By Pooja Pradeep | Project Leader
Dear Diary,
Hello! I want to write about today.
Today was such a fun day! We started the day with making birds and rockets out of coloured paper. It's called origami. We made around 50 colourful birds which we will hang in the classroom tomorrow.We then played cricket and also learnt how to play football. I scored 1 goal but my team lost. I'm still happy.
After that we spoke about who we want to be when we grow up so that we could draw balloons on the wall and write our ambition in a balloon. I want to be a doctor so I wrote that on a pink balloon on the wall. I want to learn how to be better at English so that I can write more things on the wall.
I wish they would keep coming to school every day. Coming to class is a lot of fun now and even the teachers love it.
I can't wait for tomorrow. Didi promised us that we'l be painting on rocks and will also get ice cream. I love ice cream! I will write about it tomorrow.
Bye for now.
( Diary entry written by Ali, a 11 year old Rohingya refugee boy after Day 4 of the Welcome Refugees Fest 2019, shared here with his permission )
Letters of Love in collaboration with a handful of incredible organisations, local and international, hosted its first ever week-long 'Welcome Refugees' fest at the Roghinya Refugee Camp in New Delhi. From 14th June, there were games, recreational activities, art, dance and sports workshops, educational talks et al leading up to World Refugee Day on June 20.
Every day from 9am -12pm, a team of 25 youngsters from all over New Delhi, India, trained by the Letters of Love team led by Pooja, our Founder & Executive Director, spent time with 50+ children in the makeshift school at the camp, doing a myriad of things from playing games, engaging them with arts and crafts, teaming them up to compete against each other to conducting empathy-centric activities. In an effort to build bridges, the final day was open to visitors in order to encourage friendships and connections where 15 visitors showed up, particpated in activities with the children and also bought the hand painted cards, painted rocks and other craft work the children have done over the past week. All the sales were forwarded to the school. We also provided snacks and lunch for the children throughout the course of the fest. Ice creams were evidently their favourite :)
The teachers of the school took part as well and thoroughly enjoyed having expert volunteers impart new skill-sets to the children. Needless to say, the children enjoyed it thoroughly!
Thank YOU for enabling this joy.
We are truly grateful to your generous heart!
This was a pilot project connecting the local youth with the migrant community in the area and was a huge success. Letters of Love team is now gearing up for more projects in refugee hotspots around the world, leveraging our youth network to impart psychosocial support to refugee children.
We are counting on your support. Please stay tuned.
Here's to doing whatever we can, with whatever we have, wherever we are :)
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