WOW day 2006

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Corporación Waldorf Bogotá, Colombia

For those of you who have participated in WOW-day before, Extra Muros is our oldest project. We started to support this project 8 yearsago and since then we have assisted 36 families in getting their own houses. The small organization of Extra Muros has helped the children in the families to go to school and the grown-ups to find some work. Last year we managed to open a kindergarten for some of the children between 2 and 6 years of age. Now about 30 children come to the kindergarten where two kindergarten teachers take care of them. Two mothers, together with the teachers, help prepare the meals. As the families in this Sierra Morena district of southern Bogotá are very poor, most of the parents cannot pay for their children. So they do all kinds of work for the kindergarten instead. For instance they do the cleaning and repairing. In the evenings the teachers arrange seminars for the parents where they learn about nutrition, diseases, the rights of the child etc.

This is very important as the conditions for the children at home are appalling. In a way it is the children who now teach the parents how to behave decently

Some facts about Colombia:
Colombia has 44 million inhabitants of which 64% are poor and 6 million of these live in extreme poverty with less than $1 a day.
The district of Sierra Morena in Bogotá is one of the poorest in the country. Here we have our kindergarten.
The level of criminality of the country is unbelievable: from January 1997 to April 2002 15,621 persons were kidnapped.
In 2001 the murder rate was an average of 28 per hour.
During the first three months of 2002 there were 23 massacres in which 228 people were killed. The unemployment rate is 25%
In these conditions it is clear that it is very difficult to grow up. Our children in Sierra Morena have parents who are unemployed and have been living in the streets for years and who do not know how to raise a child. The children have never seen a forest, a cow or other animals (except for dogs and cats). They have not been told stories or read to and they get very little food at home. The question is what will happen to them? Will they turn to the streets just as their parents did?
In the kindergarten the children get a good meal, they sleep, they paint and draw and do other activities and they are told stories. They learn to take care of each other, they get a rhythm in their lives and – most important of it all – they teach their parents all this when they come home. The parents have a place to turn to; they are also being educated with their children.
We see this work as so important that we will continue to support this kindergarten. We hope that we can find enough money so that we can find a new house where there is room for more children and, perhaps, open a school for them next year.

Child Protection Foundation – Bangkok, Thailand

If, as they say, the eyes mirror the soul, then Ann’s, which are huge, dark and almond-shaped, reflect a severely traumatised inner being. Barely four years old, this slim, frail little girl from Phetchaburi province has already had her fair share of knocks in life.
Her stomach has been ripped open by repeated kicks from her father and she is now recovering from her physical injuries. However the psychological damage will take much longer to mend.
At a time when other children her age are preparing for primary school, Ann has to deal with profound grief and a huge emotional vacuum.
In the modest but cosy setting of the Child Protection Foundation home in Bang Kapi district she is licking her wounds, surrounded by scores of other children who have endured similarly painful experiences.

Montri Sintawichai, the secretary-general of the Child Protection Foundation has been caring for child victims of cruelty, sexual abuse and other injustices for the past 20 years. He has great hopes for his charges:
“I have a dream that some of these children may, in later years, decide to pursue this line of work. I’d like them to expand this type of social activity and set up similar centres throughout the country.”
He admits, however, to feeling overwhelmed sometimes when he thinks of the size and scope of the problem in contemporary Thailand.
“I am beginning to wonder whether this society of ours really does love children and is genuinely concerned about their wellbeing. I fear that people are mostly indifferent to this issue. The proportion of adults who harm children is growing and the number of people willing to help is very small and decreasing.”

Set up in 1993, the Foundation does what it can to raise public awareness about the full extent of child abuse.
Hundreds of cases, each one more alarming than the last, end up in the hands of the 10 staff members at the Foundation.
Each year, this NGO deals with an average of 200 new requests for intervention, often going to court to have custody of a child taken away from unfit parents.
It currently supervises, directly or indirectly, the care of some 230 children, aged between one and 17 years. Of these, 65 are residents at the Foundation’s shelter on Lat Phrao Soi 106. Another 54 children are enrolled in boarding schools in the provinces and a further 110 have been placed with foster families to whom the Foundation sends a monthly contribution of 600 to 1200 baht. A few are still in hospital recovering from their injuries and a handful of rescued toddlers are now in the hands of trusted families.

Montri Sintawichai and his colleagues have a plan to build a children’s refuge.
Thanks to private donations the Foundation has been able to purchase a plot of land. But a good deal more money is needed to cover the cost of constructing and equipping the home.

“My plan is to build a house which will be as close as possible to that imagined by the children. If you ask a child to draw his dream house, he usually locates it in a natural setting with plenty of flowers, trees and a river. I want this home to be as far as possible from air and noise pollution and from things like supermarkets. Ideally it should be full of music and art.
Home is a place where everyone wants to go when they feel down. And everyone needs parents to talk to when things go wrong. But what about all those children who have neither of these things”

WOW-day wants to continue to support this project. We hope that they will be able to build this dream house.

