| WOW day 2005
News 2004 from our old WOW-day project in Bogota, Colombia |
European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education Friends of Waldorf EducationWOW-day!
Wow-day organizationWOW-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 22 European countries representing more than 635 Steiner-Waldorf schools. At these meetings and between times WOW-day is planned and coordinated by an ECSWE working group consisting of:
To choose the projects we consult the expertise of the staff of the Friends of Waldorf Education, and all the money that we raise is directly transferred through their accounts and international contacts. We would also be very interested in hearing about your experiences and projects for WOW day so we can post them on our webpages to encourage and inspire others. Support and DonationsPlease note! Without the exact details of your address we are unable to thank you, or pass on any further information. Please note down your school, address and class where relevant on all transactions.
Complete list of WOW-day resultsYear: Sum: Number of schools: Total: 1.001.365 € 223 schools
Name of the participating schoolsTimes Name of school Country Art Studio St. PetersburgWe were able to give this project 3315 € which helped them furnish the new therapy centre for blind and sight-impaired children. We met with Alla and Svetlana in July in St. Petersburg and saw how beautiful the centre is. They have a small kitchen where they will do modelling, felting and painting with the children, one bigger room for eurythmy and other movement exercises and one small room for office work. In addition there is a toilet and a bathroom and an entrance. Now they only lack a fridge, a piano and a parquet floor.
As a WOW-day project we will close this now, but you may still work for them if you want. They are getting some help from a foundation in Norway to pay for the running costs, but prices are rising quickly in Russia, so they will be happy if people will continue tohelp them develop their centre. Corporación educative y social Waldorf, Bogotá, Colombia
Two years ago an educational and social centre was opened in Sierra Morena in Bogotá, which is one of the poorest areas in the city. With the help of money from WOWday they take care of 50 children in the kindergarten and have opened some workshops for older children. They have courses for parents and have built a green house where they grow vegetables for the neighbourhood and the children in the centre. We were able to support this centre with almost 9000 € last school year and we will continue to support this work which gives hope to so many of the poorest people in Colombia. WOW Waldorf One World Action 2006/2007 ChechnyaSince the beginning of the first Chechen war in 1994 Malik and Hadizhat Gataeva have worked with children who lost their parents in the wars. Some of the children have stayed with them for a while because the parents could not take care of them, some have found relatives to stay with and some have had nowhere to turn to, so Malik and Hadizhat have either adopted them or simply taken responsibility for them in their family orphanage “Rodnaja Semja”. One day they were asked how they managed to raise so many children. - It is very simple, they answered, you just have to love them! WOW-day started with this project last year after having met with Hadizhat and Malik in a conference held in Norway. There they told their story. We also saw the Finnish film “The 3 Rooms of Melancholia”, a documentary film that depicts the vulnerability of the child’s mind in conflict situations. Here we could see Hadizhat as she combs the ruins in central Grozny in search of orphaned or semi-orphaned children and offers to take care of them and be “a mother” to them. We were so touched by their story and the film that we simply had to help these extraordinary people in their work to save children from the war. They had a house in Grozny for about 40 children at that time, and they had obtained a flat in Kaunas, Lithuania where 10 children had lived for four years. Hadizhat and Malik themselves moved between these two places. It was a very difficult situation. The German organisation Cap Anamur had helped them for some years, but now they would withdraw because they only support a project for 5 years. Together with Hadizhat and Malik we found out that we could try and get more of the children from Grozny to Kaunas. The situation in Grozny is so dangerous that the children could not go to school or walk in the streets. Kidnappings and “cleansing” are the order of the day, and the bombing has gone on after “the end” of the war in 2002. No journalist is free to go to Chechnya to report on the situation, so anything can happen. To be able to stay in Kaunas, the children needed a place to live. The flat where they were living was too small and in addition it was in a very bad condition. WOW-day last year collected money so that we could send two workers over with paint and equipment to renovate the flat. We could also buy some beds for them, so the flat became very much better during the autumn of 2005. But then we had to find money to buy a house so that more children could come. First 15 children came and stayed in different places, but after 3 months they had to leave again because the living conditions were too bad for them to get a permit to stay in the country. By the end of spring we found a house which we were able to buy with money from Finland and Norway. In beginning of July 13 children came from Grozny to live in the house, which was quite empty. We had to find furniture and money for living etc. When we visited them in July there was still a lot to do to create good living conditions for them. They need more beds, the heating system and the water system must be changed before the winter, a new well must be made and they must have money for food, school etc. They are now 20 children living in Kaunas with Hadizhat and Malik in two different places. We want to help them to live a good life in Lithuania, go to school, kindergarten and feel safe and secure. Please help us to help Hadizhat and Malik and all their children.
