This project will help 52 children to participate in an creative programmes like drawing and painting, dancing and movement, singing and music - all areas which help children to externalize their moods and enthusiasms without internalizing or shutting them out. Sri Lankan children have gone through numerous traumatic experiences from conflicts and civil wars to more recently the Easter Sunday bombings. The plan for 2020 is to exapand and offer a diversity of creative programmes to help the kids.
According to many child psychologists, children need to be allowed to ventilate their feelings and emotions and the best way to do so they say is through the arts. Creative programmes like drawing and painting, dancing and movement, singing and music are all areas which help children to externalize their moods and enthusiasms without internalizing or shutting them out.
Grief and mood swings often found among children, specially, among vulnerable children need not be seen as mental illness nor should it be treated as post-traumatic stress. Grief is often misdiagnosed as depression. Allowing them to verbalize what they are feeling constructively, not destructively, without shutting them out through creative programmes can help in a long way to improve their state of mind.
The organization purchased a block of land and built a permanent centre to provide vulnerable children living in the eastern province with daycare facilities. Fifteen years later the project has been approved as a preschool facility. It is now recognized by the Provincial Preschool Education Bureau as one of the only child freindly Centres with the expected standards that provides children with a range of opportunities.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
