Forest fires can occur again and again in the Chilean summer. This year, there were also extreme temperatures of well over 40 degrees, which were caused, among other things, by the El Niño weather phenomenon. President Gabriel Boric called the fires, “the worst tragedy our country has experienced since the 2010 earthquake.” Thousands of people lost their homes, at least 130 died, and several hundred people were still missing weeks after the disaster. Since 2010, the Friends of Waldorf Education have conducted several emergency and trauma education courses in Chile, resulting in a network of emergency educators. During the fires last year, colleagues carried out emergency educational missions in collaboration with the Chilean government. Thanks to numerous donations, the colleagues were able to act quickly. As soon as the situation permitted, they worked with children at various schools.
From February 25th this year, work units with adults also took place at various locations in the particularly hard-hit Viña del Mar region. “At the invitation of the Chilean Ministry of Education, we spent four days training supervisors, directors and teachers, and were able to work with a total of 350 people,” reports emergency educator Lukas Mall, who is part of the Chilean team. This enabled the teachers to be well prepared for the start of school. “I felt great gratitude from the teachers,” Lukas Mal continues, “for the games, rhythmic exercises and graphic methods such as shape drawing that we showed them.”
In addition to teaching emergency pedagogical methods, it was also about giving educators and parents tools to help them deal with the situation themselves. Lukas Mall reports: “After an exercise with wooden sticks, a man who had lost parts of his house reported that it was a relief for him to be able to hold on to something – symbolically. It gave him support and orientation in a situation in which he didn't know exactly what would happen next." One participant reported that while they were escaping the fire, they were able to save their own child, but not the four-year-old girl next door. “She felt a lot of guilt,” Mall said. “It was important to clarify that it was not she, but the fire that was to blame for the tragedy.”