Support Education for People on the Move

As summer ends, it is a good time to reflect on the past few months. The Nest kept its doors open through summer, continuing to welcome the families and even their older children as the school summer holiday period was also upon us. In Spain, we continued to develop and add more modules and lessons to ¡Ojalá!. Here is a brief summary on the current situations in Greece and Spain, and some project updates! Read more about the situations in our 3rd Quarterly Report of this year.

Greece

Whilst the situation in Greece is slowly falling off the radar in terms of international news, in August Takis Theodorikakos, Greece's minister for public order, publicly announced that there had been 25,000 attempts made to cross the land border between Turkey and Greece. This number is three times more than the number of asylum seekers who have successfully made it into Greece in 2022; roughly 8,000 have made it this year. Last month, the Minister of Migration and Asylum, Notis Mitarachi announced a total number of 154,102 displaced people had unsuccessfully made it into the country, whilst at the same time denying the use of illegal pushbacks.

The Nest, Athens

In August, many of our families left Greece after finally receiving their documents. This also meant that there was no longer a demand for German lessons. We still continue our English lessons 3 times a day for the families that continue to join The Nest as well as for the new families that we registered.

The Nest also hosted a visit from the With You Foundation and Ebi, a famous Iranian singer, in August. Ebi and his team spent a shift at The Nest, playing with the children and getting to know them as well as their families. We then shared cakes that they brought and ended the session on a musical note from the children with Ebi.

In September we welcomed back AMURTEL to restart the workshops with them. Mothers can learn about sexual and reproductive health through 5 one hour sessions, each focusing on a different topic such as female organs, the menstrual cycle or STDs. As our newly registered families start to come more regularly, we will run these workshops more often so all of them have a chance to attend if they want to. Over the last few months, we continued to run our monthly distribution of diapers and sanitary pads to the families in The Nest.

Spain

With approximately 1,000 lives lost already on the Atlantic route from Northern-West Africa to the Canary Islands, we are now in the midst of the toughest months of the year considered for sea arrivals, September to November. Last year, 80% of arrivals arrived during this month. Last quarter, 5984 sea arrivals were recorded into Spain; we are not even halfway through this quarter and there have been 4,167 sea arrivals recorded.

¡Ojalá!, Canary Islands

With almost 500 new users in the last 3 months alone and over 26,000 lessons completed in the app in the same period, ¡Ojalá! has continued developing ever more strongly. In the past quarter, we have worked on improving the app and strengthening partnerships with some of our key collaborators, namely ProfedEle, who made the materials of ¡Ojalá! available for offline use and CobaltSign, who are working on improving the user experience of the app. The consistently high number of users and the continued support from our partners make us hopeful about carrying forward the opportunity for people on the move on the Canary Islands and across Spain to learn Spanish in a manner that is tailored to their needs.

We would like to take a second to thank you again for your continued support, and for allowing us to continue our work in providing access to safe spaces and education for people on the move.