WOW Waldorf One World Action 2006/2007 Sierra LeoneIn April this year the Goderich Waldorf School in Freetown, Sierra Leone got its state approval as an independent school and was recognized as a legal body. At about the same time the school lost its building to a Spanish NGO that were able to give the local community some money for it. The Waldorf school then found a new place in the middle of the poor area, hired it for one year and put up a temporary building. In this “building” they now have the 4 classes; they are 74 pupils in classes 1/2 which is combined and 3rd and 4th classes. One of their teachers has been in England this last school year to train as a Waldorf teacher. The initiative started in 1997 as remedial classes for refugees and internally displaced children during the rebels’ war. It was called Action for Child Protection. The initial intention was to provide psychosocial support and help those traumatised children by diverting their minds from the horrible experiences that were going on around them. They came to know about Waldorf education through Friends of Waldorf Education in Germany after they contacted them from an address found in the UNDP library in Freetown. They had also made a strong connection to the Alliance for Childhood. Please visit: www.allianceforchildhood.org.uk In 2000 it became clear that this would develop into a formal school as they realised that this provided the children with the only means of formal learning. The school is situated in the western part of Freetown on a tongue of land where the rebels did not get to during the war. A lot of refugees gathered here. The community is a mixture of Christians and Muslims living peacefully together. Most of the people live in slum without electricity, water and sewerage system. Many children live on the street working with the fishermen during day and have no roof over their heads at night. Action for Child Protection built a small hut where some of the children could sleep. Of the 74 pupils in the school 55% live in foster families or relatives, only 10% have both parents. Most of the parents don’t think that education is important, so it takes a lot of time to convince the parents that the children should go to school, and they will not give them money, school materials, school uniforms or any other necessities. WOW-day has supported this school for two years, and we would like to continue. Now that the school has got its recognition it is clear that they will have to find their own building. Our aim this year is to help them purchase a piece of land and then start building. For the land they need about 6-7000 €, and that we should easily manage. Shannoh Kandoh wrote to us last winter: “The children and staff would like to express their gratitude to all the individuals and organisations whose support (financially or materially) made it possible for the Goderich Waldorf School to run through 2005.” Let us help these children to have a real school building where they can get an education so that they can build their own future.
WOW Waldorf One World Action 2006/2007 India ISamata is an organization working for the rights of the tribal people of Andhra Pradesh in India. They started working in a small hamlet in East Godavar district in 1987 with a group of rural youths in order to mobilize the local communities against exploitation by outsiders and by the government. In Andhra Pradesh the literacy rate of the tribal people is only 22%. Samata has initiated Tribal Nature School, the Balamitra schools, in 40 tribal villages. WOW-day has supported this initiative during the last school year to help these children to learn to read and write and to learn about their surroundings in order to be better prepared for their future. We got this report from the work in Balamitra School and Training Centre – Visakhapatnam: “In June 2005 we started our small initiative with 17 tribal children and two of my own children in a small rented house overlooking the beach outside the town. It was a totally new and wild initiative to take this big responsibility of looking after a group of children as they have to live with us away from their homes in the mountains. It was just the trust that the tribal communities had in us as we have worked with them for almost twenty years. The children who came were mainly from the remotest villages and from the tribes called “Primitive Tribal Groups”, so called by the government because of their developmental backwardness, but as we know they are culturally rich communities. They came from villages where it is difficult to find even a single literate person and where infant mortality is very high because of lack of medical attention. Some of the children were our own activist’s children and some had lost one or both of their parents. The first two months was a trying time for all of us as the children came from villages which had no toilets, no electricity, no running water or roads. Lessons started with learning to switch on the light, how to use a tap, use a toilet and use doors and latches and there were lots of accidents using them. The children came with lice in their hair, scabies all over their bodies and within a week the whole school had scabies. It took us more than three months of scrubbing and combing and cleaning and washing. Finally the only solution we had to lice