bush and camps, stranded in a village in the center of the country, she will be able to meet up with pupils her own age and learn, quite simply.
In this land, ravaged by violence and insecurity, over a million children are no longer being educated...
In the Xanky camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, where 12,000 Yezidi survivors of massacres by the Islamic State have been crammed together for ten years, it is still difficult to think about returning to their land of Sinjar, occupied by armed groups. In September, Mission Enfance inaugurated its new education centre, where displaced children come for high-quality teaching in English, French and IT, and for the youngest children, to learn sport, music and art. For our young pupil, Parwen: ‘Here, it's like a happy palace!’
© Mission Enfance Iraqi Kurdistan - October 2024
As for Zadig, a refugee with his family in Gyumri, Armenia, since his exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, he's in luck! Since his father came across Mission Enfance, he has received the funds to rebuild his livestock, leave his slum and support his family. Just like before. But every evening, from his garden, he contemplates the lost mountains of Artsakh that he used to roam with his sheep.
Monday is a day of celebration for Margarita. She watches the Mission Enfance pirogue filled with toys dock on the bank of her village on the Amazon, in Colombia. It's a day of learning and playing with our toy librarians. These weekly meetings are vital for overcoming the isolation of the indigenous people and encouraging physical and caring contact with a humanity they know only through social networks...
Yohanes and his friends at the Shamalaka school are very poor but happy: they have just received all their annual school books from Mission Enfance. Without our support for these pupils from the Arba-Minch region in southern Ethiopia, they would never be able to reach their educational level. Hundreds of pupils are still waiting for our distributions...
In Syria, Chamsa helped her parents to repair the cracks in their house caused by the earthquake in February 2023, thanks to donations from Mission Enfance. Since the start of the new school year, she has been studying in a classroom restored and repainted by our association. Learning, despite everything, is the key to overcoming the severe economic crisis in this country where the average wage is just USD 20...
"Mission Enfance is a beacon of light for our school", says Chamsa, our Syrian student.
(© Mission Enfance - Syria June 2024)
Rahman is a survivor of the floods in Afghanistan in May 2024. Since our emergency aid in Baghlan to 900 families in villages devastated by torrents of mud, Mission Enfance is now drilling wells to bring drinking water to the region. Young Rahman and his family will be able to stay on their land.
School may not be enough to make them forget their traumas, but education will be a guarantee, for these young victims of adult anger, of their knowledge and their history being perpetuated.
Let's take advantage of Christmas to make their lives easier, they need you so much, thank you!
Yours sincerely
Best wishes.
Domitille Lagourgue
Director of Mission Enfance