CHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONAL'S WORK WITH CHILDREN AFFECTED BY THE TSUNAMI IN SRI LANKA
NEW MINI TOUR MARCH 2006
Sri Lanka was very badly hit by the Tsunami - almost 40,000 died and thousands of families lost their houses, their fishing boats, their businesses and their livelihoods. Many thousands of families are still living in camps or temporary shelters in very difficult cramped, crowded and stressful situations.
Children's World International first sent their Director Arabella Churchill and an excellent performer, Devilstick Peat, to Sri Lanka in MARCH 2005. They visited many camps on the West and South coasts with performances and parachute games. Peat then continued on to the East Coast where he worked in many more camps. Peat was invited to return in MAY 2005 to take part in a Children's Festival that IOM (the International Office of Migration) were running on the East Coast and worked in more camps there at that time.
In NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 2005 a 5-person team (Arabella Churchill, the Director, Paddy Hill and Charlie Miller, Children's World's 2 main Workshop Leaders, Jo Galbraith, an excellent performer, and Holly Whitmore a drama student volunteer) undertook a 23-day Performance, Workshops and Play Tour on the West and South coasts of Sri Lanka in conjunction with Impakt Aid and the Teardrop Relief Playbus. This Tour was a great success (and was immediately followed by Arabella and Jo flying on to Thailand, to be met by Jake Goode and Haggis McLeod, two more excellent performers, to continue the work there in December 2005 and January 2006).
Children's World did not have many bookings in mainstream schools in England during the second half of the Spring term in England, so In MARCH 2006 we decided to send Paddy and Charlie back to Sri Lanka to run a 14-day Performance, Games and Play Tour with Impakt and the Teardrop Relief Bus on the West and South coasts of Sri Lanka and with IOM on the East coast. They flew out of England on 28 February and their first day of touring will be with Impakt on 2 March. As soon as we receive Paddy's daily diary, it will go up on this web page, so do keep up with their news.
So many thousands of families are still living in really difficult conditions in camps and temporary shelters now, 14 months after the Tsunami. Morale is low, and peformance, workshops and games really do a huge amount to raise morale of both the children and their families and are tremendously worthwhile.
(Also upcoming is a mini-Tour of Aceh by Arabella Churchill and her juggling maestro husband Haggis McLeod in April, and a further Tour in Sri Lanka in June and July.)
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