During an acute mission, we establish contact to many other aid organisations, schools, and active people at the mission location. In working with these institutions and persons, sometimes the wish and need arise for a continuous offering for children and adolescents on-site. Especially after severe natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods, many affected persons must spend a long time in improvised camps or in the open. A similar situation is that of the many refugees in the world. Under such conditions, it is especially difficult for children and adolescents to process traumatic experiences, particularly as under these conditions new traumatisations can occur repeatedly.

At such mission locations, the Friends of Waldorf Education try to establish together with other partners child protection centres, so-called “Child Friendly Spaces”. There, local pedagogues are trained during further follow-up missions. These pedagogues then take over the daily work with the children. A contact point, where they receive daily offerings of care and healing activities, is very important for the children. Even “little things” like a structured routine or regular meal times help immensely.

The goal of these long-term activities is to be able to later place these initiatives in the hands of local colleagues. Some child protection centres exist over a certain period of time and can then later, after an improvement in the situation of the children, be closed, like for example in Haiti. In other regions it is good to maintain the offerings on a sustained basis, like for example in the refugee camp Kakuma in Kenya. In yet other cases, we accompany the work of local projects and support the initiatives through regular visits and trainings, like for example in Gaza.