Blind children in St. Petersburg, Russia

This is the only WOW-project in Europe. As St. Petersburg is not very far from Finland the school in Helsinki has taken on this project with a lot of enthusiasm; one student from Class 11 describes this as follows:
“When we were in St. Petersburg with our class last autumn we did an eurythmy performance for children in the Russian Steiner schools. We all fell in love with the city and its “Russian atmosphere”.
I was so lucky to go back to the city once more in March 2001. When we started I had no idea how enormously impressive this journey would be. We did so many things in these five days that it would be impossible to tell everything. I want to tell about one thing that made a deep impression on me.
On the second day of the journey we participated in an eurythmy lesson for blind children. They were from 8 to 10 years of age. You could never think that these children were blind or weak-sighted when we saw what they were able to do. They were so good at coordinating and played all kinds of games and did the most wonderful forms. They had practised so much that they had full confidence in each other and themselves.
But what made the deepest impression was how musically talented they were. All of them played to us on the piano and sang in different voices. One girl had composed a song and written the words to it. It was about her dead cat and was very sad. When she played the other children sang. She had also written a poem, which she read to us.
These children were 8 years and blind. This was so unbelievable that I didn’t believe my own eyes. It was so overwhelming that it is difficult to explain in words.”

Alla Maksimova has done her training in both eurythmy and curative pedagogy. Together with Igor Andryushenko she has set up this workshop for blind children. They are some 20 children who come in the afternoons to do eurythmy and art therapy. They also get something to eat and are being taken care of in many other ways.
Many of the children have psychological problems, which are connected to their very difficult social situation. One example is Olya, who is totally blind. She is 11 years of age, but looks like she is 7-8 years old. Last year her mother died and the girl became an orphan. She is very small and thin, but inside she is strong and has a wish to do something in life. Last year one of our teachers took responsibility for Olya.

Alla and Igor and all the blind children were invited to go to Finland this summer to do a small performance in a conference. They had looked forward to it very much, but in the end they could not go because of financial problems.
As they have lost the space they used to have they are now looking for a new place to continue the work they have initiated. They get some help from organisations for the blind in Norway and Finland, but this is very little. It takes a lot of money to buy an apartment in St. Petersburg.

WOW-day will continue to support this project and we hope to be able to assist Alla and Igor to eventually buy a place for their work.

WOW-day is organized as a cooperative venture between the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education (ECSWE) and Friends of Waldorf Education,
ECSWE meets three times a year and has representatives from 20 European countries, and at these meetings WOW-day is planned by a working group consisting of:
Meri Arni-Kautu, Finland, Astrid Bjønness, Norway, Christopher Clouder, UK, Jeppe Flummer, Denmark, Kamiel van Herp, Belgium and Helmut von Loebell, Austria.

To choose the projects we use the expertise of the staff of the Friends of Waldorf Education, and the money is being transferred through their accounts and international contacts.

Former WOW-day projects:
Parsifal in Santiago, Chile; Lar Benjamin in Sao Paulo, Brazil: a drop-in centre for drug addicts in Split, Croatia; kindergartens in the townships Khayelitsha and Philippi, South-Africa; Wolakota Waldorf school in Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, USA.

WOW-day results 1994-2001:

1994/95: 48.718 DM (20 schools)
1995/96: 72.353 DM (39 schools)
1996/97: 55.420 DM (26 schools)
1997/98: 74.652 DM (25 schools)
1998/99: 65.034 DM (17 schools)
1999/00: 90.781 DM (30 schools)
2000/01: 119.632 DM (38 schools)
Sum: 526.590 DM (268.668 €) (102 schools)
2001/02: 53.760 € (35 schools)
Total: 322.428 € (107schools)

Which countries have participated?
Austria (3 schools), Belgium (5 schools), Czech Republic (1 school), Denmark (7 schools), Finland (6 schools), France (3 schools), Germany (37 schools), Ireland (1 school), Luxembourg (1 school), Netherlands (4 schools), Norway (10 schools), Slovenia (1 school), Sweden (12 schools), Switzerland (2 schools), United Kingdom (14 schools)

Which schools have participated many times?

8 times: Freie Waldorfschule am Bodensee, Germany
7 times: Freie Waldorfschule auf den Fildern, Germany
Rudolf Steinerskolen i Vestfold, Norway
6 times: Hibernia School, Antwerpen, Belgium
Martinskolan, Sweden
Elmfield School, England
York Steiner School, England

WOW day 2006

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WOW day 2004

WOW day 2003

WOW day 2002