was to tonsure all the heads and we became a school of skin-heads. Then we had to experiment with all kinds of leaves and herbal medicines to clear the skin infections. We did conquer the sores and the lice at last, but we still find some crawling on their heads each time they go home and return. The children had never seen a road and cars before, so it was difficult to get them away from the school gate and bring them indoors. We started with three teachers – all young tribal girls who had just finished school and had attended programs of Waldorf education. Two young tribal women joined us to help with the cooking and cleaning and our senior activist from Samata who is also a trained nurse took charge of the care-taker, nurse and warden of the children. The children were of three age groups – four ten year olds, four five year olds and the rest were between six and seven years. In the middle of the term, we had two more ten year old boys who joined us. So we started with Classes I, V and kindergarten. We started the school with lot of singing and dancing as all our teachers and helpers and the children are from different tribes and know beautiful songs about nature and fruits and animals. We have printed our first song book in different languages which we use in all our 40 village schools now. In Class V we had to start with the alphabet in English, and it did not take long before they could read and write simple sentences. A short visit by two Waldorf students from Germany helped a great deal as they taught them songs and reading. This year our school has grown to 35 children and there are at least a thousand children who want to come. WOW-day will help this project to take care of as many children as possible.
WOW Waldorf One World Action 2006/2007 India IIIndia has had a sharp increase in the number of its people living with HIV, from a few thousand in the early 1990 to around 5,7 million adults and children in 2005. That is more than any other country in the world. It would be easy to underestimate the challenge of HIV/AIDS in India. The country has a large population and population density. Low literacy levels and consequently low levels of awareness, and HIV/AIDS is one of the most challenging public health problems ever faced by the country. Freedom Foundation was set up as a place for HIV+ adults, but soon it showed that the adults died and children were left who were born with HIV. These children had nowhere to go so in 2002 they put them in a small house in the garden where they are living today. The first child to come to them was a girl. She had been going from children’s home to children’s home, but no one would take her when they got to know she had HIV. She was very depressed and completely enclosed in herself when she came to Freedom Foundation. They had to work hard to convince her that they would keep her and help her. A boy was found at about the same time, he was lying beside a woman’s body that had been dead for two days. Together those two children started to open up, and soon they expressed a wish to go to school. It took about two years to find a school that was willing to take them. They even had to go to court to show that the schools have to take also HIV+ children. But then the girl died. She was 9 years old. Thanks to her effort the other children are now allowed to go to school. The house where the children are living is very small. They are now about 25 children, and they all sleep in one room. The kitchen is outside, and the washing room is very basic. Around the place where they eat there is an open sewage system and a lot of big rats running around. WOW-day could give them 2000€ this summer, and they will use 1/3 of the money to make a new sewage system and get rid of the rats. As for the rest of the money, 2/3, will be used for school fees and school materials. And if anything is left after that they will make a window in the sleeping room so that the children will have some fresh air. WOW-day has visited Freedom Foundation two times, and this summer it was clear that the children looked better. The fact that the children had started to go to school has had great impact on the children. They have to be clean and nice in school, and the hygiene has improved in the house. There are great challenges to be faced for Freedom Foundation. The children live so close to the adults that they experience death every week. The bodies are put in the garden until they are taken away. This reminds the children of death all the time and it makes them sad and depressed. The children get very little physical and professional care because of the lack of money. What Freedom Foundation needs for the future:
WOW-day will continue to help these children to have a decent life and grow up with good caregivers and get an education together with other children.
|
||||||||||||
|
WOW day 2006 WOW day 2004 News 2004 from our old WOW-day project in Bogota, Colombia |
|||||||||||||
1994/95: 24.906 € 20 schools
About 100 children will have their exercises here during the coming school year. Both teachers and children send their warmest greetings and thanks to all of you who have made this possible. 
Colombia is still one of the most dangerous places to live, and it is one of the 10 places that “Doctors Without Borders” call “the forgotten conflicts”.
Download article as PDF-File